THE REPRESENTATION OF FECUNDITY AND BARRENNESS IN THE POETRY OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, AND THE BIBLE: A CRITICAL AND CREATIVE INTERROGATION OF A CHRISTIAN-FEMINIST POETICS RACHEL MANN PhD 2017 THE REPRESENTATION OF FECUNDITY AND BARRENNESS IN THE POETRY OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, AND THE BIBLE: A CRITICAL AND CREATIVE INTERROGATION OF A CHRISTIAN-FEMINIST POETICS RACHEL MANN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Manchester Metropolitan University TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS 5 ABSTRACT 6 NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS 7 INTRODUCTION 8 Between ‘Feminisms’ and ‘Faith’ – 9 Negotiating Recent Readings of EBB and CR Chapter Breakdown 22 CHAPTER ONE: 25 NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETICS IN CONTEXT – UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN’S POETRY TRADITION AS SUBVERSIVE PERFORMANCE OF FECUNDITY AND BARRENNESS ‘Winter […] congeals the melting peach, the nectarine smooth’ – 32 The Poetess in a Time of Romanticism The Woman Poet in Victorian Poetry and Culture – 49 A Fecund and Emergent Tradition of Drama and Performance ‘O pilgrim-souls, I speak to you!’ – Drama, Voice and Fantasy 73 as Strategies to Deal with Doubled Gender Trouble CHAPTER TWO: 86 ‘I HUNG, AS A GOURD’: A CHRISTIAN-FEMINIST READING OF ‘THE RUNAWAY SLAVE AT PILGRIM’S POINT’ AS DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE OF FECUNDITY AND BARRENNESS 1 ‘I hung, as a gourd hangs in the sun’ – The Runaway Slave 88 as Performance of Fecundity and Barrenness Religion, Race and Gender – The Runaway Slave 110 as Dramatic Monologue of Fecundity and Barrenness CHAPTER THREE: 128 ‘DO I LOOK A HAGAR, THINK YOU?’ – READING ‘AURORA LEIGH’ AS A CHRISTIAN-FEMINIST (MARRIAGE) MANIFESTO ON FECUNDITY AND BARRENNESS The Place of Marriage in Aurora Leigh 131 and Early Victorian Culture – Fecundity as Dangerous Excess ‘Do I look a Hagar, think you?’ – Reformulating Marriage, 145 Fecundity and Barrenness through Aurora’s Doubled Poetic Performance Aurora as a Kind of Hagar – The Female Poet 168 as Agent of Queerness A Beatific Vision? Aurora enters Slavery 186 or Marriage Reformed? CHAPTER FOUR: 191 ‘SUCH SOFT FLOWERS, | FROM SUCH ROUGH ROOTS’: PURITY, FALLENNESS AND FECUNDITY IN ‘AURORA LEIGH’ ‘There seemed no sin, no shame, no wrath, 198 no grief’ – The Precarious Place of (Fallen) Women in Victorian Culture In the Beginning – A Scene from a Garden 213 Fallen and Restored Aurora as Fecund Poet Who Resists Becoming 236 a ‘Rich White Woman Who Does Not Walk’ CHAPTER FIVE: 246 ‘YOU SHOULD NOT PEEP AT GOBLIN MEN’ – EUCHARIST, FALLENNESS AND FECUNDITY IN ‘GOBLIN MARKET’ 2 A Nineteenth-Century Chamber of Secrets – 248 The Delicious, Unctuous Elusiveness of Goblin Market’s Poetics ‘Her tree of life droop’d from the root’ – 255 A Further Note on Fallenness and the Pathologization of Female Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Culture and Religion ‘You cannot think what figs | My teeth have met in’ – 270 The Fallen Body Redeemed CHAPTER SIX: 291 THE SAINTED BODY OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTI – HUNGER, FASTING AND THE HOLY-FECUND IN ‘GOBLIN MARKET’, ‘IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO’ AND THE ‘ST PETER POEMS’ ‘I hear the fruit-call but I dare not look’ – 292 The Sainted Female Body in Christian Tradition and Faith ‘A nameless girl in freshest summer greens, | 307 A saint, an angel’ – The Fate of the Fecund Body in the Studio of God ‘Open to Me, look on Me eye to eye’ – 317 The Divine Gaze and the Fecund Body in the St Peter Poems ‘Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices’ – 325 Poetic Excess and the Fate of the Sanctified Fecund Body in Goblin Market CONCLUSION (PART ONE): 334 EBB AND CR: POETICS OF FECUNDITY, PERFORMANCES OF FAITH AND FEMINISM CONCLUSION (PART TWO): 339 BETWEEN CRITICISM AND CREATIVITY – NEGOTIATING NARRATIVE AND PERFORMANCE AS A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WOMAN POET OF FAITH Narratives of Self and Performances of Faith – 343 The Place of Fecundity in a Trans-Christian-Feminist Poetics Long Poems, Big Poems? – Indicating a Conclusion and a Path Ahead 361 3 POETRY: 367 ‘THE PRIEST IN THE KINGDOM OF LOVE’ – A POEM BIBLIOGRAPHY: 434 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS I am especially grateful to my Director of Studies, Angelica Michelis, and my supervisors, Michael Symmons Roberts and Jean Sprackland, for their patient and often incisive criticisms as this thesis emerged. I thank Nikolai Duffy for his astute questions regarding the theoretical foundations of this work. I should also like to acknowledge the proof-reading skills of Daisy Black, Martin Kratz, Anna Appleby and Susie Snyder. A special thank you must go to Deborah Bown without whom I would have been constantly bewildered. I should like to thank the editors of PN Review, Agenda, Theology and Crucible for publishing early versions of the poetry included here, as well as The Interpreter’s House, The North, and Under The Radar for publishing poems generated during the research for this thesis. Thank you also to: Sandra Kramer of Wild Goose Books for publishing some of this thesis’s draft poems in my book on liturgy, A Star-Filled Grace (Glasgow: Wild Goose, 2015); David Moloney, of Darton, Longman and Todd, for publishing my new book, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory & God (London: D.L.T., 2017) which includes a short section based on my research into Thomas Carlyle; the editors of Theology & Sexuality journal (Taylor & Francis) for publishing my article Queering Spiritual Direction: Towards a Trans*-Literary Praxis (Theology & Sexuality 2015, Vol 21, Issue 3) which used some of my first year research into palimpsests and literary texts. 5 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the language of fecundity and barrenness in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, as well as producing original poetry in critical conversation with their poetics. Concentrating on key Barrett Browning and Rossetti texts, Aurora Leigh and Goblin Market, I shall explore how their language of fecundity and barrenness make available a poetics which is simultaneously feminist and Christian in character. This interrogation will be contextualised in Romantic and Victorian theories of women’s writing which claim that women’s poetry cannot escape conceptions of femininity as bodily fecundity; that is, theories which suggest that women’s bodies are suitable to produce children, but lack the character and strength to produce the acme of cultural production, poetry. By analysing Barrett Browning and Rossetti’s language of fecundity and barrenness in conversation with feminist literary theory and Christian feminist theology, I shall explore how these critical partners make available fresh readings of femininity as fecundity. I will interrogate how it is possible to argue for interpretations of Barrett Browning and Rossetti’s poetry which re-work fecundity as femininity in creative, liberative directions as disruptive excess. The creative aspect of this thesis, The Priest in the Kingdom of Love, is a sixty-six section poem. It attempts to create a monological, multivalent voice which investigates its relationships with imagined hearers, gender, faith, and bodily fecundity. The critical chapter which precedes it attempts to interrogate continuities and aporia with the work of Barrett Browning and Rossetti generated by my gender and religious poetic performances. 6 NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS Biblical quotes are taken from the English version most readily available to both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti: the King James’s Bible or Authorised Version. All word definitions and etymological derivations are taken from the OED. Standardly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning will be referred to as ‘EBB’ and Christina Rossetti will be referred to as ‘CR’. Further Abbreviations for key texts used in this thesis are: AL Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Aurora Leigh’ GM Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’ TRS Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ ‘Artist’s Studio ‘ Christina Rossetti, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ ‘St. Peter Poems’ Christina Rossetti, ‘The St. Peter Poems’ When I refer to my new poem ‘The Priest in the Kingdom of Love’ in critical discussion I shall abbreviate it to The Priest. It should also be noted that The Priest poem itself departs from standard double-spaced PhD format. I have sought to present it as it might be printed in a book, that is, a section per page and in single-spaced lines. 7 INTRODUCTION ‘The other […] gives birth to me. My identity connects me with my birth. Hypothesis: the unconscious is that umbilical cord.’1 In 2014, BBC Online published a story with the seemingly innocuous headline, ‘Women’s Football: Why are there so many knee injuries?’2 The male journalist proceeded to given an account of how these injuries were due to the very nature of women’s bodies. The article suggests that a woman’s ‘wide’ child-bearing hips affect the way knees ‘land’ in the sport. This brief vignette is a reminder that, even in the contemporary era, the fecund bodies of women are commonly read as risky, frail and dangerous. Women continue to be read primarily as visually-constructed bodies over- identified with their fecundity or capacity to reproduce. Advertising concentrates on clothing, make-up and sexual availability. On television, a significant amount of gender-specific advertising focuses on selling menstrual products or indicating that vaginas are dangerous. Canesten produces regular prime-time adverts asking, ‘Do you have Thrush or Bacterial Vaginosis?’3 Significantly, male bodies are not advertised in the same way; women are represented as problematic, ‘messy’ and unclean by 1 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. by Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 9. 2 Alistair Magowan, 'Women's Football: Why Are There So Many Knee Injuries?', <http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/29505871: BBC Sport, 2014> [accessed: 13 November 2016]. 3 Canesten, 'Symptoms| Bacterial Vaginosis| Canesten', <http://www.canesten.co.uk/en/female/symptoms/bacterial- vaginosis/symptoms/: Bayer Group, 2016> [accessed: 13 November 2016].