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Death and Possibility in Alice James and Christina Rossetti Erika Kvistad

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Death and Possibility in Alice James and Christina Rossetti Erika Kvistad Journal of International Women's Studies Volume 12 Issue 2 Winning and Short-listed Entries from the Article 7 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Annual Student Essay Competition Mar-2011 ‘What Happens, or Rather Doesn’t Happen’: Death and Possibility in Alice James and Christina Rossetti Erika Kvistad Follow this and additional works at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws Part of the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kvistad, Erika (2011). ‘What Happens, or Rather Doesn’t Happen’: Death and Possibility in Alice James and Christina Rossetti. Journal of International Women's Studies, 12(2), 75-87. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol12/iss2/7 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. ©2011 Journal of International Women’s Studies. ‘What Happens, or Rather Doesn’t Happen’: Death and Possibility in Alice James and Christina Rossetti By Erika Kvistad Abstract The idea of the dying Victorian woman as passive victim or object of desire has justly received critical attention, but this has meant a comparative neglect of the dying Victorian woman as an active, speaking, writing subject. In response, this article focuses on the death writing of Alice James and Christina Rossetti, reading the central role of death in their work as a way of articulating a space of possibility beyond what life has to offer. In Rossetti‘s death poetry and James‘s Diary, death is what gives form to the text, and represents the possibility for the text and its speaker to be read and understood. The article reads James and Rossetti‘s death writing as neither definitively conforming to or subverting social norms about the links between death and femininity. It suggests, however, that reading these death explorations in terms of ventures into a promising unknown creates a more complex conception of the role of women as active participants in as well as victims of Victorian death culture, and of the strategies available to women writers facing the problem of an existence that could itself seem deathlike. Keywords: Christina Rossetti, Alice James, death writing, nineteenth century, Victorian death culture, femininity ―Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?‖ Romans 7:24, King James Version Introduction: Deathly femininity and death exploration Victorian culture is full of images of women made more beautiful and more perfectly feminine by death. The serene face of the ‗Inconnue de la Seine‘, purported to be the death mask of a drowned young woman, hung in thousands of homes; according to A. Alvarez it was considered an aspirational ideal of beauty.1 In Woman in American Society, Abba Goold Woolson described the feminine ideal of her time as something between an invalid, a corpse and a ghost, ‗with her sunken cheeks, lost colour and wasted smiles...like some heart-sick wraith‘.2 Earlier in the century Elizabeth Siddal's image became famous as Millais's near-drowned Ophelia (1852), while Thomas Hood's hugely popular poem ‗The Bridge of Sighs‖ admired he effect of death on a young woman, suggesting that dying has erased her sins and made her lovable and pitiable: ‗Death has 1 A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, 1971 (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 156. 2 Abba Goold Woolson, Woman in American Society, 1873, The Gerritsen Collection. <http://gerritsen.chadwyck.com>, pp. 191-192. Woolson contrasts the deathly 'belles' of American society to the less elegant, but livelier 'efficient wives and mothers' of England (188), but in Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) Martha Vicinus suggests that by the late nineteenth century the feminine ideal of the active 'perfect wife' had given way to the ideal of the passive 'perfect lady', even in English society (ix). Journal of International Women‘s Studies Special Issue Vol. 12 #2 75 March 2011 left on her / Only the beautiful‘.3 In the same era, Alice James and Christina Rossetti wrote works that fit into this tradition of the conjunction of death and femininity, but that also reveal something very different. Rather than showing the dying woman as the aestheticised, objectified other, their writing imagines and approaches death from the position of the subject. Influential writers like Elisabeth Bronfen and Bram Dijkstra have justly paid critical attention to the dying Victorian woman as passive victim or object of desire, but this has meant a comparative neglect of the dying Victorian woman as an active, speaking, writing subject. In response, this article reads the central role of death in the work of Alice James and Christina Rossetti as a way of articulating a space of possibility beyond what life has to offer. In their work, death is what gives form to the text, but it also represents the possibility for the text and its speaker to be read and understood. Rather than assume, as Dijkstra does in his comment on James's diary in Idols of Perversity, that ‗she could not overcome her environment...the realm of what she called ―my suffocation‖ came to seem to her ―the natural one‖', I will discuss what the imaginative exploration of death offered James and Rossetti, both as writers and as women preparing to die.4 A decision to imagine death in terms of possibility can, of course, be seen as in some ways not a choice at all, but an attempt to come to terms with a lack of possibility within life itself. James‘s and Rossetti‘s explorations of death shift between ecstasy and despair, and to read them definitively as conforming to or subverting social norms about the links between death and femininity would be reductive: both modes are present in the texts. But acting in a way that is informed and affected by a power structure outside oneself does not in itself mean acting without agency. While the cultural context in which James and Rossetti wrote linked women and death in ways that may have damaged and curtailed their sense of power, they approached death as writing subjects. ‘Peg[ging] away pretty hard’: Dying as art and profession Alice James died in 1892, Christina Rossetti two years later, and both left behind bodies of work in which imagining death plays a central role. Anne Jamison points out the wealth of death-poems in Rossetti‘s first collection of poems, published when she was only 30,5 and James‘s diary represents a woman so fascinated with her own process of dying that Ruth Yeazell entitled an edition of her letters The Death and Letters of Alice James.6 ‗I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn‘t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me,‘ writes James in her first diary entry, three years before her death. Her diary, like Rossetti‘s death poetry, is shaped by a sense of death as ‗what happens, or rather doesn‘t happen‘ in the text. Paradoxically – as James half-acknowledges in a letter to her brother William where she calls death ‗the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only 3Thomas Hood, ―The Bridge of Sighs‖, 1844, Bartleby.com, <http://www.bartleby.com/101/654.html>, lines 25-26. 4 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 28. 5Anne Jamison, ‗Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti's Unusual Dead‘, Textual Practice, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2006, pp. 257-280, p. 258. 6 Ruth Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2004). Journal of International Women‘s Studies Special Issue Vol. 12 #2 76 March 2011 one in fact when living seems life‘7 – Rossetti and James treat death as both the only event in the text and the one thing they can never actually bear witness to in writing, the defining plot element that always lies just outside the plot. The Alice James who speaks in her diary, and the subjects and speakers of Rossetti‘s death poems (‗After Death‘, ‗Song (When I am Dead, My Dearest)‘, ‗Rest‘, and many others), are both finished and unfinished. Death becomes the anticipated event that will give their lives form and meaning, though this shaping principle remains itself obscure and unknowable. The two bodies of work take very different forms. Rossetti imagines death through poems about imagined, constructed speakers who may or may not stand for Rossetti herself; James imagines it through autobiographical prose about real deaths, sometimes others‘ – she frequently notes news accounts of suicides – but more often her own. They construe the confessional and the artistic as almost mutually exclusive and place themselves on opposite sides of the divide, but for both writers the approach to death tends to unsettle these categories, rendering the artistic personal and the personal artistic. In a preface to a collection of Rossetti‘s poems, her brother William Michael Rossetti suggests that she wrote because ‗something impelled her feelings‘, an idea that Rossetti herself carefully resisted.8 Still, her response to Dante Gabriel Rossetti‘s concern about the potential impropriety of some of her poetical themes suggests an ambiguity in her wariness of confessional writing. On the subject of a poem written from the point of view of an illegitimate child, she says, ...whilst it may be truly urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don‘t see why ‗the Poet Mind‘ should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities.9 This both asserts Rossetti‘s status as artist, possessed of ‗the Poet Mind‘, and hints at the permeable and flexible quality of that mind, undercutting the certainty of ‗unless white could be black and Heaven Hell‘.
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