Avenging Alice: and Lewis Carroll Author(s): U. C. Knoepflmacher Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Dec., 1986), pp. 299-328 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3044929 Accessed: 03-06-2019 16:54 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Avenging Alice: Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll

U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER

(9 HRISTINA Rossetti's sonnet "In an Art- ist's Studio" brilliantly renders a male artist's appropriation of an idealized female Other. The sonnet's octet dwells on the shape the artist has deformed and arrested:

One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel-every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more nor less.

The sonnet's sestet, however, turns to the male artist who needs to satisfy his monomaniacal hunger for such a female essence:

He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.'

e 1986 by The Regents of the University of California 'All quoted Rossetti poems are taken from The Poetical Works of Christina Geor- gina Rossetti, ed. with memoir and notes by (London: Macmillan, 1904).

299

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Whether the reference here is to , whose self- same face and figure are so prominently displayed in Dante Ga- briel Rossetti's canvases of the 1850s and 1860s, or whether the sonnet harks back to Christina Rossetti's own repeated experiences as her brother's passive model, it clearly constitutes an acerbic commentary on the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics of immanence. Yet the critique goes beyond painting. It also extends to literature. Just as a decade later her own "An Echo from Willow-Wood" was to subvert her brother's "Willow-wood" sonnets in The House of Life, so does "In an Artist's Studio" allow Christina Rossetti to call into question the female forms personified by a voracious male poetic imagination. Her allusions to those precursors cherished by the Pre-Raphaelites-to Tennyson and to Browning-are unmis- takable. The artist who feeds, in her poem, upon that mirrored female "face by day or night" recalls, after all, the poet who had cast himself as a fragile Lady of Shalott, a "she" who "weaves by night and day" until the shattering of her mirror releases her into the permanence of an art-object. But Christina Rossetti emphat- ically rejects such stereotyping in her sonnet. In portraying the female model's deformation by a male's desire, she repudiates the roles of a Porphyria silenced by her lover, a last Duchess frozen into art, a Blessed Damozel transported into a painterly heaven, or even a dead-in-life whose monotonous refrain con- tributes to the ornamental effects of a poem which, in John Stuart Mill's words, is "all picture."2 Instead, as in her poem "Winter: My Secret," where she taunts a male observer who wants to ap- propriate her speaker's inner essence, Christina Rossetti insists on the irreducible and inviolable selfhood of a femininity that resists its deformation into a type. Indeed, even her dating of the poem-it is inscribed "24 December 1856"-seems defiantly ironic. Dante Gabriel's earlier poem "My Sister's Sleep" had made Christmas Eve a setting for still another beautiful female corpse as an "all white," ever-pure, aesthetic object for male contempla- tion and adoration. My own concern, however, is not to document Christina Ros- setti's quarrels with either her artist brother or with his male

2"Tennyson's Poems," Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 86.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND LEWIS CARROLL 301 poetic predecessors. For "In an Artist's Studio" can also be read as a foreshadowing of her later creative resistance against the fe- male idealizations of a very different sort of male dreamer, Lewis Carroll. In 1856 she had not yet met the young would-be poet and art-collector who would write to to ask him where he might find old copies of , the 1850 Pre- Raphaelite magazine. As shy and reclusive as herself, yet just as aggressively tenacious, this Pre-Raphaelite sympathizer, two years her junior, would gradually enmesh her in a relation which, like her relationship with her brother, simultaneously involved respect and rivalry. His threat to her was, paradoxically, exacerbated by his asexuality. For unlike Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he was uninter- ested in capturing voluptuous adult females he could dress as queens or angels or nameless girls. Instead, with an avowedly "gentle hand," Lewis Carroll preferred to detain an ever-young, prepubescent female in a static domain "where Childhood's dreams are twined / In Memory's mystic band."3 As "In an Artist's Studio" shows, Christina Rossetti was able to disengage herself from the overpowering influence of her brother's mesmeric pen, pencil, and palette. The mild-mannered Mr. Dodgson whom she met in 1863 soon posed a different chal- lenge. He came armed with a new and seemingly harmless in- strument, a camera. But Christina Rossetti discovered, when she was immediately prevailed upon to pose for him, that this gentler artist could brilliantly employ his camera as a means of control to gratify his own urge to freeze mutability into permanence. That craving became more evident to her when, not long after, he turned to pen and pencil to arrest the feminine in a dream-child, "not as she is, but was when hope shone bright." Christina Rossetti found Alice in Wonderland more difficult to oppose than Carroll's camera, for she apparently sensed a danger in her own attraction to the powerful blend of gentleness and sadism that she recog- nized in Carroll. She needed, even more than before, to deny a kindred male imagination, to shrink from its impingement on her

3Dedication to Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Through the Looking-Glass," "The Hunting of the Snark," ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 4. Further citations in my text are to this edition; the abbreviations "AW" will be used for Alice in Wonderland and "TLG" for Through the Looking-Glass.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 302 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE own. She thus was hardly pleased to find her yoked to his by reviewers who linked her 1872 poems for children, Sing-Song, with the 1871 Through the Looking-Glass.4 In 1874 she decided at last to signify her dissociation. She produced Speaking Likenesses, a book she coyly purported to depreciate in a letter to Dante Ga- briel as a mere "Christmas trifle, would-be in the Alice style."5 But this time her resistance proved futile. Her emphasis on dissocia- tion or unlikeness continued to be misread as an expression of kinship or likeness. And kinship was exactly the price that Lewis Carroll began to exact from her when, after her brother's death, she was forced to depend, in more ways than one, on the male imagination she had tried to repudiate. It thus devolved upon other Victorian women writers to reclaim the form of the fairy tale that Lewis Carroll had feminized and so triumphantly ap- propriated to fill his dream and hold it true.

It was in autumn of 1863, almost seven years after the composition of "In an Artist's Studio," that Christina Rossetti first met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in her brother's stu- dio. Carroll had yet to present Alice Liddell with her exclusive manuscript copy of "Alice's Adventures Under Ground." Indeed, that precious copy, which he would decorate with his own draw- ings of a dark-haired Pre-Raphaelite child and with the haunting photograph he pasted in an oval insertion between the story's last words about bygone "happy summer days," owes much to his 1863 visit to Dante Gabriel's studio. For Carroll had been lured into the painter's den as willingly as the fictional Alice is lured into the rabbit-hole. He found there not only a lovely garden and a ver- itable menagerie of animal creatures, but also an artistic treasure- trove that Rossetti genially invited him to reproduce with his cam- era. Shown at first "some very lovely pictures, most of them only half finished," Carroll would soon amass the hoard with which he would dazzle Christina Rossetti a full twenty years later: he avidly

4Both books actually appeared in time for Christmas in December 1871. 5Quoted in Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 305.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND LEWIS CARROLL 303 photographed Rossetti's sketches of an "Irish girl," of pretty Miss Annie Miller, of "a female head, profile," of Lizzie Siddal in var- ious poses, of a girl and grapes, of Jane Burden, of a "Miss Her- bert," and others.6 It was, as the excited visitor recorded in his diary, "a great treat, as I had never seen such exquisite drawings before" (Diaries, I, 204, 6 October 1863). But Dante Gabriel Rossetti had volunteered more than his artwork; as Carroll noted, he also proved to be "most hospitable in the offers of the use of house and garden" as a backdrop for a gallery of camera-portraits. The photographer was to have use of the premises on "Tuesday for friends," and, in return, "on Wednesday take [Rossetti] and his mother and sister" (Diaries, I, 201-2, 30 September 1863). As an added lure, Rossetti promised to procure Robert Browning as a possible sitter. Though Brown- ing did not materialize, Christina Rossetti unexpectedly did. As Carroll was unpacking his photographic equipment on Tuesday, "Miss Christina Rossetti arrived, and Mr. Rossetti introduced me to her. She seemed a little shy at first, and I had very little time for conversation with her, but I much liked the little I saw of her. She sat for two pictures, Mr. Rossetti for one, and also two friends of his who came in, a Mr. Cayley, and a Mr. Legros, an artist" (Diaries, I, 203-4, 6 October 1863). Carroll did not know, nor would Christina Rossetti have in- formed him, that the Mr. Cayley he characterized as Rossetti's friend was in fact her suitor; her desire to see Cayley probably accounted for her unexpected arrival on the day before the planned picture-taking session. Instead, she found herself posing for a stranger. The next day, the arranged sittings resulted in a series of group pictures: Mrs. Rossetti with all four children, Mrs. Rossetti with Christina and her two brothers, Mrs. Rossetti with Christina. Not unexpectedly, Christina Rossetti seemed much to prefer the group pictures to those taken on the previous day when she and Dante Gabriel had posed for individual portraits. "It was our aim," she would later explain, "to appear in the full family

6The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Cassell, 1953), I, 201, 30 September 1863; The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton N. Cohen as- sisted by Roger Lancelyn Green (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), I, 482- 83. Further citations to "Diaries" and "Letters" are given in my text.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 304 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE group of five; but whilst various others succeeded, that particular negative was spoilt by a shower, and I possess a solitary print taken from it in which we appear as if splashed by ink." When, a few months later, she requested prints of the pho- tographs Carroll had taken, she omitted from her long list any copies of the pictures in which she had been his exclusive model. Her letter to Carroll ends on a note that is both friendly and distancing in its response to his apparent invitation for the family to visit him at Oxford. The tone of her concluding paragraph resembles that of her poem "Winter: My Secret," where relation is also teasingly proffered only as it is being withdrawn:

Delightful it would be, that possible visit to Oxford. We contem- plate it in a spirit of vague approbation. Stirred up by the kind offer of such a Showman, and by a wish to see the sights of Oxford in general and Gabriel's handiwork in particular; weighed down by family immobility;-we tremble in the balance, though I fear the leaden element preponderates. It is characteristic of us to miss op- portunities. A year or two ago I had a chance of seeing Cambridge, and of course missed it.8

The letter provides an example of that rhetorical "art of self-post- ponement" that Kathleen Blake has recently traced in Christina Rossetti's poems.9 The deliberate delay of the forceful "I" that asserts itself only at the end of the letter helps to underscore the wariness of an ironic self, capable of artful concealments. Absent in the inverted syntax of an opening sentence devoid of any per- sonal pronoun, hiding itself in a collective "we" to which it attrib- utes an exaggerated vacillation, this ironic "I" finally signifies its absolute control and leaves no doubt whatsoever as to its response to Carroll's "kind" invitation. Rather than a result of indecision, the letter-writer's proclaimed inertia becomes a test of her deter-

7Quoted in Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1898), p. 149. 8The letter is quoted in Helmut Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll: Photographer (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 55. In the first half of her letter Rossetti lists her requests for photographic reprints of the following: the group with and without her sister, her mother "playing at chess with Gabriel," Mr. Le Gros, Mr. Cayley, "a large oval of Gabriel seated," as well as reproductions of two of "my brother's sketches." 9Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 3-25.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND LEWIS CARROLL 305 mination to miss an opportunity. She is indebted to the photog- rapher for the prints of the group pictures she has ordered, but she refuses him any attendant privileges. She will not be drawn into the orbit of "such a Showman." The male bastion of Oxford will remain unvisited. If Carroll detected any aggression lurking beneath Christina Rossetti's professed indecisiveness, he did not show it. Instead, he next sent her an inscribed copy of Alice in Wonderland, a work that happens to open and end in the countryside adjacent to the uni- versity town she had refused to visit. His new attempt to draw her into his orbit provoked another, even more carefully worded re- sponse. It was Dante Gabriel who wrote exuberantly to say how much he had enjoyed the book he had found "at my sister's." Whereas he singled out Carroll's parodies and "Alice's perverted snatches of school poetry" as being "among the funniest things I have seen for a long while,"'0 Christina pointedly avoided any sim- ilar reference to Carroll's subversion of a didacticism that the Ros- setti children had notoriously despised when their mother tried to rear them on moral fables such as Sandford and Merton or The Fairchild Family." There is, however, a far more pointed omission in her letter of thanks, for she fails, significantly enough, to refer to the character of Alice herself, or, for that matter, to mention the book's title. Instead, she chooses to dwell on her reaction to several of the male creatures Alice meets in Wonderland, crea- tures that she appears to recognize as agents of Carroll's own am- bivalence towards his female dream-child. If, in falling down the rabbit-hole, Carroll's Alice "never once" considers "how in the world she was to get out again," Chris- tina Rossetti stoutly resists her immersion into Wonderland:

166 Albany St., London, N.W. Tuesday morning My dear Mr. Dodgson, A thousand and one thanks-surely an appropriate number- for the funny pretty book you have so very kindly sent me. My Mother and Sister as well as myself made ourselves quite at home yesterday in Wonderland: and (if I am not shamefully old for such

'0Quoted in Letters, I, 8n. "Georgina Battiscombe, Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life (New York: Holt, Rine- hart, and Winston, 1981), p. 21.

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an avowal) I confess it would give me sincere pleasure to fall in with that conversational rabbit, that endearing puppy, that very sparkling dormouse. Of the hatter's acquaintance I am not ambitious, and the March hare may fairly remain an open question. The woodcuts are charming. Have you seen the few words of strong praise already awarded to your volume by the Reader? To descend to very prosy prose. Please do not forget that we are still in your debt for the last vignettes of my Sister: 9 copies, I think. Two or three months ago her carte was taken at Harrogate and turned out an admirable likeness. My Mother and Sister unite in cordial remembrances. Pray be- lieve me very truly yours, Christina G. Rossetti'2

Why does Christina Rossetti, who begins with such fulsome thanks to the author of Alice's descent underground, feel compelled, as she closes, to "descend to very prosy prose" by reminding her recipient of quite another sort of unfinished business between them? She notes that he still lacks payment for nine prints of a photograph he had taken of her sister. Is she not thereby subtly calling attention to a much more calculated lack? When read closely, her letter proffers little actual praise for Carroll's imagi- native achievement. For a "few words of strong praise," she almost seems to hint, Carroll had better turn to the review of his "vol- ume" printed in the Reader. Her own remarks about the unnamed "funny pretty book" are far more guarded. By forcing Carroll into rivalry with a commercial photographer who is as capable as he of turning out "an admirable likeness" of the same female subject, she reduces his potential to be her literary rival, a writer whose capacity to portray young and adult females she would indirectly question in her own Speaking Likenesses. Indeed, whether con- sciously or not, her letter seems to adopt Carroll's own mode of diminution. If the imperious dream-child extolled in the opening of Alice finds herself reduced in a Wonderland where she can be harassed by Carroll's aggressive creatures, the author of this "funny pretty book" winds up as little more than a capable resort photographer.

'2Quoted from Berg Collection MS. 244520-B, Q. 716, through the kind per- mission of the New York Public Library; a truncated version of the letter appears in The Letters of Lewis Carroll, I, 81n.

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To extract a full reader's response to Alice in Wonderland from Christina Rossetti's scant remarks about Carroll's text may seem risky-although it is safe to note how the original trinity of Liddell sisters who listened to Carroll and whom he inscribed into his written tale has been replaced by an adult trio composed of Mrs. Frances Rossetti, Maria Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti herself. Significant, too, is the choice of the figures Rossetti decides to highlight in her letter to Carroll. Appropriating the role of the unnamed Alice, she avoids the company of either Duchess or Queen of Hearts and prefers to focus on five carefully chosen male figures whom she separates into two distinct groups. Since three of these males belong to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, the hindsight provided by Speaking Likenesses proves to be helpful. For there, in the first of her three anti-Carrollian stories, Rossetti would create a tea party far more savagely cruel than that which stings Alice into her first open outburst of anger. Why is the hardly "sparkling" Dormouse, a hibernating cousin of Dante Gabriel's own beloved wombat, lifted out from the three- some to which he belongs? The timid Dormouse is dubiously placed in the company of the White Rabbit, whom the enlarged Alice so cruelly drops on splintered glass, and of the monstrous mastiff, whom the shrunken girl who leans on a buttercup falsifies as "a dear little puppy" (AW, pp. 29, 33). What does it mean, then, for Christina Rossetti to say that it gives her "sincere pleasure to fall in" with a rabbit who, far from being "conversational," fears the "savage" Duchess, flees from Alice's overtures, and later mis- takes Alice for his servant Mary Ann? Why does she extol a puppy that, far from being "endearing," might well tear the dream-child into pieces? Is she trying to signify to Carroll her penetration of a sadistic subtext he has covered with layerings of nostalgia and charm? Or is she pointing to a hidden text all of her own? Ros- setti's decisiveness in expressing her preference of the Dormouse over the Mad Hatter may provide a clue. At the Tea Party an abused Alice tries to curb her mounting indignation because "she did not wish to offend the Dormouse." Yet she finally rises in "great disgust" at the crowning "piece of rudeness" from the Hat- ter who had earlier dubbed her as "stupid" (AW, p. 60). In upholding the Dormouse over his ruder male companions Rossetti seems eager once again to stress her belief in the power

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 308 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE of a creative inertia. She protests that she is "not ambitious" of making the acquaintance of the Hatter or of the Hare, figures who, like the Cheshire Cat, display an obsessive need for domi- nation. If Hatter and Cat insist on the primacy of the abusive games they identify with a universal madness, the Dormouse is gentler and more acquiescent. Cat and Hatter refuse to act as Alice's guides. Yet by telling Alice the story of three sisters, the drowsy Dormouse adopts his creator's own role. (Dodgson, we know, often pretended to fall asleep while telling stories to the Liddell girls.) Splashed by the Mad Hatter's hot tea, the aroused Dormouse is essentially a reactive figure, like Alice herself. He is, moreover, a victim rather than a victimizer, much like the Mock Turtle whose wet sobs reverberate in the last paragraphs of the book. Christina Rossetti fastened on such lethargic creatures as em- blems for her own imagination. When her brother had purchased his hibernating wombat, she quickly penned a witty Italian poem, "L'Uommibatto," with a prefatory couplet in English that converted this innocuous dreamer into a muse that could stand for her own creative "acts of postponement": "When wombats do inspire, / I strike my disused lyre." In "Goblin Market," Lizzie covers up her eyes lest she behold the animalistic males who attract her sister. Yet Lizzie's inviolable passivity ultimately proves to be more pow- erful than Laura's lust for the forbidden fruits proffered by the dwellers of the goblin underground. In her brief letter to Carroll, Christina Rossetti similarly resists the allure of a richly seductive anarchism. And yet, her resistance enlists the very aggression she wants to repulse, for Rossetti appeared to have sensed in Carroll's imaginative work a self-division much like her own split between outer deference and inner anger. Wombats and dormice might be deemed preferable to the destructive Wonderland creatures who actively humiliate a dutiful little Victorian girl. Nonetheless, that anarchism had distinctly stirred Rossetti's own dormant imagi- nation. To her, Carroll's work thus still remained very much "an open question." If Rossetti was indirectly asking Carroll to regard a sleepy storyteller as a means to temper his "very sparkling" imagination, her plea went unheeded. For Carroll reinstated Hatter and Hare in Through the Looking-Glass, where they reappear as Hatta and

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Haigha. In an 1872 review that coupled her own volume of nurs- ery rhymes, Sing-Song, with the most recent works of George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear, the reviewer, Sidney Colvin, noted, when he came to Through the Looking-Glass, that "Every reader will be charmed to meet his old friends the Hare and the Hatter (still engaged upon his tea and bread and but- ter)."913 Christina Rossetti obviously was not one of those charmed readers. Three years later, in Speaking Likenesses, she would re- member Carroll's deliberate reintroduction of the two mad males she had disliked. When one of the child-listeners in her book pro- tests that the third story brings back "those monstrous" creatures they had disliked in the first tale, the female narrator sarcastically admits, "Yes, Ella, you really can't expect me not to utilize such a brilliant idea twice. "14 But in 1865 Rossetti still preferred to "fall in" with Carroll's milder impersonations. Whereas his male companions try to over- power Alice and detain her in a realm where all time has come to a stop, the Dormouse at least agrees to tell her a sequential narrative, the tale about the three little sisters who draw all man- ner of things that begin with the letter M. The letter-writer who excluded her brother by making "My Mother and Sister" and her- self the prime respondents to Carroll's gift of his book, and who would dedicate Speaking Likenesses to "My Dearest Mother, in grateful remembrance of the Stories with which she used to en- tertain her children" (SL, p. v), clearly found this feminized story- teller much more to her liking. He is not really "sparkling," to be sure, for he lacks the wit of either Cheshire Cat or Mad Hatter; but it is his very lack of sparkle that makes him preferable, for her, to a regressive imagination which could convert a twinkling star into a twinkling bat. Whether Rossetti sensed the extent of Carroll's attack on the adult female figures in the chapters im- mediately before and after the Mad Tea Party remains uncertain. Yet in giving primacy to adult female figures in all three of her tales in Speaking Likenesses, she would later counter the unflattering portraits of grown-up women in both Alice books.

'3The Academy, 3 (15 January 1872), 24. 14Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874), pp. 80-81; all future citations in the text will be abbreviated "SL."

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Aggression, then, is what repels yet also attracts Christina Rossetti in Carroll's Wonderland. She may rhetorically disguise her dissociation by clothing it in a profusion of a "thousand and one thanks" or by abruptly turning from her repudiation of Hat- ter and Hare to praise of those "charming" woodcuts. Yet she seems infected by the same anger that eventually leads a fully grown Alice to brush away the Wonderland creatures. Although Rossetti refuses to name Alice, she covertly identifies with the out- rage of the child whom Carroll worships as a girl yet resents for wanting to become a full-blown woman. When Carroll reactivated his ambivalence in Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice once again terminates her dream by angrily turning on a Queen, Chris- tina Rossetti was provoked into a more overt act of retaliation. The acid female narrator of her Speaking Likenesses, an impatient aunt-figure created as a counter to the avuncular voice of the Alice books, would appropriate Carroll's resentment by turning it against his dubious worship of the female child.

Seldom discussed and uniformly belittled whenever mentioned, Speaking Likenesses deserves closer critical at- tention. Not only have the book's imaginative qualities been greatly undervalued, but also its powerful engagement with Lewis Carroll's own imagination has yet to be fully assessed. Unlike the much-acclaimed Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, which Sidney Colvin hailed in his 1872 review as an achievement not even an- ticipated by Blake's "Songs of Innocence," Speaking Likenesses was poorly received by the Victorian reading public. The reaction of Lewis Carroll, who owned a copy, apparently uninscribed, will, alas, forever remain unknown. But the response of another child- lover, , seems pertinent. In January of 1875, survey- ing a recently published batch of Christmas books for children, Ruskin chose to keep "all but one," including the item he had found to be the most offensive of the lot. "The worst," he pro- nounced emphatically, "I consider Christina Rossetti's. I've kept that for the mere wonder of it: how could she or Arthur Hughes sink so low after their pretty nursery rhymes?" 15

15Ruskin to F. S. Ellis, 21 January 1875, Vol. 37 of The Works of John Ruskin,

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Ruskin's outrage over Speaking Likenesses seems as noteworthy as our own contemporary neglect of the trio of linked tales which had appeared in time for Christmas of 1874, exactly three years after the "pretty" Sing-Song and after Through the Looking-Glass. This negative book, which Rossetti originally thought of entitling Nowhere, has, not inappropriately, been denied a place in her canon. There is no modern reprint of the original 96-page vol- ume. And, though criticism is reestablishing Christina Rossetti as a major nineteenth-century poet, no such claims are made for her as a writer of imaginative prose. Indeed, both Ralph Bellas and Thomas Burnett Swann, the only authors of book-length studies of Rossetti to consider Speaking Likenesses, limit themselves to pro- viding plot summaries of stories they regard as sententious and structureless imitations of Lewis Carroll's superior "whimsy." 16 Both complain about the dullness of the incomplete middle story, which, they note with some puzzlement, even seems to lack the overt moral of the first. Both thus conclude, echoing Ruskin, that Rossetti ought not to have forsaken poetry. Speaking Likenesses is an antagonistic work. The roots of its antagonism surely go beyond Christina Rossetti's sudden desire to settle a score with a writer whose Through the Looking-Glass had given new offense. The unity of her family life had recently been weakened. When her brother William Michael chose to take a young wife, who would soon regale Christina with a succession of nephews and nieces, she decided that she and her mother could no longer live with the newlyweds. Her sister Maria had used the occasion to remove herself to an Anglican sisterhood. And Chris- tina herself had become ill of Graves disease. The irascible nar- rator of Speaking Likenesses thus is more than a parody of Carroll's Red Queen, but she is that as well. The Red Queen, who will eventually mar Queen Alice's moment of triumph at the end of the book, snaps like a governess at its beginning: "Where do you come from? ... And where are you going? Look up, speak nicely,

ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library ed., 39 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1903-12), p. 155. 16See Ralph A. Bellas, Christina Rossetti (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), pp. 103-7; Thomas Burnett Swann, Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossettz (Francestown, N. H.: Marshall Jones, 1960), pp. 60-64.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 312 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE and don't twiddle your fingers all the time" (TLG, p. 124). Ros- setti's narrator, an aunt surrounded by five little nieces, is even more hortatory:

Come sit round me, my dear little girls, and I will tell you a story. Each of you bring her sewing, and let Ella take pencils and colour- box, and try to finish some one drawing of the many she has begun. What Maude! pouting over that nice clean white stocking because it wants a darn? Put away your pout and pull out your needle, my dear; for pouts make a sad beginning to my story. And yet not an inappropriate beginning, as some of you may notice as I go on. Si- lence! Attention! All eyes on occupations, not on me lest I should feel shy! Now I start my knitting and my story together. (SL, pp. 1-2)

This utilitarian opening harks back to Sing-Song, where the title page had featured Arthur Hughes's fine drawing of an Alice- like girl industriously hemming a pocket-handkerchief with nee- dle and thread. Despite her adult point of view, the lyricist of Sing- Song had often reproduced, in Colvin's words, "a music suited to baby ears." The narrator of Speaking Likenesses, however, sharply insists on maintaining her distance from the children over whom she exerts her adult authority. Her voice is anti-lyrical, matter-of- fact. Quickly descending into "prosy prose," she has no intention of extolling the "child with the pure unclouded brow" whom Car- roll celebrated in the prefatory verses to his second Alice book. When the children interrupt her story with questions, as they fre- quently do, she displays none of the forbearance of an evasive Uncle Dodgson who pretended to doze like a dormouse. Instead, she turns on Ella, Maude, Jane, Clara, and Laura with an impa- tience that seems to arise from a perpetual state of annoyance. She repeats their questions, only to dismiss them: "How many children were there at supper?-Well, I have not the least idea, Laura, but they made quite a large party: suppose we say a hundred thousand" (SL, p. 38). Paradoxically, this authoritarian Aunt denies, again and again, her imaginative control over stories of her own invention- an invention she repeatedly derogates. When the children plead that she build a second tale around a frog who had played a totally inconsequential role in the first story, she insists on her incom- petence because, quite simply, she "was not there" (p. 49). She

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND LEWIS CARROLL 313 continues to reject the idea, until one child protests: "You know, Aunt, you always telling us to try." The appeal seems to work, since it allows the Aunt to stress once again the preeminence of unwanted chores over the pleasures of the imagination:

"Fairly put, Jane, and I will try, on condition that you all help me with my sewing." "But we got through our work yesterday." "Very well, Maude, as you like: only no help no story. I have too many poor friends ever to get through my work. However, as I see thimbles coming out, I conclude you choose story and labour." (SL, pp. 49-50)

Yet for a narrator to whom storytelling is labor, to accede to her audience's wishes seems difficult indeed. Her compliance re- mains suspect. And the story she now tells, which is about a little girl's inadequate performance of labors quite easily discharged by an adult, will render the frog as insignificant as before. Subterfuge seems to be what most interests this narrator. Her middle tale, which, as we shall see, acts as a paradigm for the entire under- taking, is carefully calculated to thwart the children's expectations. Still, even at the outset of this anti-fable, the narrator warns her listeners not to expect great wonders. She has, she avows, ex- hausted her creative powers on her first story about little Flora's dream: "Now are we all seated and settled? Then listen. The frog and his peers will have to talk, of course; but that seems a marvel scarcely worth mentioning after Flora's experience" (p. 50). How could the same writer who had created in "Goblin Mar- ket" a poem every bit as fantastic and spellbinding as "The An- cient Mariner" choose to base this narrator on one of those di- dactic anti-fantasists that abounded in earlier children's literature from Sarah Fielding's The Governess to Mrs. Sherwood's History of the Fairchild Family? She had once disliked such books as much as Lewis Carroll did. The portrait of the Aunt who insists on her limited and almost literalistic imagination is, of course, hardly un- ironical. The pleasure Rossetti takes in this figure's programmatic uninventiveness leads her-especially in that middle non-story which purports to render a non-action that does not feature a still unimportant frog-to strategies that are every bit as subversive and self-destructing as Geoffrey Chaucer's aborted "Sir Thopas."

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Still, by having her narratress so repeatedly emphasize the make-shift quality of her imagination, Rossetti seems especially eager to undermine the work of Lewis Carroll. In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll had desperately tried to uphold the power of make-believe as the last possible link between the imaginations of an adult mathematician and a child capable of playing a sym- bolic "let's pretend." The Looking-Glass Alice can still pretend, unlike her older sister, to be "kings and queens." Yet, as Carroll also acknowledges, Alice's wishfulness stems from a desire for domination as insatiable as his own. Alice, we are told in chapter one of Through the Looking-Glass, once "had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, 'Nurse! Do let's pre- tend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone!' " (TLG, p. 110). Such aggressiveness on the part of Alice allows Carroll to deflect his own. Representing himself as but an older child in his pref- atory poem, he soon inscribes himself into the story as an inef- fectual White Knight, a fragile Humpty Dumpty, a tiny gnat, a dozing Red King-all cousins of Dormouse Dodgson. Opposed to these impotent male figures is the determined girl who induces her own dreams of domination as crowned ruler of the matriar- chal chessboard. In the book's denouement, Carroll once more reveals his resentment of the female power he has had Alice pre- maturely covet. Unable to check the girl's progress towards ma- turity, he questions the extent and validity of the female mastery she so avidly desires. The mastery of the adult woman is never in doubt in Speaking Likenesses. The Aunt who rules her five little slave-laborers tells them stories which relentlessly discourage their potential indul- gence in Alice-like fantasies. Each of the girl heroines in the Aunt's three stories-Flora, Edith, and Maggie-is subjected to experiences that illustrate what the five child-listeners already know: adult women are stronger and more resourceful than little girls. If Carroll resents Alice Liddell for having grown far beyond the age of the fictional Alice, Rossetti scorns children for taking so long before attaining the maturity of grown-up women. It is her narratress who poses as hyaena and the little girls who are her bones. In Alice in Wonderland, the fictional Alice is exactly seven years old; in Through the Looking-Glass, she is exactly seven and a half. Flora, the heroine of the first and most elaborate of the

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Aunt's three tales, is celebrating her eighth birthday. The dream sequence that follows the birthday party ruined by Flora's guests is so horrid an exaggeration of Alice's Mad Tea Party that the awakening Flora gratefully returns to the mother who had earlier roused her from sleep and to the older sister who had tried to soothe her with the first version of the unsuccessful frog story. The heroines of the second and third stories are likewise forced to acknowledge adult female power. Involved, like Alice again, in "friendly chat with bird or beast" (AW, p. 3), Edith and her animal helpers abysmally fail at a task which takes her Nurse bare seconds to perform. Only Maggie, in the third story, which parodies "Little Red Riding Hood" as much as it does Alice's ad- ventures, manages to remain unhumiliated. Her partial success, it is suggested, stems from her strong identification with Old Dame Margaret, her grandmother and namesake, whom this un- straying Little Red Riding Hood serves as unquestioningly as the Aunt expects her little nieces to obey her. Yet even the sentimen- tality which closes this last tale seems to be ironically undercut. Negation is all in the book once entitled Nowhere. Speaking Likenesses activates Rossetti's extraordinary powers of repression and denial. Still the same person who as a teenager had given up chess because of her intense desire to win, Rossetti seems affronted by the eagerness that Carroll's little chessplayer shows in her quest to become Queen Alice. She attributes a similar desire for preeminence to Flora and her birthday guests in the first story. The wrangling children, who are portrayed by Arthur Hughes as being guided by a huge and hideous, Medusa-headed goddess of discord, soon assume monstrous shapes in Flora's sub- sequent dream. Flora herself encounters her own speaking like- ness in the malevolent queen who rules her subjects far more absolutely than any of Carroll's queens. By attacking these sadistic magnifications of Wonderland creatures, Rossetti's narrator pur- ports to put down the childish fantasies of power that were given such a free range by Lewis Carroll. In actuality, however, she re- veals her own hunger for domination. Although ostensibly placed in the services of a cultural superego, this hunger by far exceeds that of a Flora or an Alice. Paradoxically enough, it is the nar- rator's very repressiveness, her hostility to all forms of fantasy, that endows Rossetti's three anti-fairy tales and anti-narratives

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 316 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE with a powerful energy of their own. If Carroll had fed upon the energies of Alice, Rossetti draws strength by feeding on the very imagination she opposes. In the review in which he had moved from unmitigated praise of Sing-Song to a more measured estimate of Carroll's second Alice book, Sidney Colvin expressed two strictures about Through the Looking-Glass that Christina Rossetti may well have remembered when she told Dante Gabriel that she had decided to make Speak- ing Likenesses a "trifle, would-be in the Alice style." Noting that Through the Looking-Glass was, after all, a sequel to Alice in Won- derland, Colvin deplored that the book was forced to suffer the "misfortune of all sequels-that it is not a commencement." Gravely belaboring the self-evident, he observed: "An author who continues himself, loses the effect... of his originality.... No reader will have the sense of freshness and the unforeseen ... in [Alice's] new dreamland, which he had amid those of the old; hence the inevitable injustice of a comparison." Still, Colvin also professed to find a flaw in the new book-a "weak point"-that had nothing to do with its being a sequel. For he detected in it "a certain ugliness at times which seems to run near the edge of the vulgar."17 It seems likely that Christina Rossetti recalled both of Colvin's strictures. Another sequel would have had the desired effect of diluting even further the "sense of freshness and the unforeseen" which readers had found in the first Alice. It was not enough, though, to fill her book with ironic cross-references to Carroll. By exaggerating, in the first and last of her three stories, the "ugli- ness" bordering on the "vulgar" which Colvin professed to find in Through the Looking-Glass, she could also find a license for her own love of the grotesque. Rossetti wanted her Victorian readers to be sure to note that hers was indeed an imitation of the Alice books. When the little nieces ask their Aunt for a winter story to match her first two summer stories, the narrator complies with an unusual alacrity:

'7The Academy, p. 24.

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"Well then, Jane and Maude, what is it?" "We were only saying that both your stories are summer stories, and we want you to tell us a winter story some day. That's all, Aunty dear." "Very well, Maudy dear; but don't say 'only,' as if I were finding fault with you. If Jane and you wish for a winter story, my next shall freeze hard. What! now? You really do allow me very little time for invention!" "And please, Aunt, be wonderful." "Well, Laura, I will try to be wonderful; but I cannot promise first-rate wonders on such extremely short notice." (SL, pp. 70-71)

To the girls who still vainly hope at this late point in the book that the storyteller might oblige them with some of the wonder they had so abundantly found in Carroll's wonderlands, Rossetti coyly suggests that "only" secondhand wonders will have to do. For in this passage, she explicitly forces us to recognize that little Jane, Maude, Laura and little Ella, too, who comes to join them, are, in effect, child readers familiar with Lewis Carroll's work. It is from Carroll, after all, that the children have learned that a summer story such as Alice in Wonderland can be complemented by a winter pendant such as Through the Looking-Glass. No wonder their Aunt is so eager to freeze their ardor. But the Aunt has new tricks in store to chill her audience's appetite for wonder. When she surprises her listeners by re- introducing the monster-children who had presided at Flora's mad tea party, they are understandably aggrieved, for they had not liked these ugly and vulgar monsters any more than Rossetti had liked the Hatter and the Hare. To justify herself, the Aunt, as mentioned before, sarcastically remarks that she is perfectly entitled "to use such a brilliant idea twice." But she has not fin- ished demolishing her originality. For Rossetti now has her last heroine, little Maggie, encounter in a dark forest a horribly fat boy, whose face "exhibited only one feature, and that was a wide mouth" (p. 84). This walking embodiment of hunger demands the food that Maggie carries in her basket. When she replies that she has "nothing I can give you," this repulsive "tormentor" begins to accost her. Like the earlier dream episode in which the monster-

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Maggie's "tormentor" (drawn by Hughes) boys had abused Flora, the scene carries unpleasant sexual over- tones:

"Nothing, with all that chocolate!" "The chocolate is not mine, and I cannot give it you," answered Maggie bravely: yet she felt frightened; for the two stood all alone together in the forest, and the wide mouth was full of teeth and tusks, and began to grind them. "Give it me, I say. I tell you I'm starving." (SL, p. 85)

Like the hungry artist of Rossetti's sonnet, the hungry boy rep- resents a rival imagination. His bulbous lips and shark-like teeth suggest his promiscuity. He is described (and drawn by Hughes) as a hideous distortion of one of the Tweedle twins. But there are further associations. His mouth is also that of the Cheshire Cat. And lest the point be missed, this creature happens to be followed by a "fat tabby cat, carrying in her mouth a tabby kitten" (p. 84). In the drawing, the cat has moved forward and sticks out between the boy's legs; huge and striped, it looks much more like the grin- ning male Cheshire Cat than like the maternal Dinah. It seems about to devour the kitten that it carries in its mouth. That kitten,

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Alice and Tweedledum (drawn by Tenniel) which it will later desert, will be adopted by Maggie together with a frozen dove and a dear little puppy. It is an abandoned "helpless creature," an orphan like Maggie herself, and not a tool to be shaken and harangued by an Alice who projects on the Black Kitten the same unsatisfied hunger for power that motivates her thwarted male creator. If girls in Speaking Likenesses are shown to be less powerful than adult women, they are also less disgusting than the boys who want to play with them. As the Aunt snidely puts it in the story of Flora: "The boys were players, the girls were played (if I may be allowed such a phrase)" (p. 36). Like Mad Hatter and March Hare, Flora's torturers at the tea party in her dream are sadistic males. The boys-called Quills, Angles, and Hooks-boast phallic protrusions that prove more hurtful than was the play of the ac- tual boys at Flora's party. Yet the insidious creatures called Sticky and Slime, who exude fluids, are a female pair also based on two of Flora's actual party guests, Emily and her sycophantic friend Serena. The setting for Flora's dream, a room "lined throughout with looking-glasses" (p. 18), is eventually shattered, permitting Flora to escape. But her flight cannot be accomplished until after

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 320 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE she has been exposed to two games of cruel violation. The first is called "Hunt the Pincushion."' 8 This game, the narrator tells her wards with sadistic relish,

is simple and demands only a moderate amount of skill. Select the smallest and weakest player (if possible let her be fat: a hump is best of all), chase her round and round the room, overtaking her at short intervals, and sticking pins into her here or there as it happens: repeat, till you choose to catch and swing her; which concludes the game. Short cuts, yells, and sudden leaps give spirit to the hunt. (SL, p. 33)

Scratched, cut, and slimed, Flora survives only to enter the even more cruel game of "Self Help." When, in the last indignity, she gets walled in with the Queen in a glass abode that is about to be shattered, she wakes up, rumpled but intact. It seems rather significant that most critics who have written on Speaking Likenesses should have concentrated exclusively on Flora's tale. Indeed, Gillian Avery, so upset by the first tale's "re- pellant intensity" that she seems not to have ventured beyond it, wrongly identifies Flora's "particularly unpleasant little story" with the entire book, which she then indignantly dismisses both for its moralism and its "cruel ingenuity."' Nina Auerbach, on the other hand, less prone than Avery to shy away from the demonic sub- texts of overtly pious Victorian representations, shrewdly recog- nizes that Rossetti's illustrator, Arthur Hughes, brilliantly taps a Carrollian "energy" in his representation of Flora's tea party. "In Hughes' illustration," she notes, "Carroll's symbolism becomes ex- plosively explicit: though the helpless little girl at the center of the composition is as boneless, pure, and inexpressive as we would expect, monsters form themselves from the planes and contours of her body."20 Professor Auerbach's account helps to explain why a Ruskin who welcomed the "pure" and "boneless" drawings of

18For her birthday Flora had earlier been given a pincushion shaped "like a hedgehog" (SL, p. 4); the reference to Alice's croquet game seems obvious. '9Nzneteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children's Stories 1780-1900 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), pp. 47-48. 20"Falling Alice, Fallen Women, and Victorian Dream Children," in Edward Guiliano and James R. Kincaid, eds., Soaring With the Dodo: Essays on Lewis Carroll's Life and Art (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, for The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1982), p. 58.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND LEWIS CARROLL 321 his friend Kate Greenaway should have seen fit to indict Hughes the illustrator as well as Rossetti the illustrated. Yet, like Avery, Auerbach dwells only on the first of the three stories. And, con- cerned with visual rather than verbal representations, she does not extend the "power" she finds in Hughes' drawing to the lin- guistic "framework of a moralistic children's book" in which she finds "the energy of monsters" to be "safely tucked away" (p. 58). It seems high time to look at that framework. Its subversive intentions are, as I have suggested, best signified by the book's much-neglected middle story, with its wholly unfantastic and un- demonic non-plot. The story, in fact, describes the futile efforts of what seems to be the youngest of Rossetti's three heroines, Edith, to light a fire with lucifer matches. Eager to be considered as important a member of her household as her oldest siblings, her mother, and a nurse who has become the family's house- keeper, Edith finds out from the cook that her "loving mother had planned a treat for her family that afternoon," an outdoor party to which friends and relations are to be invited. Edith de- cides to contribute to the arrangements. She volunteers to take the teakettle into a little grove which to her looks "no less than a forest" (pp. 52, 51).

"I will carry the kettle out ready." "The fire will have to be lighted first," answered cook, as she hurried her tarts into the oven, and ran out to fetch curled parsley from the kitchen-garden. "I can light the fire," called out Edith after her, though not very anxious to make herself heard: and thus it happened that the cook heard nothing beyond the child's voice saying something or other of no consequence. (pp. 54-55)

The cook's response perfectly captures that of readers who, like Bellas and Swann, have dismissed this tale as being of "no consequence" whatsoever. For, indeed, in what must surely be the most consummate hoax in English children's literature, Rossetti makes sure that the story about a tiny girl who could not light a fire will never catch a fire of its own. The reader's expectations are programmatically subverted. Edith immediately drops most of the lucifers from the matchbox as she sallies out of the house with her pets-a cockatoo, a Persian cat, and the Newfoundland dog

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who carries the kettle. When she gets to the grove, she wastes four of the remaining six matches. Joined at this point by a group of forest animals, she and the reader anxiously hope for some friendly assistance. The animals are indeed friendly. When a frog joins them, the Aunt's listeners excitedly cry out, "The frog, Aunt?" She reassures them that this is indeed the very frog around whom they had wanted her to build her story. But nothing happens. The pigeons advise Edith to fly away. A squirrel prom- ises to fan the nonexistent flames with his tail. A mole volunteers to rearrange the sticks. A wise toad, "cleverer" than the other creatures, suggests that the match be applied "inside," rather than outside, "the heap" (p. 65).21 Yet the fifth match dies out none- theless. When the sixth and final match results in a "first spark of success" followed by "a dim, smoky, fitful smouldering," the frog at last seems to assume his promised role. "Now to boil the kettle," he exults (pp. 67, 66). But the fire dies out and with it his role. It is just as well. For Edith had forgotten to fill the kettle with water. The frog had earlier asked whether it did not need filling, but no "one noticed what he said" (p. 64). Read superficially, this non-story proclaims the tedious moral that little girls should not play with matches. But Edith's story is, of course, an elaborate put-on in which Rossetti mocks the ex- pectations of child readers and adult readers just as the Aunt is mocking the expectations of her little auditors. We are teased by the story's multiple narrative possibilities only to find each of these aborted. The frog turns into no magical frog prince; a fox who appears out of a La Fontaine fable, only to look at some sour grapes and walk away, performs no function other than the useless task of brushing Edith's frock with his tail. Yet one seemingly insignificant detail catches the attention of the Aunt's listeners: the kettle happens to be hung on a tripod. When one of the girls inquires, "Why a tripod, Aunt?" the narrator comes up with a reply that casts a light on Rossetti's framework:

21The Aunt explains that the Toad may be wiser because he and his ancestors have lived immured "inside stones." Though masculine, he thus resembles the walled-in figures in several of Rossetti's poems, notably "An 'Immurata' Sister."

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"Why a tripod, Aunt?-I have been wondering at the no re- marks, but here comes one at last. Three sticks, Maude, are the fewest that can stand up firmly by themselves; two would tumble down, and four are not wanted." (p. 57)

Rossetti here covertly calls attention to the structure she has built. Her narrative tripod stands on the bare minimum of three stories; a fourth tale is not wanted, yet even though the two stronger legs of her tripartite structure, the first and third stories, depend on Carroll's imagination, they nonetheless need the support of the weak, middle story to prop up the whole. It is this shaky and shortest of tales that thus holds together Rossetti's elliptic triptych. Less fantastical than the others, less dependent on Carroll's ante- cedent, it is even more destructive than the other two tales. For its mockery is not just aimed at Carroll, but at the Victorian cult of the child and at the literary market that such magnifications have created. When Edith and her animal friends fail to light the fire, the old nurse comes with a new box of matches and some newspapers as kindling, and sends the crestfallen child home.22 In Speaking Likenesses, Christina Rossetti courted a fate much like little Edith's unsuccess. But the success of her unsuccess had an effect that she may not have anticipated. By inviting her read- ers to regard her book as an inferior version of the Alice stories, she became reliant on the success of the imagination from which she had so wanted to distance herself. Had she not created such unmistakably Carrollian analogues, her book might indeed have been totally forgotten. Instead, it would hereafter be remembered only in conjunction with the two components of the larger tripod to which Rossetti had contributed-with Alice in Wonderland and with Through the Looking-Glass. Desirous of writing a book that would call attention to its deliberate unoriginality, Rossetti had,

221t seems rather noteworthy that in the same letter she wrote to accompany the manuscript of Speaking Likenesses Christina Rossetti should resort to the met- aphor of a dead fire in responding to her publisher's request that she consider introducing "additional matter" for a possible reissue of her poems: "I fear there will be little indeed to offer you. The fire has died out, it seems; & I know of no bellows potent to revive dead coals" (The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, ed. Lona Mosk Packer [London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963], p. 99, 4 February 1874).

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 324 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE in effect, only managed to reinforce her rival's originality. The repression of her imaginative fire had thus merely added to the "very sparkling" wit that she had, in her 1865 letter to Carroll, so ironically attributed to a sleepy dormouse.

EQ~D

Christina Rossetti's relation to Lewis Carroll did not end with the publication of Speaking Likenesses, for, along with her book, she herself was finally drawn into Lewis Carroll's orbit. Her rebelliousness became gradually extinguished by his placid yet unrelenting dominance. It was Dormouse Dodgson rather than the grinning Mouth-Boy who would prevail and erode her resistance. The death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in April of 1882 led to a totally new phase in the relation between Christina and Carroll. She turned to him for a negative of the photograph he had taken of her brother. Although he had not sent a condolence before, he was now quick to respond. Writing from a vacation spot in Eastbourne, "a favorite haunt of mine," he apologized for the brevity of his letter, "the 13th letter I have had to write today." But his tone was kindly and unresentful:

I had learned from the newspapers the sorrow that has fallen on you, and beg to offer, to you and your family, my sincere sym- pathy. My photographic negatives are all locked up at Oxford, and I fear I can do nothing in the matter till I return there about the middle of October, when I will send you word what negatives and prints still exist. I am very sorry you should have to wait so long. (Letters, I, 464)

But Carroll did not prolong his Rossettian act of postponement. He acted promptly, sending her five prints of Dante Gabriel's pic- ture and promising to bring personally the negative he would not entrust to the post. Once again, though more feebly, she tried to resist. Could not her brother William Michael pick up the negative on his next visit to Oxford? Still, she allowed that "the temptation the other way is that were you so good as to bring it yourself it might afford my Mother and myself the pleasure of thanking you in person. The 5 prints are a treasure highly valued. My Mother

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unites with me in friendly remembrances" (Letters, I, 464n). Car- roll seized the opportunity. He went to London, "called on Miss Rossetti, and gave her the negative of her brother I had prom- ised" (Diaries, II, 411). Yet he also held out a further lure to draw her into his rabbit-hole. He revealed to her that he had kept pho- tographic negatives of all those female sketches he had photo- graphed in Dante Gabriel's studio in 1863. She took the bait ea- gerly. It was at this time that she probably gave him a copy of her latest volume of poems, A Pageant and Other Poems, with the lavish inscription, "Rev. C. L. Dodgson, from his obliged friend Christina G. Rossetti." Before, he had presumably been forced to buy his own copy of Speaking Likenesses, as well as the earlier volumes of The Prince's Progress, Goblin Market, and the extremely rare 1847 volume of Verses, dedicated to her Mother, privately printed, which he also owned.23 Just as Rossetti had toyed with the expectations of the child readers of Speaking Likenesses, so did Carroll now dally with her own. Instead of sending the promised list of negatives, he sent her a ghost story that he had also promised her. In her response, Christina Rossetti became extremely cautious. She thanked him "for the famous ghost story which has interested us all," but strongly hinted at the true object of her desire: "Photographs seem a sort of ghost, so the rediscovered negative falls in with its context. I hope and trust the more precious negative you gave me is all we wish" (Letters, I, 464-65). But she clearly wished for more. She expressed her hunger-and her irritation-far more openly in a letter to a relative: "Mr. Dodgson has not sent me those photographs from Gabriel's drawings I was hoping to re- ceive: but perhaps they may appear yet. He recollected to send me up a promised ghost-story, and I hope does not doubt which prospect I care most for" (Letters, I, 465n). Carroll's new act of postponement ended two and a half months later. On 31 January 1883, he sent Christina Rossetti a

23See Jeffrey Stern, ed., Lewis Carroll's Library (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, for The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1981), p. 21. The six Rossetti items in the May 1898 catalogue of Carroll's books are 427-31 and 433; the June 1898 catalogue offered a seventh item, Seek and Find. The absence of Sing-Song seems surprising; perhaps it was item 432 or maybe it was included in the "Bundle of Children's Books" listed as item 565.

This content downloaded from 143.107.8.10 on Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:54:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 326 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE long letter in which he not only catalogued all the female faces he had photographed in Dante Gabriel's studio, but also drew two of the female heads, one of which strongly resembles, not unsur- prisingly, his own illustration of Alice in the manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground. He painstakingly described the photo- graphs, marked those for which he possessed negatives, enclosed a few prints, and hinted that others might be obtained elsewhere, although he professed his willingness to oblige her with copies of any that "may be possibly new to you" (Letters, I, 482-83). Carroll had effected a brilliant reversal of "In An Artist's Studio" by be- coming Dante Gabriel's stand-in, the guardian of all those faces and figures that had looked out from the dead artist's canvases. The sister now looked eagerly at those female portraits drawn twenty years before, "when hope shone bright." The man with the camera had become a preserver. But Carroll's mild revenge was not yet complete, for, in the next decade, he would compel Christina Rossetti to stare at a succession of live female faces. He would bring a sampling of those Janes and Maudes-and Alices-which the Aunt in Speaking Likenesses had so acidly tried to mock. If Carroll persistently "bor- rowed"-as he put it-young women from their parents and guardians, he also began to borrow the elderly Miss Rossetti as an Aunt figure he could similarly appropriate. He not only forced her to read the poems of one of his new fledglings, the eleven- year-old May Mileham, but also extracted from her a letter of thanks for those "sweet and pure little poems" to share with the child's mother. The author of Sing-Song dutifully produced the desired testimony: she had read the poems "with admiring plea- sure" and could vouch that "My Mother, too, greatly likes them" (Letters, I, 584n). When Carroll took the nineteen-year-old Edith Rix to call on the Terrys he made sure to produce the young woman to Christina Rossetti as well (Diaries, II, 437). And when Christina's mother's death left her more exposed and vulnerable than ever, he began to bring younger children to this suddenly complaisant maiden aunt. "Enid shall come, and welcome, to see Miss Rossetti (two s's)," he proudly announced to Enid Bell's mother. And then, assuming an even more pronounced proprietary stance, he added a post- script: "P. S. You know Miss Rossetti's poetry, I suppose? I regard

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her as a genuine poet. 'Goblin Market' seems to me a work of real genius. If only the Queen would consult me as to whom to make Poet-Laureate! I would say 'for once, Madam, take a lady!"' (Letters, II, 986). He had become the undisputed ruler of his feminized world. And he liked his new role. Ever polite, Carroll asked Chris- tina Rossetti, a year before her death, "kindly" to tell him "in what form you would like your name to be inscribed" in the copy of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded he would send her by the end of the year: "I can't remember what I wrote in the first volume" (Letters, II, 1000). Christina Rossetti may even have liked the fairy-child Sylvie; she had by now become wholly tractable. She inscribed her last volume of poems, with a dash of sentimentality, to the "Rev. C. L. Dodgson, from his old acquaintance the Author." Speaking Likenesses had presumably been forgotten by both. But had it? On 10 August 1897, five months before his own death, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote a letter to a Miss E. Ger- trude Thomson who had tried to lure him to a beach teeming with naked girl bathers. "Your description of the sands, and the naked children playing there," he allowed, "is very tempting, and I might possibly make an expedition there, some day (would your landlady take me in?), on the chance of getting some picturesque victims to sketch." Yet Carroll also wondered whether it might not after all be "a hopeless quest to try to make friends with any of the little nudities." Carried away with the prospect, he humour- ously continued:

A lady might do it: but what would they think of a gentleman daring to address them! And then what an embarrassing thing it would be to begin an acquaintance with a naked little girl! What could one say to start the conversation? Perhaps a poetical quotation would be best.

Rummaging for literary touchstones, he came up with a piece of poetry by one Susanna Blamire: "And ye shall walk in silk attire." Still, he concluded, that would not do to address a little girl: "I'm afraid she would reply 'Do I look like it?'" He thus entertained a better possibility: "Or one might begin with Keats' charming lines 'Oh where are you going, with your love-locks flowing, And what have you got in your basket?'" But that quotation, too, he la- mented, might not produce the wanted effect (Letters, II, 1134).

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Lewis Carroll had apparently forgotten that the first of the two "charming lines" he attributed to Keats did not come from "The Devon Maid: Stanzas Sent in a Letter to B. R. Haydon," but rather opened "Amor Mundi" by Christina Rossetti, the "genuine poet" he would have advised Queen Victoria to crown as Poet Laureate. He had spliced together Rossetti's first line with the second line (slightly misquoted) of Keats' poem: "And what have ye there in the Basket?" Given the similarities in diction and tone, his mistake seems understandable. Yet if the meticulous Reverend Dodgson had committed an inadvertent error, however slight, his alter ego, Lewis Carroll, had not. Although there is no basket in Rossetti's poem, there is the basket that Maggie keeps "close" as the "lumpish-looking" Mouth-Boy tries to "seize it" (SL, p. 86). Carroll had spotted an echo of Keats in Rossetti's poem. And now, by blending her identity with that of her male predecessor, he could also absorb the identity of the woman who had so ironically tried to echo him in Speaking Likenesses. She had tried to enlist Carroll for her job of self-demolition in that book. He could now complete that demolition by devouring her identity and erasing it altogether. Alice had been avenged.

Princeton University

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