Notes Introduction: the Haunting of Christina Rossetti 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, `Finite History', in David Carroll (ed.), The States of `Theory': History, Art, and Critical Discourses (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990) p. 152. 2 Italian proverb recounted in Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: a Reading Diary (London: SPCK, 1885) p. 4. 3 Cited in Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: a LiteraryBiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994) pp. 567±8. 4 Note, however, that some woman poets had a problematical literary relation to Rossetti as precursor. For a discussion of Michael Field's elegy, which figures Rossetti as an unfit muse for future poets, see Susan Conley, ` ``Poet's Right'': Elegy and the Woman Poet', in Angela Leighton (ed.), Victorian Women Poets: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) pp. 235±44. Diane D'Amico's analysis of Rossetti's influence on Katharine Tynan and Sara Teas- dale suggests that they figured her as, respectively, a saint and artefact. See `Saintly Singer or Tanagra Figurine? Christina Rossetti Through the Eyes of Katharine Tynan and Sara Teasdale', Victorian Poetry 32 (1994) 387±407. Neither option embodies Christina Rossetti's historical personage. For a further discussion of Tynan and Rossetti, see Peter van de Kamp, `Wrapped in a Dream: Katharine Tynan and Christina Rossetti', in Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges (eds), Beautyand the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R.L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996) pp. 59±97. 5Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian LiteraryCanonization (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). 6 TomaÂs Eloy MartõÂnez, Santa Evita, trans. Helen Lane (London: Anchor, 1997) p. 68. 7 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991) p. 1. 8 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as UncannyCausality (New York: Methuen, 1987) p. xiv. 9 Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: the Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 10, 11. 10 See Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, dated 1867 but finished between 1867 and 1868. 11 Jacques Derrida, `Signature Event Context', trans. Alan Bass, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) p. 107. Garber also makes the connection between Keats's `living hand' and Derrida's conception of the signature, but she overly deanimates the latter, equating the signature directly with the ghost (p. 21). Yopi Prins offers a similarly annihilistic reading of the signature of Sappho in the nineteenth- century, which sidesteps the continuing durability and tenacity of the myth of Sappho. See Victorian Sappho (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999). 157 158 Notes 12 The term muscular is D.G. Rossetti's suggestive but derisory epithet for women's poetry on social or political themes. See PW: CR pp. 460±1. 13 Letters 1: 348. For a discussion on the literary relationship between Rossetti and Barrett Browning, see Antony H. Harrison, `In the Shadow of E.B.B.: Christina Rossetti and Ideological Estrangement', in his Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), and also Marjorie Stone, `Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Brown- ing', Victorian Poetry 32 (1994) 339±64. Tricia Lootens explores the reception histories of Rossetti and Barrett Browning as one of competitiveness for a place in the literary canon (Chapter 5). 14 Kathy Psomiades makes a similar point about feminist reading of nineteenth- century literature, but not specifically in relation to new historicism: `because modern feminism has its roots in nineteenth-century constructions of gen- der, it is possible, and indeed more than likely, that in the course of recovery nineteenth-century ideologies may be replicated, rather than subjected to scrutiny.' See ` ``Material Witness'': Feminism and Nineteenth-Century Studies', Nineteenth-CenturyContexts 31.1 (1989) 13±18 (p. 14). For further comments on the continuation of nineteenth-century paradigms in contem- porary critique, see her Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997) pp. 29±30. 15Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) pp. 193±4. 16 Ros Ballaster, `New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The body, the text and the feminist critic', in Isobel Armstrong (ed.) New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 284. 17 Linda Marshall explains the poetry's concern with `postmortem awareness', a specific form of self-deletion, as part of Rossetti's theological interest in Hades. Marshall comments: `whether one sees the intermediate state [between death and Resurrection] as withdrawal of consciousness or the heightening of it, perhaps the same point is made: life is neither sweet nor good, and to die is the best criticism of it'. See `What the Dead Are Doing Underground: Hades and Heaven in the Writings of Christina Rossetti', Vic- torian Newsletter (Fall 1987) 55±60 (p. 58). Marshall also reminds us that, despite her investment in the afterlife, she had an intractable sense of self- hood, as the biographical anecdote `I am Christina Rossetti' illustrates. See Chapter 3 for a further discussion of this episode. 18 See his two chapters on Christina Rossetti in The Beautyof Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 19 Margaret Linley, `Dying to Be A Poetess: The Conundrum of Christina Ros- setti', in Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (eds), The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999), p. 292. 20 Jan Marsh (ed.), Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (London: Everyman, 1994) p. 251. For the text of Maude, I use David A. Kent and P.G. Stanwood (eds), Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). 21 Angela Leighton, ` ``When I am dead, my dearest'': The Secret of Christina Rossetti', Modern Philology 87 (1989) 373±88 (p. 374). 22 Arthur Benson, `Christina Rossetti', The National Review (26 February 1895) 753±63 (p. 756). Notes 159 23 See Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 339. 24 The `subject-in-process/on trial', as Kelly Oliver shows, runs throughout Kristeva's writings, but perhaps most obviously in Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) p. 187 and passim. What is termed, with a mistaken homogeneity, French feminism, has much to say about the intersubjective rapprochement of mediating subjectivities. For an account more utopian than Kristeva's, see Luce Irigaray's witty revision of Plato in `Sorcerer Love: a Reading of Plato, Symposium, ``Diotima's Speech'' ' in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: The Athlone Press, 1993) p. 21. The project of Irigaray and Kristeva is to revise Lacanian intersubjectivity which insists upon the paranoia and alienation of the split subject. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) Ch. 16. 25Oliver p. 14. Toril Moi discusses Kristeva's `difficult balancing act' in the introduction to her edition of The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 13. 26 One of the most perceptive commentators on the aesthetic, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, criticises Terry Eagleton's adoption of the figure of the mother in his account of Western aesthetics as the `unhistorical other of history' (Beauty's Body pp. 19±21), and yet her analysis of two key texts, `Goblin Market' and `In an Artist's Studio', is predicated upon indeterminate figures that exceed legibility, commodification, and aestheticism, in a fashion simi- lar to the position I am arguing for the maternal (pp. 53±4, 105). For an important account of Victorian motherhood which stresses the non-mono- lothic construction of the maternal in fiction, see Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexualityand Maternity (Manchester: Man- chester University Press, 1995). 1 `A Bizarre Medium': the Return of the Dead and New Historicism 1 Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: a Biographical and Critical Study, second edition (London: Hurst and Brackett, 1898) p. 134. 2 See Christina Rossetti's `The Lowest Room' (Crump 1: 200) and Kathleen Jones's biography, which is focused around this motif as the organising principle of Rossetti's life. See her Learning Not to be First: the Life of Christina Rossetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 3 In Chapters 9 and 10 of his Ventures into Childhood: Victorians, FairyTales, and Femininity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), U.C. Knoepflmacher gives a full account of the literary relations between Dodgson and Rossetti. 4 The phrase describes, in William's memoir of his sister, how a photograph taken in 1856 proves, `by the irrefutable evidence of the sun, that she was not very far from being beautiful'. He also approves of the authenticity of Dodg- son's photographs taken at Cheyne Walk: `in each of these Christina is 160 Notes capitally characterised'. William is at pains