Christina Rossetti's Devotional Emblematics

Chapter 3 “Wise upbraidings”: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Emblematics

Christina Rossetti was never considered an official member of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, but her substantial contributions to The Germ helped shape that magazine as well as the art and poetry movement it would launch. Emblematic strategies, themes, and references dominate the magazine’s aesthetic: in fact, more than a curiosity or an isolated interest on the part of a few members, the emblem’s representational structure resonates with the work of the Pre-Raphaelite movement as a whole, and Christina’s own figural assump- tions and emblematic methods place her squarely within that movement. The prb’s decision to include seven of her poems in a magazine they intended as a mouthpiece for their moral-aesthetic goals signals their recognition of the emblematics at work in her poetry. But while most Pre-Raphaelites would drift away from the devotional emblem tradition and towards more rhetori- cal, esoteric, and idiosyncratic manifestations of the genre in their later work, Christina’s use of the devotional emblem remained consistent throughout her career as a writer of both prose and poetry, a sign of (among other things) her unwavering faith in the divine authorship of the temporal world. Through close readings of Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), and Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), this chapter highlights the degree to which emblematic structures constitute a fundamental hermeneutic strategy in Christina’s major works. A number of critics have already remarked on Christina’s indebtedness to various strains of the emblem tradition: Gisela Hönnighausen has drawn atten- tion specifically to her use of floral emblems; Mary Arseneau and D.M.R. Bent- ley note meaningful parallels between Peter Parley’s popular Victorian emblem book about plants and her own Called to Be Saints; and by demonstrating that her brother was exposed to the Anglo-Dutch emblem tradition, Bentley’s work on Dante Gabriel hints at Christina’s own familiarity with that tradition. Lor- raine Janzen Kooistra’s studies, including “The Dialogue of Image and Text in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song,” and the monumental Christina Rossetti and Il- lustration: A Publishing History, go further than any other to date in identifying Christina’s compositional method as fundamentally emblematic. As Kooistra demonstrates, Christina pursued visual-verbal hybridity throughout her more

86 chapter 3 than forty-year literary career (Kooistra, CR and Illustration 3). Not only did she hand-illustrate personal copies of her own writings and books by authors she admired, but she consistently sought publication in illustrated venues and conceived several of her own books as illustrated volumes from their earliest stages of composition. Atypically for a writer of her period, Christina also ex- erted a considerable degree of control over the appearance of her books, es- pecially their illustration: she requested the hiring of certain illustrators and frequently directed their work (Kooistra, “Dialogue” 466; CR and Illustration 9, 11–12). While her interest in illustration may have been due in part to market- ing savvy – pictures adding beauty and therefore cachet to books in a competi- tive market – more importantly, it was a way of “introducing a nonlinguistic form and a hermeneutic framework” that would extend the meaning of her poetry (Kooistra, CR and Illustration 6). Considered as an emblematic strategy, this is also a way of encouraging the development of exegetical skill in her readers: by placing image and text together on the page, Christina taught her audience to find figural correspondences by fostering “the hermeneutic habit of interpreting all material signs for their symbolic significance” (Kooistra, CR and Illustration 44). In other words, as Kooistra, Bentley, Arseneau, and others have noted, her verbal-visual habit of composition and its moralizing purpose were substantially emblematic. While normative emblems and emblem books continued to circulate dur- ing the Victorian period, the emblem had also evolved by this time into a discourse – a habit of thought and a mode of reading. Building on the crucial work of Kooistra, Bentley and Arseneau, but taking into account the emblem’s discursive evolution, this chapter will focus on the emblematic strategies at work in the verbal component of Christina’s works. While the bimediality of her writing practices is an acknowledged sign of their emblematic intent, I ar- gue that the emblem is also “visible” on the level of discourse in her poems and devotional prose. Thus, while I view Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations of Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems as a key to the emblematic mode of these texts, the poetry segment of this chapter (“Naked Emblems in the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress Volumes”) will focus on the emblematic structures in the verbal component of these volumes, examining Goblin Market and Other Poems as an extended “naked” emblem whose ultimate lesson is the importance of cultivating emblematic vision, and The Prince’s Progress, similarly, as a meditation on the difficulty of that important task. Finally, the devotional prose section of this chapter (“‘Wise upbraidings’: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Emblematics”) will examine the emblematic strategies that organize some of Christina’s devotional prose volumes, looking specifically at the unusual mix of hagiography and herbal in