Avenging Alice: Christina Rossetti 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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Nineteenth-Century Literature 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 found 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 hope 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 William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904). 299 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 300 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE Whether the reference here is to Elizabeth Siddal, 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 Mariana 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 Dante Gabriel Rossetti to ask him where he might find old copies of the Germ, 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 work 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.