CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI

Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

Judging from somewhat idealized sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been quite attractive if not beautiful. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he reverted to Roman Catholicism.

When Professor Rossetti's failing health and eyesight forced him into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, but had to give it up after a year or so. Thereafter she led a very retiring life, interrupted by a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. From the early '60s on she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.

All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.

Rossetti's brother William Michael edited her complete works in 1904. He once said that "Christina's habits of composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind. I question her having ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this, something impelled her feelings, or "came into her head," and her hand obeyed the dictation. I suppose she scribbled lines off rapidly enough, and afterwards took whatever amount of pains she deemed requisite for keeping them in right form and expression." Rossetti's work has suffered from reductive interpretations, but she is increasingly being reconsidered as a major Victorian poet. Typical for her poems was songlike use words and short, irregularly rhymed lines.

The poets of her time:

The Victorians saw poetry itself and its muses as feminine, making it doubly difficult for women to be authors of poems and so effectively silencing them (Victorian Women Poets, p. 68). Christina Rossetti's contemporary female poets placed themselves outside of the sphere of male poetry by forging a unique discourse of their own from within the patriarchal form, but they were also bound by the assumptions and the expectations of the time. This gendering of poetry often trivialised women's writing, as poetry was 'too high and great' for women (Cixous, Literature in the Modern World, p.317). Women poets were therefore forced to reach beyond these barriers, and in effect manipulate one of the forms of their own suppression and repression. Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Katherine Tynan and Elizabeth Barrett Browning dedicated poems to one another in a uniquely female dialogue. Many women wrote poetry despite the many obstacles, and anthologies and journals of women's poetry encouraged a distinctive conversation between female poets (Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, p. xxxii). Isobel Armstrong also claims women used 'expressive' language to represent their emotions and experiences, and the representational symbols on the page were paradoxically both a means of expression and part of the forces of repression. She proposes that poetry involves the 'movement outwards, the breaking of barriers' (Victorian Women Poets: Critical Contemporary Essays, p. 60).

Christina Rossetti entered into poetic conversations with her contemporaries, including the poem 'L.E.L' which was written in response to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'L.E.L's Last Question' (Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, pp. 68-70). Browning was often critical of her contemporaries, criticising women 'versifiers' rather than 'true poets', and the poem describes the plaintive cries of a lonely but self-absorbed woman who wrote 'one tune of love' (Cunningham, p. 152). Barrett Browning's L.E.L calls to her friends from 'across the waves' with the constant wistful refrain at the end of each stanza 'Do you think of me as I think of you?'. Browning argues that L.E.L should have asked 'Do you praise me, O my land?' concentrating externally rather than looking to her 'inward sense'. Christina Rossetti's poem offers a more sympathetic view as her struggles with her own temperament and depressions create a deeper understanding. Christina claimed that Browning would have been a better poet had she been less contented and 'happy'; a euphemism for being married (Victorian Women Poets: Contemporary Critical Essays, p. 47) Christina's poem 'L.E.L' describes a woman laughing in 'sport and jest' in public rooms, but yet in 'solitary rooms' she turns her 'face in silence to the wall' (Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, pp. 377-8).

The speaker sees that others 'all love, are loved' and 'play the pleasant parts'. They cannot guess the depth of her loneliness and misery, or that her heart 'was breaking for a little love'. Christina's narration changes to the first person in the second stanza, as she empathises deeply with the dead poet's emotions and the way they relate to her own troubled emotions and experiences. In the unpublished poem 'Introspective', Christina replicates some of the feelings she ascribes to L.E.L, as they both struggle with their repressed emotions:

My heart within me like a stone
is numbed too much for hopes and fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone. [Thomas, p. 138]

Christina Rossetti uses different imagery to express the depth of faith and love. In 'Heaven Overarches' she suggests that the vast expanse of sea and sky encompasses the 'earth sadness and sea-bitterness' (Stuart, p. 171). Heaven reaches over all and the speaker imagines a time when there is 'no more sea' or barren wilderness' as she slips into the oblivion and the unity of spirit and identity in soulsleep. She urges the reader to 'look up with me until we see/The day break and the shadows flee'. She suggests that the pains and frustrations of the day will not matter, as 'tomorrow' offers redemption.

Christina Rossetti also refers explicitly to her 'Heavenly Lover' in the poem 'Til To-Morrow' (Works, p. 352). She speaks of 'longing and desire', wishing 'farewell' to 'all things that die and fail and tire'. The second stanza is irregular in length, drawing direct attention to the strong emotions expressed. She dismisses 'youth and useless pleasure' while the alliterative 'glow-worms' and 'gleaming' and repeated end-rhymes highlight the density of expression. The alliteration continues as she says 'farewell to all shows that fade', expressing her 'joy' in 'tomorrow' when she will see heaven 'glowing'.

The act of writing allowed women's voices to be heard and provided them with a public forum. Christina Rossetti's individual use of metaphor, alliteration and the doubling of ideas and images provide a unique type of discourse that reflects Rossetti's fractured sense of identity and her concerns and experiences.

Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," in addition to the multitude of ideological messages embedded within it, serves as a critique of the fairy tale genre, which was used to inculcate children with conventional Victorian morality and often placed unrealistic and destructive expectations on them.

Rossetti, as numerous critics and biographers have noted, was deeply religious. Her mother, Frances, helped lay the foundation for her daughter's austere existence by advocating against any improper willful, vain, or impatient behavior (Marsh 12). Rossetti biographer Jan Marsh explains how "self-control was, quintessentially, a feminine lesson: far more than their brothers, girls were taught to suppress desire and ambition, told that wishing and wanting were greedy and selfish, and schooled to internalize the values of denial and docility" (13). It was a lesson hard learned by young Christina, who was prone to fits of temper that were on par with those of her notoriously stormy brother, Dante Gabriel. To help curb her obstinate spirit, Rossetti was introduced to songs and nursery rhymes, many of which contained strongly didactic messages, like those of Isaac Watts, Sara Coleridge, and Ann and Jane Taylor (11-12).