Abstract
I begin with my central question: suppose that with Christina Rossetti’s 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems, a transgressive, innovative strain in poetry emerges in England nearly simultaneously with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal in France and its more recognized poetics of shock. Why did no one notice? Difficult, subversive, self-reflexive, ironic, Rossetti’s poetry throughout this collection is marked by qualities readers readily associate with Baudelaire and the tradition in modern poetry he is understood to have inaugurated. Unlike her French contemporary, Rossetti rarely comments on her poetry, poetic practice, or aims. But supposing she set out to do something innovative and subversive in her poetry— rather than unconsciously stumbling into it, as Victorian readers who recognized her innovations suggested—how would she go about it? Transgression at the hand of a woman writer could not burst onto the scene as “shock.” Women did not “burst” or “shock” if they wished to be received as ladies and wished, as ladies, to be publishable.
For all along the valley, down the rocky bed, Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me.
—Christina Georgina Rossetti
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Notes
As quoted by Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (New York: Saint Martin’s, 2000), 83.
Susan Conley, “Rossetti’s Cold Women: Irony and Liminal Fantasy in the Death Lyrics,” The Culture of Christina Rossetti, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio UP, 1999), 263.
Catherine Maxwell, “The Poetic Context of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death,’” English Studies 76.2 (1995), 154.
This is not to suggest that Rossetti avoided the topos of sexual trans-gression in terms of representation, but such aesthetic representation was not in itself transgressive—it was rather, by midcentury, quite common. Rossetti often represented the “fallen woman,” and the relationship between such work and her volunteer work with “fallen women” at Highgate Penitentiary has attracted a great dea l of critical attention. See, for example, Diane D’Amico, “Equal before God: Christina Rossetti and the Fallen Women of Highgate Penitentiary,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1992), 67–83
Roxanne Eberle, “Rewriting the ‘vile text’: Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Social Reform,” in Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1972–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 168–201.
Catherine Maxwell, “The Poetic Context of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death,’” English Studies 76.2 (1995), 144–145.
Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1996), 166–167.
Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 33.
Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 19.
This tradition has attracted extensive critical attention. For book-length studies, see, particularly, Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988)
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992)
Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 25–63.
Edgar Allan Poe, “Life in Death [The Oval Portrait],” The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), 734–738.
Thomas Hood, Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, with a Critical Memoir by William Michael Rossetti (New York: Routledge, 1874), 21.
Christina Georgina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862 edition), in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. Rebecca Crump (New York: Penguin, 2001), 31.
Suzanne Clarke both documents and challenges the modernist rejection of the sentimental in Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991).
See Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (New York: Harvester, 1992)
In British Women Poets of the 19th Century, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet (New York: Meridian, 1996), 229.
Esther Schor, B earing the Dead: The B ritish Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 235.
Diana Fuss speculates that “the broken physicality of verse aligns poetry, more than any other literary genre, with corporeal disintegration.” “Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30.1 (2003), 27.
Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985).
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 43–44.
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© 2009 Anne Jamison
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Jamison, A. (2009). Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti’s Unusual Dead. In: Poetics En Passant. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101258_5
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