Christina Rossetti Contextual Revision

CATEGORY	CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION
Gender / Women	·         ‘it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning’ Rossetti 1870 ·         So ‘weary[ing]’ is the position of women that annihilation is preferable, since this would enable escape from gender expectations and imposed identities (From the Antique) ·         a cutting critique of the ways in which the female model – William Michael Rossetti suggested she might be based on the Pre-Raphaelite muse, Elizabeth Siddal – is painted, ‘framed’ and controlled by the male artist: (In an Artist’s Studio) ·         What this poem asserts is the woman’s right to say ‘no’ and to claim independence and agency for herself. Certainly, she is not to be bullied into a relationship because a man or social convention more generally demands it. (No Thank You John) ·         Rossetti has often been depicted as shrinking from worldly concerns, but, in fact, she did engage in humanitarian work. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down. ·         In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of “fallen“ women. As an “associate” at Highgate, Rossetti was known as “Sister Christina”, lived there and wore a habit-like black uniform with a veil. Its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as “Cousin Kate,” though poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate— “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and “Maude Clare” for instance—demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman. “Goblin Market,” with its theme of a fallen woman being saved by a “sister,” can also be seen as informed by Rossetti’s experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. ·         Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil. ·         Like many of Rossetti’s poems, her devotional works are double-edged swords of submission and assertion: while they urge obedience to divine will, they also encroach into the traditionally male territories of theological study,  (e.g. Babylon the Great and Standing Afar Off) and spiritual guidance. ·         Similarly, Rossetti’s views on gender issues combine the conservative with the radical. Citing biblical teaching on woman’s subordination to man, Rossetti had written to the poet Augusta Webster in 1878 that because she believed that “the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes,” she could not sign a petition for women’s suffrage. She went on, however, to suggest that suffrage is not enough to protect women’s interests and that female representation in Parliament would be more consistent with the aims of the women’s movement. ·         She also argued for the heroic possibilities of maternal love and its potential to sweep away “the barrier of sex.” ·         It is not uncommon to find such traces of subversiveness in Rossetti’s work. An extended discussion of the subject in Seek and Find begins with a quite traditional discussion of woman as a lesser light—a moon to man’s sun. But Rossetti then moves from a statement about the feminine lot being one of obedience to a comparison between the feminine role and the position that Christ voluntarily assumed on earth, and she ends with a leveling of gender hierarchies: “in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one (Gal.iii.28).”
Family Life / Upbringing	·         Rossetti was the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. ·         Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. ·         He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca, Gabriel Charles Dante, William Michael and Christina Georgina on 5 December 1830. ·         In 1831 Gabriele Rossetti was appointed to the chair of Italian at the newly opened King’s College. ·         The children received their earliest education, and Maria and Christina all of theirs, from their mother, who had been trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family. Certainly this ambition was satisfied: in addition to Christina’s becoming one of the Victorian age’s finest poets, Maria was the author of a respected study of Dante, as well as books on religious instruction and Italian grammar and translation; Dante Gabriel distinguished himself as one of the foremost poets and painters of his era; and William was a prolific art and literary critic, editor, and memoirist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. ·         Rossetti’s childhood was exceptionally happy, characterized by affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings. In temperament she was most like her brother Dante Gabriel: their father called the pair the “two storms” of the family in comparison to the “two calms,” Maria and William. Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper. Years later, counseling a niece subject to similar outbursts, the mature Christina looked back on the fire now stifled: “You must not imagine, my dear girl, that your Aunt was always the calm and sedate person you now behold. I, too, had a very passionate temper; but I learnt to control it. On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath. I have learnt since to control my feelings—and no doubt you will!” ·         Self-control was, indeed, achieved—perhaps too much so. In his posthumous memoir of his sister William laments the thwarting of her high spirits: “In innate character she was vivacious, and open to pleasurable impressions; and, during her girlhood, one might readily have supposed that she would develop into a woman of expansive heart, fond of society and diversions, and taking a part in them of more than average brilliancy. What came to pass was of course quite the contrary.” As an adult Christina Rossetti was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained. ·         . In the 1830s and 1840s, when Christina Rossetti was growing up, school education was not compulsory. It was not until 1870 that an education act was created and all children under the age of 12 were required to attend school. Rossetti and her siblings were fortunate enough to have well-educated parents who believed in encouraging girls in their reading and writing skills. ·         Christina and Frances: All of Rossetti’s books of poetry were dedicated to her mother, with whom she lived all her life. She acknowledges the shaping influence that her mother Frances had on her life and work, in a sonnet she wrote for her. To my first love, my Mother, on whose knee I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity, And she my loadstar while I go and come.
Relationships	·         One of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, James Collinson, proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848. (Rossetti 18)She refused the offer, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism as the reason. Collinson promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted. The engagement ended in the spring of 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism.” ·         Many poems in ‘Goblin Market and Other Poems’ depict the failure or betrayal of human (as opposed to divine) love and explore women’s sexual and economic vulnerability include “At Home,” “A Triad,” “After Death,” “The Hour and the Ghost,” “An Apple-Gathering,” “Maude Clare,” and “The Convent Threshold.” These works serve to reinforce the devotional poems’ theme of looking to the next life for reward, happiness, and fulfillment. Indeed, with the exception of “A Birthday“ and its ecstatic declaration that “the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me,” little evidence exists anywhere in the volume that human love is satisfied or satisfying.” ·         In the autumn of 1866 Rossetti declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. (Rossetti 36) Cayley had begun studying Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossettis’ enthusiasm for Dante and endearing himself to them with his attentive visits during their father’s final illness. A hesitant romance probably began to develop between Rossetti and the awkward, absentminded scholar around 1862. Rossetti’s reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised. In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down “on grounds of religious faith.” ·         Much is unknown about the relationship between Cayley and Rossetti. In his memoir William notes that “Christina was extremely reticent in all matters in which her affections were deeply engaged” and that “it would have been both indelicate and futile to press her with inquiries, and of several details in the second case [Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley]— though important to a close understanding of it—I never was cognizant.” ·         Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883, and Rossetti served as his literary executor. She declined to have a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking that they be destroyed. ·         After Rossetti’s death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian. Composed between 1862 and 1868 and titled “Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente” (The Reddening Dawn), the sequence is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley; it was first published in Rossetti’s New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (1896).”
Literary Influences	·         The thirty-nine poems are notably literary in their inspiration, which is traceable to the Gothic writers Radcliffe, Lewis, and Charles Maturin; the English poets George Herbert, George Crabbe, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, (Romantics – detail and glory of natural world) and Alfred Tennyson; and the Italian poets Petrarch, (‘inventor’ of the Petrarchan sonnet – one of Rossetti’s most often used forms) Dante, Torquato Tasso, and Pietro Metastasio. ·         Throughout her canon, but especially in the devotional poems, biblical image and idiom merge with Rossetti’s own voice. Revelation and Ecclesiastes are favourite sources, and the “vanity of vanity” refrain is a recurring motif.” ·         Readers have generally considered Rossetti’s poetry less intellectual, less political, and less varied than Browning’s; conversely, they have acknowledged Rossetti as having the greater lyric gift, with her poetry displaying a perfection of diction, tone, and form under the guise of utter simplicity.
Rossetti’s Life	·         Gabriele Rossetti’s health collapsed in 1843, leaving him virtually blind and unable to teach. Frances Rossetti returned to her former employment as a daily governess. Maria and William also took employment, Maria as a nursery governess and William in the civil service. Dante Gabriel continued his art studies, while Christina remained at home as a companion to their ailing father. ·         In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister. ·         She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania. Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father’s breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter. ·         Christina’s recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a “clammy fin” repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma. ·         Rossetti had bouts of serious illness throughout her life; William insists in his memoir that one cannot understand his sister unless one recognizes that she “was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid.” The morbidity that readers have so often noted in her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina’s ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition.” ·         The family’s financial crisis continued, and in 1851 the Rossettis moved from Charlotte Street to Camden Town, where Christina and her mother briefly ran a small day school. A second attempt at establishing a school, this time in Frome, lasted from March 1853 to February 1854, the only period in Rossetti’s life when she made her home outside London. ·         When she returned to the city, the family moved to Albany Street. At this point Christina and her mother permanently gave up teaching, and the family lived on William’s and Mary’s earnings and Frances’s modest inherited income. Gabriele Rossetti died on 26 April 1854. For most of her adulthood Christina was financially supported primarily by William, a debt that she made provisions in her will to repay.” ·         From 1870 to 1872 Rossetti was dangerously ill, at times apparently near death, with a condition characterized by fever, exhaustion, heart palpitations, stifling sensations, occasional loss of consciousness, violent headaches, palsied hands, and swelling in the neck that made swallowing difficult. Her hair fell out, her skin became discolored, her eyes began to protrude, and her voice changed. After some months her doctors diagnosed a rare thyroid condition, exophthalmic bronchocele, more commonly known as Graves’ disease. ·         Although Rossetti recovered, the threat of a relapse always remained. Moreover, the crisis left her appearance permanently altered and her heart weakened.”
Death	·         As children growing up in the increasingly industrialised city of London Rossetti and her siblings enjoyed frequent trips to their maternal grandfather’s house in Holmer Green in Buckinghamshire. Here, they were surrounded by orchards and a variety of animals not to be found in the city. Rossetti reflects on her own childhood in her 1872 volume of poetry, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. Here, she gives the impression that it was both full of opportunities to appreciate the beauty of Nature, but also tinged with sadness as she recognises that childhood is a time when an awareness of death first develops. ·         This awareness is significant when considering Rossetti’s poems about death. In the mid nineteenth-century, it is likely that most children would have watched at least one sibling, if not parent, die. Without the knowledge about the spread of germs that we have today, disease spread rapidly and the child mortality rate was high.
Religion	·         Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. She was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement, as is documented in the annotations and illustrations she added to her copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and in her reading of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. ·         The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry. ·         More on Tractarianism: In 1833, a series of tracts (leaflets arguing a point of view) entitled Tracts for the Times were circulated at Oxford. Some of these were by John Keble, an Anglican clergyman who wanted an even stricter observance of the rituals set down in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The tracts, which continued to be published until 1841, wanted the Church of England to become more like the Roman Catholic Church (though not to accept the authority of the Pope, who was the Head of the Catholic Church.) ·         An influential group of people accepted the challenge of the tracts. They became known as Tractarians, or Puseyites, after their leader, Edward Pusey. The movement was sometimes called the Oxford Movement. One of the early Tractarians and the writer of the very first tract was John Henry Newman. ·         Seeking to revitalise the Church, the Tractarians drew attention to the importance of the Bible for the nineteenth-century Christian and tried to find ways of addressing the problems that they felt were corrupting Victorian society. ·         To opponents, this meant putting the clock back to before the time of the Reformation. ·         To others, however, it meant restoring a proper sense of awe to church services and enhancing them with greater beauty and drama. For such individuals it also meant a new devotion to prayer, leading to a new spiritual energy. ·         Typically, ‘High Church' Anglicans put a great stress on: ·         Ritual in worship ·         Observing the seasons of the church year ·         Saints' days ·         Ornate robes worn by the clergy and choir ·         Incense and other aesthetic considerations.
Rossetti’s Poetry	·         Throughout her twenties Rossetti continued to write poetry and prose. Her Italian heritage is apparent in the Italian poems “Versi” and “L’Incognita” and an unfinished epistolary novel, “Corrispondenza [sic] Famigliare,” which were published in a privately printed periodical, The Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens during 1851 and 1852. Attempts at publication in prestigious periodicals such as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s in 1854 failed. In a letter of 1 August 1854 to William Edmonstoune Aytoun of Blackwood’s Rossetti declared: “poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality; and . . . I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right.” ·         This tendency to reduce is part of the economy of expression that is a Rossetti trademark, and the result is poetry in which meaning is suggestive rather than explicit. Looking back on her career, Rossetti wrote in an 1888 letter to an unknown clergyman that “Perhaps the nearest approach to a method I can lay claim to was a distinct aim at conciseness; after a while I received a hint from my sister that my love of conciseness tended to make my writing obscure, and I then endeavoured to avoid obscurity as well as diffuseness. In poetics, my elder brother was my acute and most helpful critic.” ·         Her lyric gift has never been doubted, but the unassuming tone and flawless finish of these compositions has sometimes led critics to suggest that their lyric purity is achieved at the expense of intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity. Such assessments have been bolstered by William’s description of her as a “casual” and “spontaneous” poet to whom verse came “very easily, without her meditating a possible subject,” and without her having to undertake substantial revisions. More recently critics have expressed suspicion of William’s reconstruction of his sister’s life, his censorship of her letters, and his revisionist editing in the posthumous collections of her poetry. ·         Rossetti's own brother, William Michael, adhered to the standard Victorian pattern of writing about female verse in terms of feminine spontaneity and sweetness. Introducing his 1896 edited edition of her poetry, he writes ·         I question her having ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write out something or other and then, after thinking about 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'. ·         By suggesting that Rossetti's process of poetic composition came solely from inspiration and that the ideas for her poetry simply and spontaneously ‘came into her head', William Michael discredits the idea that Rossetti is a serious poet to be considered in the same framework as her male contemporaries.
Pre-Raphaelitism	·         Later in 1847 Dante Gabriel, William, and Christina began a tradition of playing bouts rimés, a game in which two of them would race to compose a sonnet conforming to a set of line endings provided by the third. Christina excelled at the exercise, composing sonnets in a matter of minutes. ·         In 1848 she had her first taste of fame when, at Dante Gabriel’s instigation, she submitted two of her poems, “Death’s Chill Between” and “Heart’s Chill Between,” to the prestigious literary periodical The Athenaeum; their acceptance made her a nationally published poet at seventeen. ·         During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group; she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings, on the grounds that such display was unseemly. ·         Nevertheless, her poetry has been described as “Pre-Raphaelite” in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism. ·         Later in her career a reviewer in the Catholic World (October 1876) called her the “queen of the Preraphaelite school”; but more-recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences. ·         Certainly, Rossetti was involved in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism. She sat as Mary for Dante Gabriel’s paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), and her pensive Italianate countenance was a familiar image in the first phase of the movement. The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.
Changes in Victorian Society	During Christina Rossetti's lifetime, Britain underwent changes that transformed the lives of its people: ·         The population grew enormously, from around 12 million at the time of Rossetti's birth in 1830, to around 30 million at the time of her death in 1894 ·         Living in London, Rossetti would have been affected by the growth of the cities, as more and more people moved away from the countryside and found jobs in the commercial and financial sector ·         The rail network, begun in the 1830s and largely completed by the 1870s, had a great effect not only on the accessibility of travel and speed of movement, but also on the appearance of the countryside. It also brought many visitors to London on day-trips and enabled many to leave the city for short breaks and holidays ·         British manufacturing became dominant in the world so trade and the financial sector also grew significantly ·         British power and influence overseas expanded. ·         The dangers of modern living ·         In her commentary called The Face of the Deep on the final book of the Bible, Revelation, Rossetti writes that England is ‘full of luxuries and thronged by stinted poor' (p. 422). She recognised the country's preoccupation with wealth, power and influence and felt that this focus was a dangerous ‘vanity'. ·         More on vanity: Vanity is a word that Rossetti uses repeatedly throughout her poetry to speak of the alluring but dangerous influences of the world. (Its original connotation in the Bible was that of ‘emptiness'.) Rossetti takes her emphasis on vanity from Ecclesiastes 1:2. In a sonnet, entitled The World, she uses the figure of an evil woman ‘with pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands' to describe the temptation of worldly influences. She thereby warns her readers not to depend on worldly comforts such as financial security but to instead trust in God. ·         Rossetti sought to highlight the social problems that needed addressing, by concentrating on the practical application of the biblical commandment to love one's neighbour (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 19:19). She longed for a society based on the biblical principles of assisting the poor and comforting the broken-hearted. ·         This can be seen to correspond with the emphasis placed on social reform by Tractarian leaders. Seeking to re-vitalise the Church, the Tractarians drew attention to the importance of the Bible for the nineteenth-century Christian and tried to find ways of addressing the problems that they felt were corrupting Victorian society.