6. Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

            The example of Christina Rossetti demonstrates that female as well male artists were identified as isolated creators. Her brother, William, emphasized her isolation, inviting comparison with accounts of her contemporary, Emily Dickinson. William Rossetti wrote that when she was inspired Christina wrote standing up in the corner of her little bedroom at the back of the family house (Troxell 138), supposedly unaffected by interaction with family members: "What she wrote was pretty well known in the family as soon as her impeccably neat manuscript of it appeared . . . but she did not show it about as an achievement, and still less had she, in the course of her work, invited any hint, counsel, or co-operation" ("Memoir" lxviii-lxix). Most critics follow his lead, representing Christina as content with isolation, "tenacious of [her] obscurity" (Packer 394), writing poems some of which remained unpublished in her lifetime.

            However, she apparently did not choose to be as isolated as her brother suggested she was. This traditionally male concept of creativity was forced upon her at the same time that her brothers were choosing collaborative creativity. We have heard the claim that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was modeled on the "communal, family model" of the Rossettis (Goff). However, though Christina was the sister of two of the members of the group, and the ostensible fiancée of another (James Collinson), something was missing in the new P.R.B. "family," something so obvious it is often overlooked. Half of the family was excluded: the two girls, ostensibly educated and encouraged as "equals," were apparently no longer considered equal. While it may be argued that one of the girls, Maria, was far more committed to religion than to art, there is little doubt that Christina was in poetry the equal of most, if not all, of the members of the "Brotherhood," and her art epitomized many of their principles.             More importantly, she considered herself a member of the group. Using the same kind of self-deprecating language Mary Shelley used, she described herself to Edmund Gosse "as the least and last of the group" (Sandars 88). From the home of her fiancée, James Collinson, himself a member of the Brotherhood, she wrote to her brother William: all news of the "Brotherhood ... thankfully received ... Love to Papa, Mama, and Maria, and any two of my brethren you choose to select" (Family Letters 6 -- my italics; cf. Going 3). She clearly expected that the collaboration she experienced initially in her family of origin would be expanded in her new family of choice, no longer limited to her blood brethren. Her brother William assumed that the two brethren she most likely had in mind were Collinson and her brother Dante, but "any" suggests a broader circle. Indeed, she felt herself so much a part of the inner circle of the P. R. B. that she could instruct William, concerning The Germ, "several are thinking of calling it the P. R. B. Journal. Think maturely and write to Stephens" (Family Letters 12; cf. Going 5).

            Many readers continue to identify her with the Pre-Raphaelites, on the grounds that her poetry was as characteristic of their art as any one poet's could be. She has been described as the "Pre-Raphaelite poet par excellence" (Apostolos-Cappadona 110) and "the purest, most characteristic Pre-Raphaelite of them all" (Zaturenska 74). Harrison concludes,

Despite its stylistic divergence from her brother's poetry, Christina Rossetti's work was not anomalous among either generation of Pre-Raphaelites. . . . Throughout her poetry and much of her prose Christina Rossetti demonstrates true and deep affinities with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic values. A careful examination of her poetry very significantly increases our understanding of Pre-Raphaelitism . . . As much as her brother, Swinburne, or Morris, and certainly to a greater extent than figures more peripheral to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Christina Rossetti produced works which are dominated by precisely the same aesthetic consciousness and literary values that make Pre-Raphaelitism (Christina 24)

            In 1893 Edmund Gosse assumed that she benefited from creative cooperation with Morris, Swinburne, and Dante Rossetti:

It is with these poets that Miss Rossetti takes her historical position and their vigor and ambition had a various influence upon her style. On this side there can be no doubt that association with men so learned and eager, so daring in experiment, so well equipped in scholarship, gave her an instant and positive advantage. By nature she would seem to be of a cloistered and sequestered temper, and her genius was lifted on this wave of friendship to heights which it would not have dreamed of attempting alone. ("Christina,"214)

Apparently most of Christina Rossetti's contemporaries were unaware that she was excluded from the Pre-Raphaelite male bonding, the mutual encouragement, the shared subjects for art. As William Michael recalled, those in the P.R.B. "were really like brothers, continually together, and confiding to one another all experiences bearing upon questions of art and literature, and many affecting us as individuals" (Rosenblum xii). Yet the P.R. B. violated what Dewey was to call the first principle of community formation: "all the members of the group must have an equitable opportunity to receive and to take from others. . . . . Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves" (Democracy 84; Fishman). By accepting Dante Rossetti's addition of the name "Brotherhood" they made it clear that there would be no question of including Christina or any other woman, no matter how well qualified she might be. Thus she was excluded more completely than Mary was from the Shelley circle, or Rosalind Franklin was from the Watson-Crick-Pauling competition (Jacobus 128-130). Christina could identify more fully than Mary Shelley herself with Shelley's monster who "articulates the misery of being neither fully inside nor outside culture" (Gilbert 160).

            Exactly how did the group control the impermissible aberration? When Dante Rossetti nominated Christina for "honorary" membership, he explained "I never meant that she should attend the meetings, to which I know it would be impossible to persuade her, as it would bring her to a pinch of nervousness infinitely beyond Collinson's. I merely intended that she should entrust her productions to my reading; but [I] must give up that idea, as I find she objects to this also, under the impression that it would seem like display" (Weintraub 30). Her own brother's stereotype of her as the hysterical woman apparently prevented him from considering her physical attendance at the meetings. Even that excuse is problematic, however, as Collinson was not known for his nervousness but for the opposite, a dull sleepiness akin to depression. Was Dante implying that his sister was even more depressed, even more incapacitated than Collinson? In any case, all he had in mind was that she give her art over to a male member of the group for "reading." They voted as a group to exclude her from even that form of "honorary" membership. Had they voted to include her as an honorary member, she may well have objected on grounds other than "display" of course, for one of her brother's goals was apparently to control her aberrations.

            Would Dante Rossetti have in this way deliberately subjugated or even excluded a highly qualified rival? In the case of Hopkins he did just that: he blocked the publication of three of Hopkins's better sonnets. Though Hopkins has been identified as one who later attempted to marginalize Christina Rossetti with his antifeminist rhetoric (Smulders 162, 171-2), he too was marginalized by her brother. But would Dante Rossetti treat his own sister this way? Sibling rivalry can be one of the fiercest forms of competition we know, and as a full, participating member in the P. R. B., Christina, with her religious rather than secular brand of Pre-Raphaelitism, could have been perceived as a dangerous rival to her brother's dominance in the group. The most obvious explanation for Ruskin's famous statement about her poems ("no publisher -- I am deeply grieved to know this -- would take them"), aside from his attitude toward women in general, "is that Ruskin felt it was damaging to Gabriel to have another Rossetti in the market" (Troxell 30-31). There is also the implicit perception of her as a threat in Swinburne's description of her as the "Jael" who led the Pre-Raphaelites to victory, for the biblical Jael won fame by deceiving a man into sleeping in her tent and then pounding a stake through his temple.  Whether Swinburne or Dante Rossetti were fully conscious of perceiving Christina as a dangerous rival, such a perception probably influenced her exclusion from the "Brotherhood," even though, or perhaps because, she was the one who would lead them to victory in poetry.

            Christina Rossetti apparently gained little from proximity to such a group. Nor was she comfortable with what has been called the "Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood" of lower-class, ill-educated models the brothers attracted to themselves. The only group to which she truly belonged was the matrifocal family of her mother and her older sister, which did not support her artistic vocation nearly as much as an artistic "family" like the PRB might have. Hence whatever the artificiality of her adolescent sadness, she truly experienced the standard Romantic inspiration of isolation as well depression. She recognized that her sex alone was enough to reduce her to second class status (Family Letters 31). She suffered from the special depression of a female genius excluded from the creative "brotherhoods" of her time, the loneliness of the female artist in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," a model which recurs throughout her poetry, nowhere more obviously than in Prince's Progress:

                        I dwell alone -- I dwell alone, alone,

                           Whilst full my river flows down to the sea,

                        Gilded with flashing boats

                           That bring no friend to me;

            She has been excluded by critics, mostly male, ever since. John Dixon Hunt ignored her almost completely in The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination and Lang stated that if the term "Pre-Raphaelite" "is to be used as a strictly critical term [rather than merely a description of poetry written by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle], it has to mean something like `visualized poetry of fantasy' or `fantasy crossed with realism'" and therefore it "excludes nearly all the poetry of Christina Rossetti (Queen of the Pre-Raphaelites, so called), though `Goblin Market' might be said to qualify" (xxvi-xxvii). In his next paragraph Lang identifies the primary mode of creativity of the P.R.B. as revolt against dualism, in other words that recombination of opposites we have related to the recombination of genes. He explains that while all romanticism is, in a sense,

`natural supernaturalism'....In its purest form, romantic `supernaturalism', positing a higher order of reality within us all, denies philosophical dualism. Pre-Raphaelitism -- and this is at once its characteristic strength and its mortal weakness -- strives, impossibly, to accept and reject it simultaneously: matter and spirit are not quite different and not quite identical, ... Pre-Raphaelite fantasy affirms the dichotomy, Pre-Raphaelite particularity repudiates it."

In many of her poems Christina Rossetti certainly seems to have chosen to exclude herself from their emphasis on a "Pre-Raphaelite particularity" that repudiates dichotomy (Bump,"Christina" 332-3).

            Her attraction to puritan melancholy no doubt affected her attitude toward nature. She epitomized the Victorian attempt to revive the medieval stairway of creation, the metaphor which enabled the ascetic to grant some provisional value to this world.  Meditation on finite things was acceptable if it led the mind up the stairway of creation to the contemplation of the infinite.  However, as many of Christina Rossetti's poems demonstrate, such stairway imagery connoted a progressive contemptus mundi which led ultimately to a melancholy rejection of this world.  This imagery is particularly prominent in "The Convent Threshold" (ll. 4-5, 15-16, 146-147).  The lower stairs were to be left behind as the mind advanced, their chief lesson being memento mori, the fact that they will crumble -- as they do in her "A Shadow of Dorothea." The ultimate goal was for the umbilical cord of nature to be severed completely.

            This traditional Judeo-Christian suspicion of nature excluded Christina Rossetti from one of the most fascinating versions of Pre-Raphaelite creativity: their recombination of the supernatural immanent in the natural (Bump, "Christina" 328-329). In "A Shadow of Dorothea," for instance, she stresses the transcendental, otherworldly aspiration embodied in the Dorothea legend, focusing on the celestial origin of Dorothea and her flowers. She concludes the poem by forcing the reader to choose between these flowers and their earthly counterparts, between the supernatural and the natural. The melancholy choice she often made, iterated again and again in her poetry, is stated forcefully in "Three Nuns":

                        I will not look upon a rose

                         Though it is fair to see:

                        The flowers planted in Paradise

                         Are budding now for me.

Hence, most readers have focused on her love of irreconcilable antitheses (Bump, "Christina" 333n). Of course, one could argue that she had more justification. Her exclusion from the "Brotherhood" was, after all, their enforcement of one of the oldest reductive antitheses: male vs. female.

            Recombination of Opposites. However, she did not always accept antitheses. In fact recombination of opposites is more of a key to her creativity than isolation. Much of her art was inspired by attempts to transcend the boundaries between the individual and the group, painting and poetry, fantasy and realism, the natural and the supernatural, past and present, and the city and the country.

            The Individual and the Group: Collaboration in the Family. Her recombinations of the individual and the group remind us that she was not as isolated as we have assumed:  much of her art was motivated by social interaction, by competition as well as cooperation with others. William Rossetti's picture of Christina Rossetti isolated in her family is a gross oversimplification, apparently constructed, consciously or unconsciously, to support the myth of the isolated, suffering creator. His representation of her writing, standing up  alone in the corner of her little bedroom at the back of the house (Troxell 138), is significantly different from that of another chronicler of the Pre-Raphaelites, William Bell Scott's:

I entered the small front parlour or dining room of the house, and found an old gentleman writing by the fire in a great chair, with a thick manuscript book open before him ... By the window was a high narrow reading-desk at which stood writing a slight girl with a serious regular profile.... Though I did not know that both of them -- he and his daughter -- were probably at that moment writing poetry of some sort              (Mayberry 6)

Rossetti did write standing up, but obviously not always alone in her bedroom. Bell saw her writing in the front parlour, where guests were received, in the company of another creator, her father. And of course publication of her finished poems was impossible without collaboration. Her brothers helped her get her poetry published, a partial confirmation of Goff's argument that "individual strengths were encouraged non-competitively" within the Rossetti family.

            They were also encouraged competitively, reminding us that even sibling rivalry can be a form of collaboration which helps overcome isolation. The children vied for publication in their grandfather Polidori's home press. Christina was apparently the winner. Her grandfather printed two volumes of her adolescent poetry, in 1842 and 1847. In 1848 she was able to move beyond the family circle, placing two poems in The Athenaeum and in 1850 seven appeared in The Germ under a pseudonym. Hence she was justified in representing her poetic persona winning a poetry contest in Maude, written about this time (23).

            It's been said that "a productive but as-yet-untapped vein of Rossetti studies is the mutual indebtedness of Christina and Dante Rossetti" (Mayberry 13). Because she was the first to achieve success in poetry she could well have been the dominant influence in that relationship. He is perhaps most famous for burying his poems in the coffin of Elizabeth Siddal, for example, but Christina Rossetti had already created that plot in Maude, whose poems are buried with her. At the very least we need to recognize that Christina Rossetti was able to resist his "fraternal stone-throwing":

she constantly received advice, guidance, and direction from her brother, much of which she managed to reject, not without some difficulty, as this letter from Christina to Dante Gabriel suggests: `I have thickened my skin and toughened the glass of my house sufficiently to bear some fraternal stone-throwing. ... if you will let me have [one of my poems] back, I will consider my point before deciding. For really I think I might just as well have it and the rest back, and transact what little business remains to be done straight with the Athenaeum, instead of troubling you'. (Family Letters 66; Mayberry 14)

The anger which seems just below the surface here is explained in part by the condescension Dante expressed at times for her poetry -- "my sister's pennyworths of wheat" -- and the contempt he felt for her efforts at drawing: "I find you have been perpetrating portraits of some kind; you must take care not to rival the Sid [Lizzie Siddal] but keep within respectful limits" (DGR: Family Letters II, 399;C. Rossetti,  Family Letters 19; Going 4).

            Her defiant rivalry of the Brotherhood as a whole apparently began after they cast her out as an "honorary" brother and she refused even to have her poems read aloud at their meetings  (Mayberry 5). Within a year after her rejection by the Brotherhood, the social inspiration of rivalry, rather than the isolation of depression, was the creative inspiration of much of her better poetry. "The P. R. B. in its decadence" concludes, "So luscious fruit must fall when over-ripe." "In an Artist's Studio" (1856) focuses directly on her brother Dante's treatment of women, in this case Lizzie Siddal, who became  chemically as well as emotionally dependent waiting for him to marry her (Doughty 262; Mayberry 53). The poem concludes

    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.

Lizzie was sad and "wan with waiting" because, as Christina says twice in the poem, Dante Rossetti was not interested in her as a real woman, but only as a mistress and a model for his narcissistic, idealized art, merely as a momentary stimulus for paintings on which he could project his own anima.

            This was the usual treatment of the "Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood," the models used by the Brotherhood. Following the Academy tradition of employing prostitutes as models, the Brothers sought out working class girls, some as young as fifteen. Dante Rossetti was clearly the leader, recruiting Lizzie Siddal, Jane Burden, and Fanny Cornforth and taking Annie Miller from Hunt. Only Sarah Cox, alias Fanny Cornforth, was actually a prostitute, but Dante Rossetti was obsessed with that subject in his poem "Jenny" and his paintings Found and Mary Magdalen. "More often than not, the Fallen Woman was not a professional prostitute but an 'unfortunate', a victim led astray by a wicked man's lust. However, this did not disguise the fact that the message carried by this recurrent theme was that of the dominant ideology, functioning to blame and punish deviant women by presenting seduction (disobedience to social and parental instructions) as inevitably leading to prostitution, destitution, and death" (Marsh 71-2). Dante Rossetti managed to convey that ideology in his works even as he used the girls for his own ends.

            Christina's ultimate response to the Brotherhood's treatment of women, however, was her most famous poem, Goblin Market (1862). In this, her greatest poem, rivalry rather than depression was the primary inspiration of her creativity, for on one level it is a parody of the P. R. B. Apparently suspecting as much, Dante Rossetti replaced her own illustrations of the goblins of Goblin Market as little men with his representations of them as animals, thereby deflecting readers away from the parodic possibilities of the poem. Nevertheless, one of the protagonists is named "Lizzie" and she is attacked by goblin "men" who are described repeatedly as "brothers" (lines 49, 93-96). Hence we are still invited to consider the possibility that Lizzie and her sister Laura stand for all the women abused by the P. R. B. and its allies.

            That list includes, of course, Christina Rossetti herself. According to her brother William, Christina was “struck a staggering blow" by one of the brothers, James Collinson (Poetical Works, "Memoir", p. lii; cf. Going 3). She also watched her sister Maria be deserted by a number of possible suitors, including Ruskin. Ruskin saved the "Brotherhood" from oblivion, but rejected Christina's art. Indeed, like Laura in "Goblin Market," Christina was treated worse than the woman named Lizzie. Ruskin claimed to be attracted by Lizzie Siddal's poems and drawings and even paid her expenses for a while, but he regarded Goblin Market as an impermissible aberration: "your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write like the public like" (DGR: Letters 2.391; Going 4).

            Nevertheless, Going's suggestion in 1979 that Goblin Market is somehow "about" the P. R. B. seems to have fallen on deaf ears. If we remember that their fame was chiefly from their paintings, not their poetry, we can more easily identify Goblin Market as a parody of the Brotherhood. Even if we do not recall the association between the Brotherhood and fruit in "The P. R. B. in its decadence," the association of the fruit with art in the Goblin Market is fairly obvious. First of all the fruit, harvested in all seasons, is clearly artifice: the fruits and flowers are "Plucked from bowers / Where summer ripens at all hours" (lines 150-152). Nature is in a state of suspended animation, as it is in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Tennyson's "Lotos Eaters." The fruit is not only unnaturally perfect -- each piece full, fine, unpecked, unmarred as in a painting-- it is sterile. What few seeds there are will not grow if planted. It is primarily because the artificially perfect fruit in Goblin Market does not thus foreshadow mortality that it is regarded as a dangerous illusion, evoking the traditional puritan tendency to believe that beauty is evil because it tantalizes the senses, the bonds that chain us to this world. Hence when Laura dreams of melons she is compared to a traveler seeing "False waves in desert drouth" (line 290 -- my italics), a remark which places the fruit in the tradition of the Bowre of Blis of The Faerie Queene, and of course the Garden of Eden.

            However, Rossetti reverses the gender implications of Genesis: "the fruit forbidden" (line 479)  originates with men rather than with women, just as the temptations did in the seductions of Lizzie Siddal and the other models used by the Brotherhood. In "The P. R. B. in its Decadence," Rossetti lampooned what might be regarded as the artificiality, insincerity or hypocrisy of the fruit, that is, the paintings, of the Brotherhood. Her brother Dante, for example, wanted to be the champion of the Brotherhood, but soon refused to exhibit his paintings, shunning the "vulgar optic," as he put it. However, his sister Christina could not help but notice that his remained the vulgar cry, "Come buy, come buy," to the industrialists of the Midlands. The "masculine society" of the P. R. B. had "become a snare and a delusion" for those who had placed their faith in them (Going 5). Their artificially "luscious fruit," as she called it in "The P. R. B. in its Decadence," was not only decadent and illusory, it was dangerous.

            Painting and Poetry: "Goblin Market." The initial temptation, the one most familiar to the public, was that of their paintings. Hence at first the seduction in Goblin Market is primarily visual. Laura said "We must not look"; Lizzie said "You should not peep" and "covered up her eyes / Covered close lest they should look" (lines 42, 49-50). When Laura succumbed, she iterated, "`Look, Lizzie, look" (line 54). To save Laura, "for the first time in her life" Lizzie "began to listen and look" (lines 327-8). It's been said that Ruskin enabled the Victorians to open their eyes and see as they never had before, and he recommended the paintings of the P. R. B. Part of his objection to Goblin Market may have been that it revealed only too well the dangers of attraction to visual art, especially to that of the Brotherhood's. No doubt especially objectionable was Christina Rossetti's disruption of traditional gender associations. In Victorian poetry it is usually males who are tempted by erotic vision or "scopophilic" voyeurism, subjecting themselves to the danger of the females' "gorgonizing power" (Christ 386,391). In Goblin Market the roles are reversed.

            Christina Rossetti's poetry is usually far more oriented to the ear than the eye. In this poem, however, her creative recombination of visual and auditory effects, rivaling the best of Pre-Raphaelite wordpainting, sets up the parody. Compound adjectives are grouped together to paint fairly extensive canvases, as in the list of fruits which opens the poem. The plump fullness of the fruit and sheer enumeration of one fruit after another conveys that sense of plenitude so characteristic of those Pre-Raphaelite paintings in which the profusion of detail threatens to burst the bounds of the frames. Her poem is also full of the naturalistic imagery so characteristic of their art, not just single metaphors such as Laura's "tree of life drooped from the root," but also more spectacular multiple comparisons (lines 260,81-84,184-9,408-17). Some of the extended passages of wordpainting even seem gratuitous (e. g. lines 530-558), suggesting that love of wordpainting for its own sake so pervasive in the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their model, Keats. The result was that as late as 1891 La Gallienne, presumably thinking primarily of "Goblin Market," focused on the "`decorative' quality" in her poetry, "as of cloth of gold stiff with sumptuous needle-work design, which is a constant effect in the painter's poetry" (131).

            The most striking feature of many Pre-Raphaelite paintings is the preternaturally bright light which seems to shine from them, caused by painting the canvas white before laying on the color. To set up her parody, Christina Rossetti used lapidary adjectives to create a similar initial effect in Goblin Market. The fruit is presented in "a golden dish" and the colors are dazzling: "Pears red with basking / Out in the sun,"  "Bright-fire-like barberries," etc. (lines 58, 358-9, 102, 27). Moreover, as in Pre-Raphaelite paintings the light is focused on certain people. For example, fiery light is a metaphor for the passion the brothers' fruit awakens in Laura, who responds "like a leaping flame" (line 218). In most of the paintings of the Brotherhood light is symbolic of goodness rather than evil, but in Christina's parody, light, when associated with males and their temptations, tends to be evil, suggesting that beneath their ostensible commitment to the supernatural the members of the Brotherhood harbored a dangerous love of the merely natural.  She implied that the Pre-Raphaelites were more oriented to Greek than to Hebrew traditions, more in tune with Renaissance Hellenism than with medieval Christianity. The fruit is associated with the warm south and one of the goblins makes a crown reminiscent of the followers of Bacchus (lines 29, 99-101). The basic temptation is clearly that of the classical carpe diem (lines 15-19, 375-80).

            It is only in connection with females, especially Lizzie, that light connotes goodness in Christina Rossetti's parody. Lizzie is like a beacon "Sending up a golden fire" (line 414). Her light is stronger than that of the Brotherhood and becomes a purging, cleansing agent for Laura: "Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart / Met the fire smouldering there / And overbore its lesser flame" (lines 507-509). With that one exception of Laura's "leaping flame" in response to the seduction, the females are generally represented as the true source of the light. We recall Laura's "gleaming" neck and her "tear more rare than pearl," as well as the description of the two sisters as two wands of ivory tipped with gold (lines 90-91) and the many references to their golden hair (lines 41, 120, 123, 125, 126, 184, 408, 540). The "nature" associated with the brothers is revealed to be natura maligna; it is only female light that is associated with benevolent nature. Laura, for example, says she has no gold money, "`all my gold is on the furze / That shakes in windy weather / Above the rusty heather'" (lines 120-122). Her recovery is also closely associated with the "golden sheaves" and the beauty of the landscape (lines 530-538).

            Fantasy and Realism: Goblin Market. Partly because it is a parody of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, Goblin Market is not typical of Christina Rossetti's poetry. Lang asserted that the term "Pre-Raphaelite" "has to mean something like `visualized poetry of fantasy' or `fantasy crossed with realism'" and concluded that it "excludes nearly all the poetry of Christian Rossetti" with the exception of Goblin Market (xxvi-xxvii). No doubt its parodic elements helped her contemporaries recognize that the primary mode of creativity expressed in Goblin Market was its typically Pre-Raphaelite recombination of opposite ideas, including fantasy and realism as well as visual and verbal art. In an 1863 review, one contemporary, for instance, praised Goblin Market "for the vivid and wonderful power by which things unreal and mystic are made to blend and link themselves with the everyday images and events of common life" (Norton 404).

            Following the usual pattern of the seduction of Lizzie Siddal and the other models, the temptation becomes increasingly auditory, embodied in the speech of the "brothers." We hear a parody of the sound of male Pre-Raphaelite poems, especially their narrative and ballad-like tendencies: their consistent tone, foreshadowing (lines 249-252), and simple language for complex emotions. The parody extends to the Pre-Raphaelite love of the Gothic, especially goblins and the grotesque. The responses of Laura, and especially Jeanie, to their abandonment by the goblin brethren also mimic the depression so pervasive in Pre-Raphaelite art.

            The Individual and the Group: Response to Sexism as the Inspiration of Goblin Market. However, after the rewriting of Genesis, the poem shifts away from parody, offering an alternative vision as Mary Shelley does in Frankenstein. Rossetti offers a creative revision of the New Testament, starring a woman as the Christ figure. The poems ends as an obvious example of the Victorian moral aesthetic and of Rossetti's identification with women as a group. In the beginning Lizzie warned Laura: "Their offers should not charm us / Their evil gifts would harm us" (lines 65-66). Yet, like Browning later in The Ring and the Book, Christina Rossetti is unwilling or unable to let the art speak for itself: the narrator interrupts, "Ah fool, to choose such part / Of soul-consuming care!" (lines 511-512). As the poem draws to a close, the didacticism and the traditional Victorian emphasis on the family emerge (lines 543 ff.), as in Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult." Finally, Laura warns her daughters about "The wicked quaint fruit-merchant men, / Their fruits like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood" (lines 553-5).

            Before Laura encountered it, their "poison" had already killed "Jeanie," a name in this context reminiscent of Jenny, the prostitute Dante Rossetti had been writing about since 1848 (Going 1). Hence it is significant that Christina read proofs of Goblin Market at an institution "for the reclamation and protection of women leading a vicious life" where she did volunteer work (Family Letters 26, cf. Going 8). One of the motivations for Goblin Market was apparently a desire to reclaim and protect women from the sad and (from Christina Rossetti's point of view) immoral lives they would probably lead if they could not resist the temptations of the Brotherhood.

            The seductions usually followed a pattern. First they were lured by the chance to appear in paintings and then retained, in Lizzie Siddal's case, by promises of marriage. Their chance to have their portraits painted was purchased not with money, but with their bodies. When Laura tells the brethren that she has no money

`You have much gold upon your head',

They answered altogether:

`Buy from us with a golden curl'.

She clipped a precious lock,

She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,

Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red.

                                                            lines 133-38

This description best fits Dante Rossetti's model, Fanny Cornforth, who was in fact a prostitute, but Laura is also modeled on Lizzie Siddal. Like many prostitutes Laura becomes dependent on the sexual and/or chemical substances they supply her. She becomes an addict (lines 160-165). No doubt Christina Rossetti knew, and perhaps some of her readers knew, that Lizzie Siddal had become an opium addict while living with Dante Rossetti. He had promised to marry her for years, but only did so when she seemed on the point of death. She finally died of an opium overdose in February, 1862, at the age of thirty-two. Thus it is highly likely that Christina Rossetti had in mind primarily her brother's shameful treatment of Lizzie as she composed Goblin Market, which was published in 1862. Naming one of the protagonists "Lizzie" drew attention to the parallel, of course, but Jeanie's fate best represented the end of the relationship: 

who should have been a bride;

But who for joys brides hope to have

Fell sick and died

In her gay prime,

In earliest winter time,

                                                                        lines 313-17

Attracted by the brethren's creativity, Jeanie lost all chance of her own creativity, biological or artistic. Rejected and abandoned, Lizzie Siddal also wasted away and died.

            In the poem Laura wastes away, but is saved from death at the last moment. By naming the primary victim Laura rather than Lizzie Christina may have been working out in fiction what her own fate might have been if she had married Collinson, for Christina Rossetti played the role of Petrarch's Laura (Going 1) as well as Dante's Beatrice in the imaginations of many members of the Brotherhood. The character Lizzie saves Laura in the poem, as perhaps the example of Lizzie Siddal helped save Christina from a similar fate. After all, as we have seen, Christina also began as a model for the Pre-Raphaelites.

            By creating the character of Lizzie in the poem Christina was also able to work out in her imagination at least how Lizzie Siddal might have been saved by someone like Christina. Such a savior would have to endure, as Christina did, the mockery and criticism of the brothers: "One called her proud / Cross-grained, uncivil; / Their tones waxed loud, / [They] Mauled and mocked her" (lines 394-6, 429). At this point there seems to be seven of them (lines 340-3), the exact number of the official membership of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

            Christina's solution is simple: there are no males in the final family scene in the poem. Besides parodying the "Brotherhood" Christina was proposing instead a Sisterhood ("for there is no friend like a sister" -- line 562), much as Charlotte Bronte had in Jane Eyre before she added the contrived reconciliation with Rochester. Sadly, no one seemed to answer Christina's call for a sisterhood, certainly no female poets. Nor did Christina have the consolation of an Anglican sisterhood as her sister Maria had. In fact Christina soon lost even Maria to death.

            As she gained fame, Rossetti continued to parody the poems of other Pre-Raphaelites such as her brother Dante and his friend, Swinburne, who had been out on the town with him when Lizzie killed herself. In "Within the Veil," for instance,

simple rhyming tercets mock the greater, though subtle, formal complexities of her brother's `The Blessed Damozel', which already exists on the borderline of parody, .... Similarly, in `Whitsun Monday' Christina Rossetti ironically manipulates Swinburne's typical anapests, his characteristic image patterns (river/sea, tree/fruit, silence/sound), and even the commonplaces of his poetic diction, but she does so for orthodox purposes: that is, to subvert his ostentatious iconoclasm.      (Harrison, Christina 87)

            The Individual and the  Group: Competition with the Pre-Raphaelites. As these parodies suggest, competition with the Pre-Raphaelites was an important social source of Christina Rossetti's creativity. Simply voting to exclude her obviously did not control her impermissible aberrations. By defining and promulgating her own rival version of Pre-Raphaelitism she became more famous than any of the poets in the Brotherhood.

            During the crucial first two decades of the group's history, until the publication of Dante Gabriel's poems in l870, she was their chief literary figure. We tend to think of The Germ and Morris's Defense of Guenevere as the first successful forays of the Pre-Raphaelites into literature, but in fact both were almost completely ignored. What little praise The Germ received was primarily for the poems that Christina contributed to it. Her poems "Testimony," "Sweet Death," and "Dreamland" were acclaimed in The Critic and The Guardian (W. Rossetti, "Introduction" 11-15). The first literary victory of the Pre-Raphaelites was by the member they excluded: the publication of Goblin Market And Other Poems in 1862. Hence Swinburne was right to hail her as "the Jael who led their host to victory" (Gosse, Life 136-7).

            She succeeded in becoming a member of the P.R.B. at least in the public's eye. "That most Victorians perceived Christina Rossetti as unequivocally `Pre-Raphaelite' in her poetic affinities becomes clear when we read through the contemporary reviews" (Harrison Christina 24). J. R. Dennet, for instance, reviewing her first two volumes of poetry for The Nation in 1866, concluded that "any American reader who for the last two or three years has occasionally seen and admired the stray poems attributed to Miss Rossetti, being asked to describe them by one word, would have pronounced them `Pre-Raphaelite'" (47-48).

            In other words, again she won the competition, as she had in her childhood rivalries. Even after her brother Dante achieved fame as a poet, she was regarded as the greater poet. William Sharp, for instance, in his 1886 essay, "The Rossettis," stated that "the youngest of the Rossetti family has, as a poet, a much wider reputation and a much larger circle of readers than even her brother Gabriel, for in England, and much more markedly in America, the name Christina Rossetti is known intimately where perhaps that of the author of The House of Life is but a name and nothing more" (427). Similarly, in 1888 R. R. Bowker wrote in  that "Christina Rossetti's deeply spiritual poems are known even more widely than those of her more famous brother" (827).

            Moreover, despite their attempts to exclude her, her spiritual brand of Pre-Raphaelitism became the dominant strain for many readers. In 1895 Alice Law connected Christina Rossetti's recombination of eros and agape to the P. R. B, suggesting that in her "as in the Pre-Raphaelite heroine, the earthly love became transfigured by the heavenly; the overflowing of human emotion found an outlet in religious ecstasy" (450). In 1903 Gosse described her as "the high priestess of Pre-Raphaelitism" (Critical, 158) and in 1906 her brother William acknowledged her as the "Queen of the Pre-Raphaelites" (Some, I, 74). In 1911 Ford Madox Ford, grandson of the ur-Pre-Raphaelite, Ford Madox Brown, stated that "Christina Rossetti seems to us to be the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced" (Critical 179). Gosse concluded that "as a religious poet of our time she has no rival" except Newman, and that she was the greater poet (Critical, 156), and Percy Lubbock described her as one of the greatest religious poets in the English language (V, 289). 

            Although she responded to her exclusion from the P. R. B. with parody and other forms of rivalry, she also obviously "joined" the group at a distance by adopting many of their themes and principles. As we have seen, The Germ promulgated four sources of creativity cited by many as their dominant features:  [1] a desire to reproduce nature for its own sake, often focusing on its richness, bright color and light; [2] a recombination of opposites comparable to a recombination of genes, especially verbal vs. visual and natural vs. supernatural; [3] a recombination of past and present in metaleptic medievalism; [4] and the usual Romantic preference for subjects "that have an innate poignancy or morbidity" (Merritt 12). Although she was excluded from "The Brotherhood," all four of these features became central to her more religious strain of Pre-Raphaelitism. She thus demonstrated, to Hopkins among others, that an ascetic, even puritanical form of religious medievalism could be an authentic development of the first principles of the P.R. B. and badge of membership in both the school of Keats and the school of Dante.

            City, Country and Self-Parody. Ruskin insisted that "Pre-Raphaelitism has but one truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature and from nature only" (12:157).  Yet some readers feel that "it would be pointless to search for an immediate interest in the depiction of nature in Christina Rossetti" (Hönnighausen 15), that "nothing is more curious in the mentality of Christina Rossetti than her almost complete independence of external stimuli. `My knowledge of what is called  nature', she once said, `is that of the town sparrow'" (Stuart 1930, 41).

            On the other hand, precisely because she was pent up in the city most of her life, the sensations of nature and country life were a particularly creative inspiration for her. As her contemporary, Walter Pater, put it in his essay on Morris's brand of Pre-Raphaelitism, "a passion of which the outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve, in which the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliance and relief -- all redness is turned into blood, all water into tears" ("Poems" 303). Her emblematic use of nature and the ascetic themes in her religious poetry have tended to obscure the fact that she too was inspired by nature without necessarily subordinating it for artistic or religious reasons (Bump, "Christina" 326-333). Her contemporaries certainly got this impression. Gosse felt that "what is very interesting in her poetry is the union of this fixed religious faith with a hold upon physical beauty and the richer parts of nature which allies her with her brother and their younger friends. She does not shrink from strong delineation of the pleasures of life even when she is denouncing them" ("Christina" 214). In 1866 an anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum represented Christina Rossetti as "painting scenes which, though touched by the light of imagination, are yet as vividly true as if they were photographs of familiar objects" (824) and in The Nation Dennet stressed that her poetry was "picturesque" and that "her practice" was "to dwell elaborately upon details" (47).

            Even when nature is not being described, much of her labor is focused on creating strikingly original naturalistic imagery, as it is in Goblin Market (lines 81-84, 184-189, 260, 408-417). To some extent her parody of Pre-Raphaelite imitation of nature in that poem is self parody for metaphors drawn from nature dominate many of her other poems, ranging from "Amor Mundi" to "The Convent Threshold" to the first stanza of "A Birthday." As we have seen, the wordpainting in the first stanza, for example, of Goblin Market conveys a love of plenitude in nature. This typical Pre-Raphaelite creative inspiration motivates other poems of hers, as in the description of the "thickset" fruit of "A Birthday," the "thickly" growing flowers of "Amor Mundi" and the "plenteous stars" and "many-leaved" green branches of "Paradise" (lines 37-38).

            Similarly, the parody of the color and light of Pre-Raphelite paintings in Goblin Market anticipates her own statement that "it needs no Solomon to enter into the inexhaustible cheerfulness of `all green things', an expression which we may fairly interpret as including the whole vegetable creation. . . . Fancy what this world would be were it prevalently clay-coloured or slate-coloured!" (Seek and Find 96) and her own attraction to luminosity in "A Birthday," "Paradise," "Echo," "Advent," and "De Profundis."

            Recombination of Opposites: Visual and Verbal. Her attempts to capture the luminosity of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in poetry were obvious examples of Pre-Raphaelite recombination of opposites. Though she was more often interested in overcoming the dichotomy between poetry and music, at times her creativity was stimulated by trying to overcome the division between the visual and the verbal arts. She was apparently the Virgin Mary in her brother's The Annunciation and The Girlhood of Mary, the weeping queen in his illustration of Arthur at Avalon for the Moxon Tennyson, and she even sat as a model for Hunt so that he could put some of her expression into the eyes of Christ in his The Light of the World. She also took drawing lessons from Ford Madox Brown and made illustrations for her poems. Both her books for children, Sing-Song and Speaking Likenesses, were illustrated, and her brother's pictures accompanying Goblin Market were prominent in reviews of the book. Hopkins cited them in his essay, "On the Origin of Beauty," and noted Hughes' illustration of her "A Birthday" (J 103, 142).

            Natural and Supernatural. Moreover, when her spiritual insight was allied with appreciation of nature, she could advance her version of the typically Pre-Raphaelite expression of creativity, natural supernaturalism. Although hers was a more puritan strain, she too was inspired by the sacramental typology of nature typical of so many of the early Pre-Raphaelites. Because her religious faith was stronger than theirs, she insisted more stringently on recombination: "to exercise natural perception becomes a reproach to us, if along with it we exercise not spiritual perception. Objects of sight may and should quicken us to apprehend objects of faith, things temporal suggesting things eternal . . . . Natural gifts are laid as stepping-stones to the supernatural: the nobler any man is by birthright, if keen of insight, lofty of instinctive aim, wide of grasp, deep of penetration, the more is he able and is he bound to discern in the visible universe tokens of the love and presence and foreshadowings of the will of God. . . . common things continually at hand, wind or windfall or budding bough, acquire a sacred association, and cross our path under aspects at once familiar and transfigured, and preach to our spirits while they serve our bodies" (Seek and Find 180, 203).

            Hence in 1895 Alice Law observed that "The keynote of much of Miss Rossetti's word-music is its aesthetic mysticism" (447 -- my italics). In the same year an anonymous reviewer in The Critic detected in her the "Rossetti virus" she ostensibly shared with her brother Dante: "a peculiar mingling of sense and soul in a sort of mystical aestheticism" (21). Presumably, what this critic meant was that "The Convent Threshold" and many of her other poems Christina Rossetti's were inspired by a creative recombination of natural and supernatural similar to the one her brother Dante displayed in "The Blessed Damozel": the representation of the natural in the supernatural.

            Far more often than her brother, she transported her love of this world to the next, enjoying to the fullest the sensations of this world recombined with those of the next. Heaven in "The Convent Threshold" seems even more fleshly in some respects than her brother's, for the poem ends, "There shall we meet as once we met / And love with old familiar love."  Unlike Dante Alighieri, in this poem she refuses to sublimate human love into divine love. Hence Alice Meynell described this poem as "a song of penitence for love that yet praises love more fervently than would a chorus hymnael." This and many other early poems of Christina Rossetti recall the "mystic passion" which Pater identified in Morris' Pre-Raphaelite poetry and in the middle ages where the "strong suggestion" of "a choice between Christ and a rival lover" creates dramatic tension and thus "religion shades into sensuous love, and sensuous love into religion" ("Poems").

            Perhaps the best summary of her version of Pre-Raphaelite natural supernaturalism and demonstration of how ascesis could inspire creative recombinations is the conclusion of her description of heaven in "Paradise":

                        I hope to see these things again,

                           But not as once in dreams by night;

                           To see them with my very sight,

                        And touch and handle and attain:

                                                                                    (lines 41-44)

In other words, she tore down Coleridge's pleasure-dome ("Kubla Khan") and Keats's bowers in order to be entitled to reconstruct them in heaven:           

                        Therefore as a flint I set my face,

                        To pluck down, to build up again the whole --

                        But in a different place

                                                            ("From house to home" lines 210-212)

This recombination of the natural in the supernatural was at least as influential, if not more so, than its counterpart, the Brotherhood's sense of the supernatural in the natural.

            Recombination of Past and Present: Medievalism. While this vision of heaven seems more like that of Dante Rossetti than Dante Alighieri, in most other respects Christina Rossetti's version of Pre-Raphaelitism was more true to Dante Alighieri than that of his namesake, her brother. In this sense her creativity was more completely inspired by the metaleptic competition of radicalism. It's been said that "it is evidence of Christina Rossetti's independence [from the Pre-Raphaelites] that she wrote so little at all related to medievalism," but even this reader felt called upon to compare her to "the great medieval saints of Italy"; cited a parallel with medieval theology in her art; and noted a few of the echoes of Dante in "The Convent Threshold" (E. Thomas 176-7). Rossetti's recombination of past and present was far more pervasive: because she was the high priestess  of the Oxford Movement as well as of Pre-Raphaelitism she embodied a deeper, more genuine medievalism than that represented by Pre-Raphaelitism alone (Bump "Hopkins, Christina" 4). Ultimately, if, as some have suggested, Dante was the first Pre-Raphaelite in our sense, Christina Rossetti's art is a more genuine than that of the members of the "Brotherhood." "The Convent Threshold," for instance, is more radically Dantesque than "The Blessed Damozel," and thus a better model of the definitive genre of the "Brotherhood": the medieval dream vision in which the male is represented as on a lower plane than the vision. Despite the rather suggestive ending, "The Convent Threshold" is full of deliberate echoes of the Divine Comedy, including the stair, glass, and mountain imagery selected from Dante by her sister Maria in her A Shadow of Dante. Hence Alice Law, after stating that "the keynote of much of Miss Rossetti's word-music is its aesthetic mysticism and rich melancholy" emphasizes that

It is associated here, as in the works of her brother and other Pre-Raphaelites, with the deep medieval colouring, and quaint bejewelled setting of an old thirteenth -- or fourteenth-century manuscript. The women of Miss Rossetti's pages have much in common with the long-tried Griseldas or ante-Renaissance type, with the slow fading Isabella of Boccaccio or the olive-wreathed, flame-robed virgins of the Divine Comedy   (447).

            Hers was the spiritual orientation the Pre-Raphaelites identified with Dante. Nineteenth-century readers found just about everything they wanted to find in Dante, including love of nature and of biblical typology, but many were particularly attracted by Dante's presentation of the feminine.  Harold Bloom has emphasized the importance of the father figure in his theory of creativity, but as Walter Ong has pointed out, "the male's muse, the unconscious as source of creativity, is not himself or like himself, but other, out there.... The muse, being feminine cannot have this relationship of tantalizing otherness to the feminine psyche.  And there is no muse that is masculine" (Fighting, 115).

            If Christina Rossetti's sex excluded her from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it endowed her rival version of medievalism with a powerful advantage. A need for access to the feminine muse explains part of the spiritual attraction of Christina Rossetti and other Marian figures for her male contemporaries. Moreover, her sex made her rival strain of Pre-Raphaelitism especially appealing to religious contemporaries like Hopkins who were oriented to what Ong calls the femininity of the Church:

the femininity of the Church is connected with the nature of the Incarnation itself and of redemption.  The Incarnation has a fundamentally feminine human base, particularly as related to the church's teaching regarding the virgin birth.  In the economy of the Incarnation the great advantage of the birth of Jesus without the ordinary process of sexual intercourse and thus without at human father is that, through the totally effective free assent of woman, is assured the absolute freedom of humankind in humankind's own redemption.                 (Fighting, 172).

            Christina Rossetti clearly benefited from this emphasis on the feminine in the reverence for Mary and for Marian figures such as Dante's Beatrice. She was herself a Dante scholar. In 1883 she described her ear as one "rendered fastidious by Dante's own harmony of words" and in 1892 she stated that "perhaps it is enough to be half an Italian, but certainly it is enough to be a Rossetti to render Dante a fascinating centre of thought" (Family Letters, 49). Inspired by Dante, she chose to become a living exemplar, an icon, the model for the Virgin in the paintings of her brother, Dante Rossetti.  As a result she, like the original Beatrice, had become, as Rosenblum put it, "haloed" and "etherialized" ("Inward," 84).  She willingly "assumed the traditional role of exemplar, becoming one of the first avatars of [Dante Rossetti's] pensive ideal beloved" in the tradition of Petrarch's Laura and she deliberately "constructed a poetic myth of the enduring model woman, not only a visual icon, but also a display of stereotypical qualities: Christian -- and female --forbearance, humility, renunciation, and stoic endurance" (Rosenblum "Religious," 37-38). Christina played the role of Beatrice in the imaginations of Hopkins, Swinburne, and other poets (G 44-5).  Part of this effect was due to her striking appearance and personal presence which deeply affected even determined pagans such as Swinburne. As such a figure, she recombined the medievalisms of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Oxford Movement.

Unlike the goblin brotherhood, Christina Rossetti usually conveyed the limits and dangers of a love of nature as well as its attractions.

the "golden" sands and streets of        (ll. 3-4; I, 46).

:

                        I never watch the scattered fire

                          Of stars, or sun's far-trailing train,

                        But all my heart is one desire,

                          And all in vain.     (lines 9-12)

Rossetti often regarded this world as a place of "darkness and corruption" ("Remember," line 11), and considered love of nature, or at least "amor mundi," as a time-wasting distraction, as she does in "The Convent Threshold":

                        . . . . . . . . . . tarry not.

                        Is this a time for smile and sigh,

                        For songs among the secret trees

                        Where sudden blue birds nest and sport?

                                      (lines 42-45)

Such lines recall Savonarola's "O ye Christians for what tarry you here?"

Formula to be applied to subsequent chapters:

Old paradigm of creativity –masculinist, isolated, suffering individualism; obsession with originality and direct, unmediated inspiration; vs. new paradigm of collaborative creativity; Network, internet, intranet terms;

Revolution or evolution? writing also a technologically displaced form of conversation, creativity of intranets of print literacy evident especially in draft manuscripts and formal and informal communication networks discovered in correspondence and in linkages among citations

In print literacy especially important are allusions. We will make a special study of two kinds: metalepsis, an overcoming of "temporality by a substitution of earliness for lateness" that and parody among contemporaries, 19^th c English, but not limited to. metalepses especially as manifestations of the avante-garde stance of radicalism, competition in going back to "roots," invoking that basic desire to return to the origin dominant in so many religious and ancient cultures

Community structure, group dynamics of intranets:   "How does one elect and how is one elected to membership in a particular community, scientific or not?  What is the process of and what are the stages of socialization into the group?  What does the group collectively see as its goals; what deviations, individual or collective, will it tolerate; and how does it control the impermissible aberration?" (209-210). [fst?]

capitalism and patriarchy in old paradigm to be replaced by more social form of economics and by more feminist orientation? [my critique: competition essential] Hierarchy to give way to peers?

 movement from print literacy, printed book to online literacy, digital, multimedia art, fusion of the arts;

The emotional register of creativity also is shifting from melancholy to joy

expansion of concept of reason from abstraction and traditional logic by a return to narrative; exclusive reliance on words and mathematical symbols by behavioral and experiential thinking; pure theory by concrete art; analytical thought by creative imagination; the impersonal by the personal; the alphabetic by the imagistic; the serious by the playful; the passive by the interactive; the left side of the brain by the right, i.e. a revolt against simplistic, mutually exclusive dualisms which we may call recombination of opposites

invention heuristics vs. creativity reduced to single moment of inspiration

Depression and Morbidity. Ironically, even her "isolationist" depression connected her to others as well as separated her from them. As late as  1895 an anonymous American reviewer noted the similarities between her poem, "When I am dead, my dearest," and Swinburne's "Rococo" in order to emphasize "the spiritual relationship of the author to the poets of the group sometimes styled `Pre-Raphaelite'" ("Christina Georgina Rossetti," The Dial 38; Harrison, Christina 25).

            Depression is obviously one of her keynotes. An anonymous reviewer of her 1866 volume for The Catholic World stated that "the amount of melancholy is simply overwhelming" (839). She creatively recombined five different varieties of depression: medieval morbidity and acedia, puritan depression, Keatsian melancholy, and the Victorian ennui of sexism and the divided self.

            To what extent was this depression medical and to what extent was it a mood she felt she had to cultivate in order to be a poet? As a teenager she herself represented the depression of her poetic persona in Maude as somewhat contrived: "touching these same verses, it was the amazement of everyone what could make her poetry so broken-hearted as was mostly the case. Some pronounced that she wrote very foolishly about things she could not possibly understand; some wondered if she really had any secret source of uneasiness; while some simply set her down as affected. Perhaps there was a degree of truth in all these opinions" (7-8). Later, Maude supports the narrator's skepticism about the myth of the poet's hypersensitivity: "it was quite affecting to think of her lying awake at night meditating those sweet verses -- (`I sleep like a top', Maude put in, dryly)" (47). Significantly, Maude equates poetry with urban artificiality, acting, and display: "`How I envy you', she continued in a low voice, as if speaking rather to herself than to her hearers: `you who live in the country, and are exactly what you appear .... I am sick of display, and poetry, and acting" (29).

            When Maude's sadness seems more authentic, it is due not to the usual varieties of poetic melancholy but to a puritanical scrupulosity so extreme Maude felt she was not worthy to take Communion even on Christmas Day (50-52; cf. ix-x,54-5). This kind of religious depression, also a choice rather than a medical condition, became one of Rossetti's leitmotifs. A contemporary noticed in 1866 that "there is in some of her best pictures the air of the cathedral rather than that of the world without. Her saints and heroes have not the stir and dust of life about them; but they smile to us in a repose almost mournful, like effigies from a stained window or the sculptured forms of knight and dame in the coloured light of the aisle" (Dennet 47-8; Harrison, Christina 25). This spiritual melancholia distinguished her from the PRB:

Her brother and Morris and Swinburne were moderns seeking inspiration in the medieval; she seems, rather, a medieval wraith shrinking in shy dismay before the harsh babel of modernity. In the Age of Steam she remained like some anchoress of the Age of Faith -- one who might have sat to Giotto, or knelt before St. Francis at Assissi. She was medieval also in her horrified obsession with the grave, a touch of that medieval morbidity which delighted in Dances of Death.                                                                                 (Lucas 117)

When carried this far, virtue can indeed seem a vice: "if one of the Seven Deadly sins found harbourage in the soul of this mid-Victorian Virgin Saint it was Accidia. This word is usually mistranslated `Sloth', but the thing is, as Professor Saintsbury has said, `a form or at least a corruption of Melancholy'" (Stuart 1931, 5).

            Choosing this form of melancholy was as much a poetic as a moral decision. Evaluating the results of the Romantic experiment over the distance of time, the more religious Victorians became particularly conscious of what they thought were the solipsistic and nihilistic consequences of the apparently amoral, self-indulgent egoism of Romantic models of creativity. In her version of Pre-Raphaelitism in "Three Stages" Rossetti demonstrated with unusual clarity and simplicity how her Victorian contemporaries could free themselves from the dominating influence of their immediate precursors: they could extrapolate Romantic medievalism to the point where the ascetic Christianity of the Middle Age became an antithesis to Romantic egoism. Hence Christina decided, supported by the example of her contemporary, Tennyson, in "The Palace of Art," to destroy (in order to rebuild them in heaven) the "pleasure-dome" Coleridge erected in "Kubla Khan" and the bowers Keats so carefully constructed in "Lamia," "Ode to Psyche," and so many other poems.

            Of course Rossetti had initially built these domes and bowers in her own soul. In other words, she had internalized her primary precursors, as all poets do, and to deny aspects of their creativity was to deny herself. Nevertheless, like so many other moral Victorians, she felt she had to make the difficult sacrifice of self that her Romantic precursors had not made: she had to give up her cherished secret dream of becoming a Romantic poet in order to set an example, in order to "correct" the dangerous excesses of Romantic egoism. The depression which accompanied that ascetic sacrifice of self is obvious in her "Dead before Death" and was often a product of her attempt to sacrifice her old self in the service of that particular brand of puritanism displayed in The Germ and epitomized by the Victorian fascination with Savonarola. Thus her mode of melancholy was at least as genuine a development from their first principles as the P.R.B.'s more literary depression. The imagery of impotence in her poetry is not merely a concomitant of her feminine or Romantic depression, but also a result of that puritan emphasis on waiting for grace and the paralysis of will that can occur when one chooses to live by irreconcilable antitheses such as right vs. wrong, holiness vs. sinfulness, God vs. the Devil, the next world vs. this world, heaven vs. earth.

            When confronted with such antitheses her choice was clear. "The writing of poetry was not by any means the chief business of her life. [It was more important to] live beautifully according to the sanctions of one's own creed" (Watts-Dunton II,38). Yet St. Paul emphasized that the imitatio Christi paradoxically required extraordinary creativity, nothing less than a radical revision of the self: "you have stripped all your old behavior with your old self, and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator" (Col 3:10). At times this idea of imitation was clearly supplanted by a more revolutionary concept of creativity: "your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God's way" (Eph 4:24). In this context the "new self" seems to be in conflict with that artistic self which, according to Rank, Bloom and others, a writer must create to produce her art. It was apparently displacement of the artistic self by the religious self that resulted in a period of about seven years in which prose almost entirely replaced Rossetti's poetry: from 1872, when Sing-Song appeared, to 1881, when A Pageant and Other Poems was published. During this time she produced four major prose works: Speaking Likenesses, Annus Domini, Seek and Find, and Called to be Saints. Hopkins endured a similar seven-year period in which poetry was sacrificed to prose.

            Rossetti's depression was apparently exacerbated also by the problem of achieving originality in a poetry devoted to imitation, not only of the life of Jesus, but of the most widely imitated book in the western world: the Bible. That melancholic sense of impotence and entropy which Bate and Bloom have associated with Romanticism can thus be especially strong in modern Christian poets. While they may achieve some originality by being Christian poets in a secular age, and they may be better able to fight this depression by identifying it as the sin of acedia, a puritan version of Christianity may also make them particularly susceptible to certain kinds of literary melancholy. For instance, the traditional Hebraic emphasis on the mutability of this world and the need to retreat into the self (so evident in Christina Rossetti's "Three Stages") can result in an isolation and depression similar to that expressed in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and other Romantic poems.

            She expressed her religious depression in words usually associated with literary melancholy, conveying a consciousness of the triumph of time almost as dominating as Swinburne's. Lines such as "Alas for joy that went before, / For joy that dies, for love that dies" ("The Convent Threshold" 63-64) recall Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" in which depression "dwells with Beauty -- Beauty that must die; / And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu." Her contemporaries detected this Keatsian strain in her melancholy: "her habitual tone is one of melancholy reverie, the pathos of which is strangely intensified by her appreciation of beauty and pleasure" (Gosse "Christina" 215); "the note of loss and the peculiar sad cadence of the music, even though the song be of happy things, is [a] distinctive characteristic of Miss Rossetti's singing. It wells through all, like the sadness of the spring. Her songs of love are nearly always of love's loss; of its joy she sings with a passionate throat, but it is joy seen through the mirror of a wild regret" (La Gallienne 132).

            In other words, unable to remove all aspects of Keats's influence, she redirected it. The PRB was known as the school of Keats but Christina Rossetti "and not Gabriel or Holman Hunt was the first `Pre-Raphaelite' to appreciate Keats" (Packer 14). The poem she discovered in an abridged version in William Hone's Every-day Book (1830) was "The Eve of St. Agnes," Keats's most famous medievalist poem. While she may have not found this poem as "unacceptable" as Orchard's "Christian" did, she did feel the need to revise it to emphasize religious as well as literary melancholy.

            Her response -- "while the chilly shadows flit / of sweet St. Agnes Eve" -- in "On Keats" (composed on St. Agnes' Eve, 1849), reveals her attraction to the medieval frame of Keats's poem: the cold, the shadows, and the "patient, holy" Beadsman, the representative of the religious rather than the more purely Romantic strain of medievalism.  Yet his melancholy tears testify to attraction to the worldly music nearby. Like the ascetic medieval Beadsman, Christina Rossetti was deeply attached to the music of this world but felt she must give it up: the joys of her life were to be simply her prayers, poetry, and family. She was willing to sacrifice almost everything to achieve purity. Like Orchard's "Christian," she wanted to be like her namesake, Christ, or at least like Madeline before the fall:

                                                                        like a saint:

                        She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,

                        Save wings, for heaven: -- Porphyro grew faint:

                        She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.                                                  (lines 222-225)

            The influence of "The Eve of St. Agnes" on other poems of Christina Rossetti's, such as "Repining" and "For One Sake," is clear, along with some of the affinities between Tennyson's "St. Agnes' Eve" and her more spiritual versions of Keats's paradigm (Fass).  However, the love melancholy of "The Convent Threshold" is a more important revision of "The Eve of St. Agnes" than most of Christina's poems: it, too, is about two lovers separated by some kind of blood feud and by differences in temperament (his eyes "look earthward" while hers "look up"), and it too emphasizes the woman's dreams of her lover and the man's need to "flee" for his "life" for "the time is short" (lines 38-39). Few readers still regard this as her finest poem, preferring to use it as a source of speculation about some actual love affair, but to her contemporaries it was a "masterpiece of ascetic passion" (Anonymous, The Catholic World 4,no.24 [1867], 841).

            "The Convent Threshold" is distinguished from "The Eve of St. Agnes" much as "Repining" is: both poems begin where Keats's poem ends. Rossetti's heroine is a post-seduction Madeline who has decided to repent and atone for her "guilt" and "stain" (lines 9, 12) and regain her purity in truly medieval fashion by crossing the convent threshold. Rossetti stresses that the storm Keats's lovers flee into  is that of the winds of time that destroy all earthly vanities (lines 63-64). The shadow of death is a more immediate threat to the lovers in her version: the heroine dreams that she is dead (as in her brother’s "The Blessed Damozel") and focuses on a soul flashing up to heaven (lines 85-110), a passage reminiscent of Tennyson's "St. Agnes Eve." The heroine's "How long until my sleep begin" (line 56) takes Madeline's desire to sleep and dream and extrapolates it into a death wish like that in "Repining." In "The Convent Threshold" the heroine's death bell has clearly rung and she needs to kneel, pray, and accept harsh penance like Keats's Beadsman. By thus emphasizing the spiritual medievalism of the Beadsman more than the amorous medievalism of Porphyro, Rossetti's revisions of Keats gave a new direction to the Romantic melancholy of the PRB.