“My World My Work My Woman All My Own” Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Visual and Textual Narratives

By Yildiz Kilic

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite extraordinaire, is unique as Victorian proto-expressionistic painter-poet, who relentlessly sought representation of a tormented personified-self through the communicative relationship between image and word. In this interdisciplinary study is considered the narrative interaction that unifies ideas and forms into a self-expressive dialectical that informs of autonomous individualism and gender politics as a social problematic. Rossetti, known universally as a charismatic and vibrantly passionate man, is tangibly revealed in the most tenderly transparent narratives to be a haunted and socially subjugated man who searched for self-definition as a man and as an artist. By an intricate analysis of key textual and visual narratives Yildiz Kilic provides an insightful and wholly original interpretation of Rossetti as Victorian victim and innovator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496988232

Yildiz Kilic

Yildiz Kilic is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Istanbul University where she lectures in postgraduate Cultural Studies and the Interdisciplinary study of Literature and the Visual Arts.

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Published by AuthorHouse 08/08/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8822-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8823-2 (e)

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1   THE MANIFESTO

MY SISTER’S SLEEP (1848-1870)

THE BOTTLES (1848)

HAND AND SOUL (1849)

CHAPTER 2   THE SACRED

THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY VIRGIN (1848-49)

MARY’S GIRLHOOD: SONNET I (1848)

ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI! (1849-50)

MARY’S GIRLHOOD: SONNET II (1849)

CHAPTER 3   THE ROMANTIC

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL (1847, 1850, 1870, 1881)

THE CARD-DEALER (1848, 1852)

ELIZABETH SIDDAL (1829-1862)

BOCCA BACIATA (1859)

THE SONG OF THE BOWER (1860)

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL (1873-78)

CHAPTER 4   THE PROFANE

JENNY (1870)

FOUND (1854)

‘FOUND’ (1881) (FOR A PICTURE)

FAZIO’S MISTRESS (AURELIA) (1863, 1873)

BODY’S BEAUTY (1866) & LADY LILITH (1868)

SOUL’S BEAUTY (1866) & SIBYLLA PALMIFERA (1866-70)

CHAPTER 5   THE PARAGON

NUPTIAL SLEEP (1869)

THE STEALTH SCHOOL OF CRITICISM (1871)

JANE MORRIS

THE PORTRAIT (1869, 1870)

THE DAY-DREAM (MONNA PRIMAVERA) (1880)

THE DAY-DREAM (FOR A PICTURE)(1880)

ASTARTE SYRIACA (1877) (FOR A PICTURE)

ASTARTE SYRIACA (VENUS ASTARTE) (1877)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

This book is dedicated to the memory of my Father

RAFET TUNCER

My world my work my woman

all my own

What face but thine has taught

me all that art

Can be & still be Nature’s counterpart

What form but thine within one

bosom’s zone

Unto my –––— eyes has shown

The Zodiac of all beauty?

Small Notebook II, (British Library) 1871-1879

PREFACE

This book is an academic study, not least by the scope of nineteenth-century literature and art history to which allusion is made. However, my intention in its presentation has been to make it available to a general readership; I have therefore aimed to make the diction conversational, made available poetical texts, and tried not to be too presumptuous in regard to background knowledge. I have also provided details of websites where images of Rossetti’s paintings may be viewed to greatest visual advantage. During the analysis of visual narratives I refer to specifics, intricacies such as textures, artefacts, and countenance; such details when sought in photographic images −which, in a study predominantly literary, would necessarily be minimal− tend to prove more infuriatingly elusive than enlightening. The internet provides images of the highest resolution that allows for enlargement and thereby enables an approach to the ‘reading’ of visuals as narratives that reciprocates the methodology and intensity of the textual analysis.

Y.K.

INTRODUCTION

Who shall say what is

               said in me,

With all that I might

      Have been dead in

   me?

Small Notebook III, (British Library) 1871-1879

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) marks a rare episode in English art and literature, not least of all as that profoundly elusive hybrid, the painter-poet. A literary and artistic multi-linguist, Rossetti presented to Victorian monistic phallocentrism a pluralistic narrative consolidation; surprisingly invocative of today’s interactive multi-media, he combined the mediums of word and image, in a ceaseless search for representation of his personified emotions; unifying ideas and forms into a readerly ‘discursive’ synthesis.

In other respects Rossetti was a most ‘victorian’ Victorian: a subjugated and indoctrinated individual, who found redeeming expression in the other, so that self corresponded to the dualism inherent to his creative method: indeed a tangible polarity permeates both his art and life. The Rossettian other, the manifestation of his soul that subsequently materialized in his textual and visual narratives is ever the female entity. In a letter to a friend he refers to the manifestation of the self in the mediums of painting and poetry as "putting into action a complete dramatis personae of the soul":¹ his objectification of himself as a dramatic/fictional character is matched by his objectification of woman as physical sanctified emblem of said dramatis personae. Illustrating Irigray’s idea that social objectivism of the female become inversed and that by submitting women’s bodies to a general equivalent to a transcendent, supernatural value, men have drawn the social structure into an even greater process of abstraction, to the point were they themselves are produced in it as pure concept.² The female extension is means to his expression as an artist and liberation as a man: the exigency and strain of such a personification, and the fact that he must resort to it is indication of the degrees to which he is victim of Victorian gender stipulation. The complexity of his situation arises from his being both agent and victim, indeed victim twice; as man with empathy for the feminine; as extra-patriarchal artist; although his defence of female autonym is largely indebted to an eager definition of self-identity and self-autonomy.

Such then was Rossetti, begins Benson, as he launched into a richly conflicting array of characteristics: mystical, full of passion, haunted by the sense of beauty, with an intense need of loving and being loved; dominant, fiery, genial, robust; with a narrow outlook, and yet with a keen intellectual power; capable, generous, lavish, humorous; a natural leader of men, self-centred, unbalanced; with no touch of tranquillity about him, but eager, ardent, impatient."³ Though it does not read like a eulogy, this aspect-dappled portrait of the artist is a thing of love. Rossetti is not an easy man to pin down; not by stratagem but by personal insecurity his creative life is one promulgated by a search for self-definition; he is therefore an individual largely culminating of the instinctive and the conditioned; as are we all, one may reasonably interject, but in Rossetti these two aspects –that which he is and that which external conditioning demand he must be – are mutually exclusive and stand divided; refusing to jell by an act of mitigation into customary hypocritical reconciliation that besets the rest of us; painfully separate, neither one compromised by the other, ever conflicting, ever unstable. While the artistic outcome of this troubled state is conducive to images remarkably unique, in terms of being the life experience of an imaginative, sensual man of the period, they are by no means uncommon. One cannot but agree with Christopher Wood that Rossetti, more than any of them [the Brotherhood] enjoyed the seamier side of Bohemian life in London, that he was not religious nor did he suffer from the moral inhibitions that so plagued most of his contemporaries.⁴ Yet even a cursory perusal of his poetry and paintings reveal an agitated psyche. Equally he was untypical for being far too complex, far too imaginative, far too intelligent and far too full of contradictions, ever to be forced into the constricting strait-jacket of the role of a conventional Victorian youth ⁵ − and there’s the rub.

What makes Rossetti so endearing is his transparency, a quality one perceives with an accumulative reading of his visual and textual narratives in unison. He is complex but not unfathomable. His mistakes, for which he never is able to forgive himself, are the visible marks of his humanity: his guilt perhaps his most redeeming and understandable feature.

The ‘love poet and love painter’ focused upon the female form and strove to demolish the slavishly prescribed Victorian identity of woman. In so doing he conceptualised an ideology of life through this singular image; not only decrying the reduced and pacified situation of the nineteenth-century female, but demythologising also the psyche of the Victorian male. In The Blessed Damozel, for example, Rossetti first conceptualised and placed upon the archetypal ‘pedestal’ a woman of irreproachable credentials: devout, pure and for Victorian tastes, passive and mild to the extent of being dead! The pedestal is heaven: no higher accolade is possible and no greater detachment from active life achievable: this is his biting satire. The female being imprisoned within social sanctification is foremost symbol of his own entrapment and from there on extends into a metaphor of the entangled individual, irrespective of gender: an image so eloquently caught in Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott, where the lady struggling bravely to disentangle herself from the almost invisible gossamer threads of social ensnarement is further enmeshed at every turn. Rossetti’s was a troubled psyche working through dimly perceived distress… constantly processing a world", through joint venture of the visual and the textual, not only reflecting, but also formulating and "help[ing] shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot mess of an era we know it as today.⁶ As Steiner suggests, Little wonder that we long to grasp their meaning. Our identity is at stake in their struggle"⁷, as is the identity of the poet/artist.

Rossetti’s positive re-enforement of the feminine icon was deeply and inextricably linked to his complex relationship to hegemonic Victorian Masculinity:⁸ a latent disassociation and distrust of a demonstrably ineffectual and impotent patriarchal authority, as he perceived his father as being; alongside a conversely capable, strong and inspiring example of feminine leadership, as depicted by his mother; while alienating him from the former, aligns him to appreciation, with life-long adoration, of the latter. The alienation from the father and subsequent issues of manhood and alienated social identity, are dilemmas never resolved; while the realisation that initial indoctrination is paradoxically administered in vulnerable childhood through the mother is a secondary complication that distorts his allegiance to the feminine with a half acknowledged sense of resentment. That Rossetti has a ‘love love’ relationship with his women that is also unassailably superficial without acknowledgement of their intrinsic identity, and an intense fixation that is as singularly egocentric and entirely self-centred: within the love there is in equal measure neediness and disregard. If in the beloved association with the mother is a tangible unmindfulness; so in the disdainful rejection of the father is a carefully devised association. Rossetti’s efforts to promote the feminine entity through what could be deemed a strenuously feminist argument, creates a subterfuge readily evident and voraciously political: given that in essence his treatment of the women in his life is closely akin to the patriarchal norm, how then do we explain this civic idealism? By deferring that it is civic in intention and referring to it instead as a bias towards the defence of ‘the subjugated individual’. O it can pausibly be explained as a reference to the political tendencies of his father, Gabriele. He was a political refugee from Italy⁹ who gathered around him his fellow dispossessed, compatriots one and all, whom an amazed Hunt describes as all escaped revolutionaries passionate orators on political injustice and the abhorrent rule of the tyrant. It seems not unreasonable to assume that this was the one true passion and incentive Rossetti witnessed in his father and therein registered on some subconscious level at least that negligible aspect of his masculine heritage.

Amidst this confusion of values the resulting body of work is an explicit, but at times conversely implicit, culmination of his sensual compulsions, inhibitions and angst as man, artist and Victorian. From an academic point of view, the resultant effect is firstly to clarify the tenant of his poetry through the visual medium, lending to the spiritual and intellectual deliberations over Art as Beauty and Love recognition and impact through the recognizable physicality of the visual; secondly, the unification of textual and visual often betrays sentiments in the poetry by presenting a contrary but analogous visual image that correlates with the text but includes an unwarranted subversive twist. When studied alongside his poetry, the paintings reveal, with an almost unconscious and unintended sense of confession, anxiety ridden, tormented, and often defensive attitudes. The poetry, when stimulated by pictures re-creates the interplay of sensory perception with imagination that potentially heighten any kind of experience not just that mediated through art.¹⁰ A fine balance exists between textual and visual narrative: where the poem or sonnet is guarded, restrained for whatever reason, the painting is often intemperately expressive; where the poem is courageously outspoken, there is felt to be no need for a painting, as in Jenny, for example, or the corresponding painting is conversely subdued and consolatory.

Rossetti’s double-works especially, disclose a strategic covertness that defies all but the most careful scrutiny; their unified meaning, defensively surreptitious and acutely mindful of the possible resultant critical reaction, is greater than its parts. The cipher of word and figurative image are used as much to buffer public outrage, as to provide private admonition. Yet for all its intricately evasive convoluted imagery, the emergent idea is explicit in the dimensions of its definition and flagrant in the candor of its beliefs, often a pained testimony to the inner dilemma of the poet and the age. In these most synergic, sumptuous and least didactic perhaps of all Pre-Raphaelite works are revealed the inhibitions of a patriarchal age through one uneasy patriarch. The various images of women constitute a complex pictorial documentation of Rossetti’s emotional and consequently, artistic endeavor to come to terms with his masculine/sexual identity: as such they mark a constant reaffirmation or subversion of stereotypic images of women.

Fidelity to his inner experience is a constant in Rossetti: a proto-expressionism washes over his work, re-adjusting symbolism and traditional Christian ciphers into maladjusted and distorted contradictions of what they purported to represent; eventually culminating in the anxiety ridden ‘expressionistic’ images of the late works in particular. The often decried problematic between form and content is due to an appraisal of his narratives without due consideration of his critical practices, so that his subversive use of religious emblems appear superficial and misappropriated for do not having been recognised as a negative ‘Organicist’ tool of deconstructing the designedly subjugating myth rather than using it to bind and control by means of the myth subsequently procured. When he is castigated by the same critics for mercenary and pragmatic reference to devotional symbolism, they correctly judge that he is not a devout Christian, yet incorrectly deem him devoid of spirituality; of the institutional church perhaps, for his mandatory sacred devotion is to the worship of Art.

He believed that from physical beauty was derived the sensation of Love, the palpable and ‘undeniable reality’ in a world otherwise comprising of Platonic shadows. Evelyn Waugh’s explanation that Rossetti’s impulse to pictorial expression did not come from the contemplation of objects, but from emotions, fortifies the idea that the object- in this case the female models, were not innate energy source of the painting. Rather it was an emotional state in the artist’s mind that was automatically translated into visible forms¹¹: his feminised soul. When the artist’s moral restraint falls at odds with his spiritual inclinations, the result becomes an image not of unified nature, as Ruskin implied, but of individual dissatisfaction and as with Chiaro, one can sense a similar catalyst of dissatisfaction urging Rossetti.

The consequential effect of two conflicting influences −an instinctive flamboyance and passion, curbed by a deeply obsessive fear of criticism and the presence of a psychological tension described as resembling the demon haunted victims of the diabolic tales he loved so much. Rossetti’s frustration produced emotional ambivalence and he enjoyed contradictory moods,¹² growing more pronounced with the years. From the exultation of the mystical and idealistic element of romance, a period that was to end in gross disillusionment through illness and the untimely death of his wife; to the tainted, animal sexuality of his sensual period; finally the consolidation of a long sought dialectic that united the spiritual and sensual within the image of the divinely powerful but equally intimidating and fearful ideal of the ‘Goddess’. In the ‘whole’ woman, Rossetti aims to unify his own fragmented identity.

Female subjugation within the nineteenth century is a subject much lamented upon, while the fact of autocratic phallocentrism needs little if any qualification as the controlling principle; however, it is also an inevitable fact that given a totalitarian regimes, no social component completely escapes the machinations of the restrictive doctrine. The Victorian middle class male was a curtailed and limited individual; not in the pursuit of active life, perhaps, but within the private and intimate sphere; in the realm of his feelings the Victorian English gentleman was as damaged as his female counterpart: what George Meredith’s protagonist in Modern Love demands, after all, is to freely love and be loved. The female, curtailed by being invested with child-like dependence, sexual ambivalence and unquestioning devotion may have appeared an ideally subservient construct; however within the mundane reality of marriage, this self same picture of passivity was a heavy and burdensome load - as many a Dickensian novel will vouch. The Victorian wife versed in the belief that a lady did not derive pleasure from sex, indeed was a non-sexual entity, insentienly acquiescent to her husband’s pleasure– became the rod habitually on the male back. One can imagine that nuptial sex was often a sad, apathetic pursuit. While the sexually and romantically curtailed woman was left to her frustrations, the man had the option to pursue illicit sexuality outside of the marriage, through prostitution or the obligatory mistress. Yet, this fracture in ipseity, an inconsolable rupture between the spiritual and the sensual, the sacred and the profane was a dualism latent to the patriarchy, which consequently transpired as hypocritical Victorian mindset. Even Rossetti’s Marian narratives rather than reflect a strict affirmation of Victorian gender ideology are wilfully ambiguous in their commitment to public ideology.

The Victorians feared the effeminate male as a corruption of the public body; Rossetti as smith of word and image, a practitioner of the sensual, rather than the ‘manly’ rational, fell contrary to rigid codes of civic masculinity and by evincing a propinquity of femininity fell prey to the gynephobic¹³ mandate. The attendant anxieties of the Victorian mindset regarding masculinity as a representation of social stability and civic identity, stood between Rossetti and the liberation of the individual he sought through art; not a physical liberty but a higher spiritual awareness akin to Walter Pater’s definition of aesthetic individualism: a late-Romantic concept of self itself torn between the polarity of Promethean individualism¹⁴ and the modernist conception of the individual. Pater, like Rossetti, stood at a watershed: as one who must attempt to understand the nature of the cultural and intellectual transition taking place in the late-nineteenth century and define its implications for art, are conception of self, and subjectivity.¹⁵

Within the figure of the woman dwells Rossetti’s inner world – his ego, his fears and his aspirations. This fidelity to inner experience is a constant in Rossetti’s art; his work is marked by a pre-dominant proto-expressionism that culminates finally in the anxiety ridden images of the late works. The problem with Rossetti is that again and again he challenges social imperatives and deciphers them for the arbitrary statement they are, but is never willing to emerge from the myth completely, as if fearful that in unravelling it he will disastrously unravel himself.

Chapter 1

THE MANIFESTO

A feminized egocentric projection infiltrates Rossetti’s literary, as well as pictorial art. To the the love poet and love painter¹ the women whom he painted were his inamoratas - conversely material expression of his own idealism and vulnerability: images capable of awakening in him self-recognition, so that in painting them he metamorphosed onto canvas his own thoughts, needs and dejection.

In 1845 Dante Gabriel Rossetti entered the Antique School of the Royal Academy to pursue further the career in art that he had begun at the Sass prep-school. But as with the former institution, the traditionalist mentality of the Royal Academy proved restrictive and he dropped out in 1848. His chosen route was to work under the tutelage of Ford Madox Brown as his apprentice. Attending the Royal Academy Exhibition in the same year he chanced to see Eve of St Agnes (1847-57) by Holman Hunt; with whom he subsequently became friends and under whose supervision was eventually to paint The Girlhood of the Virgin (1848). As his easy escape from the Academy to a freelance search for education suggests, the twenty-year-old Rossetti was of pronounced confidence:

… gifted, handsome, intellectual, the adored pet and pride of his mother and two sisters, and also the hero of the little art group to which he belonged. I am not sure but that the lavish love his friends had for him made him a bit smug and self-satisfied, for we hear of Ruskin saying, Thank God he is young, which remark means all that you can read into it.²

The intimation of a precociously confident, rather overindulged and therefore egocentric youth, when the reality of the juvenile is visually obscured by the seeming man, brings to mind an individual who lacks many of the necessary experiences, aptitude and resources of adulthood. He may have been one of the high-flying Romantics of the mid-Victorian era, nevertheless the fact remains that in the 1840’s he was also an inexperienced and idealistic young man, burdened with the many limitations of Victorian society. Naturally sensuous by temperament, this sensuality was tempered by the restrictions of his faith and loyalty to the feelings of his Evangelical mother,³ who had a significant impact on Rossetti’s formative years, not least by her insistence that he know and understand the Bible and the catechism: Trained from the first in the Protestant faith, though inheriting on both sides the mental bias of Roman tradition, the children entered early into the age-long conflict between the tender mysticism and spiritual glamour of catholic piety and the robuster spirit of intellectual truth.⁴ As Frances, his mother was to maintain sway over him throughout his entire life, so Rossetti on his part was duly devoted to her. Brian and Jane Dobbs, while holding with the idea that he was spoiled as a child and flattered as a youth, also read into Rossetti’s nature a self-confidence surprisingly frail beneath his carapace of extrovert public display.⁵ Their reasoning being that his sense of vulnerability craved assurance through approval, this he received from the maternal: referring to one of the many popular books on behavioural etiquette, they arrive at the conclusion that through the primal relationship Rossetti responded to being lead to a spiritual idealism, a feeling of identity with a higher state of existence beyond this present life.⁶

Conversely, there is little evidence that Rossetti was influenced much by his father, since even in the visual medium, through which he begins to express himself as early as the age of five, he produced a total of four representations but never used him in any other thematic painting. Significantly three are busts while the 1882 sketch, significantly the last visual executed immediate to his death, is of the father in full-figure, a signification that becomes clearly in the final phase of his art. Brian and Jane Dobbs’s contend that he began to drift apart from his father, the Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, when he turned sixteen⁷; oddly the period also coincides with the fruition of his interest in Dante, a subject of which, though his father was a renowned authority, he had not read twenty consecutive lines … in English or Italian…⁸ Sadly that which Rossetti seems to have derived from his father was ontological despondency that would surface as contentious self-issue towards the latter part of his life: when his mental condition deteriorated, as it would, a proclivity for melancholia would overwhelm him to an all encompassing depression and paranoia, hauntingly reminiscent of Papa Rossetti. Gabriele Rossetti as he grew older was grieved with illness; coinciding with disappointment in his work it generated a heightened self-defeat which then transpired as hypochondria. In 1828 following the publication of his book entitled Dante, Gabriele was subject to Panizzi’s harsh criticism, that fanned the author’s animosity, already roused by the loss of his professorship of Italian⁹ and making him the subject of ridicule; fixed in the mind of father, and later the son, was a self-destructive tendency to beget conspiracy theories.¹⁰ When his health had deteriorated, in 1843, to virtual blindness, making it impossible for him to teach, his family were forced to rally to action, their finances tenuous at the best of times, were in dire circumstances. The result was that Frances Rossetti returned to her former employment as a daily governess; Maria [worked] as a nursery governess and William in the civil service. The urgent need for a middle-aged middle-class, lady to go out to work must surely have been a source of excruciating mortification for the fifteen-year-old Rossetti; a ubiquitously ‘troubled teenager’ on the brink of manhood, aware of the social prerogative that staunchly delineated the identity of a man, Rossetti had, in his father, a needy patriarch,¹¹ who fell desperately short of the template of the ‘manly’, strenuously stipulated as athletic, authoritative and able. However unsettling these events Rossetti was to the most buffered; he continued to attend to his art studies and Christina remained at home to care for their father. In 1845 she, too, suffered a breakdown. Jan Marsh in a powerful argument, conjectures that its cause may have been an attempt at paternal incest: Christina’s teenage breakdown, personality change inexplicable rages and recurrent depression… her pervasive sense of sin and black double within, the self-loathing that led her to slash her arm with scissors, and the repetitive compulsion to penitence; not least of all the recurrent poetic images of the crocodile who swells and devours his kin, the monster with the clammy fin that advances an retreats, the kingly goat and dog with abominable sensual features,¹² that prompt Marsh to add that [i]n psychotherapeutic circumstances, such recurrent images are often indications of suppressed sexual trauma, indirectly disclosed.¹³ One cannot but wonder in the light of such conjecture whether Rossetti was privy to anything untoward or was he merely troubled by the want of a viable male-role model. That in the face of his father’s ‘impotence’ against life, and his mother’s converse adroitness to cope and surmount seemingly impossible challenges, he was perplexed by the reality of his experience contradicting his received social conditioning; and so at that same period he deviated away from his father, unable to consolidate the presented ideal with the all too human reality –something he would do again to his own psychological ruin. Over twenty-five years later when Rossetti, guilt-ridden and addicted to drugs and alcohol by an intractable revulsion for his invalided wife, Elizabeth Siddal; was encumbered with the added guilt of exhuming her grave, thereby forsaking her for the second time, which conspicuously generated in him a psychosomatic partial blindness. Of the sonnet entitled He and I (1870), representing an oddly enigmatic and distressing physical encounter between the male poetic voice and his masculine other¹⁴, David G. Riede observes, just as emphatic in its representation of some sort of self-division and self-alienation.¹⁵ The point being, that Rossetti’s perceived lack of a positive male role-model, as defined through the patriarchal gauge of ‘manliness’, coupled with an anomalous experience of the comparatively authoritarian woman, appears not only to have placed him inconsolably at odds with patriarchal authority; but given rise to a self-identity that that achieves expression and worth only by veering towards the feminine

There is no evidence to suggest that Frances Rossetti, the artist’s mother, was in any way knowingly harsh or oppressive towards her children, one suspects she may have been demanding in her expectations. As Philip Bourke Marston, a poet friend of Rossetti, who disliked her detachment and lack of sympathy, grudgingly acknowledges: She never seemed to me to be a lovable old lady, but I suppose she was, since she won the hearts of her children.¹⁶ Whether adoration or an inbred sense of filial duty, the fact remains that she was one, if not the singular most important influence in Rossetti’s life –often depicted by him in the role of archetypal mother; prompting a friend of Rossetti to write: "Gabriel, even to the end of his life accepted her dicta as oracles not to be challenged.¹⁷

This phase of Rossetti’s art displays the determined tenacity of the developing artist; fearless as it is involuntarily transparent, as dedicated to social definition and the delineation of his identity, as it is to the establishment of his artistic postulation.

MY SISTER’S SLEEP (1848-1870)

My Sister’s Sleep (1848) is one of Rossetti’s earliest significant poems; a ballad in iambic tetrameter, its composition began in 1847 and was completed in 1848. Its anonymous publication in The New Monthly Belle Assemblée¹⁹ within a running critique by Elizabeth Youatt,²⁰ possibly a friend of the Rossetti’s²¹, predates its second publication in the first issue of The Germ²² (1850), the first issue of the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood journal, by over a year. This otherwise inconsequential detail of the poem’s development needs be mentioned since the two published forms differ significantly. Rossetti we now is notorious for a fastidious re-working of texts, and two more publications of the poem −a private edition in 1869 and the 1870 collected works²³ fortuitously justified two further opportunities for alteration, however since so fractional a space of time separates the first two versions, one must conjecture as to what above all necessitated this change. The poem is essentially purged to eliminate the religious elements altogether²⁴, which Rossetti, having committed it to paper, clearly found rather embarrassing. Even some twenty years later the poem remains for him a woefully imperfect but strangely pertinent, nascent work; so that having re-fashioned it a total of four times, he continued to refer disparagingly to it in his early forties as the thing called ‘My Sister’s Sleep’…²⁵

The poem is based on a subject both sentimental and domestic and certainly does not immediately suggest itself as inspiring subject matter for an audacious seventeen year-old boy. The episode is of a young girl desperately ill on Christmas Eve, tended by her mother under the watchful but daunted gaze of her brother; though not a biographical incident, the work nevertheless goes a considerably way in conceding the poet’s sympathy for Victorian cliché in respect to the portraiture of ‘the mother’. The poem’s presentment is tempered by maternal indoctrination into the Protestant faith, but overhung with the lingering glamour and mysticism of an Italian Catholic past. Anglicans, through a Catholic origin and tendency to Protestantism following the Reformation,²⁶ historically shared this shifting tendency; as Wood explains, Rossetti, [t]rained from the first in the Protestant faith, through inheriting on both sides the mental bias of Roman tradition, the children entered early into the age-long conflict between the tender mysticism and spiritual glamour of Catholic piety and the robuster spirit of intellectual truth.²⁷ Christina Rossetti, for one, became intensely drawn to Anglo-Catholicism following her traumatic breakdown in her early teens, even though only five years later, in 1850, she was to break off an engagement to James Collinson on the basis that he had reverted to Catholicism. Catholic sympathies, as Mégroz stipulates are entirely in harmony with the nature of Romanticism²⁸ and as such, seem often to be guiltily retained and surreptitiously referred to by the nineteenth- century poet as anaesthetic form.

In all four versions of My Sister’s Sleep the text changes in ways sometimes subtle sometimes extreme; however the single incentive to all re-workings seems to be the removal of religious emphasis, and replacement of the socially predominant Christian/patriarchal outlook with a maternal righteousness; a feminine sanctity deliberately delineated as the viably authoritative Other. Hence, Rossetti set about to replace "Our Father"²⁹ with Our Mother.³⁰ The inference is vigorously subversive and earnestly cedes power to woman; albeit while maintaining her firmly within her designated role as mother; trenchantly within the confines of the domestic realm, indeed, the more tightly circumscribed and rigidly prescribed female domain of the sickroom. Admittedly the often cloying sentiments of Christian virtue poured upon the figure of the mother is gauche, however, assertion of the imposed ideal of motherhood is codified stipulation of dependency on the male, and nullification of all aspirations to autonomy, hence, a means of diminishing the narrative’s implicational subversion, a soothing to oblivion some of the more incendiary of its implications. The Marian implications of the text are a double-edged sword, a tentative dialectic pertaining to the female that will dominate Rossetti’s mature thinking: the inference of the Virgin Mary miraculously renders inert and unquestionably valid the narrative in which she figures; however, for all those denominations innate to the Anglo-Catholic movement supporting the Catholicisation of the Established Church, Mary also was a powerful woman with an extensive sphere of action³¹ integral to the ministry of Christ: The Protestant Mary… interfering in Jesus’ ministry. This made her a rather suspect model of womanhood and potentially, according to Protestant commentators, more powerful than her son.³²

The 1848 Belle Assemblée version of My Sister’s Sleep is the longest with 21 stanzas and the one most christianly devout in sentiments and imagery, especially in regard to gender identity. The first stanza is a direct invocation of the fatally ill Margaret:

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve,        She fell asleep on Christmas Eve,

Upon her eyes’ most patient calms      At length the long-ungranted shade

The lids were shut: her uplaid arms     Of weary eyelids overweigh’d

Covered her bosom, I believe.(1848)       The pain nought else might yet relieve.(1870)

Christmas Eve is immediately atmospheric: inciting unity both familial and social. It is the one religious element in the poem that is never tampered with suggesting that Weatherby’s reasoning is unfounded as criticism:

What we believe in here is the firelight and the rustling skirt; the Christmas morning setting looks suspiciously like decoration, like an embellishment which Rossetti adds to otherwise photographic realism in order to qualify the representation for the name of poem- in short, to give it form.³³

Rossetti places … the click of needles and the rustle of skirts…impression[s] of Zolaesque precision…in a quasi-supernatural frame… not for the lack of an integrity of focus; he grounds the reality within a social setting, as Christmas morning and thereby offers an in-depth perspective of middle-class values, pertaining to Anglican