Abstract
How to begin talking about Christina Rossetti in history? The best place to start, paradoxically, is with Christina Rossetti’s death. Her close friend Lisa Wilson remembers her last visit to Rossetti’s deathbed in a commemorative poem:
‘Farewell, until tomorrow,’ thou didst say
And, clasping close my hand, didst still delay
My going, till the shadows round us lay
Dark on thy face and mine.
‘Until tomorrow.’ In the eventide
We parted; in the darkness I could hide
My tears — and so I left thee, satisfied.
No tears, O friend, were thine.
‘Until tomorrow.’ When the morrow came
We did not meet; thy flickering, fading flame
Of life went out; as on thy lips a name
Was breathed, with one Divine.
‘Until tomorrow.’ And I spake to thee
And thou wert silent; silent even to me
Kneeling beside thee. Silent even to me,
No word, no smile, no sign.…3
The secret of history is […] causality, and the secret of causality is history. History therefore becomes a causality of causalities, which means the unending production of effects — but never the effectivity of a beginning.
Jean-Luc Nancy1
The hardest step is at the threshold.
Christina Rossetti2
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Notes
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Finite History’, in David Carroll (ed.), The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourses (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990) p. 152.
Italian proverb recounted in Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: a Reading Diary (London: SPCK, 1885) p. 4.
Cited in Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: a Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994) pp. 567–8.
For a discussion of Michael Field’s elegy, which figures Rossetti as an unfit muse for future poets, see Susan Conley, ‘ “Poet’s Right”: Elegy and the Woman Poet’, in Angela Leighton (ed.), Victorian Women Poets: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) pp. 235–44.
Diane D’Amico’s analysis of Rossetti’s influence on Katharine Tynan and Sara Teas-dale suggests that they figured her as, respectively, a saint and artefact. See ‘Saintly Singer or Tanagra Figurine? Christina Rossetti Through the Eyes of Katharine Tynan and Sara Teasdale’, Victorian Poetry 32 (1994) 387–407.
Neither option embodies Christina Rossetti’s historical personage. For a further discussion of Tynan and Rossetti, see Peter van de Kamp, ‘Wrapped in a Dream: Katharine Tynan and Christina Rossetti’, in Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges (eds), Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R.L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996) pp. 59–97.
Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita, trans. Helen Lane (London: Anchor, 1997) p. 68.
Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991) p. 1.
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987) p. xiv.
Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: the Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 10, 11.
See Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, dated 1867 but finished between 1867 and 1868.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, trans. Alan Bass, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) p. 107.
Yopi Prins offers a similarly annihilistic reading of the signature of Sappho in the nineteenth-century, which sidesteps the continuing durability and tenacity of the myth of Sappho. See Victorian Sappho (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).
For a discussion on the literary relationship between Rossetti and Barrett Browning, see Antony H. Harrison, ‘In the Shadow of E.B.B.: Christina Rossetti and Ideological Estrangement’, in his Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990),
and also Marjorie Stone, ‘Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, Victorian Poetry 32 (1994) 339–64.
Kathy Psomiades makes a similar point about feminist reading of nineteenth-century literature, but not specifically in relation to new historicism: ‘because modern feminism has its roots in nineteenth-century constructions of gender, it is possible, and indeed more than likely, that in the course of recovery nineteenth-century ideologies may be replicated, rather than subjected to scrutiny.’ See ‘ “Material Witness”: Feminism and Nineteenth-Century Studies’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31.1 (1989) 13–18 (p. 14).
For further comments on the continuation of nineteenth-century paradigms in contemporary critique, see her Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997) pp. 29–30.
Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) pp. 193–4.
Ros Ballaster, ‘New Hystericism: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: The body, the text and the feminist critic’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.) New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 284.
Linda Marshall explains the poetry’s concern with ‘postmortem awareness’, a specific form of self-deletion, as part of Rossetti’s theological interest in Hades. Marshall comments: ‘whether one sees the intermediate state [between death and Resurrection] as withdrawal of consciousness or the heightening of it, perhaps the same point is made: life is neither sweet nor good, and to die is the best criticism of it’. See ‘What the Dead Are Doing Underground: Hades and Heaven in the Writings of Christina Rossetti’, Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1987) 55–60 (p. 58).
See his two chapters on Christina Rossetti in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Margaret Linley, ‘Dying to Be A Poetess: The Conundrum of Christina Rossetti’, in Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (eds), The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999), p. 292.
Jan Marsh (ed.), Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (London: Everyman, 1994) p. 251.
For the text of Maude, I use David A. Kent and P.G. Stanwood (eds), Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
Angela Leighton, ‘“When I am dead, my dearest”: The Secret of Christina Rossetti’, Modern Philology 87 (1989) 373–88 (p. 374).
Arthur Benson, ‘Christina Rossetti’, The National Review (26 February 1895) 753–63 (p. 756).
See Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 339.
The ‘subject-in-process/on trial’, as Kelly Oliver shows, runs throughout Kristeva’s writings, but perhaps most obviously in Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
See Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) p. 187 and passim.
For an account more Utopian than Kristeva’s, see Luce Irigaray’s witty revision of Plato in ‘Sorcerer Love: a Reading of Plato, Symposium, “Diotima’s Speech”’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: The Athlone Press, 1993) p. 21.
See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) Ch. 16.
Toril Moi discusses Kristeva’s ‘difficult balancing act’ in the introduction to her edition of The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 13.
for an important account of Victorian motherhood which stresses the non-monolothic construction of the maternal in fiction, see Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
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© 2000 Alison Chapman
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Chapman, A. (2000). Introduction: the Haunting of Christina Rossetti. In: The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286009_1
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