Abstract
In the nineteenth-century, Italy functions as a privileged trope, as the metaphorical site where issues of the past, political revolution and the exotic coalesce.2 For Victorian women poets, however, Italy is also invested with particularly acute and gender inflected questions of identity and homeland. Angela Leighton reads this concern as the reaction of female poets both to the post-Romantic formulation of the home as a stable feminine sphere and the associated feminisation and interiorisation of poetry. Summarising Felicia Hemans’ reaction to this discourse of Italy as homeland, Leighton argues that ‘In many of her poems, home is either empty of its main figurehead, the father, or else home is somewhere else: in Italy, in the south — paradoxically, in one of those places still subject to the convulsions of political change.’3 Leighton’s anthology of Victorian women poets, edited with Margaret Reynolds, demonstrates the fascination with and importance of Italy as a reclaimed alternative feminine home. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s conception of Italy as a homeland in Aurora Leigh and Casa Guidi Windows is well documented, but other poets pursue the connection further and in different ways. Poems such as Alice Meynell’s ‘The Watershed’, for example, testify to the transformative and enabling potential of this trope to forge a replenishing sense of feminine place and belonging as an alternative to the patriarchy of Victorian Britain:
But O the unfolding South! the burst
Of Summer! O to see
Of all the southward brooks the first!
The travelling heart went free
With endless streams; that strife was stopped;
And down a thousand vales I dropped,
I flowed to Italy.4
We cannot fathom these mysteries of transplantation.
Edmund Gosse.1
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Notes
Edmund Gosse, Critical Kit-Kats (London: Heineman, 1896) p. 139.
Hilary Fraser argues that the metaphorical colonisation of Italy in this period is part of a wider concern to reappropriate the past. See The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) p. 4.
Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (eds), Victorian Women Poets: an Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) pp. xxxv–xxxvi.
See Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: a Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994) pp. 334–40.
Dolores Rosen-blum notes the importance of Italy as a metaphor for identity, the mother country and the afterlife, but assumes the relation is stable and unproblematic. See Christina Rossetti: the Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale: Sourthern Illinois University Press, 1986) pp. 49–50.
See also Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’, PMLA 99 (1984) 194–209.
Paradise for Christina Rossetti, Linda Marshall argues, connotes Hades (as the intermediate state between death and the resurrection), not Heaven or the New Jerusalem. See ‘What the Dead Are Doing Underground: Hades and Heaven in the Writings of Christina Rossetti’, Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1987) 55–60.
Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: a Biographical and Critical Study (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1898) p. 21.
‘[As] masculinity and femininity were defined in relation to their different fields of activity — the public and the private — gender identities became organised around the ideology of separate spheres’, Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Black-well, 1988) pp. 32–3.
Nina Auerbach sees Rossetti’s spinsterhood as the springboard for her own self-recreation: ‘The quiet sister’s devout, family-bounded existence contained its own divine potential for violent metamorphoses.’ See Woman and the Demon: the Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) p. 117.
Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croon Hill, 1982) p. 7.
For an analysis of the implications of Rossetti’s maternal conception of Christ, see Sharon Smulders, ‘Woman’s Enfranchisement in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34.4 (Winter 1992) 568–88.
Perhaps the gendering of Christ as both male and female may also be related to Holman Hunt’s use of Christina Rossetti’s as a model for the face of Christ in the painting Light of the World (1853).
Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: a Reading Diary (London: SPCK, 1885), p. 33.
The desire for the maternal should be distinguished from an inability of the subject metaphorically to separate from the mother, which is a psychic necessity. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) p. 135.
In ‘And the one doesn’t stir without the other’, Signs 7.1 (1981) 60–7, Luce Irigaray identifies the daughter’s perception of the mother as one of two categories, the phallic or castrated mother.
See Lila Hanft which relates these issues to Sing-Song in ‘The Politics of Maternal Ambivalence in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song’, Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991) 213–32.
See Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Blackwell: Oxford, 1986) p. 111.
See H.J. Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Authors: S.T. Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 672.
Harrison notes that the afterlife is often depicted as amorphous in Rossetti’s poetry. See Christina Rossetti in Context (Brighton: Harvester, 1988) p. 157.
For an exploration of Rossetti’s literary relationship to Charles Bagot Cayley, and in particular to his translations, see Kamilla Denham and Sarah Smith, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Copy of C.B. Cayley’s Divine Cornedy’, Victorian Poetry 32 (1994) 315–38.
W. David Shaw, Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) p. 258.
The chora is controversial in feminist theory: see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
and Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) for two different interpretations.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) p. vii.
Compare Barbara Johnson’s comments on J. Hillis Miller’s ‘The Critic as Host’, that the parasite is feminine and parricidal, a daughter. See A World of Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) p. 36.
See also J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979) pp. 217–53.
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© 2000 Alison Chapman
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Chapman, A. (2000). Father’s Place, Mother’s Space: Italy and the Paradisal. In: The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286009_7
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