Remembering Christina Rossetti: Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric

Abstract

Unmanly songs may undermine Tennyson’s self-fashioning, but Rossetti derives her compelling voice from confinement both in hyper-feminized little lyrics and in the grave. Her parodically excessive formal minimalism and use of proleptic retrospection, which replace active experience of the world with distant and dispassionate recollection, subvert the figure of the unambitious and over-sentimental Victorian “poetess.” Further exaggerating (and revising) feminine humbleness, Rossetti creates dead or dying speakers who ask to be forgotten in insistently memorable verse. And despite their author’s devoutness, these speakers’ static isolation disrupts Biblical teleology, forgetfully elevating frozen oblivion over redemption. Rossetti, it seems, seeks to liberate her women from clichéd love-plots both sacred and secular. Nonetheless, these women’s desire to be recalled hints that they do not wholly shun narratable selfhood.