About Victorian poetry... Among the ideas commonly associated to Victorian Poetry: Belatedness (Harold Bloom) Posthumous

1. About Victorian poetry... Among the ideas commonly associated to Victorian Poetry: Belatedness (Harold Bloom) Posthumousness (Isobel Armstrong) They saw themselves as post-teleological, post-industrial, post-technological.

2. The idea of ‘Alienated Labour’ is also central. (Carlyle attributed it to mechanization; Marx to the nature of capital) Labourers have no control over their products; self-creation is no longer possible. Relations are indirect and mystified when nothing can be done directly.

3. ‘Victorian poetry is obsessed with a series of displacements effected by these redefined relations, and helps to bring these redefinitions about. The problems of agency, consciousness, labour, language and representation become central. Teleology is displaced by epistemology and politics because relationships and their representation become the contested area, between self and society, self and labour, self and nature, self and language and above all between self and the lover. Gender becomes a primary focus of anxiety and investigation in Victorian poetry which is in its preoccupation with sexuality and what it is to love. [...] The effort to renegotiate a content to every relationship between self and the world is the Victorian poet’s project. (Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, p. 7)

4. Focus on Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) Daughter of an Italian political refugee Sister to William Michael and Dante Gabriel Connected to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood Portrait by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti

5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1850 The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, 1849

6. Pre-Raphaelites and Women ‘Stunner’ is the name given to some of the beautiful models who posed for Pre-Raphaelite painters and with whom the latter became almost obsessed. The stunner the idealized woman, with her thick neck, long jaws and masculine features.

7. Elizabeth Siddal Self-portrait, 1854 John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852

8. Rossetti’s obsession with Elizabeth Siddal

9. Jane Morris as Proserpina, 1874 By Dante Gabriel Rossetti Jane Morris as La Belle Iseult (also Queen Guinevere) by William Morris, 1858

10. Christina Rossetti ‘s poetry shares many features with Pre-Raphaelite modes of representation and poetics: • Close attention to details and ‘pictorial’ mode of representing reality • Medieval atmospheres and settings • Lush images that express an appreciation of the world’s physicality • Intensity of feeling • Preoccupation with love and experimental approach to it as a dominant topos • However, she is develops her own poetics and treats issues of gender and religion in a very different way.

11. In an Artist’s Studio One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel -- every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more nor less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: 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. C. Rossetti, 1896

12. George Gissing, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were the better novelists of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The Odd Women was published in 1893. What does ‘Odd’ mean?

13. Her main collection of poems is: Goblin Market and other Poems, 1862 But she started contributing poetry to literary journals when she was 18. She also wrote essays and fiction: Commonplace and Stories, 1870 Maude: A Story for Girls, 1897 For recordings of Goblin Market: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/poetryperformance/rossetti/poem1/rossetti1.html http://literalsystems.org/abooks/index.php/Audiobook/GoblinMarket

14. Illustrations for Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), by her brother Dante Gabriel

15. Her collection of poems includes a great variety of poetical forms: • Devotional verse • Narrative Poems • Pure lyrics • Ballads • Critical terms often used to describe her poetry: • An aesthetic of renunciation • A poetry of deferral, deflection, postponement

16. For recordings of Goblin Market: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/poetryperformance/rossetti/poem1/rossetti1.html http://literalsystems.org/abooks/index.php/Audiobook/GoblinMarket For an Italian Translation of the poem: http://www.centrorossetti.eu/e_view.asp?E=59&L=2 For a study of the illustrations of the poem, see the book:

17. Goblin Market is a narrative poems. What can you say about the time, setting, characters, plot? What about the style and metre of this poem? What about the readership for such a poem?

18. Margaret Tarrant (1888-1959)

19. Arthur Rackham (1867-1939)

20. Drawing by Laurence Housman for the 1893 edition of Goblin Market.

21. Laurence Housman (1865-1959)

22. Goblin Fruit

23. Goblin Market is not only a verse fairy tale. It has been read in many ways. One obvious pattern in the poem is: TEMPTATION - SIN – REDEMPTION THROUGH VICARIOUS SUFFERING According to some biographers it was conceived as a moral tale to be read in Highgate Penitentiary, where Christina worked many years as a volunteer to help fallen women. However, many other, less obvious, meanings are also there and many other interpretations can be provided.

24. Try to think about the poem in terms of: • -Sexual suggestiveness and allusions (bearing in mind the differences between Victorian and contemporary sexuality); • Prohibition, taboo, the exclusion or confinement of the erotic; • Resistance to male authority and the utopia of a matriarchal world; • Goblins as ‘others’ (bearing the colonial ‘other in mind’); • Goblins as seducers and transmitters of sexual diseases (see Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s) • -

25. Here are two explanations I find particularly convincing. The opinion of the historian A. N. Wilson: ‘The poem is about the dangers of excess – of an unbridled appetite. To say it is ‘really’ about rape, incest, lesbianism is to miss the point. It is about the human tendency, which could no doubt be shown by incestuous lesbians but is actually more general, to self-destruction by means of self-indulgence. A child who had been sick after eating too much chocolate would understand Goblin Market better than many of the academic commentator’ ( The Victorians, London: Arrow Books, 2003, p.316)

26. And the opinion of the literary critic Isobel Armstrong: ‘It is not a question of choosing either Laura or Lizzie, freedom or prohibition. Laura and Lizzie are doubles of one another. Rossetti has seized on the interdependence of the overflow of feeling and the barrier. [...] Laura’s second taking of the fruit is not a fall but a recovery and consolidates the power of the fruit. Sexuality is neither freedom nor constraint, but both. [...] Sexuality itself is defined by, locked into, the institution in which it has its being. It is governed by money and a principle ox exchange. It is construed as temptation.’ (‘“A Music of Thine Own”: Women’s Poetry’, in Victorian Women Poets, ed. by Joseph Bristow, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 52 and 54)