The Writer of Many Faces: A Look at Literary Master Christina Rossetti
She was considered by many as a religious fanatic and was in fact diagnosed with “a kind of religious mania” which more than likely was psychosomatic in nature. Christina and her religious scruples, where once compared to Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: as the heroine in Eliot’s writing gave up riding because she enjoyed it so much, Christina gave up chess because “she found she enjoyed winning;” covered the antireligious parts of Swiburne’s Atalanta in Calydon with strips of paper (after which doing “allowed her to enjoy it very much”); protested to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused to go see Wagner’s Pardifal, because it “celebrated a pagan mythology.” Her religion was a defining factor in her life and in her writing and is one of the prevalent themes she discusses in her writings.
Partly because of her religious devotion, her shyness and also in part just because she was a woman, Christina Rossetti was never truly a part of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood. Notwithstanding, her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) was the first unalloyed literary success the Brotherhood enjoyed. One can even find a loose parallel between her fondness for the rhythms of folk songs and the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the medieval.
Another recurrent theme in many of Christina’s poems is nature. To which her grandfather, who she frequently visited in the countryside, exposed her to in her early years. However the themes of her more serious works where dominated by themes of frustrated love and an underlying tension between desire and renunciation. Separated lovers often appear in her poems, and a regret for a life unfulfilled alternates with what one critic deemed “a death wish.”
One of Christina Rossetti’s more pioneering poems, “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children,” is a dramatic monologue in which she addresses the issue of illegitimate children by imagining that she is one herself. Her want to address this subject can be traced to the work she did for the House of Charity, an institution in Highgate devoted to the rescue of prostitutes and unmarried mothers. She also expanded her poetry with “A Royal Princess” which deals such issues as starvation, inequality, and poverty. Which made its dÃ?©but in an 1863 anthology published for the relief of victims of the Lancashire cotton famine.
Later in her career Rossetti gave up political subjects claiming that, “It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning.” “Sing-Song” is perhaps the best illustration of this turning point in Christina’s writing. In 1872 the year she wrote the collection, she was 42 years old, and having declined two marriage proposals out of religious reasons – by James Collinson in 1850 (because he reverted to Catholicism) and by James Bagot Cayley in 1866 (because he was an atheist) – she must have realized that all possibilities of marriage and thus having children were gone. This mixed with her life-threatening illness that resulted in a look back on her life: On the happy childhood she had spent with her brothers and sister in her grandfather’s home. Makes “Sing-Song” a turning point in both her life and writing. It is precisely this broad range of themes: the religious to the naturistic, to the almost macabre, to distraught love, to the political, to children’s poems that make Christina the great literary figure she is; her ability to write masterfully in any genre of her choosing.
Harrison, Anthony H. Christina Rossetti in Context. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Mason, Emma. “Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve.” Journal of Victorian Culture 7.2 (2002): 196-219.
