Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology

Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology Lynda Palazzo Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology Cross-Currents in Relig...

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Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology

Lynda Palazzo


Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture General Editors: Elisabeth Jay, Senior Research Fellow, Westminster College, Oxford David Jasper, Professor in Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow The study of theology and religion nowadays calls upon a wide range of interdisciplinary skills and cultural perspectives to illuminate the concerns at the heart of religious faith. Books in this new series will variously explore the contributions made by literature, philosophy and science in forming our historical and contemporary understanding of religious issues and theological perspectives. Published titles: Harold Fisch NEW STORIES FOR OLD Biblical Patterns in the Novel Susan VanZanten Gallagher and M. D. Walhout (editors) LITERATURE AND THE RENEWAL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE Philip Leonard (editor) TRAJECTORIES OF MYSTICISM IN THEORY AND LITERATURE Lynda Palazzo CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S FEMINIST THEOLOGY Eric Ziolkowski EVIL CHILDREN IN RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND ART Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (editors) THE ARTS, COMMUNITY AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–79469–9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology Lynda Palazzo

© Lynda Palazzo 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–92033–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palazzo, Lynda, 1950– Christina Rossetti’s feminist theology / Lynda Palazzo. p. cm. – (Cross-currents in religion and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–92033–3 1. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830–1894 – Views on feminism. 2. Feminism and literature – England – History – 19th century. 3. Women and literature – England – History – 19th century. 4. Feminist theology – England – History – 19th century. 5. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830–1894 – Religion. 6. Feminism in literature. 7. Theology in literature. I. Title. II. Cross-currents in religion and culture (Palgrave (Firm)) PR5238 .P35 2002 821’.8–dc21 10 11

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To My Parents

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Contents Preface

ix

Introduction

xi

1

1

Early Poetry, Including Goblin Market and Maude

2 Later Poetry, Including The Prince’s Progress and Annus Domini

31

3 Called to Be Saints and Seek and Find

57

4 Letter and Spirit and Time Flies

85

5 The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse

111

6

139

Conclusion

Notes

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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Preface Christina Rossetti published six volumes of devotional prose during her lifetime, beginning with a prayer book, Annus Domini, and ending, during the last years of her life, with a substantial volume, The Face of the Deep, devoted to commentary on the Book of Revelation. Although these were very popular in her day and widely used even by the clergy, they have been neglected in the study of nineteenthcentury theology. They have long been out of print and are practically inaccessible today. Her devotional poetry has fared better, featuring in literary histories of the Oxford Movement such as R. Chapman’s Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (1970) and G.B. Tennyson’s Victorian Devotional Poetry (1981). More recently, interest in her theology has grown steadily and includes her devotional texts, with the contextual approach of A.H. Harrison’s Christina Rossetti in Context (1988) and, importantly, the publication of the Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent and P.G. Stanwood (1998). Diane D’Amico’s recent study Faith, Gender and Time (1999), although using Rossetti’s devotional works mainly to support discussions of her poems, accords them an important place in Rossetti scholarship and makes the important connection between faith and gender. What has not yet been done, however, is to study Rossetti’s devotional texts as volumes, each with a specific structure and argument, and each with a theological message to convey. Furthermore, Rossetti’s work needs to be revalued as theology, not used simply as a gloss to her poetry, and it needs to be added to the rich and varied history of religion in nineteenth-century England. Rossetti should take her place with other Victorian women who struggled to make their voices heard in a society that considered them unfit to study theology or preach in church. The revaluation of women’s theology by today’s feminist theologians seemed a useful place to start in the choice of supportive theoretical material, and its use has uncovered in Rossetti’s devotional writings not only a valid and consistent theological orientation, but one that is startlingly modern. Rossetti’s literary and creative skill has ix

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Preface

added to her reading an awareness of the scriptures as text and as the production of the limited consciousness of a (male) writer. Her own volumes function as extensions of this text, restating to her own generation and in particular to her own gender the lessons she discovers there. My approach does not assume to be the only access to Rossetti’s devotional prose. Her writing is so rich and varied that there is scope for a great diversity of studies, and it is hoped that this volume will promote greater interest in her works. I have simply chosen a few aspects of her theology which I have found meaningful, and followed them through to her last volume, The Face of the Deep.

Introduction On 14 November 1971 the feminist theologian Mary Daly staged a walk-out from Memorial Church, Harvard after preaching there, thus publicly demonstrating her exodus from ‘androcentric’ Christianity. Her consequent publication of Beyond God the Father,1 which advocates a post-Christian feminist position, has had implications which few feminist theologians have been able to ignore.2 Daly’s challenge exposed in a radical way the potency of the dominant patriarchal symbolism of Christianity, itself a product of patriarchy, in determining the social and cultural fabric of Western society: The symbol of father god, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting. If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male dominated.3 Because she considers Christianity fundamentally flawed by its male symbolism, Daly formulates a post-Christian religious position which builds on a specifically female spirituality, ‘a communal phenomenon of sisterhood’ which ‘even without conscious attention to the church … is in conflict with it’. Patriarchal religions, she claims, ‘have stolen daughters from their mothers and mothers from their daughters’, rendering them ‘spiritual exiles’. She speaks about an experience of ‘sacred space’ alternative to the Church, a ritual source of life and healing, which ‘moves on the tide of ever-increasing participation of being’. Her form of radical feminism even ‘comes close to suggesting that male sexism is the original sin and that woman – or a particular kind of unreconstructed elemental woman – is the new, redeemed creation’.4 Consideration of the causal connection between established religion and social structures is especially valuable in the study of the Victorian period, where two widespread religious revivals, the xi

xii Introduction

Evangelical Movement and the Tractarians, coincided with a phase of social and scientific consolidation. In this period of upheaval and realignment, women in particular were the victims of a moral and social ethic which exalted their spirituality and domestic virtues, only to trap them inexorably within pre-existing, stereotyped patriarchal roles and moral categories.5 Daly’s work, however, and that of other feminist theologians, reminds us that there is another dimension to the damage inflicted on women by a patriarchal religious system, and that is a condition of profound spiritual suffering and alienation from traditional conceptions of God and customary practices of worship. Daly’s work strikes at the central symbolism of Christianity, evaluating its relevance in terms of herself and her identity as a woman. She exposes the salvific impotence of these symbols and eventually formulates what she considers important factors in the definition of woman’s spirituality. Of particular relevance to our study is her recognition that the historical roots of modern feminist approaches to the problem of gender in Christianity, and in particular of feminist christological inquiry, lie in the nineteenth century.6 She quotes the American, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author and editor of The Woman’s Bible, in Beyond God the Father: Take the snake, the fruit tree and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, no frowning Judge, no Inferno, no everlasting punishment – hence no need of a saviour. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology. Here is the reason why in all the biblical researches and higher criticisms, the scholars never touch on the position of women.7 In England, the Tractarian Movement brought with it a renewed emphasis on woman’s sinfulness, moral weakness and role in the Fall, which required the advent of a male saviour to redeem humanity. Studies of the Oxford Movement8 tend to omit the gender implications of Tractarian doctrine, and even Pusey himself, who in his impassioned defence of his Tracts on Holy Baptism in the face of accusations of doom and gloom admits: ‘my statement was imperfect, as making no mention of the healing and comforting power and the pardoning grace in the Holy Eucharist’,9 sees no gender bias in his preaching on sin. Yet his teaching was possibly the most powerful

Introduction xiii

single influence of his time on public attitudes towards the morality of women. He focuses time and again on the role of Eve in the Fall and her consequent legacy of corruption. Eve, he claims, took on the threefold corruption ‘of which the Apostle speaks’ and then infected her husband: ‘When the woman saw that the tree was good for food’ (this is the lust of the flesh) ‘and that it was pleasant to the eyes’, (this was the lust of the eye,) ‘and a tree to be desired to make one wise’, (here is the ‘pride of life’,) she took of the fruit and ‘did eat’, and, ‘as the first fruit of her sin, she spread her sin to whom she could …’10 He echoes the teaching of the early Church Fathers, renewing their distorted claims of the innate sinfulness of womankind: And do you know that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself …?11 Eve’s sin is balanced by the salvific potential of a male redeemer, locking the female into an ontologically predetermined position of revealed moral inferiority. Because Christ was a male, woman cannot truly become Christ-like, but can only imitate the receptiveness and docility of the Virgin. In the words of Elizabeth Johnson, ‘Women’s physical embodiment becomes a prison that shuts them off from God, except as mediated through the christic male’.12 Back into parish sermons come the scripture-based limitations on women’s authority and the doctrine of subordination. In the words of Bishop Wordsworth: St Paul has taught Woman where her strength lies. He has taught her what is the true source of her beauty and her dignity. Not by usurping what does not belong to her, not by casting off the mark

xiv Introduction

of her derivative being and subordinate authority, can she hope to retain the place which God has given her in creation … . Her true strength is in loyal submission; her true power is in tender love and dutiful obedience.13 In Reclaiming Myths of Power: Women Writers and the Victorian Spiritual Crisis, Ruth Jenkins describes how the denial of sacred authority to women led to a movement ‘that attempted to resurrect the female aspects of God’, and prophesied even ‘a female messiah, tapping the historic privilege Christianity had given the oppressed to challenge the world’.14 Florence Nightingale, for example, borrowing from the Old Testament prophetic tradition, revised the incarnation to include female oppression and called on potential female prophets to herald the coming of a new Christ, ‘perhaps a female Christ’.15 She turned away from organised religion, accusing the Church of England of distorting the character of God, and ultimately found her own ‘liberation theology’16 in the sacred call to nursing. Another ‘foremother of contemporary Christian feminism’,17 J. Ellice Hopkins, also finding spiritual relief in re-enacting the redeeming role of Christ, reclaimed female sacrality through the bond of sisterhood in her work among London’s prostitutes. Although excluded by the Church from priestly activity, she was able to ‘undermine the male monopoly on the administration of the sacred’ by identifying personally with Christ in her mission to rescue desecrated womanhood. As our understanding grows of the problems facing women in the acceptance of male-dominated Christianity more ‘foremothers’ will be discovered, living out their faith in alternative spiritual epicentres, working out patterns of female redemption which the patriarchal Church has obscured, and which their daughters have ever painfully to reinvent.

1 Early Poetry, Including Goblin Market and Maude

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Eccles. 1:2 Did Christina Rossetti, despite her acute, and at times subversive, poetic intelligence remain passive in her acceptance of her religion? Even her latest biographers assume this was the case, taking their direction from her brother William Michael Rossetti’s biased account of her Christianity: The dominating element in her daily life – and perhaps the one which makes it hardest for us in the twentieth century to feel close to her – was religion; religion of an old-fashioned rigidity that turned life into a bitter and constant struggle for spiritual perfection, that elevated Duty and renunciation above all, that circumscribed and directed her daily ways.1 Rossetti, accused on Bell’s publication of Christina Rossetti’s biography of being ‘a main performer in Mr. Bell’s book’,2 unwittingly perhaps proceeds in his Memoir to be the main instrument obscuring Rossetti’s theology. He makes much of what he calls her ‘overscrupulosity’, which has ‘the full practical bearings of a defect’, making her ‘shut up her mind to almost all things save the Bible, and the admonitions and ministrations of priests’. Whatever his reasons were for turning away from Christianity and therefore disliking his sister’s theological activity, the effect of his words has been to transfer his own 1

2 Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology

attitude of intolerance onto her. If we look more closely at his claim, for example, that ‘to ponder for herself whether a thing was true or not ceased to be part of her intellect’, because ‘the only question was whether or not it conformed to the Bible, as viewed by AngloCatholicism’, we see that far from having a closed mind, she was pondering deeply questions of accepted versus biblical truths, Tractarian biblical interpretation as opposed to popular myth. We glimpse, too, that Rossetti tended to dislike priests in their role as guardians of the national morality: ‘while she had an intense reverence for the priestly function, she cared next to nothing about hierarchical distinctions: anything which assimilated the clerical order to a “learned profession” forming part of the British constitution left her indifferent, or rather inimical’ (ibid.). It is no wonder, given such a lack of comprehension on the part of her favourite brother, and perhaps the rest of her family, that she became extremely reticent in questions of faith, and rarely referred to religion in letters to her family or others. For the critic in search of guidelines to her theology, one finds in her early years virtually nothing apart from her poetry, and it has been widely assumed that she accepted the teaching of Pusey and the other great Tractarians, writing poetry in the wake of Keble until finally consolidating an imitative Tractarian position in her devotional prose. Recent studies of her later prose volumes, however, have shown that Rossetti was actively concerned with controversial issues in her theology including questions of gender, and was particularly concerned with methods of biblical interpretation which give women meaningful access to the scriptures in a way comparable to the work of Stanton in America.3 These studies suggest that, by the end of her life, Rossetti was engaged in the critique of theological practice, was not the passive religious figure so often presented and was particularly concerned with the problems women encountered in their relationship with Christianity. She appeared to be moving towards a position that is similar to that of modern feminist theology in its attempt to identify the ways in which women are able to relate to a fundamentally male religion. Prompted, then, by what would seem a startling and somewhat unlikely reversal in the poet’s later attitude, if the accepted critical position of her early theological passivity is correct, this chapter begins with a re-examination of Rossetti’s formative years at Christ Church and her poetry of that time, bearing in mind those questions


3

of female spiritual empowerment and re-imaging of the biblical text which become central concerns in her later years. Not only did Rossetti’s early religious upbringing take place during the later days of the Oxford Movement when bitter dissensions had arisen and the exodus to Rome was at its peak, but it took place within one of the most active Tractarian parishes in London, Christ Church, Albany Street, under a fervent disciple of Pusey, Rev. Dodsworth.4 She was surrounded by controversy, by challenge and by strongly held views on all sides, and although she would have moderated her views in deference to the orthodoxy of her beloved mother and sister, it is unlikely that the young Rossetti was as passive as she is portrayed in most critical accounts of her religion. Jan Marsh, in an otherwise perceptive biography, assumes that Rossetti directed no criticism at Pusey or his stifling doctrines,5 but she undervalues the young poet’s grasp of theological issues. Although it is possible that in 1846, the time of writing ‘The Martyr’, Rossetti was in thrall to the hysteria which was then sweeping through Christ Church, from the evidence of much of her poetry of the later 1840s she in fact became increasingly critical of those very doctrines which are said to have been the mainstay of her religious thought. One thing is clear, however. She did not have an easy passage into religious maturity, despite the steady faith of the other women in her family. Such was the zeal of Dodsworth6 and the mounting hysteria at Christ Church in the wake of Pusey’s pioneering sisters that the young Rossetti suffered a spiritual crisis leading to severe physical collapse. Unpublished remarks suggest the origin of her breakdown in ‘a kind of religious mania’,7 and this is generally assumed to be her way of participating in the widespread spiritual hysteria which erupted at Christ Church at that time. Whilst this may be true, it could also suggest that she was reacting against an overload of external religious pressure, especially when she found some aspects of the teaching unacceptable, but felt forced by fear of rejection or by peer pressure to accept them. Her confirmation into the Anglican Church finally took place in 1846 after a period of great spiritual difficulty, as she wrote to her brother Dante Gabriel when he was suffering a similar crisis of faith: I want to assure you that, however harassed by memory or anxiety you may be, I have (more or less) heretofore gone through the same


ordeal. I have borne myself till I became unbearable to myself, and then I have found help in confession and absolution and spiritual counsel, and relief inexpressible. Twice in my life I tried to suffice myself with measures short of this, but nothing would do; the first time was of course in my youth before my general confession.8 So Rossetti was finally received into the Church, but her experience of the extremes of Tractarianism was to sow multiple seeds of dissatisfaction and doubt in her mind. As Marsh suggests, she was ‘marked for life by exposure to Puseyite thought’9 and her naturally warm and outgoing personality became silent and introspective. It is possible that such a profound change came about because the excesses of Pusey’s followers provoked a terrible ambiguity in her response to his Tractarian God. A natural and spontaneous love of Christ, inherited perhaps from her mother Frances’s untroubled evangelical piety, became haunted by the spectre of a harsh, cruel Father God, and a Church that demanded woman’s total submission in both body and soul. Rossetti was forced at a very early age to rethink her own spirituality and struggle painfully towards the re-imagining and re-imaging of God in terms which spoke from her own life and experience. Rossetti’s first major poem of this time, ‘Repining’ (1847), gives an idea of her understanding of the sub-text of Tractarian fervour and its effect on the young. The poem holds up to the scrutiny of her readers the way in which young girls were caught and held fast in the grip of a religious extremism which not only deprived them of their natural physical vitality, keeping them docile and obedient as they strove for salvation, but trapped them precisely through that which the poem defines as a feminine strength – spirituality. Not yet in command of a language with which to contest theological issues, Rossetti used the language of late Romanticism, and so the undefined longing of the young girl at the beginning of the poem, rendered haunting and sensual by the ‘throbbing music’ of Keats’ nightingale, is met by a cruel religious indoctrination at the hands of a Porphyro figure: His cheek was white but hardly pale; And a dim glory like a veil Hovered about his head, and shone Through the whole room till night was gone.10


5

The young soul, following the long-awaited lover and guide, her senses heightened by the thought of the delights to come, is shocked by horror upon horror of Rossetti’s own repeated versions of the ‘vanity of vanities’ theme so beloved of Pusey and his followers: a village is crushed under an avalanche, sailors drown, families are burnt alive and the groans of dying soldiers fill the air as they are picked over by carrion crows. Rossetti’s emphasis is on physical corruption: Ghastly corpses of men and horses That met death at a thousand sources Cold limbs and putrefying flesh. The girl does not understand the suffering she sees and wishes to return to the wholesomeness and joy of her own world: What is this thing? Thus hurriedly To pass into eternity: To leave the earth so full of mirth; To lose the profit of our mirth; To die and be no more; to cease, Having numbness that is not peace. Let us go hence. However, the guide ‘answers not’ to the girl’s urgent questions, and the shocked reader is witness to the brutality involved in her final capitulation: She knelt down in her agony. ‘O Lord, it is enough’, said she: ‘My heart’s prayer putteth me to shame; Let me return to whence I came. Thou who for love’s sake didst reprove, Forgive me for the sake of love’. Rossetti here has captured the severity characteristic of Pusey’s insistence on renunciation, but it is generally assumed that her poem is an uncritical acceptance of Pusey’s version of the doctrine. This interpretation would place Rossetti herself in the position of the abject maiden. Instead, the poet distances herself from this in her


exploration of women’s spiritual needs by suggesting that the attraction for women of this doctrine is its emphasis on their spiritual strength. Faced with the prospect of a fiery death, the women in the burning city demonstrate their spiritual superiority, as martyrs: What was man’s strength, what puissance then? Women were mighty as strong men – Some knelt in prayer, believing still, Resigned into a righteous will, Bowing beneath the chastening rod, Lost to the world, but found of God.11 Young as she is, Rossetti has grasped the fact that the movement to promote sisterhoods is in fact an exploitation of women’s spirituality, however unwitting it may have been on Pusey’s part. An adolescent girl’s longings, half-sexual, half-spiritual, are easily directed towards the passions of martyrdom, either real or imagined; even more so when society denies her a place in the active world where she may find fulfilment. Although the lure of active involvement in sisterhoods led to the increased participation of women in church life, these institutions were little more than an attempt to channel and disarm what might otherwise develop into a challenge to the male hierarchy. The inspiration to revive sisterhoods within the Anglican Church came directly from the more austere figures of the Early Church, and brought with it the misogynist tradition of such figures as St. Jerome, whose work profoundly influenced Pusey.12 As Pusey himself admitted, sisterhoods became a way of controlling woman’s religious zeal, ‘which might otherwise … go off in some irregular way, or go over to Rome’,13 and he cannot hide his satisfaction that in some cases women have preferred sisterhood to marriage.14 Rossetti notes in her poem High Church Anglicanism’s insistence that for women with spiritual fulfilment comes the necessity for an often brutal stripping away of specifically female attributes.15 In the most obvious instance we see the novice entering the convent, obliged to leave behind her personal clothes, her ornaments and her earthly affection. The suffering protagonist of ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1858), Rossetti’s great poem on the psychology of sisterhoods, has been trapped into believing that her salvation requires the renunciation of her physical


7

identity and wakens from agonising dreams to find her femininity destroyed: My face was pinched, my hair was grey, And frozen blood was on the sill Where stifling in my struggle I lay.16 Grace Jantzen notes the way the ‘sisterhood’ of the convent strips women of their womanhood, and isolates them from their sisters: For a woman to develop in spirituality, she must put off womanliness, work against the grain of her gender rather than with it. And it is important to note that to whatever extent she was able to succeed in this male-defined spiritual enterprise, to that extent she also cut herself off from the community of women, becoming ‘manly’ and thus other than women rather than continuing in solidarity with them.17 We see the tormented sister, grey-haired and in decline, wander through Rossetti’s poetry of this time, finding salvation at last only in the positive female spirituality of Goblin Market. In his 1835 Tract on baptism Pusey emphasised the gravity of postbaptismal sin, and in his own life constantly battled with feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing. But the cost of such worldly abstention was high. His adherence to a regime of wordly renunciation was so strict that he seriously jeopardised the mental and physical health of his own family. His wife Maria and their children were literally starving, as a result of a poor diet and excessive fasting: Even when strongly criticised by his elder brother, Philip, for the excessive discipline which he meted out to his offspring (in his will Philip forbade his own children to be entrusted to the care of Pusey), Pusey remained adamant. ‘Our system’, he told Maria, ‘if it is worth anything must be contrary to the world’s system’.18 Pusey’s calls for the mortification of the flesh, especially in his sisterhoods, had serious consequences for many of the young women under his spiritual guidance. A few women even died, ‘worn out … by the cramped mental life, and the bodily austerities’.19 Pusey himself,


writing in 1879 admitted, ‘Of course blunders were made; some about health, grave’.20 There comes a point when such severity against the human body becomes a symptom of something different. There seems to be a hatred of nature itself and particularly of the power of the female body which shares nature’s capacity for reproduction. Excessive mortification of the body such as Pusey practised seems to be a selfinflicted martydom, in which the body is the enemy. During an illness in the autumn of 1846, when Pusey was so sick and weak that he was unable to carry out physical penance, not even ‘resume the haircloth’, he wrote to Keble begging him to send suggestions for further penance, ‘some penitential rules for myself’.21 Keble understandably declined, and his subsequent letters to Pusey convey his suspicion of self-indulgence. Self-enforced withdrawal from the world and punishment of the flesh, an attitude Rossetti sums up in her ‘vanity of vanities’ poems, is not only incompatible with the idea of a sacramental universe so dear to Tractarian thought, but makes a monster out of our physical relationship with the rest of creation. In Pusey’s teaching, through the figure of Eve, the scapegoat, women become accomplices of ‘the material world, its pomps and tinsel vanities’ because ‘all which is in the world ministers to those three cupiscences, through which we fell in Eve, and wherein we conquered in our Head … the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and vainglory’.22 To become holy, women must reject the ‘cupiscences’ of Eve. Sisterhoods were an ideal way to render Eve barren and harmless. It seemed at the time, perhaps, that the Anglican Church was being ‘feminised’ and that women were being allowed increasing power in the Church. Rossetti’s early battle against many of the doctrines handed down by the Tractarians suggests otherwise. Rossetti was aware of the controversies surrounding the sisterhoods, and she seemed well aware too of the gender implications of Pusey’s version of the doctrine of renunciation. Her poetry of the time shows her understanding of the unspoken moral evaluation of male and female, where the woman’s fertility and her role in procreation are identified with the ‘lower’ life of the body and allied with the sinful ‘world’. At the age of 19 she had recognised the fundamentally male conception of God in her religion, which was alien to women’s experience despite the establishment of sisterhoods, and the negative imaging of the feminine worried her. A poem written in


9

1849, ‘A Testimony’, appears initially to endorse the doctrine of renunciation. The speaker, taking the position of ‘the preacher’ of Ecclesiastes, emphasises the masculine language used to convey the ‘vanity of vanities’ theme: ‘Man walks in a vain shadow’, ‘Our fathers went; we pass away’ (p. 78). All creation is barren and human endeavour is worthless: All things are vanity, I said: Yea vanity of vanities. Why should we hasten to arise So early, and so late take rest? Our labour is not good; (ll.49–51) In sudden contrast to this sterility, the word ‘she’ finally appears in stanza 11 with triumphant power and vitality. The female earth flourishes, despite the disgust apparent in the preacher’s words: The earth is fattened with our dead: She swallows more and does not cease: Therefore her wine and oil increase And her sheaves are not numbered: Therefore her plants are green, and all Her pleasant trees lusty and tall. A common critical mistake is to see Rossetti herself as having adopted the stance of the preacher in the poem. As in ‘Repining’, however, she is always at a distance, leaving the reader to judge. On the one hand, the (male) preacher has rejected nature. She has been outcast, and the natural processes of generation, birth and death are seen as abominations, as lust, greed and decay. The preacher’s people are misled and society suffers. His maidens ‘cease to sing’ and his young men are ‘very sad’. On the other hand, not even the misogynist loathing of the preacher manifest in the words ‘fattened’ and ‘swallowed’ can hide the triumph of the earth. To drive home its message against such misogyny, the poem ends with a direct challenge to the doctrine of renunciation, suggesting that the preacher, like the grotesque male figure in the dream ‘The Convent Threshold’, came to his ‘vanity of vanities’ conclusion through over-indulgence and

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satiety: ‘He had all riches from his birth, / And pleasures till he tired of them’. Whilst Rossetti is able to articulate in poetry her misgivings about the religion which has been handed down to her, she finds it much harder in prose, a medium which does not lend itself so easily to the tensions and ambiguities of her position. Her short novel Maude,23 written at much the same time as ‘A Testimony’, labours to convey her anxiety, hampered as a story perhaps by the theological and metaphorical status of her characters, which never allows them to become fully credible as protagonists. The story was written around a sequence of poems, which form the heart of the debate, and we are told by William Rossetti (it would seem sensible to trust his testimony here) that ‘they were all written without any intention of inserting them in any tale – except only the first two of the trio of bouts-rimes sonnets’.24 The advantage of this method of composition is that Rossetti’s positioning of her own poems at vital points in the story gives us a guide to her interpretation of them and their relationship to the central event of the text: Maude’s anxiety about the conflict between a spontaneous love of nature and its beauty, and the oppressive religious teaching she has received. Maude Foster, a young poet, seems to be on the brink of a decline, secretive (she hides her poems from her mother), pale, with ‘an expression not exactly of pain, but languid and preoccupied to a painful degree’ (30). A glimpse at one of her poems explains her religious position. Inspired by images of martyred saints, she has created her own martyrdom in ‘hated life’, dragging ‘the heavy chain whose every link galls to the bone’ (30). Although confirmed, she declines good works and refuses to attend her parish church, preferring instead St. Andrews with its rich choral tradition,25 inspired and uplifted by the beauty of its service. But even there she is haunted by guilt, as the call to renounce ‘the world’ echoes in her mind. She finally confesses her spiritual distress to her cousin Agnes by means of two poems, which show her progression from unquestioning acceptance of renunciation to a critique of it, and finally a condemnation. The first poem in the volume states the ‘vanity of vanities’ theme, which as we have seen has become a leitmotif when Rossetti refers to the renunciation of worldly vanities: ‘Weaned from the world’, as Maude calls it (p. 53). The second poem, however, records the confusion that arises when this strictly enforced renunciation of worldly


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pleasures clashes with Maude’s delight in the sensuous beauty of church vestments and music: I ask my heart with sad questioning: ‘What lov’st thou here?’ and my heart answers me: ‘Within the shadows of this sanctuary To watch and pray is a most blessed thing’. To watch and pray, false heart? It is not so: Vanity enters with thee, and thy love Soars not to heaven, but grovelleth below. (51) The heart’s instinctive movement towards the beauty of colour and harmony is brutally checked in a manner reminiscent of ‘Repining’, and the voice that interrupts seems no longer to be the sad questioning voice of the speaker, nor that of her heart, but an external voice which condemns her of complicity with the world. In his introduction to the first publication of Maude William Rossetti indignantly exclaims: ‘I cannot see that the much-reprehended Maude commits a single serious fault from title page to finish’.26 For once he is right, but he has missed the point, as have many of the later critics of Maude. The novel is not criticising Maude at all, but rather, through her suffering, exposing the extremism of a religious position that denies the beauty of the natural world or of human efforts to reproduce it. There is a close affinity between the ideals of the early Pre-Raphaelite Movement and the Oxford Movement’s claim in their appreciation of the beauty of nature, understood through typology and symbol, both seeking out ‘the deep spiritual significance of common things’.27 Their use of ceremony and church vestments proclaimed the importance of outward manifestation of spiritual truth. So the voice that forbids any delight in the symbolic robes or music at St. Andrews betrays the ideals of the two movements, both of which played a central role in Rossetti’s early life. Pusey’s insistence on the evil of the world, which ‘we must not love, nor the things in it’, and his condemnation of those who ‘are called in scripture by the name of “the world” which they love’,28 is singled out in Maude as inconsistent with Rossetti’s understanding and love of the natural world.29 If the things of this world are symbols and sacraments of God’s kingdom, why should we shun them? If we turn away from

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nature, how can we hear God ‘speaking to us through all which he made very good’? The starkly gendered aspect of Pusey’s evil ‘world’ is not lost on Rossetti. Maude eventually submits to the Eucharist, having been forced to confess the whole in a chance meeting with Mr. Paulson. She does enjoy some measure of relief, but it is only temporary. The poem ‘Symbols’, which comes at a crucial point in the novel when Maude is on her death-bed, brings back in full force a point of bitter dissatisfaction with the Church and its gender-biased theology. Dolores Rosenblum, in her use of ‘Symbols’ as a starting point for feminist discussion of Rossetti’s poetry, correctly identifies the rose and egg as ‘archetypal symbols of female sexuality’.30 Whilst her approach is valuable, the theological implications of the symbols need to be examined also: I watched a rosebud very long Brought on by dew and sun and shower, Waiting to see the perfect flower: Then, when I thought it should be strong, It opened at the matin hour And fell at evensong. I watched a nest from day to day, A green nest full of pleasant shade, Wherein three speckled eggs were laid: But when they should have hatched in May, The two old birds had grown afraid Or tired, and flew away. Then in my wrath I broke the bough That I had tended so with care, Hoping its scent would fill the air; I crushed the eggs, not heeding how Their ancient promise had been fair: I would have vengeance now. But the dead branch spoke from the sod, And the eggs answered me again: Because we failed dost thou complain? Is thy wrath just? And what if God,


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Who waiteth for thy fruits in vain, Should also take the rod? (p. 77) The rose points to the rose of Sharon, the beautiful female image from The Song of Songs, in which delight in physical beauty and sensuality becomes a celebration of God. ‘I am the Rose of Sharon’, Agnes tells Maude, as she explains the meaning of the emblems in her embroidery. More important still, the egg, which is a symbol of the female role in the creation of new life, is also the popular symbol for Christ’s rising from the dead at Easter. Rosenblum dismisses the theological content of the poem as ‘prim didacticism’, a ‘miniature sermon in verse’, but the full horror of the speaker’s position becomes clear only when the poem is considered theologically. The speaker is caught between justifiable anger at the stunting effect of unfulfilled female expectations (the egg and the rose) and a God (in the case of the poet herself, a God whom she loves) who endorses such injustice. Furthermore, the male symbol of God’s vengeance, ‘the rod’, threatens to become an instrument of further punishment if she acts out her frustration. The damaged female symbols, the rose and egg (and here one cannot help thinking of the pinched, grey face of the nun in ‘The Convent Threshold’) can only reiterate the repressive teachings which they have internalised. The destruction of the symbols is doubly tragic: not only are the beauty of the physical world and the female potential for creating new life rejected as sources of our understanding of God, but the potential link between woman and Christ in the symbol of the egg is lost through fear or complacency. The neglect of female symbols and the absolute power given to the male symbols in Christianity are the result of male ‘hegemony over the externalisation process, itself a linguistically mediated phenomenon’.31 Women’s internalisation of the very values which lead to their oppression serves to perpetuate the system, as the damaged rose and eggs themselves threaten the speaker with God’s anger if she complains. In the novel Maude gives a copy of the poem to her cousin Agnes, a firm upholder of Tractarian values, but Agnes is horrified by Maude’s doubts, reminds her of the gravity of an unrepentant death-bed and eventually suppresses most of the evidence of the young poet’s testimony. When Maude dies, a lock of her hair is laid by Agnes, almost as a trophy, beside a lock of hair from their friend Magdalen, who has renounced the world and entered a sisterhood.

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The other sister, Mary, tends to be overlooked in accounts of the novel, as she seems to confirm the image of the satisfied wife and mother, like that in the poem ‘A Triad’, for example, who ‘droned in sweetness like a fattened bee’ (29).32 But Rossetti is attracted by the potential of the domestic metaphor to integrate natural beauty, creative potential and, above all, the figure of Christ the bridegroom. Mary is close to the natural world, with its cats, dogs, rabbits, even a pig, its flowers and gardens, and its newborn babies (32) and will eventually become the ideal wife of Mr. Herbert,33 who, if not exactly Christ-like, suggests the name of a fine religious poet. Although Mary does not write poetry, she embroiders designs of flowers, herbs, ‘vineleaves and grapes; with fig-leaves at the corners’ (40) for her church. She inspires Maude to return to embroidery in order to fashion a present for her wedding, ‘a sofa-pillow worked in glowing shades of wool and silk’ (59), which the dying girl is most anxious should reach Mary safely. Of all the sisters, cousins and friends, it is only Mary who has Maude’s ‘unique’ (61) legacy, her beautiful embroidery. Agnes chooses poems to her own taste only, and destroys the rest. The figure of Mary is the one that contains the germ of Rossetti’s future theology, and will point the way towards a feminist vindication of the natural world and of the female body. Rev. Dodsworth eventually went over to the Roman Church in 1850 after growing disagreements with Pusey, and his place was taken by Rev. Burrows, who became a lifelong friend of Rossetti. Perhaps we owe to this kindly clergyman her continued attendance of the Anglican Church, although anger and a sense of alienation remained with her. Gender awareness in the social sphere and a recognition of injustice towards women are very much a part of Rossetti’s poetry over the next ten years, even before her friendship with the feminist Barbara Bodichon and other members of the Portfolio Society34 began; it is important to remember this when reading poems such as ‘The World’ (1854), with its loathsome Medusa-like figure. Not only does this poem highlight the hypocrisy of the male attitude towards that most hated figure of Victorian respectablity, the prostitute, but it traces the figure to its scriptural source, the Book of Proverbs: By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair: But all night as the moon so changeth she: Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy,


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And subtle serpents gliding in her hair. By day she woos me to the outer air, Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety: But thro’ the night a beast she grins at me, A very monster void of love and prayer. By day she stands a lie: by night she stands In all the naked horror of the truth, With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands. Is this a friend indeed, that I should sell My soul to her, give her my life and youth, Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell? (p. 76) The poem was written in June 1854, and in January of that year an article had appeared in The Times which renewed the debate on fallen women, in the announcement of plans for a penitentiary (which was to become St. Mary Magdelene, Highgate), and in a request for assistance. Rev. Burrows was most probably drawn into the debate35 and Rossetti herself later took up the call. Given its date of composition and Rossetti’s continuing interest in the lot of fallen women, the common interpretation, which sees the poem as a manifestation of somataphobic self-loathing in the style of Pusey, is simply inadequate. Jan Marsh, for example, despite her introduction to Rossetti’s connection with the Portfolio group, remains reluctant to accord Rossetti any place in their campaign for social reform. Rossetti was not chasing after the ‘hidden, leprous enemy within’,36 but rather accusing the enemy without, in her ironic treatment of a male mentality that defined woman as ‘that great gilded snake – a cherub’s face, the rest a reptile’.37 Eve the tempted, to the popular mind, becomes temptress herself. The subject of the prostitute inspired savage attacks on the very nature of womankind, with the complicity (or at the very least the apathy) of the Church. Whilst society frequently turned a blind eye to a man who frequented a prostitute or seduced a young girl, the moment a woman had any kind of sexual experience outside marriage she was transformed into an object of loathing: ‘In one hour daughter, sister, wife, hath become the thing from which the fondest shrink; the very name of which they dare not utter. It is too horrid to look upon, or to fashion into speech’.38 The apparent legitimacy of such attacks comes from the traditional model of man’s relationship

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to God, where the dualism of God (superior)/man (inferior) is imposed on the relationship between the sexes: man becomes the superior being and woman the inferior being, ‘the symbol of the repressed, subjugated and dreaded “abysmal” side of man’.39 William Wilberforce’s legacy of evangelical theology in the eighteenth century had left an exalted view of Christian femininity, centred on the capacity for devotion, self-sacrifice and motherhood, giving, in effect, religious status and spiritual superiority to the very fact of being female. The nineteenth century channelled this potential threat to the religious supremacy of the male into either a passionless, submissive angel of the house, or, as we have seen in Pusey’s establishment of sisterhoods, into a virginal nun. The feared sexual potential of woman, the power deriving from her femininity, was transferred to the demonic ‘world’ figure of the prostitute, to be vilified and marginalised. The origins of Rossetti’s demonic woman in ‘The World’ lie in the ‘strange woman’ of Proverbs,40 who lures unwary young men to hell: For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. (Prov. 5: 3–5) Much of the imagery used in conveying loathing of fallen women is scriptural in origin, as Rossetti points out. Ignoring the metaphorical status of the woman figures in Proverbs – the harlot (wordly wisdom) as opposed to the virtuous woman (divine wisdom) – the popular mind, through a literal misreading of the Old Testament, has forced on all women the application of prostitute or virtuous, domestic woman. In the absence of any direct statements from Rossetti herself it is difficult to form a precise picture of her transition to an understanding of her own spiritual predicament, but at this point it is helpful to consider what may be an unwitting testimony to her spiritual suffering, as it bears out the tensions in Maude and the anger of ‘The World’. During the late 1840s or early 1850s Rossetti was reading Maria’s copy of Keble’s The Christian Year and sketching rough illustrations to the poems.41 Her pictures show a gendered representation of the breaking down of the sacramental universe which was the basis for Keble’s volume. Although their execution is primitive (they


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were not likely to have been thought of as material for publication) these pictures show a marked continuity with her religious poetry of the time. Around the title of Keble’s poem for the Fourth Sunday in Advent Rossetti has drawn three female figures which show a contrasting attitude to the speaker of the poem. At the outset, where Keble’s speaker regrets his inability to read, paint or hear traces of the divine in the natural world around him, his understanding is deferred to ‘The region “very far away”’ of the afterlife, when finally we may ‘with that inward Music fraught, / For ever rise, and sing, and shine’ (p. 22)42 Rossetti’s female figures, on the other hand, are absorbed in total communion with nature and are participating untroubled in the reading, painting of and listening to an imanent divine world. Where Keble’s speaker strives in vain to hear from nature ‘What to her own she deigns to tell’, Rossetti’s women, ‘nature’s own’, already hear, see and, in the case of the central figure who is painting another woman or child, re-image. In later illustrations, however, configurations occur which depict in a most literal way the breaking down of continuity between women and the divine. In response to Keble’s ‘Ash Wednesday’, Rossetti focuses on the line ‘Then let the grief, the shame, the sin / Before the mercy seat be thrown’, but her literal rendition of ‘between the porch and altar weep’ shows an Old Testament altar and the women kneeling before it emaciated or dying. The flood of hope which lights up the conclusion of Keble’s poem in his reference to the loving relationship between Christ and His Father is absent from Rossetti’s illustration, suggesting the exclusion of a daughter. More disturbing still is her illustration of Keble’s ‘Fifth Sunday after Epiphany’. She fixes on a few words of the epigraph from Isaiah 59: ‘your iniquities have separated between you and your God’, ignoring the comforting message of Keble’s poem which promises salvation for those who reject the world, drawing instead a grotesque Medusa figure with a serpent’s tail, obscuring the body of Christ on the cross. Three female figures surround the cross in attitudes of supplication, withdrawal and death, and although an unshaded area around the cross indicates that the saviour is still there, the monstrous figure stands as a barrier between the dying women and Christ. The illustration is provoking in its literal depiction of women’s spiritual despair, and the young Rossetti has captured the essence of Victorian notions of sin centred on a prostitute’s degradation, in her serpent-like female figure. Without a language which links them directly to God, women

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have had to accept that their relationship with the divine is mediated by the male religious consciousness and its interpretation of femaleness. The women figures are dying because they are denied direct access to the saving light of the cross. One of Rossetti’s poems of January 1856, ‘Shut Out’, conveys in words the import of the illustration, that women have been denied spiritual tokens which allow them to identify with the divine: The door was shut. I looked between Its iron bars; and saw it lie, My garden, mine, beneath the sky, Pied with all flowers bedewed and green: From bough to bough the song-birds crossed, From flower to flower the moths and bees; With all its nests and stately trees It had been mine, and it was lost. A shadowless spirit kept the gate, Blank and unchanging like the grave. I peering thro’ said: “Let me have Some buds to cheer my outcast state’. He answered not, ‘Or give me, then, But one small twig from shrub or tree; And bid my home remember me Until I come to it again’. The spirit was silent; but he took Mortar and stone to build a wall; He left no loophole great or small Thro’ which my straining eyes might look: So now I sit here quite alone Blinded with tears; nor grieve for that, For nought is left worth looking at Since my delightful land is gone. A violet bed is budding near, Wherein a lark has made her nest: And good they are, but not the best; And dear they are, but not so dear.


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Bewildered by the loss of the garden of Eden and longing for her home, Eve is devastated when her request for a token from it is refused, and as punishment for her request she is denied even the glimpse she had. The original title of the poem, ‘What happened to me’, suggests the importance of the poem to Rossetti herself, and helps us understand why, in her later poems, she needs to seek out images of womankind which can re-establish the links between Eve and her garden. The composition of ‘Shut Out’, perhaps in its unequivocal recognition of her spiritual need, enabled Rossetti to move forward and, by the end of 1856, she had ‘discovered’ the powerful figure of wisdom from the Book of Proverbs, the counterpart to the despised prostitute metaphor of the ‘strange woman’. In her long poem ‘The Lowest Room’ she reconsiders her options, depicting on the one hand the dwindling femininity of the woman who aspires to a ‘male’ conception of God, but on the other recognising the potential for female spiritual empowerment represented by the figure of wisdom. With her development of the latter she began to reclaim the feminine in an emerging ideal of woman’s spirituality which looks forward to Goblin Market and beyond. The two sisters in ‘The Lowest Room’, who are engaged in an argument about the merits of the age of Homer, support two contrasting theological positions. The preacher of Ecclesiastes with his ‘vanity of vanities’ informs the thinking of the older sister, who longs for a life of passion, of achievement in the male world, where she can show her mental and spiritual strength. She renounces the common things of the world, refusing to participate in the activities of her sister, who during the conversation is engaged in embroidery, and agonises because she cannot relive the heroic ‘golden days’ of Homer. Thwarted in her desire, she resorts to a martyrdom of her own, embracing renunciation and defending her position by quoting the preacher of Ecclesiastes:

Vanity of vanities he preached Of all he found, of all he sought: Vanity of vanities, the gist Of all the words he taught. (p. 205)

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Taking our critical and theological bearings from a poem like ‘A Testimony’, we see that by introducing the renunciation theme, the elder sister has allied herself with the sterility of a world which has rejected the feminine, her faded femininity the price she has to pay to exercise her mental and spiritual strength in the heroic martyrdom of Pusey’s self-denial. In terms of her own womanhood, however, she has lost her place in the spiritual order; she has lost the special way in which femininity reflects the face of God, the way woman in her active ability to create and nurture is able to link nature and the infinity of God. The elder sister is consequently no longer able to see God in His creation and can only look back, or forward to life after death, ‘When all deep secrets shall be shown’. The figure of the elder sister, with her striking, passionate renunciation, has been seen as a model for Rossetti herself, the stance of passive resistance becoming the position of strength from which she subverts the conventions she sees around her. There is no doubt that the position is strongly represented in her poetry, and certainly held a great deal of attraction for Rossetti the poet, but in her theology she recognises the spiritual sterility of the stance, and in ‘The Lowest Room’ we see her searching the scriptures for a figure who can better satisfy her spiritual need. For fear of enslavement by the ‘strange woman’ of Proverbs, High Church theology rejected the feminine identity of wisdom; Rossetti brings it back in the figure of the younger sister who is modelled on the virtuous woman of Prov. 31:10–21: She is the tree of life to them that lay hold upon her; And happy is every one that retaineth her. (Prov. 3:18) Get wisdom, get understanding Forget it not, neither decline from the words of my mouth: Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee; Love her, and she shall keep thee; (Prov. 4:5–6) Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; And call understanding thy kinswoman: (Prov. 7:4)


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The sensuously beautiful younger sister thrives as the elder sister declines; she is productive in the domestic sphere (she embroiders as she speaks), she is in harmony with nature, her choice of flowers from the garden ‘intuitively wise’ (p. 205, ll.212) and as wisdom spans earth and heaven, the natural world and the divine, so does she: She thrives, God’s blessed husbandry; Most like a vine which full of fruit Doth cling and lean and climb towards heaven While earth still binds its root. (p. 207, ll.249–52) Most important of all, she is closely linked to Christ. Her function in the poem is to rebuke her elder sister’s attitude of martyrdom and her use of ‘vanity of vanities’ as a motto: ‘One is here’, the younger sister murmurs, ‘Yea Greater than Solomon’. The figure of the younger sister is the key to understanding the later Rossetti, the Rossetti of the Benedicite, the lover of wild flowers and spiders, reader of the amber and onyx stone. Here she is not writing a poem about Victorian domesticity or of domesticity versus participation in the male world of action and commerce; to interpret the domestic situation literally in her poetry would be to echo the Victorian misreading of Proverbs. Rather, she is attempting to reconstruct a feminine God-language, by using metaphors, preferably scriptural ones, with which to debate woman’s relationship with God. She has revalued the literal, certainly, as her ‘fleshing out’ in Victorian terms of the virtuous woman shows, but holds up the literal in a renewed configuration in order to restore the power of the metaphor. My rejection of the renunciatory female figure as the crucial symbol in the critical appreciation of Rossetti’s work is, in effect, going against mainstream Rossetti criticism, which tends to see her in biographical and literary terms as an isolated, withdrawn and ultimately frustrated woman, locked into a stance of passionate destitution from which she is able only to subvert existing conventions. Sandra Gubar’s depiction of Rossetti as one of the ‘great nineteenth-century women singers of renunciation as necessity’s highest and noblest virtue’,43 which has to a certain extent inspired this critical tendency, although it has done much to bring Rossetti’s work to the attention of feminists and to postmodern sensibility, has worked against it in that such an approach

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cannot profitably illuminate the Rossetti of the devotional works. Gubar attempts to make sense of Rossetti’s theology in her discussion of Goblin Market and quite rightly centres on the role of Lizzie, who ‘like a female saviour, negotiates with the Goblins (as Christ did with Satan44) and offers herself to be eaten and drunk in a womanly holy communion’, but is unable to get past her disappointment that ‘the redeemed Eden into which Lizzie leads Laura turns out to be a heaven of domesticity’. Gubar’s legacy of disappointment has been a stumbling block to later critics who draw on her work. Rosenblum, as we have seen, has trouble seeing Rossetti’s theology as anything more important than ‘didacticism’.45 More recent criticism, of Goblin Market especially, still gets bogged down in the theme of ‘hope deferred’, and the utopian ‘“distant place” of the Christian afterlife … to which woman’s desire is displaced in much of Rossetti’s poetry’.46 Thus Goblin Market itself and its triumphant conclusion can never attain more than the status of ‘improved domesticity’,47 and the consequent weakening of its feminist authority leaves it open to the sort of male voyeuristic abuse that focuses on the erotic possibilities of the sisters’ relationship.48 It is not necessary to reject the figure of feminine renunciation; Rossetti continues to use her, not only for her poetic possibilities, but as recurring symbol of women’s suffering and spiritual endurance. She must not, however, be allowed to obscure the empowering figure of feminine wisdom, which gains strength in Rossetti’s theology as she begins to participate in work for and amongst women. Here feminist theology can help in our understanding of Rossetti’s work, by its reassertion of the spiritual authority of woman’s activity in all spheres through the authority and dignity of wisdom. We learn that the domestic sphere is used in Proverbs as a central metaphor to present the political and economic centre of Israel after the loss of the monarchy.49 So rather than signal submission and inferiority, the domestic scene can be considered a sign of solidarity and hope for the future. Those poems which present us with a wisdom-figure can be interpreted with this reversal in mind. Furthermore, as we will see, Rossetti’s development of this figure becomes the foundation of much of her later devotional writing. Modern feminist critique of Christianity also provides a terminology with which to discuss the spiritual difficulties experienced by Victorian women in their encounter with the male bias of Christianity, especially in their relationship with a male redeemer. Recent feminist christological enquiry has also ‘rediscovered’ the figure


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of Wisdom/Sophia as a centre of renewal and healing made available to humankind through the incarnation of Christ.50 The Old Testament source of wisdom teaching, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, from which it appears Rossetti derived her sister figure, and more recently reclaimed sources such as early Jewish wisdom theology, have been revalued for their testimony to female sacrality and as pointers to the absence of gender exclusivity in early pre-Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and work. Rossetti’s use of a domestic figuration therefore need not disappoint; rather, as we shall see, it indicates a revolutionary rejection of the dominant atonement theology of the Tractarians, in favour of a liberation christology in which the feminine becomes source of redemptive healing. Before examining Goblin Market, however, it is worth examining a ‘bridging’ poem, one that links it to her earlier wisdom figures and possibly the last major poem she wrote before her voluntary work at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary began in 1859.51 ‘From House to Home’ shows her still struggling in her attempts to work out an understanding of the way womankind can participate in redemption. In ‘The Lowest Room’ the close link between the younger sister and Christ rests uneasily between an emerging idea of the sister having a Christ-like function herself (the vine) and the necessary secondary position she has to assume in marriage, despite the suggestion (as in Maude) that the husband represents the arrival of Christ as the fulfilment of wisdom. In ‘From House to Home’, Rossetti attempts to solve this problem by conflating the figure of the redemptive sister and Christ and dismissing the male figure altogether, which suggests the poem as a link between Rossetti’s early ‘wisdom’ figures and the entirely female representation of Christ in Goblin Market. In a dream vision, the swooning female speaker sees the embodiment of feminine suffering as a woman sustained between earth and heaven, who strengthens her with an apocalyptic vision of heavenly rewards for her renunciation and suffering. The vision is strikingly portrayed and is the forerunner of some of Rossetti’s most powerful devotional poetry, but as an answer to the need for a living and active spirituality is unsatisfying. In order to reproduce the suffering of Christ in a female figure Rossetti has used the female martyr of her earlier poems, who, although able to wean the lost soul from earth-bound nature to God, is unable to re-establish contact with the goodness of the created world which she has left: the flowers, fruit,

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frogs and caterpillars which Rossetti loved. The experience of Highgate was instrumental in drawing her away from the self-absorbed martyr figure, and restoring a wholeness to the poet’s vision of feminine spirituality as a two-way bridge between the realities of everyday life in the world and God’s kingdom. Rossetti’s attention had been drawn to the plight of the prostitute in 1854, and probably, together with the rest of the congregation of Christ Church, she followed with interest the purchasing and naming of the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary on Highgate Hill. Rev. Burrows was one of the clergy on the management council of the Home and there was a constant appeal for money (annual reports show a donation by William Rossetti in 1857, ‘perhaps paid on his sister’s behalf’52) and woman helpers. The emphasis at Highgate, as at the other London penitentiaries which were established in large numbers at this time, was on spiritual instruction and training in domestic work,53 and although public opinion may have condemned the prostitute in abstract terms, the ideal of sisterhood runs through many appeals for assistance: ‘that poor, weary, outwardly-hardened, sin-debased creature – a victim to man’s brutal requirements – is, in the sight of our most holy God, your sister’.54 Sensitised as she already was to the spiritual problems faced by Christian women and the oppression of their minds and bodies, in need of an activity in which she could directly express her faith, it was inevitable that Rossetti should be drawn to the penitentiary movement. By the summer of 1859 she was closely involved in the work at Highgate, and continued until 1870 when failing health made it inadvisable. (She was diagnosed as suffering from Graves’ disease in 1871.) We do not have an account by Rossetti herself of her penitentiary work, perhaps because discussion of their work by the sisters was actively discouraged, but we do have the testimony of a contemporary, J. Ellice Hopkins, an outspoken activist against moral lethargy in the Church of England in matters of woman’s rights. Like Rossetti she found spiritual inspiration and fulfilment working at a penitentiary similar to Highgate. Her severe criticism of the Church and championing of fallen women give us an insight into the motivation of penitentiary sisters and in terms of Rossetti’s poetic and spiritual development, provides a helpful context for the reading of Goblin Market as a manifestation of spiritual solidarity towards the inmates of Highgate penitentiary.55


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Hopkins stresses the sacrality of the task of redeeming the prostitute. Prostitution is a spiritual evil; furthermore, it is evil perpetrated by men upon women. Churches, she claims, should ‘cease to look supinely on [women’s] desecration … a deadliest evil’ which destroys the true purpose of womanhood, the ‘fountain of life, and love, and purity to the world’.56 The defilement of women’s bodies by men is seen as a spiritual offence, requiring spiritual salvation, and so Hopkins envisages sisterhood as a ‘spiritual collective’ in which women rescue-workers, in ‘an act of heroic sacrificial love’, would enter brothels ‘where the regular cycle of night and day was broken’, and attempt to rescue prostitutes amidst manic laughter and jeering. On leaving the brothel and entering the penitentiary the prostitute would cross into a femaledominated sphere of spiritual regeneration through participating in a series of ritual domestic duties. By treating the redemption of prostitutes in this way we see Hopkins subverting traditional separate sphere ideology, ‘by turning the home into a symbol and space for female sacrality which operates independently of the male sacred space – the church’. Like Daly’s ‘communal phenomenon of sisterhood’, in the woman-dominated penitentiary we see an alternative spiritual sphere to that of the Church. The rescue-worker, operating within an exclusively female space, assumes the priestly function by re-enacting the resurrecting role of Christ. This climate of reassertion of female spirituality is the context in which Goblin Market should be read if its theology is to be understood. Such a context validates the conclusion of the poem, ‘there is no friend like a sister’, as a statement of female spiritual strength and empowerment, the spiritual power of female domestic ritual subverting the power of the Church, and the portrayal of a female Christ demolishing the gender exclusivity of the sacred. No longer obscured by the overworked theme of ‘hope deferred’, the sisters’ sacred space of female spirituality in Goblin Market may be seen as a position of strength, not one of capitulation to an inhibiting social reality. Also to be revised is the reading of Goblin Market as an affirmation of the Tractarian doctrine of renunciation, which mars the interpretation of both Marsh and D’Amico, who so ably place the poem in its Highgate context. D’Amico is slow in moving away from Pusey’s condemnation of the flesh and consequently she interprets the poem as a warning against worldly pleasures and the ‘impossibility of ever finding full satisfaction by attempting to satisfy the body’.57 She

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does, however, recognise the closeness of the text ‘in both form and content’ to ‘the Wisdom literature of Proverbs and the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus’. Marsh’s interpretation is similar: ‘By denying gratification, the ascetic soul triumphs over desire, and is no longer in thrall to the senses. Contentment thus comes, paradoxically, from self-denial’.58 Whilst it is true that the shadow of atonement theology, the vengeful Old Testament God and the guilty Eve haunts Rossetti’s spiritual development until the end of her life, locating the sisters’ idyllic life (from which Laura is lost and to which she is eventually restored) in asceticism or self-denial simply does not answer. Both sisters sleep comfortably in a ‘curtained bed’, prepare (and presumably also eat) rich, nourishing food, cakes with ‘churned butter, whipped up cream’, and Lizzie at least sings ‘for the mere bright day’s delight’ (16). Nowhere in the poem is blame attached to pleasure of any kind. In fact, for its time, the poem is remarkable for the absence of allusions to any kind of female sin, guilt or atonement. Suggestions of sin and evil lie exclusively in the goblins, and there is no threat whatsoever of punishment to any of the maidens should they look at them or eat their fruit; only a warning that ‘their evil gifts would harm us’ (12). The domestic life of the sisters is instead a development of Rossetti’s emerging wisdom figuration: the heritage of the younger sister in ‘The Lowest Room’, the location of a female spiritual home, and a source, through Lizzie, of spiritual and physical redemption. As with J.E. Hopkins, the ritual nature of domestic duties in the poem suggests the affirmation of female identity in doing and in being. It is from this that Rossetti takes her spiritual vocabulary. The idyllic nature which surrounds the two girls is an Eden from which even the theological language of Adam has been banished, and the authority of the warning ‘We must not look at goblin men’ (l.42) stems from the wisdom and vocabulary of collective sisterhood. Laura’s fall, therefore, is a fall from sisterhood. We are told that ‘Her tree of life drooped from the root’ (18), her feminine beauty and vitality dry up, and she is no longer able to participate in the maidens’ activities. What, then, is the fruit? It is described in sensuous Pre-Raphaelite detail, causes a repeat of the fall of Eve as Laura gives in to its attraction (Dante Gabriel’s woodcut of the scene turns a goblin’s tail into a lurking serpent), is closely associated with illicit sexual experience (we have the example of poor Jeanie) and is


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located at the point of intersection between an evil male goblin world and the female wholeness of the maidens’ activity. Clearly, the fruit has multiple associations and the poem itself is dense with intertextual allusions, but for our purpose of theological enquiry its interest lies in the effect it has on Laura. Once she allows herself to be exposed to the sensuous attraction of the luscious fruit and eats it, she moves into a sphere dominated by the duplicitous morality of the goblins, which are unambiguously male, and is no longer able to participate in the life-giving female activities within the matrix of sisterhood. Through the deception of the goblins, she has been tricked into surrendering control over her womanhood, becoming a re-interpretation of herself in the male mind as she greedily sucks the fruit; as a consequence, she becomes the erotic creature of the later Pre-Raphaelite painting, Dante Gabriel’s ‘Jenny’, the plaything of the male imagination: ‘not as she is but as she fills his dream’.59 By yielding a lock of her hair, symbol of her womanhood, Laura also becomes as dead to her physical and spiritual self as Magdalene and Maude, both of whom were able to see themselves only from a male perspective: Maude a thwarted Keats, frustrated spiritually and broken physically, Magdalen a barren, unsexed nun. In the context of Rossetti’s work at Highgate, the fall into prostitution is also to accept Victorian man’s valuation of the female self, to accept the moral stereotype imposed by a patriarchal society: angel or devil, ‘a cherub’s face, the rest a reptile’. Laura is also the dying woman of Rossetti’s illustrations in Keble’s Christian Year and the grieving Eve in ‘Shut Out’. Rossetti has radically rewritten the fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees around her, and includes more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin.60 If woman’s suffering has its source in gender oppression by men, there is real difficulty in accepting the efficacy of a male saviour who would thus seem to be participating in such oppression. This has led to the rejection of Christianity by many feminists, not least Daly herself in her anti-Christian phase. Rossetti’s capacity to envisage a ‘female saviour’ from within Christian theology, however, allows her to continue living and writing within the tradition of the Church without sacrificing her integrity as an active worker against woman’s oppression. Once the traditional ontological guilt of Eve is removed, as in Goblin Market, the gender duality of redemption falls away, and Rossetti

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can restore Christ’s liberating role to the oppressed, in this case women. It no longer matters whether Christ is a man or woman, because gender difference is subordinate to Christ’s redeeming function. Rossetti re-images Christ through the actions of Lizzie, in the context of the life-giving wholeness of the wisdom metaphor which she has used in previous poems as an antidote to spiritual sterility and physical decline. Lizzie therefore is Christ inasmuch as she is a manifestation of those aspects of the redeemer which are directly needed in the salvation of Laura – those which Rossetti associates with her wisdom figures: activity, vitality, fruitfulness, love (‘The Lowest Room’), compassion, suffering and spiritual authority (‘From House to Home’) – and so Lizzie is able to bring about the reversal of Laura’s physical and spiritual subjection and dependency in relation to the goblins, and heal her, body and soul. Lizzie, moved by compassion for the dying Laura who has withered away under the spell of the evil fruit, sets out to save her by obtaining for her another taste of the goblin fruit for which she longs. Of course, the goblins will not allow her to take the fruit away – their only interest is to claim another victim – and insist she eat it on the spot. When she refuses, they use violence against her in a symbolic rape, suggesting the physical abuse many of the women at Highgate must have experienced: Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her, Elbowed and jostled her, Clawed her with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soiled her stocking, Twitched her hair out by the roots, Stamped upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeezed their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat. (ll.398–407) Lizzie stands firm, natural images of fruitfulness and virginity proclaiming the strength of her womanhood, and they are powerless against her, disappearing without trace but leaving fruit pulp and juice on her body, which she is able to take back to Laura.


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Taken from the hands of the goblins, the fruit brings death. Given by Lizzie, it restores life. Through her body womankind has been offended and through her body she must be healed, hence the sensual and erotic language of Lizzie’s celebration of the Eucharistic feast, which is needed to heal her desecrated female sexuality: She cried ‘Laura’, up the garden, ‘Did you miss me? Come and kiss me, Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, Goblin pulp and goblin dew. Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me: For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men’. (ll.464–74) The effect the fruit has on Laura calls to mind Christ’s acts of healing recorded in the Gospels, particularly the casting out of demons. Laura’s leaping and writhing is reminiscent of the demon-possessed man of the tombs in Mark 5:1–20, or the boy with the dumb spirit of Mark 9:17–29, who wallowed, grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth, pining away until Jesus cast out the demon. Like the boy, Laura falls down senseless and awakens the next morning restored to life, health and the fruitfulness associated with the sisterhood of wisdom. The conclusion of the poem, in celebrating the triumph of Lizzie and her act of sisterly redemption, proclaims Christ as sister and friend of the vulnerable, of children, of daughters and of women. To continue the parallel with Mark’s Gospel, the feminine image of Christ surrounded by young children in Mark 10:13–16, when brought to bear on Laura’s calling of the little ones, strengthens her emphasis on spiritual and redemptive sisterhood. The validity of Jesus’ teaching for women, which the conclusion promotes, lies not in the sense that to be weak is to be Christ-like (although it does not exclude such a parallel) which, as we have seen, traps women in a subordinate position, but because it is specifically directed towards the liberation of the defenceless, the powerless and disenfranchised, it speaks to women; it recognises their experiences. In the incident of Mark’s

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Gospel Jesus was angry when his disciples denied children direct access to him, and taking the children in his arms proclaimed his affinity with them, ‘for of such is the kingdom of God’ (Mark 10:14). Through identification with the figure of wisdom which validates women’s experience, Rossetti claims the gospel as her own, and Christ her guide and friend. With their children gathered around them, Laura and Lizzie pass on the message of sisterhood: ‘For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.’

2 Later Poetry, Including The Prince’s Progress and Annus Domini

I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel. Genesis 3:15 During the period when she was writing and publishing Goblin Market, Rossetti was particularly close to the Langham Place Circle of feminists and kept up her contributions to the Portfolio Society, to whom she sent the forerunner of The Prince’s Progress, ‘The Prince who arrived too late’. To Bessie Parker’s newly formed English Woman’s Journal, she also sent ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock’ and ‘A Royal Princess’, and was rewarded with a note in the journal on the publication of Goblin Market. She is seen to share the indignation of the Circle against the oppression of women, the exploitation of prostitutes and of working-class women and to press for a greater role for all women in the shaping of society and the alleviation of suffering. In ‘A Royal Princess’ especially, Rossetti shows her sympathy for their cause. Her protagonist, a pampered and docile subject of patriarchal oppression, breaks out of her confinement and rushes to certain death, to give all her jewels to the starving mob who have besieged the palace of her tyrant father. She echoes the words of Esther who saves her people: They shall take all to buy them bread, take all I have to give. I, if I perish, perish; they today shall eat and live; (103–4) 31

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The feminist Victoria Magazine, whose launch she attended, benefited from her poem ‘LEL’. It may well be the influence of these feminists which inspired the daring reworking of Christian doctrine that we saw in Goblin Market, helped perhaps by Barbara Bodichon’s reports of feminist theological controversy in America.1 At about the same time as Goblin Market Rossetti wrote its similarly daring counterpart in prose, ‘Hero’,2 a short story which retrieves the treasures of the goblin world, placing them in a female ‘fairyland’, ultimately resolving the different elements of the tale into a trinity of father, son-in-law and daughter. The resources of the glittering Pre-Raphaelite world, rather than being a source of destruction as in Goblin Market, are used for spiritual healing and renewal, as Hero learns not to see herself in terms of men’s approval, returning wiser to ‘man-side’, to a father who in turn recognises that he has failed his daughter: ‘I, who could not save’ (209). Yet despite a continuing sensitivity towards gender injustice, by 1864 Rossetti was seeing less of her feminist friends, dropping out of the Portfolio Society and most probably also discontinuing her work at the penitentiary. The English Woman’s Journal had failed because of financial problems, and although there seems to have been no outright break in her relationship with Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, Rossetti did not hesitate to send a poem to the journal’s successor, Victoria Magazine. Sharing as she did with the group a sense of outrage at the treatment of women, the question why Rossetti did not work more closely with the Langham Place Circle, or indeed liaise more fully with any of the intellectual circles where women’s issues were coming to the fore, must be asked. The emphasis on women’s philanthropic activity in The English Woman’s Journal fits in well with what we know of Rossetti’s sympathies and there seems not to have been any active campaign for woman’s suffrage which might have come in conflict with her religious beliefs.3 Yet Rossetti remained aloof, and one suspects that she saw these journals simply as vehicles for publishing her poetry, and apart from a general feeling of sisterhood in alleviating the suffering of women, never saw her work as akin to theirs. In her discussion of Victorian feminism Barbara Caine stresses the diversity of approach exhibited by feminists in the nineteenth century. Her point is helpful in our discussion of Rossetti’s feminism in explaining how difficult it was for women working for women’s

Later Poetry, Including The Prince’s Progress and Annus Domini

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rights to see each other as part of a common movement. In the early days the woman’s movement was by no means unified, and women tended to articulate reform from within their own set of values and assumptions, alternatively reassured or threatened by co-workers in a situation where ‘the wrong move or the wrong approach would be disastrous, setting back the whole feminist cause irremediably’.4 It was harder than we realise to see a common thread running through one’s work and that of possible rivals. Rossetti was particularly vulnerable in that she did not have the firm social or financial backing which many suffragists enjoyed. She had to court the goodwill of publishers and had to tread warily to avoid offending her brother William, on whose kindness she and her mother depended. William seems largely to have ignored (or chosen to ignore) her association with the Langham Place Circle and she would certainly have embarrassed him had she taken a public stance on the Woman Question. In short, Rossetti belonged to a different world. A glance at Barbara Bodichon’s feminist manifesto Women and Work shows how far she was from the life of financial struggle into which Rossetti was born. Bodichon was writing from a position of social and financial privilege, addressing women of similar social outlook. Some of the sweeping generalisations in the book must have been hurtful to an unmarried woman, approaching middle age and almost entirely dependent on the charity of her brother: No human being has a right to be idle, no human being must use the earth as a stable, and ‘eat off his own head.’ … It is a good thing to ask ourselves daily the question, ‘Have I eaten my head off today?’5 The Rossetti women were very thrifty and dressed plainly, but must have been conscious of themselves as a burden on William, especially after his marriage. Bodichon also betrays her distaste for the homely duties of everyday life, pouring scorn on those who, out of childish obedience, ‘spend their lives in ministering to the little fancies and whims of a father or mother’, and who by ‘wasting their lives in such trivial duties … weaken their own intellects and hearts’.6 There would certainly have been a clash there. Not only did Rossetti’s work tend towards the re-valuation of woman’s everyday experiences, but the

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poet’s care for her beloved mother and aunts was a duty she took seriously. Unable because of bad health to earn her living as a governess, and struggling to earn what she could from her writing, Rossetti could only have been offended by Bodichon’s descriptions of ‘faded’ women of thirty-five, ‘getting meagre, dried up, sallow, pettish, peevish’ because they haven’t had a chance to learn a trade such as watch-making. Finally, although Bodichon is right when she states unequivocally that money is power, she assumes that there will be equality in the workplace and that the equality of women with men had already been established in England, ‘because it is a Christian country’. Such an assumption was far from true, with prejudice against women particularly marked in the Church. Here lies the fundamental difference in outlook between the two reformers. Rossetti makes no such assumption. She is faced with a religion dominated by patriarchy, whose structures and language exclude women’s experience. Furthermore, she is socially bound and dependent on others whose goodwill she must cultivate. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, she loves her family and friends and at all costs wishes to avoid embarrassing them. Eccentricity is not forgiven in the poor. Her aim therefore is transformation rather than the appropriation of male privileges. She recognises the warped religious images of womankind which society has internalised and therefore searches for affirmations of sisterhood which will give women power to change oppressive structures. There is no head-on collision with religious authorities – indeed she avoids confrontation of any kind, but works patiently from within. Her agenda contrasts sharply with the central message of Women and Work, which is that women must do what men do, or risk dropping below them. Bodichon quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Preface: The honest, earnest man must stand and work; The woman also; otherwise she drops At once below the dignity of man, Accepting serfdom. The assumption here is that worth depends on capacity for production, and if woman wants to achieve equality, she must equal man in the workplace. Rossetti’s understanding is perhaps further-reaching than


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this, with the recognition that if women are to establish their own authority, it must be by the reversal of the deeply ingrained assumption of their moral inferiority and by a triumphant assertion of the value of womanhood, rather than simply by going out to work. Because it stresses ‘difference’ rather than claiming ‘equality’7 Rossetti’s feminism can easily be overlooked by the modern critic. She often has to articulate new ideas from within Victorian ideals of womanhood and can so easily be seen to have internalised the oppressive values of her society. But as Barbara Caine (pp. 16–17) points out, ‘had these mid-Victorian feminists not accepted and addressed the ideal of womanhood articulated in Victorian domestic ideology, they would not have been able to speak to their contemporaries at all’. Rossetti did have opportunities to discuss religious matters within her church circle, however, and two clergymen are prominent in her biographies: Rev. Burrows, a friend since his taking over of Christ Church in 1850, who wrote the foreword to her first devotional volume, Annus Domini, in 1874, and Dr. R.W. Littledale, a High Church friend of the Rossettis’ good friends, the Scotts, and chaplain to a London Sisterhood. Although Rossetti’s emphasis on the moral superiority of women was probably derived from evangelical notions of woman’s purity and came through her mother, Rev. Burrows appears to have had a considerable influence on her in his fair-minded attitude towards women, fallen women in particular. In a sermon to raise money for the Oxford Female Penitentiary he stressed the fundamental innocence of many women who had been duped into prostitution, maintaining society’s responsibility for addressing the issue, even suggesting the complacency of many parish churches8 and considering the inmates of a penitentiary as ‘probably far less guilty than many out of it’. His high esteem of womankind mirrors the evangelical idolisation of woman’s purity; but although he obviously admired and supported woman’s efforts in ‘doing the work of the ancient deaconesses’ in sisterhoods, his language is tinged with sentimentality: The sweet sister, the type of purity to brothers, the supporting wife, the mother of children, the head of a household, the Christian matron, dignified even in poverty, honoured in old age, – One can discern the origin of Rossetti’s interest in the lot of fallen women through Burrows’ care for and appreciation of his parishioners,

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which is evident in his little history of Christ Church.9 He was a High Churchman, but rejected the excesses of the movement,10 and was thus in a position to assuage much of the anger generated in the young Rossetti by Dodsworth and Pusey’s extremism. He encouraged both Rossetti sisters in their work, but there is an absence of intellectual challenge in his writing and it was most probably Littledale, a controversialist by nature, who roused Rossetti to more daring theological discussion. Jan Marsh attributes to Littledale’s encouragement Rossetti’s first steps in devotional writing, as he strongly supported improved religious teaching for women. She quotes from his 1874 publication The Religious Education of Women: Woman as well as man must look up directly to her creator, for we read of woman, as of man, that she was created in the image of God. Conformity to that image, therefore, not to the blurred and defaced impression of it left faintly traceable on man’s battered soul, is to be her ideal.11 Although it is more likely to have been Burrows who encouraged Rossetti to publish her theological reflections, she sought Littledale’s approval for her first publication, Annus Domini. A glimpse at Littledale’s writing gives us an idea of the difficulties Rossetti must have faced in religious discussion, even with one of the more enlightened theologians of the time. Littledale’s volume on women’s religious education, although apparently dedicated to the religious emancipation of women, would have done little to instil confidence in a woman writer. Rossetti’s ideas and those of other woman activists in religious matters may well have been Littledale’s inspiration for the volume, but The Religious Education of Women, despite his sincere attempt to be helpful, testifies to the lack of real understanding on the part of the Church (and of Littledale himself) of women’s religious alienation, and to the blurring of important issues in an attempt to assimilate women’s protests into an unchanged patriarchal structure. In contrast to what would seem the attitude of most well-known High Church figures, however, Littledale had listened with sympathy to women’s grievances in theological matters. His accounts of their problems in the first part of his essay ring true to the testimony we have of the period and could have come from Rossetti herself, so


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similar are they to the legacy of spiritual suffering in her writing up to this time. An oppressive religious education for women which deprives them as women of ‘wholesome and harmonious development’, he claims, is a ‘deliberate effort to counteract the purpose of God’.12 Furthermore, stripping a prospective convent sister of ties of affection and of possessions is repressive and ‘is an effort to crush out the affections and the ties of association’, in themselves necessary to avoid ‘selfism’ and to promote ‘altruism’. As Marsh has noted, he accuses as immoral the doctrine encapsulated in Milton’s ‘He for God only, she for God in him’, seeing femininity also as a part of the image of God: ‘If we limit her, it is because we have first limited Him’. ‘Women’, he claims, ‘should be strong, true, liberal, wise, and just’, and, noting the scriptural figure of wisdom, ‘such as have had capacity trained into practical efficiency and decisiveness; like the noble portrait in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs’. As Littledale’s argument unfolds, however, he becomes increasingly caught up in efforts to convince the male reader that women would be far pleasanter if they were better educated spiritually, as it would remove that fussy and frivolous nature ‘in which women often jar against the sensitive nerves of men’. The figure of divine wisdom, as we have seen, is mentioned only in her domestic role, and the real plea of women is distorted so that once more women are put in their place: One of the most ardent female champions of women’s rights has said that it is high time that the woman’s side of religion should be heard from the pulpit, that men have too long had the monopoly, and have set the masculine aspect of Christianity too exclusively and persistently forward. Begging the lady’s pardon, I cannot but think that the exact contrary is the truth. To me, judging from the sermons I have heard and read, and the devotional books I have examined, it is precisely the feminine way of regarding theology, and not the masculine, which is in the ascendant amongst us … . The broad fact is that a negative and unprogressive faith is usually taught, and that by all schools alike. The shibboleths may vary in accent, but they are all pitched in the treble cleff, and one does long for the mighty bass of a masculine theology. What promises to be a document on women’s religious emancipation is ultimately oppressive because Littledale is fearful of the feminine

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in theology, equating it with inferiority and weakness, and is unable to grasp the true nature of women’s objection to the male bias of Christianity. What he sees as ‘the feminine way of regarding theology’ is simply a projection of the way the male-dominated Church would like women to relate to theology. The desolation and despair which underlie Rossetti’s next major poem, The Prince’s Progress, owe as much to her intellectual and spiritual loneliness as they do to her perception of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s tardy marriage to Lizzie Siddall. She is able to image woman as Christ the liberator and redeemer, as we saw in Goblin Market; a ‘male Christ’ however, in terms of Victorian manhood or priesthood, is unworkable as a redeemer for women and so is doomed to failure. Her jokes about her ‘reverse of the Sleeping Beauty’ in the writing of ‘The Prince who arrived too late’ belie the seriousness of the poem’s accusation against ‘the mighty bass of a masculine theology’. In her account of Rossetti’s typological hermeneutics Linda Peterson has correctly identified the relationship between her two major poems, with Goblin Market, which ‘narrates a tale of women acting christologically to save other women, and of their passing this hermeneutic tradition to their daughters’ seen ‘as a pair of which The Prince’s Progress comprises the other half’.13 Her commentary on the presentation of the tardy prince as a Christ-figure is particularly good: ‘He is like the bridegroom of the New Testament parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:5) who wait while he tarries’, and like the bridegroom of Psalm 19:5, who comes ‘out of his chamber, and rejoices like a strong man to run a race’. She also identifies a ‘community of women’, and their accusatory ‘Too late, too late’ (l.482). However, by limiting the theological scope of the two poems, which she considers first as a response to Dante Gabriel and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and second, as subversion of ‘the gender divisions to which Victorians were so prone’ in their biblical hermeneutics, she is unable to do justice to Rossetti’s writing as criticism of patriarchal Christianity itself. She misses in particular the Victorian resurgence of theological misogyny and the consequent salvific impotence of the male figure, both as priest and as redeemer. In a later article Dawn Henwood goes further in recognising more specifically the theological significance of the poem, and its origin in spiritual desolation and hopelessness: In this version of Christ coming to claim his Church for his own, neither a worthy Bridegroom or a worthy Bride is to be found. In the


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shifting symbolic ground of this poem, not only are gendered roles de-stabilised, but a central Christian myth is gravely undermined. Far more than a courtship hangs in the balance of a poem so charged with sacred relevance. When the Prince and Princess fail to fulfil their roles, they fail, in effect, to fulfil Biblical prophecy. Given the poem’s inescapable mythical context, its closing funeral lament gives voice, we realise, to the deepest, darkest spiritual despair.14 Henwood confirms Joan Rees’s disclosure of ‘“a nightmare” quality underlying the surface allegory of traditional readings’, and our own study of Rossetti’s developing theological awareness identifies more clearly this sub-text of horror. ‘Traditional readings’, Rossetti finds, are patriarchal readings, and if she probes them further, she risks utter despair in finding that they, like the rest of the trappings of Christianity, are after all no more than the tools of oppression. Take, for example, the milkmaid episode. Henwood sees subversion in the Prince’s ‘interpretive blindness’ (87) in not recognising the milkmaid with her ‘shining serpent coils’ (l.94) as a representative of evil. But the Victorian reader would immediately recognise the milkmaid as an evil temptress, a Miltonic Eve leading Adam astray. There is no subversion here. The narrator even raises in her audience if not a laugh, then a wry smile, in the revelation that the Prince is making excuses for himself. Rossetti knows her audience: Loth to stay, yet to leave her slack, He half turned away, then he quite turned back: For courtesy’s sake he could not lack To redeem his own royal pledge Ahead too the windy heaven lowered black With a fire-cloven edge. (ll.85–90) The subtext of despair emerges clearly only when, for example, the representation of the milkmaid is compared with Goblin Market’s reworking of the Fall and Rossetti’s refusal to contemplate a sinful Eve. In The Prince’s Progress Eve (in the form of the milkmaid), the scapegoat herself, rather than the Prince, becomes the serpent as we watch: So he stretched his length in the apple-tree shade, Lay and laughed and talked to the maid,

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Who twisted her hair in a cunning braid And writhed it in shining serpent-coils, And held him a day and night fast laid In her subtle toils. (ll.91–6) Laughing at the Prince’s laziness or stupidity is not threatening to the male reader, because, like satire, it never applies to him and because the patriarchal ego has the safety net of Eve’s sin and the general inferiority of women to fall back on. There is always a ‘wicked milkmaid’ to blame. Like the Princess in her poem, Rossetti is trapped by a deeply internalised gender prejudice. One way forward is the acceptance of ascetic suffering and the ‘crown’ of heroic martyrdom, which the attendants are holding out to the Princess. But Rossetti has categorically rejected that barren road, as we have seen, despite its illusory glory. Despite the rejoicing of her attendants that she has gone on to claim her royal crown, the Princess in death must ‘wear a veil to shroud her face / And the want graven there’ (ll.507–8). She must be hidden, lest anyone recognise the true loss; that she would have brought fruitfulness and life to a sterile world: The frozen fountain would have leaped, The buds gone on to blow, The warm south wind would have awaked To melt the snow. Her attendants are reiterating the suffocating illusion that they have been taught: recompense in death for suffering on earth. There is nothing redemptive about this kind of suffering. Another poem of the period, ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children’, has been recognised as a poem of outrage against social hypocrisy, but it fits in here as a cry of disillusionment and anger against the Church and a Christianity which blights an innocent life, and drives a wedge between mother and daughter. The poem is spoken from the point of view of an illegitimate daughter whose mother (‘My Lady at the Hall’) can never acknowledge her because of the taint of illegitimacy. From an accusation of social hypocrisy, ‘the


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decent world’ whispering and pointing fingers, the poem moves to accuse the Church of complacency: ‘All equal before God’ – Our Rector has it so, And sundry sleepers nod: It may be so; I know All are not equal here. (ll.501–5) It finally locates the violence perpetrated by the father on the mother within the scope of Genesis 3, only here the ‘daughter of Eve’ is (‘almost’) cursing in turn: But I could almost curse My Father for his pains; And sometimes at my prayer Kneeling in sight of Heaven I almost curse him still: Why did he set his snare To catch at unaware My mother’s foolish youth; Load me with shame that’s hers, And her with something worse, A lifelong lie for truth? The vengeful God of ‘Symbols’ has returned to threaten with his ‘rod’. ‘Tomorrow He may save’, the speaker concludes – but he probably won’t. Again and again, Rossetti battles with the legacy of Genesis 3, and Tertullian’s ‘You are the devil’s gateway… . On account of your desert, that is death, even the Son of God had to die’.15 It is unlikely that she had access to the work of American women such as Sarah Grimke or Eliza Farnham in their defence of Eve, and would have been referred to the scriptures if she had doubts about the interpretation of the Fall. Nevertheless, there is a similarity between their work and Rossetti’s cautious but determined reassessment of Eve. Her need differs sharply from that of her social reformer friends who are fighting for equal rights in the workplace, but her work also differs from that

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of others working in organised religion. Catherine Booth, for example, asserts woman’s right to preach. Rossetti never insists on a priest-like role in the Church. In a way, her problem is far more serious because her quarrel is with Christianity itself. Like the Americans, she needs to work out her relationship to it and to judge what she sees there. We saw her early frustration with the Tractarian fervour of Christ Church, Albany Street, and her dislike of convent life. The confidence that it is possible to have a ‘female saviour’ in terms of women’s supporting sisterhoods shines through Goblin Market. But the fact is that Jesus was a man and Christianity has become a patriarchal religion. Rossetti is faced with the redemptive inefficacy for women of this patriarchal religion. How can a woman achieve the salvation of Christ when divided from Him by a gender barrier? Must woman be forever ‘shut out’ of full participation in theological matters because of her moral inferiority, which the Bible appears to state unequivocally? Rossetti’s attention turns to scripture itself to try and understand. With ‘Eve’ (1865) she faces the biblical text head on, and begins to rebuild her relationship with Christ on a firmer foundation than before, through a revaluation of her own relationship with key women in the text. In the poem she does not deny Eve’s sin; the words of Genesis still stand: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. (Gen. 3:6) Eve, the speaker in Rossetti’s poem, takes upon herself the blame for bringing death to her race, overcome by grief at the death of her son at the hands of Cain: While I sit at the door Sick to gaze within Mine eye weepeth sore For sorrow and sin: As a tree my sin stands To darken all lands; Death is the fruit it bore. (ll.1–7)


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She does not, however, accept responsibility for Adam’s act of disobedience: Hadst thou but said me nay, Adam, my brother, I might have pined away; I, but none other: (ll.18–21) And having thus separated her action from his, is able to dwell on the consequences of the fall to her as a woman: ‘I, Eve, sad mother Of all who must live, I, not another, Plucked bitterest fruit to give My friend, husband, lover; – O wanton eyes, run over; Who but I should grieve? – Cain hath slain his brother: Of all who must die mother, Miserable Eve!’ (ll.26–35) The most striking aspect of Eve’s understanding of her action is that it is not a sin, in that she did not deliberately set out to disobey; rather, in carrying out her activities of tending, nurturing and giving life she made an error of judgement: ‘The Tree of Life was ours’, ‘I chose the tree of death’. The consequence of her error brings great grief to her, not because she is cursed by God, but through the negation of her role as life-giver. All her children will die. Like Rachel weeping for her children, she grieves, and all creation grieves with her. Rossetti’s definition of evil reappears in a similar form in some modern feminist studies, and this similarity is worth looking at in more detail because in her study of Eve, Rossetti begins to move forward with confidence to revalue the physical world: Women’s relational way of being in the world typically creates in them a deep vulnerability to being rendered desolate when suffering visits those whom they love and care about. This experience is

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so powerful that feminist theorists are using it to rewrite the definition of evil. Whereas in the history of Western thought a preponderance of definitions of evil has concentrated on human disobedience to divine law and thus on ‘sin’, some feminist ethical analysis now argues that women’s experience identifies the most fundamental evil to be the phenomenological conditions of pain, separation, and helplessness.16 Such a definition of evil is empowering to woman, because in her grief she becomes God-like, echoing God’s sorrow at the destruction of His creation, and it is even more liberating for the Victorian woman because her emotional reactions, commonly held to be stronger than those of men (and often termed ‘hysteria’17) were seen as an indication that she was less rational than man, more tied to the body and therefore morally inferior. Eve’s sorrow is a vital step out of the drugged lethargy imposed on the Princess of The Prince’s Progress, not only in its redefinition of woman as image of a suffering God, but also in its legitimisation of her anger and protest. The narrative comment at the end of the poem allows the reader to withdraw from contemplation of Eve and her grief, and view the situation from a distance. Moving away from the shared grief of Eve’s creatures, the eye discerns the serpent, condemned to writhe in the dust for his part in the Fall: Only the serpent in the dust Wriggling and crawling, Grinned an evil grin and thrust His tongue out with its fork. (ll.67–70) The evil force working against creation is identified as male, linking Adam rather than Eve with the serpent, and suggesting that the serpent knew Eve to be the more powerful figure of the two because her feminine nature was further from his own than that of Adam. In her discussion of the poem D’Amico refers to Rossetti’s unpublished notes on Exodus 1:22, commenting on ‘her desire … to see Eve in terms of life, not death’.18 Rossetti writes: There seems to be a sense in which from the Fall downwards the penalty of death has been made on man and life on woman. To


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Eve: ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children:’ to Adam: ‘Unto dust shalt thou return’. The mere name Eve was ‘the mother of all living’, or it may be (?) of the living one. May it so be that in this distinction is hidden the true key which supercedes any need of an ‘Immaculate Conception’, that from the father alone is derived the stock and essence of the child; the mother, transmitting her own humanity, contributing no more than the nourishment, development, style so to say. The father active, the mother receptive. Thus dead Adam must be the father of a dead child: the Living God the Father of the Living Son. Thus ‘Who can bring a clean thing out of the unclean? Not one’, would darkly set forth the same immutable fact: (All this I write down craving pity and pardon of God for Xt’s sake if I err).19 Rossetti’s focus on the tongue of the serpent is also to be found in ‘Eve’. Satan corrupted Eve with his speech, a vital point in Rossetti’s later discussions of language. In her endeavour to establish the Christ-likeness of woman, Rossetti produced a poem which, more than any other of hers, claims once and for all the acceptability of womanhood to Christ; a poem which reverses the grief of ‘Eve’. ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written in 1871, rather later than ‘Eve’, and presented to the American periodical Scribner’s Monthly, where it was advertised as ‘a little poem … wise in a sort of child-wisdom, sweet and clear and musical’.20 The poem reconstructs the birth of Christ, emphasising the immediate, the physical and, in the context of a desolate winter landscape, the stable becomes the locus of the early physical relationship of the infant Christ with the natural world, and with his mother: Enough for Him whom cherubim Worship night and day, A breastful of milk And a mangerful of hay; Enough for Him whom angels Fall down before, The ox and ass and camel Which adore. (ll.17–24)

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The poem does not mention Mary by name, because she has become representative of all womankind after Eve, sharing in the restoration of life in the birth of Christ. In surrendering her name, Mary comes alive as a woman: loving, nurturing and giving birth. Moreover, not only is womankind and her physical body established as acceptable to Christ, but as the poem suggests, there is a special physical and emotional closeness which women are able to share with Him: But only His mother In her maiden bliss Worshipped the Beloved With a kiss. (ll.29–32) Physical acceptability was needed in Victorian times, more than perhaps is recognised today, in order to counteract revulsion towards the body in general, and the female body in particular, which we saw was exaggerated in the Tractarian revival of the tradition of the Church Fathers. But Rossetti is claiming more than acceptability. She is reasserting woman’s role in re-establishing life for all humanity. Eve was tricked by the serpent, but she is given the chance to reverse the evil he brought into the world. God’s words to Eve are seen as a prophecy rather than a curse: And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, cursed art thou above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. (Gen. 3:14–16) Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza uses a speech promoting woman’s suffrage from an African-American woman and former slave, Sojourner Truth, to illustrate a similar affirmation of feminist christology: That little man in black there say a woman can’t have as much rights as a man cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to


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do with him! If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, all alone, together women ought to be able to turn it rightside up again.21 In highlighting the woman’s role in the birth of Christ, Sojourner Truth, ‘points out, on the one hand, that the incarnation of Christ must be correctly understood as the collaboration of God and a woman. On the other hand, she stresses that redemption from sinful structures can be experienced only when women come together and organize for turning the “world rightside up” again’.22 Other American women too were working to defend the actions of Eve and reinterpret God’s words to Eve as prophecy. In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838), Sarah Grimke explains that Eve was not able to discern evil as she had never met an evil being before. Adam, on the other hand, had no excuse for disobeying God and, for all his claims of superiority, failed to protect his wife: Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavoured to lead her to repentance instead of sharing her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man the superiority which he claims; but as things stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve.23 As we have seen in Goblin Market, Rossetti saw sisterhood as liberating and her friendship with the Langham Place Circle testified to her general acceptance of woman’s liberation, but she had more in common with E.C. Stanton than with Sojourner Truth or the suffragists because, rather than use theology directly for social reform, her aim was to transform doctrinal concepts within theology itself. She based her christology on the experience of women, articulating a theology that is valid and liberating for women, but that nevertheless remains within a Christian doctrinal framework. She also sought to establish an equal space for women within the historical unfolding of Christianity, and the authority to speak and practise theology as full members of the Church. By the time she wrote her first major religious text, Annus Domini, she had established this authority, and laid claim as a woman to full participation in her Christian heritage. Annus Domini is a small

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collection of prayers, one for every day of the year, and Rossetti’s first prayer asserts woman’s place in the development of the faith. It establishes the genealogy of Christ as descended from Eve, and, without overturning the traditional typological interpretation, claims the fulfilment of God’s prophecy of Gen. 3:15: 1 Gen. 3:15 I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel. O Lord Jesus Christ, Seed of the woman, Thou Who has bruised the serpent’s head, destroy in us, I entreat Thee, the power of that old serpent the devil. Give us courage to resist him, strength to overcome him; deliver the prey from between his teeth, bid his captives go free; for his kingdom, set up Thy kingdom; and for the death he brought in, bring Thou in life everlasting. Amen.24 ‘Christ, Seed of the woman’, born through her agency, has power over the serpent, and woman is in her turn empowered by this relationship to request the healing promised and the reversal from the kingdom of death to one of life. Presented in this way, woman has greater authority than man to deliver the prayer. There is a close link here between Eve’s error and Mary’s role as mother of Christ, and it is one which, as Grace Janzen points out, was used by the early mystic Hildegard of Bingen to establish the place of women in the created order. Eve is the one ‘who fully represents humanity, partly as the mother of all living, and specifically as prefiguring Mary from whom the human Jesus would be born’.25 The prayers of Annus Domini have been greatly neglected in critical evaluations of Rossetti’s work, perhaps because they are seen simply as repetitions of popular scriptural quotations. The danger in analysing Rossetti’s religious works lies in ignoring the theological understanding which informs them, and although the density of allusions underlying each prayer here may vary, Rossetti takes great care in the opening pages of each of her prose works to establish a theological foundation for her operations. Moreover, as we have seen, the relationship between the scriptural quotations and the prayers is vital.26


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The second prayer develops the ideas of the first. The speaker, who in the introductory poem is unable to take her place in the line of patriarchs, ‘fainting’ from the agony of trying to make her voice heard, in order to make ‘God’s Face of Mercy shine again’, through Christ, is able to see herself as part of Christian history. It would be a mistake to see this second prayer simply as a call to renounce earthly treasures in favour of heavenly riches: 2 Gen. 16:1 I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward. O Lord Jesus Christ, our exceeding great Reward, make, I pray Thee, earth and her treasures exceeding small in our eyes: that we may long for Thee most of all, and labour to obtain Thee first of all, and that where Thou art there may also Thy servants be. Amen. The passage from Genesis states the promise of God to Abraham, who has just refused a substantial reward from the King of Sodom for rescuing Lot. Because of his integrity and his action of turning away from material wealth, Abraham is granted a greater gift, to be patriarch and father of God’s people. His seed will inherit the kingdom. The speaker of this prayer begins by claiming Jesus as her reward, and through the close identification with Christ, her ‘seed’, as descendant of Eve, is able to share a similar place to that of Abraham in the history of Israel. The prayer still functions of course as a call to turn away from earthly riches and is applicable to all Christians, because if, unlike Abraham, the Christian prefers material reward, she is effectively turning away from Christ and will therefore fail to gain his promise of salvation. As much as in the satisfaction of claiming woman’s authority, Rossetti appears to be delighting in the free play of her reasoning powers as she operates on the scriptural text. As her confidence grows, she will begin to take more ‘liberties’ with scripture, as we shall see, but she always does so with care so as not to mislead the unwary reader, and in a manner applicable to all her readers, men and women. But for the moment, she is primarily engaged in establishing woman’s place in scripture. Prayers 3–6 make similar claims for participation in the inheritance of Isaac and Jacob, ‘with that holy patriarch by prayer to hold Thee

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fast’, betraying, as is so often characteristic of women who claim spiritual authority from within patriarchal Christianity, real fears of overpresumption: I entreat Thee, when Thy Providences are dark to our eyes strengthen our faith; and whatever portion thou allottest to us, give us grace to say, It is enough. (no. 6) Christ, the source of wisdom, in these prayers becomes the way of naming the unnameable, of approaching ‘the unapproachable Majesty’ of God (7). Christ is the authority through whom the speaker both judges her society and makes supplication for those who are outcast or excluded. In their simplest form the prayers in the Old Testament section depend upon typological transference through Christ the anti-type, to applicability in the contemporary world: Ps. 31:12 I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel. O Lord Jesus Christ, Who wast forgotten as a dead man out of mind, shew forth Thy loving kindness, I entreat Thee, to all persons who in this world feel themselves neglected, or little loved, or forgotten … . (56) Psalm 31:12, from which Rossetti takes the introductory quotation, depicts the psychology of intense suffering and persecution, which is transformed into joy by the kindness and healing power of God. Christ, through his own suffering, makes the healing power of God available to all people, past and future, through His resurrection, and the speaker, through her invocation, becomes the channel through which this comfort may reach the unloved and wronged of her own generation. The formula is not an unusual one for prayers of this kind, but certain aspects of Rossetti’s delivery transform the structure from within, and her prayers push at the limits of traditional Christian doctrine. The intensity of her social criticism against the Church itself, which is often well hidden behind apparent self-blame, suggests that whilst Rossetti is writing within an established formula, her agenda is revolutionary. The introductory quotation from prayer no. 24, for


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example, insinuates that whilst ‘The strength of Israel’ will not lie, the Church does: 1 Sam. 15:29 The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for He is not a man, that He should repent. O Lord Jesus Christ, Strength of Israel, keep, I entreat Thee, Thy holy Church militant from backslidings and errors, from laxity and superstition, from coldness and lukewarmness, from dead faith and dead works, from the gates of hell and the bottomless pit. Amen. The quotation refers to King Saul’s lies, for which he was utterly rejected by God and dethroned; ‘coldness and lukewarmness’ from Revelation contain dire warnings to the Church in Laodicea, and together with ‘bottomless pit’, suggest hell as the destiny of the Victorian Church if it does not change. Beside their value as social commentary of the period, however, the poems document a revolutionary change in traditional attitudes to the biblical text, not only in terms of reinstating the ‘viewpoint of Eve’, but in her recognition of the relativity of religious language – as Sallie McFague calls it, ‘the interpretive context’.27 Rossetti’s christological transactions utilise the process of ‘naming’ (a familiar technique in Christian worship), but constantly strain against traditional use of biblical terminology, recontextualising in terms of her own concerns. From the ‘naming’ of a female Christ in Goblin Market, and the reclaiming of woman’s wholeness and acceptability to Christ ‘seed of the woman’ in her first prayer, Rossetti finds freedom to move within the scriptures, choosing names that meet her own needs and those of her society. The extension of her earlier concerns may be seen clearly, for example in the continuation of the Genesis theme. Prayer 102 names Christ as the new fruit made available to Eve, which replaces the ‘goblin fruit’ offered by the serpent: Song of Sol. 2:3 As the Apple Tree among the trees of the wood, so is my Beloved among the sons. O Lord Jesus Christ, Who art as the Apple Tree among the trees of the wood, give to us to taste of Thy Sweetness, that eating we may

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yet be hungry, and drinking we may yet be thirsty. Infuse of Thy Sweetness, I pray Thee, into Thy servants, that cleaving to Thee they may attract others also to Thee: until as the hart desireth the water brooks, all souls may long after Thee, O God. Amen. Rossetti’s use of a quotation from The Song of Songs brings physical delight to bear in our relationship with Christ, where Christ’s ‘Sweetness’, although holding us fast like the “goblin fruit”, becomes a bond of joy in our relationship with others. As we saw in Chapter 1, the figure of wisdom was a key to Rossetti’s understanding of our relationship to the physical world in its emphasis on wholeness and continuity between God and creation. Christ is named a number of times in the prayers as wisdom, and one of the most beautiful of her prayers, Prayer 170, is dedicated to Christ as the perfection of God’s love for His creation: Matt. 121; Isa. 9:6 She shall bring forth a Son, and thou shalt call His Name Jesus: for He shall save His people from their sins. O Lord Jesus Christ, the Son given unto us, Root of our life, Flower of our stock, its Fruit all perfect, and its Sweetness beyond all sweetness, teach us, I beseech Thee, to worship and adore, to love and delight in Thee. As the Father hath given Thee unto us, grant us to give back to Him through Thee all we are and all we have. Be Thou formed in every heart: that in each one of us the Almighty father may behold Thee, and be well pleased. Amen. Rossetti’s ‘Son’ strains at the limitations of the traditional use of the word in Christian worship – the male child born of Mary. Here the Son becomes root, flower and fruit, and the process of physical birth and growth is echoed in spiritual birth as Christ is ‘formed in every heart’. The similarity between Rossetti and other women mystics such as Julian of Norwich is quite striking in their ability to relate to the physical Jesus: In their greater appreciation of the physical universe, in their franker acceptance of bodiliness and sexuality … and in their choice of metaphors and themes that reinforce integration rather than separation of body and soul, these women, even while fixed in their


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time and ecclesiastical structure, developed a strand of spirituality whose principle of integration is a significant alternative to the dualist thinking which rendered spirituality in effect a male prerogative.28 Rather than a conscious imitation on Rossetti’s part, the similarity stems from a shared need to secure an alternative access to the scriptures given woman’s exclusion from theology. In her process of ‘naming’, Rossetti draws attention to the metaphorical nature of biblical language. ‘Son’ is recognised as part of human experience (the child of Mary), but is also a means of describing God’s gift of Himself to humankind, a gift which is, as God Himself, ‘unnameable’, beyond human comprehension. (In a way Christ Himself represents the gift of metaphor,29 and it is significant that all the prayers are addressed to Him.) But Christ the ‘Son’ can become so tied to its sacred context that its meaning shrinks, and for those battling to recognise God’s gift of grace in their own lives it may mean nothing at all. In her discussion of the importance of a metaphoric theology McFague describes the danger of losing relativity in scriptural language: If we lose sight of the relativity and plurality of the interpretive context, our religious language will, as with the loss of religious context, become idolatrous or irrelevant. It will become idolatrous, for we will absolutize one tradition of images for God; it will become irrelevant, for the experiences of many people will not be included within the canonized tradition.30 In this prayer Rossetti has taken the human dimension of ‘Son’ from within the experience of woman, as she did in ‘A Christmas Carol’. The growth of a child within the womb is like a plant putting out roots, flowers and fruit, and like this growing and developing embryo, we may all nurture Christ in our hearts and return the fruits of this gift to God. R.F. Littledale recommended Bible-reading for women as an antidote to the ‘pettiness’ of their minds, in the hope that it would ‘fill with lofty ideas minds which scarcely ever come in contact with good secular literature’.31 But ‘lofty ideas’, whatever these might be (Littledale does not specify), distance religious language ever further away from women’s experience and from the experience of any others

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who have had little or no contact with ‘good secular literature’. It is no wonder that Rossetti, calling on the ‘Wisdom and Knowledge’ of God, condemns as ‘subtleties of Satan’, ‘miscalled reason, or apparent facts of science, or wit and learning of misbelievers’ (234) Reason, science, learning have traditionally been denied women, and have served as a means of degradation and oppression.32 The practice of naming, whilst satisfying as a means of reversing Adam’s prerogative in naming the world, also provides a means of making the scriptures live in the mind of the general reader. Although we shall discuss the implications of Rossetti’s use of metaphor and her relation to Tractarian doctrine in later chapters, it is worth noting here how she uses metaphor to grasp the imagination of the reader, who is pulled between the physical object and the concept to which it points. Prayer 212 centres on Christ the ‘Door’, and her treatment is specifically aimed at producing tension between the two poles of meaning, the ‘is’ and ‘is not’:33 John 10:9 I am the Door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. O Lord Jesus Christ, the Door, I cry unto Thee, let us in; into Thy peace, into Thy Kingdom, into Paradise with Thee. Now while Thou wilt bestow, give us all grace to ask; while Thou mayest be found, to seek; while Thou wilt open to us, to knock. I ask, I seek, I knock: O Lord, send none away empty. Amen. The prayer sets up the dramatic situation of a cry for entry, such as in her poem ‘Despised and Rejected’ (except that here it is the speaker who risks being shut out) with suggestions of physical banging on the door, which then gives way to the elaborate rhetoric of The Book of Common Prayer and the language of corporate worship. The last urgent request interrupts the complacency of what risks becoming a dead metaphor and brings the imagination once again to the physical reality of a door. As we have seen, Rossetti’s theology develops in two directions, one radically feminist, expanding the meanings of her text to encompass female religious power, to reverse the image of woman inherited from the English Church, and to establish the validity of woman’s


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experience in Christian theology. As a result of her need to reinterpret the scriptures in this way, however, she also makes available to theology the resources of the contemporary literary world and her own poetic skill, answering the widespread need for an accessible theology. The first leads her to expanding visions of the interdependence of all creation, and the second to ever-closer scrutiny of the sacred text. Her wisdom figures lead her to highlight the ‘life-creating’ qualities of the feminine, to revalue the female body and to embrace the despised ‘emotionalism’ of women as an intuitive, life-giving force in contrast to the rational, ‘scientific’ and ultimately destructive male. Rossetti is unimpressed by Littledale’s ‘lofty ideas’, and ‘miscalled reason’; true reason, true science and true intellect come from divine wisdom as manifest in Christ. She names the world anew with images that often break down traditional barriers between conventional religious language and the everyday experiences of women. As we have seen, at times her anger and desire for re-identification match those of modern radicals such as Daly,34 but having made the choice to remain a Christian, she is constrained (but also empowered) by the traditional Christian paradigm and has to work within it, expanding, revising and realigning it. For this work of renewal, spared the usual classical and religious indoctrination often imposed on theologians, she uses her understanding of language and of poetry. She does not attack the central symbols of Christianity, but through the multifaceted figure of Christ makes them live again in the popular imagination. The inflexibility of the symbol gives way to metaphor. The physical reality of a seed, a door or an apple tree creates tension as it draws away from a sacred referent and involves the imagination in processes of re-identification and re-alignment as it struggles to achieve a focus between the two. Christ’s ‘Counsel’ (Prayer 58), which ‘standeth for ever’, is surrounded by the swirling debris of human mortality, which risks being swept away with a broom on the Day of Judgement. If the broom is taken from Isaiah 14:23, so much the better. A little of the strangeness of the Bible is restored, and so too is the impact it would have had on its contemporaries. So also its anti-social thrust, as in Rossetti’s Prayer 141, which links Christ to thieves: a social outcast, descended from ‘fallen women’, and we note her eye does not miss ‘those who sinned with them’.

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Her distance from the Tractarians here needs to be stressed; Pusey especially was horrified by the liberal attitude to Bible-reading and blamed it for the widespread religious doubt of his time: ‘If they become bewildered’, he argued in a letter of defence to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘who should bear the blame, – they who inculcate the use of ‘Private judgement’ or they who would restrain it? They who enjoin obedience to the Church which has the succession from the Apostles, or they who set the individual’s judgement as to Holy Scripture above the authority of the Church?’35 Rossetti was to a certain extent shielded from such criticism36 by the tradition of women’s devotional tracts, which would not normally have been considered to participate in anything unorthodox, and by her own avowed obedience to the Church, in Annus Domini manifest in Burrows’ foreword. But whilst such authorisation allowed her a certain amount of freedom to write on religious matters, it also limited the possibilities of their interpretation which she could put forward. Burrows’ qualified approval of the volume has dominated critical appreciation of its content to the present day, but in his comment he manages to convey the sense that her volume is simply derivative and of no consequence. Nowhere does Rossetti describe her prayers as ‘a result of meditation and as an example of the way in which that exercise should issue in worship’. This description in the introduction is from Burrows himself. His observation, whilst helpful in a general way, has perpetuated the impression that the prayers are subjective, sentimental and ultimately harmless. Few indeed are the critical descriptions of the work which do not contain the words ‘meditation’,37 or inward and outward imaginative flow. Burrows’ warning of the limitation of the prayers as being always ‘addressed to the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity’ also misses Rossetti’s quiet but firm re-instatement of Christ’s centrality in our understanding of the word of God, and her own claim through Christ to interpret the word as woman and as wordsmith. She bypasses clerical authority in her introductory quotation from Job 9:15. ‘I would make supplication to my Judge’, and although nominally disclaiming originality, proceeds to renew and revitalise the scriptures, unrecognised by theological ‘authority’ but beloved and understood by a vast number of Victorian readers.

3 Called to Be Saints and Seek and Find

Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living. Job 28:20–1 Rossetti’s next work of devotional prose, Called to Be Saints, although not published until 1881 was written before 1876, following close on the heels of Annus Domini. There is much similarity in their underlying theological understanding, and in it we can see Rossetti continue to construct her own theological models. As a development of the naming activity of the earlier volume, Rossetti takes biblical characters for development, choosing ‘the nineteen saints commemorated by name in our Book of Common Prayer, with the Holy Innocents neither named nor numbered, with St. Michael and his cloud of All Angels, with All Saints’ (from the section entitled ‘The Key to my Book’, p. xiii). With due regard for the inspired text and its sacred associations, which flow in and out through the margins of the text as a mirror to her discourse, Rossetti paints a portrait of Christ’s friends as social beings: living, loving, teaching and, ultimately, reversing the process of suffering and death through identification with the life-giving power of Christ. This parable of human endeavour and triumph is interpreted and held together by a close relationship with the rest of physical creation, itself given meaning by the event of Christ, the fulfilment of wisdom, the divine creative principle which draws all to God. Each saint is linked to a semi-precious stone and a wild flower, illustrated and described in botanical detail. This not only serves as an emblem or 57

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analogy, but becomes a miniature world parallel to our own, touching and teaching us, hinting at powers and virtues half-understood and now forgotten. Rossetti has come far from the barrenness of a religion of negation and denial; rejecting the sterility which she identifies with ‘vanity of vanities’ she has embraced the virtues of life-giving wisdom. In Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, Kent and Stanwood describe the volume as ‘a particularly splendid example’ of Tractarian publishing,1 and this is true not only of the beautiful binding and illustrations, but also of its vision of divine wisdom at the heart of a universe rich in analogy and symbol. Wisdom is at the centre of much of the Tractarian enterprise; central to Keble’s sacramental universe, for example, is St. Augustine’s explanation of wisdom’s appeal to the soul through the senses: Consider whether this be not what is written concerning wisdom; ‘she will show herself to them cheerfully in the way, and meet them with every kind of Providence:’ i.e. which ever way thou turnest thyself, she speaks to thee by certain traces which she hath impressed upon her works, and when thou slippest back to external things, recalls thee by the very forms of those external things. So that whatsoever delights thee in the body, and allures thee by the bodily senses, thou mayest perceive to be according to certain numbers; and inquiring its origin, mayest return into thyself, and understand that whatever reaches thee by the bodily senses, cannot be to thee an object of approbation or the contrary, except thou hast within thee certain laws of beauty to which thou mayest refer whatever seems outwardly fair to thee.2 For Isaac Williams also, ‘hidden wisdom’ shines forth from parable, analogy and from ‘dark and difficult sayings, conveying instruction by a kind of metaphor, or similitude’.3 He quotes Proverbs, ‘Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets, she crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates, in the city she uttereth her words’,4 and is careful to make explicit the link between wisdom and the life-force presented in Christ, who was ‘Wisdom itself’. But where Keble and Williams cautiously approach nature’s abundance, hurrying on to Keble’s ‘Poetical, Moral and Mystical phases or aspects of this visible world … considered the one great and effectual safeguard against such idolising of the material world’,5 Rossetti

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delights in the vision of cosmic order, her understanding of wisdom closer to that of the twentieth-century appreciation of the creative power of Wisdom/Sophia: The power to arrange the universe harmoniously is hers: ‘she reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well’ (8.1). Hers too the power to enlighten, for since she knows she can therefore teach skills and crafts, and the knowledge of the structure of the world and the activity of its elements: the cycles of the seasons and the stars, the varieties of animals, (7:17–22). Recreative agency, the power to make all things green again, this renewing energy profoundly affects human beings in their relation to divine mystery, weaving them round with a web of kinship: ‘in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets’ (7:27).6 It is no accident that Rossetti chose her title from 1 Corinthians, and prefaced her book with 1 Cor. 3:9: ‘ye are God’s husbandry’. 1 Corinthians is steeped in the tradition of personified wisdom, with Paul’s testament to the relationship between the wisdom of the Old Testament and Christ: We preach Christ crucified … the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:22) We speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory: which none of the rulers of this world knoweth: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Cor. 2:7–8) Wisdom is the life-force which sweeps away the ‘vanity of vanities’ of humanity without God, renewing and revitalising; it is the ‘new song’ of God’s kingdom, when, as Rossetti quotes in her preface, ‘our sons may grow up as the young plants: and … our daughters may be as the polished corners of the temple’ (Psalm 144:12). We have seen in Chapters 1 and 2 Rossetti’s rejection of the mortification of the flesh as a way to holiness and her move away from a strict application of the doctrine of atonement. Another significant reaction

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against the application of Tractarian doctrine, ultimately bound to both the former, is her new formulation of the role of wisdom in our understanding of the scriptures, and her consequent refusal to accept the doctrine of reserve in the form outlined by Williams. She accepts the principle of inspiration which Williams derives from Origen, whereby ‘The Word … hath different forms, appearing unto each beholder in the way beneficial to him, and being manifested unto no one, beyond what he that beholdeth Him can receive’,7 and we shall see in The Face of the Deep how she makes use of it in her own exegesis. However, she rejects the way Williams twists the figure of wisdom around to demonstrate the exclusivity of spiritual understanding, where ‘the want of comprehension [is] indeed a fault in the moral understanding of the hearer’.8 For the Tractarians, theological understanding becomes the privilege of the learned few, the male priesthood: For of this whole description in the Book of Proverbs, Bishop Butler has remarked, that it may be questioned, whether it was most intended as applicable to prudence in our temporal affairs, or to that wisdom, which is purely religious and heavenly. To him, therefore, who was a beginner, or who had not yet entered into the school of Christ, it would speak of this temporal wisdom; the higher sense would be to him a secret, concealed under the other, as by the veil; but to the heavenly-minded it would open the higher meaning, the deeper treasures of divine Wisdom.9 Williams’ use of ‘the school of Christ’ betrays the fact that he is thinking in terms of priestly exclusivity, and later in the tract we see his impatience at the ‘indiscriminate distribution of Bibles and religious publications’.10 Furthermore, through a strange twist of logic, in his reasoning wisdom becomes a means of repressing the natural vitality of its own creation. If the unlearned have only temporal wisdom at their disposal, presumably concerning the world of everyday comings and goings, the learned who desire the true wisdom of Christ should keep aloof from these things, so much so that they should humiliate their bodies, as Christ’s was humiliated on the cross. So physical abuse and suffering become ends in themselves, and the prerequisite of holiness: The apparent paradox which we witness, of Christianity having become publically acceptable to the world, contrary to our Lord’s


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express declarations, can only be accounted for by its having been put forward without its distinguishing characteristic, the humiliation of the natural man … There is no giving glory to God without this humiliation of the creature.11 Although constantly haunted by the possibility of error, Rossetti rejects outright the notion of scriptural commentary as a priestly preserve, and in Called to Be Saints claims authority of authorship ultimately from St. Paul himself, defending her emphasis on the saints by echoing the words of the apostle in 1 Cor. 1:13: If one say, ‘Was Paul crucified for you?’ I answer that I desire to follow St. Paul not otherwise than as he bade us thus follow Christ. (The Key to My Book, p. xiv) She claims authority as a follower of Paul, building on the foundations of ‘the wise master builder’ who himself built on the solid foundation of Christ. As in Annus Domini she circumvents ecclesiastical authority through justification by faith (favoured by the Tractarians themselves), acknowledging no judge but God and her reader, particularly her male reader, in case she has gone too far: ‘And whereinsoever I err I ask pardon of mine own Master to Whom I stand or fall, and of my brother lest I offend him’. By claiming authority in this way she is able not only to make her lack of theological sophistication irrelevant, but allows entry to alternative ways of validating scriptural material. In effect, she is searching out the cracks and flaws in contemporary theology and using them to establish her own freedom of interpretation: But if one object that many of my suggestions are exploded superstitions or mere freaks of fancy without basis of truth; and that if I have fancied this another may fancy that, till the whole posse of idle thinkers puts forth each his fresh fancy, and all alike without basis; I frankly answer, Yes: so long as with David our musings are on God’s work. (xiv) In much the same way as she makes use of the work of the Tractarians, Rossetti also uses Ruskin. A.H. Harrison claims that her vision of nature, God and human perception ‘serve almost as a

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summary of the central tenet of Ruskin’s moral and sacramental theory of art in Modern Painters.12 Some aspects of Ruskin’s theory must have held a certain attraction for her as a co-inheritor of developments at Oxford in the 1830s, and they both share a reverence for the beauty of nature which appeals ‘to our moral nature in its purity and perfection’.13 It is true that both are striving to ‘reinstate a lost synthesis’14 between humanity and the natural world, but Rossetti is using the language of contemporary aesthetics without necessarily agreeing with Ruskin. In fact, despite the theological origin of his aesthetic principles, there is an underlying decadence in his work which Rossetti would never have accepted. Guided by the pleasure principle, Ruskin is forced to reject change where Rossetti can encompass it. In a way similar to the excesses of Dante Gabriel’s later paintings, Ruskin’s art cannot face the realities of the actual physical world, and ‘unable to assimilate the world of process, his innocence can conceive natural change only as a child’s nightmare’. His vision is unable to embrace the cyclical processes of degeneration and rebirth; in his own words ‘those obscene processes and prurient apparitions’ connected with ‘digestive and reproductive operations’. Like the excessive self-loathing of Pusey, Ruskin’s horror seems ultimately to be fear of the human body, and linked to the ebb and flow of the natural world, its processes of reproduction, decay and death. In Thealogy and Embodiment Melissa Raphael traces a connection between fear of natural change and fear of women’s bodies as representative of chaos and destruction: The patriarchal fear that women are too ‘naturally’ chaotic to be contained even by their subordination to men, and that their organic materiality will ‘go off’ regardless of religious law, was graphically illustrated in medieval Christendom when nature was represented by the duplicitous Frau Welt: a beautifully dressed woman from the front, but from the back a swarming, crawling mass of reptilian, maggoty uncleanness … . In the patristic period, for example, women were similarly imaged as temples built over sewers. In ascetic patriarchal religions the beauty of female flesh is a hallucination; a vaginal trap which opens onto the pit of death.15 In this context one can better understand the young Rossetti’s anger and frustration, and the dreadful ambiguity of her early poems such as ‘The World’. In this earlier poem the apparent confidence of her


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ironic portrayal of man’s fear of the ‘strange woman’ is haunted by a lifetime of patriarchal indoctrination. But the Rossetti of Called to Be Saints has broken away from the deadly Tractarian inheritance of physical mortification and fear of the body; she rejects any suggestion of ‘the humiliation of the creature’. Through acceptance of her identity as a woman and her claim to ‘the positive moral value of female bodiliness’16 so vividly portrayed in poems such as ‘A Christmas Carol’, she is able instead to contemplate growth and change, and her ‘love of connectedness’ with the physical universe is celebrated in Called to Be Saints by the tapestry of nature she weaves through the lives of the saints, following Christ, the root which ‘shoot[s] up into every virtue’ (Key, p. xv): I will, as it were, gather simples and try out their lessons: I will adorn the shrines of Christ’s friends with flowers, and plant a garden round their hallowed graves. (p. xvi) Although the chronological order of her volume is determined by the order of saints’ days in the ecclesiastical year (a necessary precaution to make her volume an acceptable Tractarian publication), at the theological and chronological centre of Called to Be Saints lies the coming of Christ, a vital force already present at the Annunciation, when ‘the dormant Sap stirred in the Root of Jesse; the Tree of Life burgeoned towards bringing us forth food and medicine’ (p. 174). Mary, the mother of Christ, is therefore placed at the forefront of the theological action. We saw her bodily perfection and the life-giving potential of the female body in such poems as ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1871), but here her physical perfection, ‘the consummated splendour of created loveliness’, (p. 137), is also seen as continuous with the life-force of Christ. Rossetti stresses the similarity between mother and son: ‘Who infinitely excelling her, yet in her showed forth a measure of His own likeness’, (p. 180) and makes explicit the connection between Mary’s womanhood and Christ: Herself a rose, who bore the Rose She bore the rose and felt its thorn. All loveliness new-born Took on her bosom its repose, And slept and woke there night and morn.

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Lily herself, she bore the one Fair Lily; sweeter, whiter, far Than she or others are: The Sun of Righteousness her Son, She was His morning star. She gracious, He essential Grace, He was the Fountain, she the rill: Her goodness to fulfil And gladness, with proportioned pace He led her steps through good and ill. Christ’s mirror she of grace and love, Of beauty and of life and death: By hope and love and faith Transfigured to His likeness, ‘Dove, Spouse, Sister, Mother’, Jesus saith. In her womanly perfection Mary carries the life-giving, nurturing properties of wisdom fulfilled in Christ, and he names her likeness: ‘Dove, Spouse, Sister, Mother’. The violet is given as Mary’s companion flower and its properties further illustrate her life-giving role as mother, and the involvement and proximity of the female body to Christ, the source of life: The petals having dropped away, the seed-vessel matures, and exhibits the figure of a somewhat irregularly-modelled globe; this, surrounded by the fingers of a five-pointed calyx, seems a miniature world held in the hollow of a hand. (p. 102) Rossetti’s vision, which links physical motherhood and God’s care for the world, again brings her close to the great female mystics of the medieval period in their appreciation of the importance of the female body in the doctrine of incarnation. Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich both have a cosmic vision of the fragile world held in the palm of God’s hand. The former in a vision sees humanity in the centre of the world, which itself lies safe within the womb of God17 and the latter describes how in a vision she sees the world ‘no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand’.18 Like these two mystics, Rossetti is working to establish the importance of


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women in Christian theology, ‘by combining the doctrine of creation with the doctrine of incarnation’.19 Rossetti’s revaluation of the role of Eve, ‘mother of all living’, whose seed will bruise the serpent’s head, leads her to Mary, who gives life to Christ, the seed. Despite the importance she accords Mary, Rossetti is careful not to allow her to usurp the role of Christ: ‘She is Christ’s gate through which He once came to seek and save us’, she tells us, ‘but Christ is our open door’. Mary has been withdrawn from us: ‘we catch sight of her, but hidden as in the clefts of the rock; we discern her, but dimly as withdrawn within the secret places of the stairs’. Her perfection is not ours to view, lest ‘the consummated splendour of created loveliness … blind us to the peerless loveliness of the creator’ (p. 136). But Christ, ‘the Wisdom of God’ (p. 363), is ours as inspiration and friend, touching the lives of the apostles and martyrs and their communities, who in their turn become extensions of His revitalising power. We see St. Andrew, the first saint in her volume, inspired by Christ’s power to bring life: By him … did our Lord go forth as fire into fields of barren snow which yet are portions of God’s own harvest-field of the whole earth. Then were the wilderness and the solitary place glad for Him, then did the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose. (p. 4) As she works through each section, Rossetti builds up a sense of the character of each saint, and the relationship with Christ that has inspired each one to carry on His work. She takes her study of each saint initially from scripture in a section headed ‘The Sacred Text’ and then broadens her discussion to include legend, tradition, in fact any conjecture or suggestion that adds to the imaginative appeal of the text and helps bring the saint before our eyes. She uses local wild flowers and herbs, rather than those of Palestine: I even think that a flower familiar to the eye and dear to the heart may often succeed in conveying a more pointed lesson than could be understood from another more remote if more eloquent. (p. xviii) Curious and vivid details handed down through popular legend engage the imagination of her reader, ‘the sure utterance of inspiration being supplemented by the uncertain voice of tradition’ (p. 25). For example to St. Thomas she adds a twin sister, Lysia, whom the saint

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forsook ‘for the love of Christ’ (p. 27). Physical suffering is often described in detail, and an emotional dimension added to wellknown scriptural incidents. St. Peter, for example, ‘is said never again unmoved to have heard the cock crow: and we are told that his cheeks became furrowed by tears’ (p. 319). As each saint is made special either from biblical account or from folk-lore in her volume, Rossetti also tries to flesh out their specific relationship with Christ, and with their community. St. John, from a close relationship with his parents, being the youngest of the apostles, becomes especially beloved of Christ. St. Paul, joining late, ‘laboured more abundantly than they all’ (p. 113), cheered and solaced in his imprisonment by a loving community of the Early Church. He is flanked by gorse, where in late summer the leaves and thorns are overtaken by the flower, ‘swallowed up in a golden glory of bloom which blazes back full against the full blazing sun’ (p. 129). St. Andrew, the ‘large-hearted’, shows a very human hesitation as he weighs up the five loaves and two fishes against a multitude of five thousand: ‘but what are they among so many?’ (p. 5). He is given a daisy as companion plant, the ‘mother of thousands of millions’, (p. 22) and his section ends with a quotation from 1 Corinthians 15:38: ‘God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed his own body’ (p. 22). This last quotation from scripture is indicative of the direction her theology is taking. St. Paul’s discourse in 1 Corinthians 15 concerns the fate of the human body after death, but by locating the quotation in a section on a flower, she is expanding St. Paul’s difficult discourse on the resurrection of the body to encompass an even more inclusive participation of plant and seed in the event of Christ’s redemption of the world. The natural world is no longer the unequal participant of St. Paul’s parable, but is seen as an equal shoot of God’s planting. The direction in which her thought is moving is compatible with the more recent understanding of our interdependence with the forces of nature. From simply ‘reading the book of nature’ in the manner of the Tractarians, she is moving closer to a position like that of Carol Christ in Rebirth of the Goddess, in her search for a feminist spirituality: Our intelligence does not set us apart from nature, but rather is an expression of the intelligence that exists within nature. Stones and trees, rivers and mountains, can communicate their wisdom to us if we are willing to listen.20


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Carol Christ’s vision has made necessary her rejection of Christianity as limited and patriarchal, as not representing the essentially female life-forces which she ascribes to the Goddess. Rossetti, on the other hand, does not have to reject the figure of Christ as male because the cosmic significance of His coming far outweighs the transcribed physical manifestation of Jesus of Nazareth. This is not to undervalue the incarnation, take attention away from the figure of Jesus or minimise the historical importance of His earthly mission. In fact, the exact opposite is true because once the incarnation is seen in terms of the advent of the physical force of life-giving wisdom into the world, His earthly life and the life of His followers become our own access to wisdom’s fulfilment. Another implication of such a vision of Christ is that any division between soul and body falls away. Soul and body are intimately connected, as Christ is intimately involved in His creation.21 Rossetti has rejected the old dualist principle which haunted Pusey, where the body, tied to ‘the world’, is corrupt and corrupting. Pusey, one senses, longed for a unity which he was unable to allow himself. Attracted by the idea of a community of saints, he shies away from it and from any kind of imaginative involvement with scriptural heroes as once living, breathing, physical bodies: ‘the saints … in themselves rather lead away from Him, by resting in the creature’.22 By emphasising detail in the description of Christ’s friends, and even ‘inventing’ it through the use of folk-wisdom where no details are found in scripture, Called to Be Saints demands active imaginative response to once living people. A note is appropriate here on Rossetti’s use of the imagination to immerse the reader in ‘living’ scriptural communities. We have seen her use the imagination in the process of re-imaging established religious symbols, and here she extends this concern in order to re-image scripture itself, to re-order and re-interpret through the freedom brought about by the transforming properties of the imaginative process. The use of the imagination in the practice of scriptural interpretation is certainly not new, but in modern feminist theology it has become a means through which scripture can be transformed, liberated from patriarchal appropriation: When the imagination wanders freely into a scene … constraints fall away. In their place come an intimacy and immediacy which visit and heal our most distorted images and understandings. Jesus walks

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in our landscape, comes into our home, is our brother, our lover, our friend. The gospels are peopled with our own friends and enemies, we choose to follow the Lord and walk the way of Calvary. We stand at the foot of the cross and wait in the garden for resurrection.23 This dramatic involvement has been noted in Rossetti’s devotional poetry, and W.D. Shaw traces this ‘astonishing empathy’ to ‘a combination of Dallas’ Christian existentialism and ‘a staid, more conservative Tractarian doctrine of Reserve’.24 In her poem ‘Good Friday’ she uses empathy to bring her reader face to face with the bare and awful reality of Christ’s crucifixion: Am I a stone, and not a sheep, That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross, To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss, And yet not weep? Such is the horror of the scene that the speaker is unable to take it in: ‘numbed and dazed, as if entranced, she counts “drop by drop” the blood that oozes from the cross’. The speaker is unable to join in the grief of those around her, or of the natural world without the intervention of Christ himself. This intimate participation in the material world of the scriptures becomes characteristic of all of her later volumes. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for the understanding of the theology of Rossetti’s next volume, Seek and Find, with the location of Christ as vital centre of the cosmos comes a strong affirmation of immanence, where the transcendent world is seen as continuous with the presence of God within the physical universe. In her section on the Holy Innocents, Rossetti calls attention to grieving motherhood, to Rachel weeping for her dead children and refusing to be comforted. The response of the murdered infants is to reassure their mothers that despite the violence done to their bodies, their link with nature is not broken: We bloom among the blooming flowers, We sing among the singing birds;


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Wisdom we have who wanted words: Here morning knows not evening hours, All’s rainbow here without the showers. (p. 109) To die is to return to oneness with the natural world, to live again in a heaven of natural beauty. In one sense, Rossetti is giving a feminist theological answer to the Romantic quest for immortality, but more importantly, she looks forward to the spirituality of ecofeminism, ‘knowing ourselves as an integral part of a Great Matrix of Being, that is ever renewing life in new creative forms out of the very processes of death’.25 The poem ends with a scriptural reference to the maternal God of Matt. 23:37: And softer than our Mother’s breast, And closer than our Mother’s arm, Is there the Love that keeps us warm And broods above our happy nest. (p. 110) The shift of emphasis in Rossetti’s dealings with nature away from the Tractarian idea of a symbolic world which is there for us to ‘read’, is at times so subtle that it could almost pass unnoticed, but her dealings with nature are very different from those of, say, Isaac Williams, whose influence she acknowledges in her preface to Seek and Find. He tells his reader that ‘it is the very purpose of objects in visible Nature to suggest to us the invisible as we contemplate them’.26 Rossetti, on the other hand, liberates the natural world from a position of servility and commodity for the use of mankind (that is not to say that they do not ever serve humanity) to full participation in a cosmic order springing to life in Christ the fulfilment of wisdom. Although she never rejects the Tractarian assertion that we can learn from creation by analogy and symbol, she accords each aspect of the physical world its own independent function in relation to God. The independent, essential holiness of all creation which Rossetti claims here is the key to understanding her next volume, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879).

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Seek and Find Compared to the previous volume, Seek and Find is much more tightly constructed and formulaic, guarded almost, apparently lacking spontaneity and variety. There are no illustrations, no poetry, and the confident defence of her interpretation we saw in Called to Be Saints is replaced by a terse Prefatory Note: In writing the following pages, when I have consulted a Harmony it has been that of the late Rev. Isaac Williams. Any textual elucidations, as I know neither Hebrew nor Greek, are simply based upon some translation; many valuable alternative readings being found in the Margin of an ordinary Reference Bible. C.G.R. She has established the volume’s Tractarian credentials, and declared her lack of scholarship but, in a way which becomes typical of the volume, ends the note with a subtle but pointed attack on scholarship itself: ‘valuable alternative readings’ are ‘simply based’ on unremarkable translations and ‘ordinary’ Bibles. To a certain extent the bleakness and formal austerity of the text can be explained by Macmillan’s rejection of her previous volume, and her recognition that if she wanted her devotional work published she would have to fit into an acceptable category for women religious writers: non-threatening, derivative and faintly domestic. Her old friend Rev. R.F. Littledale was active in the Tract Committee of the SPCK and no doubt encouraged her to present her manuscript to the SPCK General Literature Committee, which she did in March 1879. They were in fact looking for ‘accredited writers’ and ‘celebrated Novel-Writers’ by the end of that year (Anthony Trollope was a particular prize),27 but Rossetti it seems did not fall into this category as her work was initially declined, (as ‘Treasure Trove’28) although it was published later in the year. She could not afford to be inventive. So she used, almost ruthlessly, the methods and models of her theological ‘masters’. She had recently published a short work, ‘A Harmony on First Corinthians XIII’,29 in the journal New and Old, which she explained in the preface to have been a recommended Lenten exercise (possibly by Littledale himself) and Seek and Find


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repeats the same formula in its introductory harmony: The Praise-Givers are

God’s Creatures

Christ’s Servants

O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: Praise Him and magnify Him for ever.

God saw everything that He had made, and, behold it was very good (Gen. 1:31)

The Word was God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made (John 1:1, 3)

Nevertheless, in Seek and Find, through her use of the Benedicite,30 the apocryphal ‘Song of the Three Children’ which exhorts all spheres of divine and natural creatures to praise God, Rossetti is still able to scan the whole of creation, humanity taking its place amongst the praisegivers, which include (together with the larger bodies like sun and moon) the more humble aspects of nature: rain, dew, wells and all green things. The harmony she constructs takes account of the equality between all creatures manifest in the Benedicite, and although it does not deny a natural order, foregrounds unexpected aspects of the scriptural text such as grass, birds or wells, and in a similar way to her use of plants and stones in Called to Be Saints. This close focus disorients and forces the reader to re-image the scene: The Praise-Givers are

God’s Creatures

Christ’s Servants

O all ye Green Things God said, Let the upon the Earth etc. earth bring forth grass …

Jesus said, Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, in number about five thousand (St. John 4:6)

O ye Wells, etc.

Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with His journey sat thus on the well (St. John 4:6)

… I will make the wilderness a pool of water.

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The first column (a verse from the Benedicite) names the creature, the second tells of its creation and the third paints a picture of Jesus involved in physical transaction with it. In the first example here the reader is forced to take account of the contact the bodies of the listeners have with the texture of the grass, or in the second, Jesus sitting down and perhaps running his hands over the rough wall of the well, and so a bond of physical affinity is established between the consciousness of the reader and the events of the Bible. The two series of commentaries which follow show Rossetti roughly following the formula of Keble’s Tract 89, ‘the Poetical, Moral and Mystical’31 aspects of nature, which he explains as the imaginative (through speculation or personal association), the symbolic or analogical, and finally the ‘authentic records’ which are ‘Holy Scripture and the consent of ecclesiastical writers’. Rossetti is doing what is expected of her, as a woman writer of devotional prose, carrying out the recommendations of male theologians and spelling out moral lessons in the way she has been taught; as Joel Westerholme puts it, saying ‘what she had to say in order to be read’.32 Her section on angels, for example, the first of the praise-givers, in its self-conscious adherence to Keble, reads a little like a Sunday School lesson – What do we know about angels? What lessons can we learn from them? Westerholme suggests that two levels of meaning emerge, the one a ‘printed equivalent of teaching catechism’, which would include the literal reading of her disclaimers; her deprecation of her own scholarship, her proclaimed horror of originality,33 and the other a partially hidden engagement ‘in serious and scholarly biblical interpretation’. The reason for such subterfuge would be her violation of the ban on a woman’s practice of theology. Furthermore, some of Rossetti’s theology would have earned her the same treatment (or worse) as that of the unfortunate Jowett34 had it been stated directly, and anything that looked unorthodox would not have been published at all.35 But Rossetti’s simple observations and accounts of the natural world are not just an overlay of pious words designed to disguise her true message, although they might seem alien to the modern reader who is suspicious of what one might call Victorian sentimentality. The focus on simple, everyday things was of great importance to her readership, and addressed the current thirst for accessible religious texts after the controversies of the 1850s and 1860s;36 in fact, Rossetti’s devotional writing was soon so much in demand that the SPCK had published


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the rejected Called to Be Saints by 1881. We should be wary of dismissing her work because of its apparent excess of Victorian piety, or the seemingly derivative nature of its theology. Rather than looking at two levels of meaning as Westerholme does, which implies the devaluation of Rossetti’s surface narrative, it is necessary to see the accumulation of physical details, the simple ‘What are the characteristics of angels?’ (p. 17) or ‘let us for a moment dwell on the firmament’ (p. 23) as part of the overall theological discourse: the embracing of the small things in nature, the insignificant, the everyday, in order to create theological meaning: ‘Today is the day of small things (see Zech. 4:10)’ (p. 29). Rossetti seems to be making excessive use of the ‘building blocks’ of Tractarian theology, and becoming oversentimental in her observation of nature, but where the Tractarians would recommend the study of nature simply for relief, for the outpouring of intense feeling, or for tracing reflections of already held doctrinal beliefs, Rossetti is forming her theology from our everyday experience as physical beings. In doing so, she combines the sacramental view of the natural world with an understanding of wisdom’s role in revelation, a concept which would have been alien to the Tractarians. For Rossetti, wisdom does convey instruction through the scriptures, but she also ‘cries aloud in the street’ (Prov. 1:20); in fact, she speaks from everywhere that daily life takes place. She reveals the divine presence in the ordinary, in those things closest to us, which touch and surround us every day, in the sort of questions a child would ask as she looks with wonder at the world. We may touch, feel, see God everywhere, not only in specific sacred objects or rituals.37 Rossetti takes Keble’s vision of nature as sacrament to its logical conclusion: all that surrounds us is holy, no more or no less than those objects which patriarchal theology has set aside as holy. There can be no distinction between temporal wisdom and divine wisdom, and no reservation of understanding for the select few. An ‘alternative theology’ emerges from the study of an alternative text,38 a theology which is never overtly threatening to the status quo because it is constantly understated (in Rossetti’s protestations of inferiority or challenges which are quickly withdrawn) and frequently ‘canonised’ by references to ecclesiastical authority. As we saw, her Harmony is derived from Williams, but the defamiliarising effect of close focus and physical familiarity is her own. So we see Rossetti, through a process of reversal, using Tractarian

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terminology and method in the wisdom-discourse which informs much of her discussion; the exclusivity of divine wisdom claimed by Williams (for example, in his doctrine of reserve where revelation is reserved for the elect) is reversed, and wisdom becomes both a freely available key to God’s presence in the physical world, and the source of her own inspiration and authority as a woman interpreting the scriptures. In the first half of this chapter we saw her revaluation of Christ as the fulfilment of wisdom; here we see, through the process of retrieval, a similar revaluation of God the creator. This process of retrieval is important in the development of feminist theology because it means that patriarchal texts, including the scriptures as presently constructed, do not have to be rejected outright. The feminist theologian can still access them by a process of unravelling and re-weaving to regain a truer picture, a process Raphael sees exemplified in the work of Mary Daly, who ‘rereads, rewrites and reverses the androcentric concept of the sacred. She expends energy on patriarchal texts – catching (them out), deciphering and digesting them – precisely because the patriarchal defamation of female sacrality is the clue to its feminist power’.39 It is not Rossetti’s aim only to establish women’s right to preach the gospel.40 As we have seen, even in her early work she has problems with the gender bias of Christianity itself and in the way it is practised. So, although she may exploit current religious terminology, we see her working from within to transform what she sees, recognising and retrieving from the work of the Tractarians the creative power and authority of wisdom. Seek and Find is thus able to open a new discourse of God the creator, ‘the giver, cherisher, cheerer of life’ (p. 34), to add to her re-imaging of Christ, and to replace the angry Father-God of early poems like ‘Symbols’. She goes back to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew vision of creation dancing with joy in praise to its creator. The freshness of her approach, and its relevance to developments in ecofeminism may be seen from a comparison with Ruether’s revaluation of Hebrew thought: The modern stress … on biblical theology as desacralising nature has ignored the remarkable sense of nature as animate typical of Hebrew thought, not animate in the sense of filled with gods, but animate with personalised energy as creatures of a God who interacts with


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them in mutual rejoicing. In Psalm 65 God visits the earth in rain showers, watering its furrows abundantly, and the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the meadows deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy (vv. 12–13, NRSV)41

The first series: Creation Although the work has no introduction, Rossetti’s first commentary, as so often in her writing, lays down the theological framework for the volume. Her wisdom-text this time is Job, introduced at the beginning of the first of her two series, Creation: Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living. God understandeth the way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof. And unto man He said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is under-standing. Job 28:20–8 The writer of the Book of Job refuses to accept Job’s suffering as a punishment for sin and seeks an explanation, but the God of the whirlwind allows for no explanation of His judgements. To this inaccessibility Rossetti responds with the wisdom of the New Testament, available to all through Christ: If at the very outset we lack wisdom, St. James (i.5) prescribes for us a remedy: ‘If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him’. (p. 13) Wisdom, we learn, is freely available to all who ask and enables the wise to discern God in His creation, albeit only partially, according to their ability to receive it. Rossetti goes further, using the revelation wisdom accords to claim authority for her own work as commentator on the scriptures: ‘If even St. Paul might have been exalted above measure through abundance of revelation (2 Cor. 12:7), let us thank

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God that we in our present frailty know not any more than His Wisdom reveals to us’ (p. 15). Wisdom is free to all (we only have to ask), and although hers is not ‘abundance of revelation’, as in the Parable of the Talents, (Luke 19:12–26) the worth of the action ‘depends on the fidelity of the servants, rather than on the amount of the trust’ (p. 15). Rossetti’s use of the words ‘frailty’ and ‘ignorance’ disarm the judgemental reader and divert attention from the claim Rossetti is making, which is, as in Called to Be Saints, to be following in the footsteps of St. Paul. She also uses the language of contemporary aesthetics, which would have been acceptable in theological discussion. She borrows, for example, the language of Ruskin’s Typical Beauty42 to explain God’s presence in creation, where ‘Beauty essential is the archetype of imparted beauty; Life essential of imparted life; Goodness essential, of imparted goodness’ (p. 14). The Benedicite has as its central vision the whole of creation united in praise of its creator, and Rossetti begins by exploring the meaning of ‘praise’. How can the natural elements, or plants, birds and finally human beings ‘praise’ the Lord? The act of praise is the fulfilment of the natural function of each (‘every obedient creature, whatever its particular act of obedience whether in judgement or in mercy, may by and for that act render praise to God’, p. 15) and in order to find this God-given ‘natural function’ she draws on everyday experience and scripture which, she claims, was ‘written … for our instruction as regards ourselves, and consequently as regards visible creation in reference to ourselves’ (p. 107). Humankind needs to listen and learn from the rest of creation: ‘Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee’ ( Job 12:7, 8) ‘for not that which cometh from without defileth a man, but that which proceedeth from within. (See Mark 7:14–23)’ (pp. 110, 112). The ‘master student’, we are told, ‘was King Solomon the Wise. But it needs no Solomon to enter into the inexhaustible cheerfulness of “all green things”, an expression which we may fairly interpret as including the whole vegetable creation; a little child can delight in a flower, a speechless baby can notice one’ (p. 96). Central to the listening process is imaginative perception of the physical aspects of creation, and Rossetti uses her poetic skill to describe the beauties of the natural world, even those that appear destructive or stand at the limit of scientific discovery. Her technique


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is the same as we saw in the harmony at the beginning and she takes care to emphasise the link between our everyday comings and goings and the world of the scriptures: ‘Without adverting to spiritual analogies, a mere natural well has about it something religious if we make it “memoria technica” recalling to our minds many a merciful providence of olden times’ (p. 105). But apart from the opportunity to use her poetic gift to show the beauties of nature, the authority of wisdom which Rossetti claims enables her to speak out with renewed power as a woman and through affinity with the life-giving force of Wisdom, with a power base, in fact, exceeding that of a man, revising received hierarchies of power. Her section on the sun and moon has been quoted as proof of her anti-suffrage stance. Diane D’Amico, for example, in her discussion of the poem ‘A Helpmeet for Him’, sees the section as an example of ‘the woman’s movement coming in conflict with her Christian beliefs’.43 Rossetti added her name to an anti-suffrage appeal in 1889, and it certainly does seem that she supported the move to oppose woman’s suffrage, although we do not know the circumstances surrounding the inclusion of her name. In principle, however, she accepted woman’s right to determine the fate of a nation, as a letter to Augusta Webster confirms.44 This letter and her poem ‘A Helpmeet for Him’, although apparently stating woman’s subordinate position in fact turn the balance of power round, and claim even greater authority and power for women: Her strength with weakness is overlaid; Meek compliances veil her might; Him she stays, by whom she is stayed.45 The poem is so fraught with ambiguities that, rather than suggesting feminine weakness, it claims women’s superior power, her assumption of servility her ultimate means of control. With similar ambiguities in this volume Rossetti tackles the scriptural passages dealing with the subordination of women. In her sun and moon section she begins with the observation that the world in which we live has gradations of greater and less, but for her own part as an exegete she will overturn them: ‘I, being a woman, will copy St. Paul’s example and “magnify mine office” (Rom. xi.13)’ (p. 30).46 But it is one thing to make claims for her own writing, another to

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meet the scriptures head on. Her wealth of scriptural references threatens to overwhelm the reader but she needs the references to ‘canonise’ her text. Her logic is relentless. If woman’s lot because of her inferior physical strength is to serve, it is because, like Christ, she has assumed this position, overlaying her strength with weakness in the service of humanity: He came not to be ministered unto but to minister; He was among His own ‘as he that serveth’ (I St. Peter iii.7; I Tim. ii.11, 12; St. Mark x.45; St. Luke xxii.27). Her office is to be man’s helpmeet: and concerning Christ God saith, ‘I have laid help upon One that is mighty’ (Gen. ii.18, 21, 22; Ps. lxxxix.19). (p. 31) She does not seem to be saying anything new; in fact, comparing women’s subservience with the humble position of Christ was one way of keeping suffering women quiet. But she is also claiming the power of Christ, merging the role of Christ and the role of women, and she shows the continuity of woman’s exercise of comfort and nurture with the nature of God Himself: And well may she glory, inasmuch as one of the tenderest of divine promises takes (so to say) the feminine form: ‘As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you’ (Is. lxvi.13). (p. 31) She disposes of unacceptable New Testament strictures like 1 Cor. 11: 3, 7 (‘The man is the head of the woman, the woman the glory of the man’) by comparing them to outdated scientific discoveries: It used to be popularly supposed that ‘the moon walking in brightness’ (Job xxxi.26) is no more than a mirror reflecting the sun’s radiance: now careful observation leads towards the hypothesis that she also may exhibit inherent luminosity. (p. 31) Yet Rossetti’s acceptance of God the beneficent creator, and of the essential goodness of creation (‘God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good’), makes it imperative that she at least try to explain God’s imposition of such limitations on woman. She begins by comparing the power of women to the ‘proud waves’ of Job 38:11,47 at one with the elemental forces of chaos, which because


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of their power must be limited and controlled. God the creator has set these limits which we can no more understand than could Job, but now the advent of Christ brings a new promise: ‘there is neither male nor female, for we are all one (Gal. iii.28)’ (p. 32). At this point Rossetti does not explain the scriptural reference directly, but her next section, on God’s power over the universe, demonstrates her meaning through analogy. Just as God through various miracles in the Old Testament could suspend planetary law and make the sun stand still, He can reverse all natural law. If at the moment it seems that His ordinances are unfair, we can take comfort from the fact that He has power to reverse them. It was not His purpose to inflict suffering on women, and those who have caused it will not go unpunished. We have the promise that ‘He doth not willingly afflict the children of men’ (Lam. 3:33) but ‘He will by no means clear the guilty’ (Ex. 34:7). Our limited understanding of the apparent unfairness of His laws ‘will be adequate when we come to realise them as Job (40:19) was instructed to estimate behemoth: ‘He that made him can make His sword approach unto him’ (p. 33). Nevertheless, we need to persist in our supplication to Him: One said to Jacob, ‘Let me go:’ but Jacob denied Him except He blessed him, and prevailed (Gen. xxxii.24–30). The Lord said to Moses, ‘Let me alone:’ yet Moses let Him not alone, and Israel was saved (Exod. xxxii.7–14). (p. 35) So it is merely to our limited sight ‘that the sun obliterates the stars, the sun being in truth of inconsiderable bulk when compared with many of them’ (p. 33) and once we recognise that the sun ‘is truly no more than our fellow creature in the worship and praise of our common creator’ it can then also become a symbol of God, ‘the giver, cherisher, cheerer of life’ (p. 34). From this position of authority Rossetti also lambasts those who would abuse the natural world. Her anger against vivisection is well known and she actively petitioned against it, enclosing a leaflet in a letter to Dante Gabriel in 1875: ‘I used to believe with you that chloroform was so largely used as to do away with the horror of vivisection … but a friend has so urged the subject upon me, and has sent me so many printed documents alleging and apparently establishing the contrary, that I have felt compelled to do what little I could to gain help against what (I now fear) is cruelty of revolting magnitude’.48

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In her section on ‘whales and all that move in the waters’, she cautions against pretending to understand completely the natural world and its creatures, and their relation to God, attempting to ‘define the limits of all they are and all they are not’. There follows an angry outburst against animal cruelty and the exploitation of animals for research or for fashion: One thing however is absolutely clear: they are entrusted to man’s sovereignty for use, not for abuse. If land may cry out and furrows complain against a tyrannical owner ( Job xxxi.38, 39), if the Holy Land emptied of inhabitants enjoyed a compensation for those Sabbaths whereof lawlessness had deprived her. … much more may not life wantonly destroyed and nerves without pity agonised enter a prevalent appeal against men who do such things or take pleasure in them? (See Rom. i.28–32: ‘inventors of evil things … unmerciful’). God weighed the claims of the ‘much cattle’ of Nineveh, as well as of the human infants (Jonah iv. xi.): if we honestly weigh the claims of all our sentient fellow-creatures, I think we shall forbear to adopt some pretty fashions in dress, and to follow up some scientific problems. (p. 115) Again, we see a similarity with recent anger against the abuse of the natural world. Rosemary Radford Ruether also uses the book of Job to accuse a theology which allows the domination of nature: The book of Job, in dramatic contrast to the theology of universal human dominion, proclaims a message of human limits over other creatures and God’s direct relations with realms of nature with which humans have no knowledge or contact: Ask the animals and they will teach you; The birds of the air, and they will tell you; Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing. (12:7–10 NRSV)49


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Rossetti used the same lines from Job to explain the purpose of her study. Particularly striking here is Rossetti’s emphasis on the feminine quality of God the creator, and her recognition that the abuse of nature is closely bound to the despising of the feminine. God’s relationship with His creation is tender and nurturing, like a mother bird, and we should be inspired to follow His example: The Divine injunction, with its dependent promise, touching a sitting mother-bird (Deut. xxii.6, 7) is framed so strikingly on the model of ‘the first commandment with promise’ (Ex. xx.12; Eph. vi.2, 3), that while it quickens our perception of the honour due in all cases to the parental character, it surely also authorises and invites, sanctifies and blesses human tenderness towards the dumb creation. (p. 120) When she finally comes to the place of humanity amongst the praise-givers, Rossetti returns to the value we need to place on the natural world, as we have seen, itself in independent relationship with the creator. Solomon’s attitude, satiety followed by rejection of the world as ‘vanity of vanities’, brought a curse, not a blessing. Nature is not a commodity to be consumed and despised. We need to open ourselves to the beauties of all nature, allowing the world around us to speak to us and fill us with longing. The Queen of Sheba, rather than Solomon, was open to this desire: It was not the wise king, himself a freeman of the sacred commonwealth, it was the wisdom-craving Queen of Sheba, who standing without and gazing as an alien upon the beloved nation became overwhelmed by the glories and felicities of their lot (Kings x.1–9). (p. 146) Only from within this world and its creatures will we learn through obedience and humility to find the next: ‘All creation begins by enforcing a negative lesson: “The depth saith, It is not in me:” nevertheless in that negative is latent an affirmative: Not in me, then elsewhere’. The ‘elsewhere’ to which nature points is to God, through Christ, the root (p. 159).

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The second series: Redemption Adam’s disobedience caused creation to become separated from the source of life, and now, either ‘in judgement upon man, or in sympathy with him, all is disjointed, unstrung, enfeebled; all faints, fails, groans, travails in pain together (Rom. viii.22): “Cursed is the ground for thy sake” (Gen. iii.17), gives us the key to much of that mystery of misery which environs us on our right hand and on our left’ (p. 170). In her second series, Rossetti begins by explaining how Christ came to rescue a world which had become barren and lifeless through turning away from God: ‘Irresponsible nature, involved in the curse of man’s guilt and sometimes directed by his will, hid as it were her face from her Maker’ (p. 184): The heaven above His head became as brass (Deut. xxviii.23; St. Mark xv.34), and the earth under Him as iron incapable of fecundity; for rather than give rest to the sole of His foot she sent up a lifeless tree whereon He should hang between earth and heaven, one like the awful tree of St. Jude’s (v.12) prophetic epistle: ‘Without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots’. (p. 171) The dreadful image of Christ hanging nailed to a dead tree, between earth and heaven, dramatically illustrates His role as life-giver – physically joined to a dying creation, He infuses it with new life as its Root (pp. 261–2). Christ, then, is intimately bound to our life on earth, and as our only way to God is through Him, we need to concern ourselves with the world in which we live, and ‘take pains to consider the heaven that now is’ (p. 177). Now abiding ‘safe and blessed within the will of God’ (p. 186) the natural world, through Christ, has become for humanity an access point through which we can see to follow Him: Thus common things continually at hand, wind or windfall or budding bough, acquire a sacred association, and cross our path under aspects at once familiar and transfigured, and preach to our spirits while they serve our bodies: till not prophets alone and sons of prophets, but each creature of time bears witness to things which concern eternity, and without speech or language makes its voice heard. (p. 204)


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Although she is using the language of the great Tractarians, she is claiming far more for the natural world than they ever did. The exclusivity and privilege of a line of male prophets has been replaced by free access to the sacred, which itself is not limited to traditional sacred objects but surrounds us completely. From within the physical world, Christ who ‘bought with a great price His right to re-quicken us’ (p. 217) charms and inspires us to copy Him in active service: Christ holds up before our mental eyes Himself in all the loveliness of His perfect Beneficence: and when He has charmed our heart through our eyes He rests not satisfied with our idle admiration or inoperative love; but says to each one of us, ‘Go and do thou likewise’. Taking on the role of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, Rossetti formulates in practical terms the daily behaviour of a lover of wisdom: Symbols, parables, analogies, inferences, may be fascinating, must be barren, unless we make them to ourselves as words of the wise which are as goads (Eccles. xii.11). Let us imitate the practical example of that virtuous woman who ‘is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet’ (Prov. xxxi.10–31): and copying her we shall become trustworthy, loving, prudent, diligent; we shall go in advance of those whom we require to labour with us; we shall demean ourselves charitably, decorously according to our station; we shall reflect honour on those from whom we derive honour; out of the abundance of our heart our mouth will speak wisdom; kindness will govern our tongue, and justice our enactments. (p. 223) She returns to Romans 1:20 at the close of the volume, but ends with a warning that seeking God in the natural world is not simply to enjoy a pastime (‘like the listeners to Ezekiel (xxxiii.30–2) who flocked after the poet and ignored the prophet’ (p. 326)). It is not an exercise in Romantic sentimentality, but a necessity, lest we be numbered amongst ‘those who, standing on the left hand at the bar of judgement, shall make answer, ‘Lord when saw we Thee?’(Matt. xxv. 41, 44) (p. 327).50

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Seek and Find, then, in its first series explores God the Creator, and in its second continues the discourse of Christ, renewer of life. The third person of the Trinity is mentioned only briefly, but the seriousness of Rossetti’s discussion of the mystery of the Spirit suggests that she is thinking deeply on the matter. In her Redemption series, she broaches the subject through the section on wells, referring back to the passage quoted in her harmony, where Jesus sits on the wall of Jacob’s well and asks the Samaritan woman for a drink. She revises the story in a gender-sensitive way, giving greatest importance to the revelation of theological mystery to a woman, rather than as more traditionally considered, to the Gentiles: Wells Behold, God is my salvation … Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. Is. xii.2, 3 This prophesy delivered about seven centuries before the commencement of its plenary fulfilment (St. Luke ii.11) leads our thoughts to Christ seated on Jacob’s Well, and out of all the millions of the human family making wise unto salvation one solitary sinful woman (St. John iv.5–26). On a second occasion our Lord vouchsafed to declare to a larger audience what appears to be the same Theological mystery which He had once revealed to her singly. (p. 267) Rossetti gives a passing nod to 1 Tim. 2:11, 12, but then contradicts the ban on women’s testimony both by her reference to Job (see above) and through the testimony of the Samaritan woman herself. Although careful to acknowledge the gravity of a discourse ‘touching the deepest things of God’ (p. 268), and no doubt mindful of the scriptural warning that ‘whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness’ (Mark 3:29), her point is made with confidence: a woman was the first to be offered ‘living water’ (p. 269) and to be given an explanation of the theological mystery of God the Spirit. This confidence pervades her next volume, Letter and Spirit, an exploration of the operation of the Spirit through Old and New Testament law.

4 Letter and Spirit and Time Flies

Letter and Spirit The heart of the wise instructeth his mouth, And addeth learning to his lips. Prov. 16:23 Rossetti was by now an established writer of devotional texts1 and began her discussion with the confidence of a preacher as she stated the law: ‘Hear, O Israel; The lord Our God is one Lord’ (p. 8). Marsh sees Rossetti as ‘assuming the mantle of Victorian sage’,2 following in the footsteps of Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold, and berating her age for its Godlessness. In a way this is true, but it is a mistake to see the volume as intellectually distinct from the volumes that preceded it, or to neglect its underlying theology in favour of its social criticism. Rossetti’s warnings, in fact, come from the new theology she has been developing in her last two volumes at least, and in particular we see her working from the position of her revaluation of the material world. Her title Letter and Spirit refers to a debate over the interpretation of scripture, which is as early as the history of interpretation itself; as we can see, for instance, in St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:6, ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’.3 The Tractarians inherited the allegorical frame of mind (through their study of Origen and the Church Fathers) which favoured the ‘spiritual’ rather than the ‘literal’ interpretation of the scriptures. On this basis of symbol and analogy grew Keble’s claim of a sacramental universe, expanded by Rossetti, as we 85

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saw in Seek and Find, to a cosmic vision of all creatures praising God, renewed by the life-giving Spirit of Christ. Where the Tractarians refused to negotiate the material reality of the scriptures – here I am using ‘letter’ in terms of the literal-historical sense which has developed over the last few centuries and which is popular today4 – and reacted in anger against the liberal interpretations of Jowett and the essayists, Rossetti emphasised the reality of daily life, both our own and that of biblical communities. The vision of unity which we saw in the last two of her volumes becomes her means of healing the duality of ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’, as she re-centres the debate in terms of the spirit of wisdom which claims every part of our life. Although Rossetti moves away from close reference to Proverbs and Job in her study of the commandments, the figure of wisdom is never far away, in the mediating role between God and the reality of living in the world. Like Called to Be Saints, Letter and Spirit begins with a harmony, and Rossetti uses the connection between the two Great Commandments of Mark 12:28–30 and Matthew 22 to align and cement the two spheres of Christian duty, love of God and love of neighbour, uniting the spiritual (our relationship with God) and the physical/social realities of life (our everyday dealings with our neighbour and our world). Although recognising the primacy of the First Commandment, she stresses the indissoluble union between the two: ‘the First is the head, source, root; the Second, made after its likeness, derives from it authority and honour. Even could the Second be abolished, the First would remain: yet to fulfil that Second is man’s only mode of making sure that he observes the First, nor can these two which God has joined together be put practically asunder. “We love Him, because He first loved us”’ (pp. 14–15). Through Christ, in whom is manifest the union of flesh and spirit, our relationship with the rest of the world is firmly bound to our love of God. The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament ‘appear under the similitude of a numerous offspring of the Two united and indivisible Commandments’, and whilst all of them relate to human behaviour in the world, the first four relate directly to our relationship with God, and the rest to our dealings with our neighbour. The importance of Rossetti’s harmony is that she can trace the relationship of all the commandments to the first ‘great’ commandment, the spiritual centre of the law, setting up numerous possibilities for diversity whilst containing all within a central unity, in a pattern

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which reflects the unity and multiplicity of the cosmos in Seek and Find: ‘within this unity is bound up the entire multitude of our duties; out of this one supreme commandment have to be developed all the details of every one of our unnumbered obligations’ (p. 8). Every small detail of our daily actions, however insignificant, is indissolubly linked to our duty to God. Other significant points emerge as Rossetti considers the Trinity in relation to the law. The unity of the ‘One Lord’ is the first and most important aspect of the ‘great’ commandment and it follows that such unity is not exclusive to Christianity, but it is universally accessible to all who believe in a spiritual centre. Rossetti’s relief and comfort in this discovery is evident: ‘Let us thank God that this main point of knowledge we hold in common with so vast a number of our dear human brothers and sisters’ (p. 9). Following from this is the observation that the ‘Christian verity’ (p. 8) of the Trinity is raised from this unity, and therefore secondary. Whilst anxious not to undermine the value of the Trinity, her claim that it falls under the power of the ‘boundless licence of imagination’ leads her to the possibility of human error: ‘opposite errors invite us; and well will it be for us if trembling between them our magnet yet points aright … and we yet set them not practically one against another, producing in our vain imaginations a “Trinity in dis-Unity”’ (p. 11). Yet the Trinity is important as it tells us about God’s relationship towards us: But for the Ever Blessed Trinity man might seem to stand for ever aloof from the sympathy of his Maker: absolute Oneness may, but could exclusive Oneness have any fellow-feeling with such as we are? An ever-renewed multitude who stray like sheep and need a shepherd, who die away like foliage and need renewal, who from evening to morning are made an end of yet not done with. On the other hand, to view in fact even if not avowedly the Three Persons as Three Gods leads towards arraying them in opposition to each other: till we feel towards the Divine Son as if He alone was our Friend, the Divine Father being our foe; as if Christ had not only to rescue us from the righteous wrath of His Father, but to shelter us from His enmity. (p. 12) Here we see, I think, the reflection of the battle Rossetti had in the early days of her theological understanding, and her painful move

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away from the angry vengeful father figure.5 The Trinity becomes more the promise of a God who has very special links with His creation, the diversity in unity of the Three Persons reaching out to embrace the whole of creation, itself an echo of God’s multiplicity of forms: ‘For if … God is not to be called like His creature, whose grace is simply typical, but that creature is like Him because expressive of His Archetypal attribute, it suggests itself that for every aspect of creation there must exist the corresponding Divine Archetype’ (p. 13). Rossetti thus has a theological basis for the freedom she claims in re-imaging God, expanding endlessly the possibilities of recognising and naming God, through the logical application of the principles of a sacramental universe. Closely bound to this diversity, however, is always the unity of God, and consequently everything we are or do, however seemingly irrelevant or diverse, must be directed towards it. The First Great Commandment dominates her volume, and at its centre is the difference between simply obeying the letter and having no other Gods, and loving Him ‘with heart, soul, mind and strength’ (p. 15). Rossetti’s re-examination of the law reinforces a theological stance which is becoming increasingly critical of her own society and of the futile theological controversies which left the average churchgoer perplexed and confused. We have seen her anger in her last volume over the treatment of unreasoning creation, but in Letter and Spirit her anger is more specifically directed and more severe.6 She takes the occasion, for example, of lapses in obedience to the First Commandment to give a lengthy response to the hated 1 Timothy 2, and in doing so not only reversing the traditional condemnation of Eve, but in her selfdeprecating way, suggesting that Adam caused Eve to fall through his irresponsible manipulation of language: Adam and Eve illustrate two sorts of defection (1 Tim. 2:14). Eve made a mistake, ‘being deceived’ she was in the transgression: Adam made no mistake: his was an error of will, hers partly of judgement; nevertheless both proved fatal. Eve, equally with Adam, was created sinless: each had a specially vulnerable point, but this apparently not the same point. It is in no degree at variance with the Sacred Record to picture to ourselves Eve, that first and typical woman, as indulging quite innocently sundry refined tastes and aspirations, a castle-building spirit (if so it may be called), a


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feminine boldness and directness of aim combined with a no less feminine guessiness as to means. Her very virtues may have opened the door to temptation. By birthright gracious and accessible, she lends an ear to all petitions from all petitioners. She desires to instruct ignorance, to rectify misapprehension: ‘unto the pure all things are pure’, and she never suspects even the serpent. Possibly a trace of blameless infirmity transpires in the wording of her answer, ‘lest ye die’, for God had said to the man ‘ … in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die:’ but such tenderness of spirit seems even lovely in the great first mother of mankind; or it may be that Adam had modified the form, if it devolved on him to declare the tremendous fact to his second self. Adam and Eve reached their goal, the fall, by different routes. With Eve the serpent discussed a question of conduct, and talked her over to his own side: with Adam, so far as it appears, he might have argued the point forever and gained no vantage; but already he had scored an ally weightier than a score of arguments. Eve may not have argued at all: she offered Adam a share of her good fortune, and having hold of her husband’s heart, turned it in her hand as the rivers of water. Eve preferred various prospects to God’s will: Adam seems to have preferred one person to God: Eve diverted her ‘mind’ and Adam his ‘heart’ from God Almighty. Both courses led to one common result, that is, to one common ruin (Gen. iii). (p. 18) Adam, not Eve, was the one tied to the body, led astray by sentiment and earthly affection. Eve, the pioneer, the more intellectually powerful of the two, in the exercise of her intellectual and moral potential was the victim of deception. Rossetti openly contradicts 1 Timothy 2:12: ‘I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man’. Eve is the teacher, who like personified wisdom, bold and direct in her aim, listens and instructs, and leads humanity towards understanding. ‘Possibly’, Rossetti admits, Eve was guilty of ‘blameless infirmity’, in misunderstanding God’s order, but since the initial command was given to Adam, there is more than a hint that he modified the instructions, giving Eve a vague linguistic construction implying only possible consequences; ‘lest ye’, rather than the full severity of ‘thou shalt surely die’. Adam’s ‘watering down’ of God’s commandments is at the heart of the criticism in Letter and Spirit; it is the explaining away, through

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tricks of interpretation, of the severity of God’s law: ‘To do anything whatsoever, even to serve God, “with all the strength”, brings us into continual collision with that modern civilised standard of good breeding and good taste that bids us avoid extremes’ (p. 19). Rossetti echoes wisdom’s claim to plain speaking (Prov. 8:9), and insists that there is ‘no room for two opinions as to whether the Lord meant what He had plainly said’ (p. 20). She is scathing in her opinion of the ‘prudent precautions’ (p. 27) taken in contemporary interpretations of scripture. Joel Westerholme singles out her criticism of a popular reading of Mark 10:17–27: Who has not seen the incident of the Young Ruler … utilized as a check to extravagant zeal? So far, that is, as a preliminary stress laid on what it does not enjoin can make it act as a sedative. It does not, we are assured, by any means require us to sell all; differences of rank, of position, of circumstances, are Providentially ordained, and are not lightly to be set aside, our duties lie within the decorous bounds of our station. The Young Ruler, indeed, was invited to sell all in spite of his great possessions; therefore we must never suppose it impossible that that vague personage, ‘our neighbour’, may be called upon to do so; we must not judge him in such a case, nay, we must view it not as his penalty but rather as his privilege: only we ourselves, who are bound by simple every-day duties, shall do well in all simplicity to perform them soberly, cheerfully, thankfully, not overstepping the limits of our vocation: therefore let us give what we can afford; a pleasure or a luxury it may well be to sacrifice at the call of charity. (pp. 28–9) Rossetti’s ‘powerful sarcasm’, and ‘withering’ irony see her at odds with ‘a (probably) male reading of the passage’,7 which not only lacks common sense (wisdom, in its practical form), but deviates from the spiritual understanding which comes with obedience to the First Commandment: ‘Is our most urgent temptation that which inclines us to do too much, or that which lulls us to do too little, or to do nothing? … When we detect ourselves calculating how little will clear us from breach of any commandment, and paring our intention accordingly, we shall (I think) have grounds for searching deeper, lest already we be breaking the first commandment’ (pp. 29–30). Rossetti had little patience with the religious controversies of her time and the disputes over interpretation of the scriptures, which she


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saw as attempts to evade the responsibility of acting on them. The scriptures were becoming a vehicle for the display of contrasting viewpoints in the Church of England, rather than serving as a moral guide in everyday life. Those whose attention is held exclusively by the form or presentation of God’s message instead of the message itself break the second commandment: It is, I suppose, a genuine though not a glaring breach of the Second Commandment, when instead of learning the lesson plainly set down for us in Holy Writ we protrude mental feelers in all direction above, beneath, around it, grasping, clinging to every particular except the main point. (p. 85) Rossetti has in mind, of course, the controversies sparked by the publication of Essays and Reviews,8 and possibly the Colenso affair as well. The mind is waylaid by the physical truth or falsity of the scriptures: ‘What was the precise architecture of Noah’s Ark?’ Rossetti asks her reader with contempt; ‘Clear up the astronomy of Joshua’s miracle. Fix the botany of Jonah’s gourd. Must a pedestal be included within the measurement of Nebuchadnezzar’s “golden image”?’ (pp. 86–7). Joshua’s miracle must have exasperated her, as she had, two years before, attempted to publish a detailed comment on it in Seek and Find, but had had the page rejected by her publishers: We read in the Book of Joshua (10:12–14) how that hero spake to the Lord & ‘said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; & thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, & the moon stayed’. A mist bred rather from oversight than from insight has, I believe, obscured to some apprehensions the sun of the miracle. … I have heard it suggested that Joshua himself understood the relations of the sun to earth, but judged the moment inopportune for conveying such information to his hearers: but I own that except for a pious & reverent aim this solution appears to me as valueless as the original difficulty.9 Rossetti is not attempting to devalue the words of the scriptures, but she sees words as symbols, and such disputes over their surface value display a reluctance to come to terms with the Divine message to which they lead. As in Romans 1:18–23, ‘sooner or later the symbol

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supersedes that which it symbolises; at first among foolish and ignorant apprehensions; afterwards the wise themselves become taken in their own craftiness’ (p. 72). She compares the misuse of language to sensuality and idolatry, in the same way as the worship of the natural world becomes the appropriation of nature, robbing it of its own relationship to God, and stamping it with the likeness of man. ‘Man’, she claims, ‘reversed the process of creation, and making gods after his own likeness adored himself in them’ (p. 77). ‘Such errors’, Rossetti warns, ‘avenge themselves. Nature worshipped under diverse aspects exacts under each aspect her victims; or rather, man’s consciousness of guilt invests her with a punitive energy backed by a will to punish greater than he can bear’ (p. 74). Irresponsible use of language in the same way leads to confusion, as ‘men made originally capable of discriminating truth from falsehood’ become unable to recognise honesty and truth. This irresponsibility will ‘strike at the root of human society and tend towards the bringing of social chaos’ (pp. 77–8). The misappropriation of language is abuse: abuse of language itself and abuse of other people through language. Adam made excuses in his effort ‘to shelter himself at the expense of Eve’, showing that sin ‘by which the strong inflict vicarious suffering on the weak’ (p. 84). Contemporary interpretations of the Fall still attempt to evade responsibility: ‘the question of mortal sin shrinks into the background while we moot such points as the primitive status of the serpent: did he stand somehow upright? Did he fly? What did he originally eat? How did he articulate?’ (p. 85). In her explanation of the relationship between the First and Second Great Commandment, Rossetti spells out the importance of our living in the world, and the need to keep a balance between our physical and spiritual natures. In a passage which has often been quoted out of context and incorrectly used to show her views on marriage,10 Rossetti illustrates the difference between the two Commandments, in terms of 1 Cor. 7:34, 38: ‘The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband’ (pp. 90–1). St. Paul may well have had strong views on remaining virginal, but Rossetti is using the figures as illustration, and here she is talking about our duties towards God and neighbour. If one were to cling too exclusively to either commandment,


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she explains, the gracious harmony between the two would be destroyed: And we may trace no less clearly the correspondence (if I may call it so) of these two ‘holy estates’ with the First and Second Commandments, by weighing and sifting the characteristic temptation of each vocation: the Virgin tends to become narrow, self centred; the wife to worship and serve the creature more than the creator. (p. 94) To become lost in spiritual meanings to the exclusion of all else is narrow and limiting, but to remain on the surface of language, speculating or dabbling with words alone without reference to moral or spiritual significance, is idolatry. In her study of the Third Commandment and its ‘parallel’ the Ninth, Rossetti makes it clear that spoken words also carry the responsibility of actions: ‘unenlightened man would probably hold himself guiltless, or at least lightly absolved, in matters of mere speech … . Yet on the whole, the testimony of Holy Scripture is (I think) clearly and preponderantly on the contrary side’ (pp. 126–7). Like the rest of the natural world, words need to be backed by an eternal light, like the essential quality of God, which shines through his creation. Words have a special sanctity as vehicle for God-talk: through them we can name God, praise Him and call on His name. Hence there is a direct relationship between our involvement in a universe which speaks of God, and our own speech. Brilliant yet empty plays on language may seem to shine, but ‘there is a phosphorescence which indicates death and corruption’ (p. 150). Speech and interpretation are no less involved in sin than human actions. Just as the natural world turned away from life at the cross, so did language desert our Lord: Almost the last sound of human speech that (so far as we can suppose) reached our Redeemer’s dying ears was a misinterpretation: ‘Behold, He calleth Elias’. (p. 153) Letter without Spirit becomes, as in 1 Cor. 13, ‘sounding brass, or tinkling symbol’ (p. 154). Rossetti ends her study of the law with a Harmony on part of 1 Cor. 13, but not before returning to the vision of a universe which turns

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in harmony with God’s purpose for us: ‘that circle of the Divine Will into which the circle of human obedience fits … to each other as the First Great and Second Like Commandments are also to each other, distinguishable while indivisible; as the outer and inner edge of a wheel-tire revolving in indissoluble union, yet of which one moving along its vaster orbit with a dominant sweep encompasses and entails the other’ (pp. 163–4). The keeping of the Sabbath Day is an opportunity to ‘sit loose to the world’ and to synchronise our hearts with ‘the Divine scheme of universal harmony’ (pp. 165, 166).

Time Flies Her children arise up, and call her blessed. Prov. 31:28 Rossetti’s next volume, Time Flies, expands further the discourse on language and symbol, clarifying in particular Christ’s role in making possible the language of symbol. In the opening pages she describes the just combination of Letter and Spirit as ‘poetic’ and suggests, as in the earlier volume, that ‘Scrupulous Christians … too often resemble translations of the letter in defiance of the spirit’ (p. 2). From language itself, in this volume Rossetti moves to embrace the language of everyday actions, in a synthesis of poetry, prayer, hagiography, anecdote and autobiography, organised in the form of day-to-day advice on Christian conduct. The central theme of Time Flies is the birth and growth of the Spirit, God’s gift to humanity through the birth and death of Christ, and Rossetti traces Christ’s role in leading us from ‘surface history’, towards the ‘mystery of eternity’ (p. 13). Her entry for 1 January begins with the Feast of the Circumcision, and she traces a parallel between Christ’s physical and spiritual life: He was just eight days old when He shed the first drops of His Blood: thus (in a sense) He began His spiritual life. His natural and His spiritual life began one with privation, the other with suffering. (p. 1) The book is a journey into spiritual understanding, and Rossetti provides a section of prose or poetry for each day of the year, in the manner of Hone’s Every-Day Book, a publication with which she had


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been familiar as a child. The variety of form in her volume is reminiscent of the ideas represented in her early novel, Maude: the locked diary of the protagonist, a ‘writing book’ of ‘original compositions … pet extracts, extraordinary little sketches and occasional tracts of journal’, hidden and ultimately destroyed at the end of the story. Maude herself dies in the story, without fulfilling her poetic vocation. The manuscript of Maude lay hidden in a drawer during Rossetti’s lifetime, and it must have been with great satisfaction – if Rossetti had ever seen herself in the character of Maude – that she now presented in Time Flies such a personal account of her experiences and beliefs, knowing that she had a public eager for her next volume. Characteristic of Time Flies is a newfound confidence, especially in form: prose flows into poetry, anecdote into prayer, the tone at all times open and friendly. Rossetti has found a medium of expression which exactly fits her needs, and a public responsive to her message. In Letter and Spirit from Matt. 16, she concluded: ‘Works preach at least as powerfully as words; and this form of sermon all can deliver, even those who have neither call nor eloquence as teachers’ (p. 150). In turning to the experience of everyday life in a Christian community, Rossetti has correctly read the Victorian need for an accessible theology, one which turns away from controversy and complex argument, and one which presents even difficult concept in a form accessible to everyone. She has stressed in all her work the need to focus on the small, the simple; ‘this our day is the day of small things’, she repeats in Letter and Spirit, ‘Over and over again the lesson is brought home to us how tongues of angels and miracleworking faith are bestowed on some few, while of all of us without exception charity is required’. Faith and theological understanding are worth nothing unless carried forward into every detail of daily life. As in her other devotional texts, the theological foundations are laid in the early sections. The poem for 6 January hails the coming of Christ as the fulfilment of humanity’s need for concrete symbol, and warns that too much attention to formality and hierarchy will blind us to the simplicity and humility of Christ’s message: ‘Lord Babe, if Thou art He We sought for patiently, Where is Thy court? Hither may prophecy and star resort;

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Men heed not their report.’ – ‘Bow down and worship, righteous man: This Infant of a span Is He man sought for since the world began.’ – ‘Then, Lord, accept my gold, too base a thing For Thee, of all kings King.’ ‘Lord Babe, despite Thy youth I hold Thee of a truth Both Good and Great: But wherefore dost Thou keep so mean a state, Low lying desolate?’ – ‘Bow down and worship, righteous seer: The Lord our God is here Approachable, Who bids all draw near.’ ‘Wherefore to Thee I offer frankincense. Thou sole omnipotence.’ (p. 5, stanzas 1–2) The excessively formal language of the first three stanzas of the poem presents a striking contrast to the warmth and tenderness of Rossetti’s Christmas carols, notably the carol beginning ‘In the bleak mid winter’, with its emphasis on the physical closeness of Christ to his mother. Here the wise men have difficulty fitting the incongruous sight of a helpless baby into the stern reasoning of prophecy. Confronted with the poverty and hardship of a stable, they do not understand. The answer to their question is not given in logical argument or ritual; they are simply directed towards the Christ Child. The speaker’s blunt answers betray a mounting irritation and impatience: the sages’ need to question and to probe risks missing the answer, which lies revealed in the physical presence of Christ. One is reminded of the impatience of Christ Himself, addressing the multitude in Luke 12:56: ‘Ye hypocrites, ye know how to interpret the face of the earth and the heaven; but how is it that ye know not how to interpret this time?’ The answer to mankind’s need for tangible form lies revealed in the Christ-Child, the fulfilment of prophecy, the gift of gold pointing to His acceptance of an earthly identity. The second stanza points out why such an identity is necessary: ‘The Lord our God is here/Approachable’.


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The tense dialogue of the first three stanzas gives way, in the fourth, to a language free from the constraints of ceremony, as shepherds enter, bringing with them a lamb, the symbol of Christ as sacrificial lamb: And lo! From wintry fold Good will doth bring A Lamb, the innocent likeness of this King Whom stars and seraphs sing (p. 6) The old language of prophecy has now been replaced by the new language of revelation through symbol, which Christ has made possible, and in which all creation, even the humblest creature, may be seen to tell of God’s love. This recognition of the involvement of Christ in the creation of symbol, of Christ incarnate in the symbolic mode, allows Rossetti a new freedom to transpose the message of the scriptures into the language of the natural world and into that of our every day comings and goings. As in Seek and Find, humanity stands together with the rest of the physical world in the worship of Christ, because not only has He deigned to take on our human nature, but He has also endowed our natural forms with His own power of symbol: And lo! The bird of love, a Dove Flutters and cooes above: And Dove and Lamb and Babe agree in love: – Come, all mankind, come, all creation, hither, Come worship Christ together. Christ Himself as human child stands with other representatives of the natural world, and all creation may share in this unity of love and praise. Rossetti attempts to describe the joy she experiences in moments of particular closeness to the natural world. She tells of a small incident near a pond, where the wild creatures emerged, encouraged by her stillness, as she sat and watched them: ‘Many (I hope) whom we pity as even wretched, may in reality, as I was at that moment, be conscious of some small secret fount of pleasure: a bubble, perhaps, yet lit by a dancing rainbow. I hope so and I think so: for we and all creatures alike are in God’s hand, and God loves us’ (p. 69).

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As in her former volumes, scripture springs to life as we observe the world around us. The sharp focus characteristic of Seek and Find runs again through Rossetti’s descriptions of the natural world, and her parables of nature. For 6 March she describes a nest of still blind nestlings, ‘who with well-placed blind confidence … sat ready and adapted to be fed. No visible agency did I discern at the moment, yet they gaped on unabashed and unwearied … I might well have recalled (though I did not) that familiar verse of the Psalm: “Open thy mouth wide, and I shall fill it”. Ask now … the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee’ (p. 47). The forms of everyday experience are transformed, rather like Keble’s sacramental universe, where they are ‘clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer symbols, but to partake … of the nature of sacraments’.11 But unlike Keble’s vision of nature, Rossetti’s circles of duty and obedience which encompass all creation and unite it to God’s Will are not appropriated and divorced from the natural world to become abstract theology for use in the pulpit. As we saw in Seek and Find, nature has a specific relationship with God, and even though we may learn from it, we may not dominate or abuse it. Rather than following Keble, Rossetti uses the symbol in the Coleridgean sense, where the symbol is characterised ‘above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal’, and ‘always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative’.12 For Rossetti the ‘heavenly symbol’ is firmly rooted in the physical world; ‘however dense or however translucent’ it is ‘equally an appreciable body’. Like the light of a prism, heaven would be ‘over spiritual for us’, because ‘we need something grosser, something more familiar and more within the range of our experience’ (pp. 41–2). Christ Himself in the flesh would appear ‘more winningly accessible, less awe-striking, less overwhelming than he does now’ (p. 73). The harmony of symbol is an echo of the harmony which should exist between soul and body, like the two wheels of the First and Second Great Commandments moving together. For her entry of 8 April she compares the body to the Holy Land, home to the Holy Nation, in response to a quotation from Lev. 26:34, ‘Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths’: Viewed in reference to each other, it was the nation that sanctified the land rather than the land the nation: and this, because it


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appertains to the higher and not to the lower element to consecrate its fellow. It was so in theory. In practice, Israel oftentimes and widely desecrated their hallowed dwelling-place. They, living, were the nobler element; she, lifeless, whilst filled with them became defiled with their defilements; emptied of them, recovered her passive proper sanctity. They were like the soul, she like the body. (p. 67) In her entry for 30 September, the Feast of St. Jerome, she hints at the Tractarian excesses of renunciation and their tendency to abuse the body in order to ‘overcome the natural man’. St. Jerome’s strength in overcoming self ‘occasionally ran … into ruggedness, asperity, unseemliness, in the field of controversy’ (p. 189). Rossetti believed in the resurrection of the body (p. 88), but it was not the human body only that Rossetti saw as suffering man’s defilement. As we saw in Seek and Find, she spoke out against human cruelty; here again her anger is kindled against humanity’s abuse of the natural world. Nature is created not only for mankind to enjoy, but belongs just as much to its other creatures however small. Her poem for 5 July may be seen as a declaration of animal (and insect) rights: Innocent eyes not ours, Are made to look on flowers, Eyes of small birds and insects small: Morn after summer morn, The sweet rose on her thorn Opens her bosom to them all. The least and last of things That soar on quivering wings, Or crawl on grass blades out of sight, Have just as clear a right As Queens or Kings. (p. 128) The fright she once felt on being startled by a frog, she tells us in her next entry, will be nothing compared to the fright we shall feel at the anger of God if we hurt even the smallest creature: ‘It is quite certain that no day will ever come when even the smallest, weakest, most grotesque, wronged creature will not in some fashion rise up in the


Judgement with us to condemn us, and so frighten us effectively once for all’ (p. 129). Her comic poem for 7 July accuses humanity of ignoring the suffering inflicted on animals. We pay lip-service to the natural world, but do not give the ‘actual’ world a second glance. A waggoner has just squashed an adventurous frog under his wheels: Unconscious of the carnage done, Whistling the waggoner strode on, Whistling (it may have happened so) ‘A Froggy would a-wooing go:’ A hypothetic frog trolled he Obtuse to a reality. O rich and poor, O great and small, Such oversights beset us all: The mangled frog abides incog, The uninteresting actual frog; The hypothetic frog alone Is the one frog we dwell upon. (p. 130) Abuse of anything, human, animal or inanimate nature, stirs her to anger despite the thin veneer of humour to her anecdotes. In an unpublished note, possibly for a new edition of her volume, Rossetti adds more to her account of St. Blaise, and urges, ‘let us reflect on our duties & privileges towards dumb animals. Our love draws out their love, our sympathy their sympathy. It is no trivial boon to be loved by any love capable creature whatever its degree: a dog’s fidelity through life until & beyond death shames many a human friend and lover’.13 The well-known strawberry incident from Rossetti’s childhood in which the two young Rossetti girls wait for a strawberry to ripen, only to find it ‘half-eaten and good for nothing’ (pp. 136–7), becomes a parable of sharing the earth’s resources with the rest of earth’s creatures: ‘why should not they have their share in strawberries?’ But man, alas! finds it convenient here to snap off a right and there to chip away a due. Greed grudges their morsel to hedgerow


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birds, and idleness robs the provident hare of his winter haystack, and science pares away at the living creature bodily, ‘And what will ye do in the end thereof?’ (pp. 137–8) We see in Time Flies Rossetti’s theology of daily experience and of the natural world remain firmly rooted to the physical, to the home and to the hedgerow, or where such a close identification with location or circumstance is not possible, such as in the lives of saints, she adds curious, often domestic detail, real or imaginative. As in Called to Be Saints we hear of wives, of sisters and of small details concerning the life or death of the saints, such as St. Augustine’s reputed ‘arrogant and unbrotherly attitude’ (p. 100), or the rejected wife of St. Hillary (p. 11). We work, Rossetti claims, to fulfil our spiritual journey through our physical one and every small detail of our lives is significant. An important characteristic of Rossetti’s thinking about the Spirit is her insistence that we can be sure of its presence only when we are in active engagement with the world around us. As she said in Letter and Spirit, ‘to fulfil that Second [Commandment] is man’s only mode of making sure that he observes the First’ (p. 14). It is true that physical beauty as opposed to that divine radiance is only a shadow-caster rather than the light-giver, but we cannot gaze on God directly: ‘even the eagle gazes not upon the sun, except under shelter of a special optical guard’ (p. 91). We benefit from the physical world around us if we seek the Spirit through it. Because we are physical beings, we need to discern and develop the spiritual with and through our bodies. It is helpful here to turn briefly to a modern comparison to show how Rossetti’s vision foreshadows the holistic nature of recent feminist definitions of woman’s spirituality. Here soul and body are seen as one, and spirituality is a way of being in the world: In truth, there is nothing ‘mystical’ or ‘other worldly’ about spirituality. The life of the spirit, or soul, refers merely to the function of the mind. Hence spirituality is an intrinsic dimension of human consciousness and is not separate from the body … . From one perspective, we realise that we need food, shelter and clothing; from another that some sort of relationship among people, animals and the Earth is necessary; from another that we must determine our identity as creatures not only of our immediate habitat but of the


world and the universe; from another that the subtle, suprarational reaches of mind can reveal the true nature of being.14 Time Flies is dedicated to Rossetti’s mother, with a line from Proverbs 31:28, ‘Her children rise up and call her blessed’, its theology learnt from the wisdom of the little circle of women at the heart of the Rossetti family: maternal aunts, her sister Maria, and above all her mother. Her mother is frequently associated with the figure of wisdom, as we see in the dedication of the volume, and indeed her wisdom and love shines through Rossetti’s homilies. One lesson from 27 April suggests Frances Rossetti’s encouragement and advice not to renounce this world in a fit of despair: April 28 Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is the tree of life. Prov. xiii.12 We feel or fancy ourselves quite at home in the first clause of this proverb, whether or not we have deeply and keenly experienced the heart sickness of which it speaks. But how about the second clause? Left to myself, I at any rate might never have caught its most blessed meaning. But one from whose words I ought to have imbibed much wisdom, and from whose example many virtues, once pointed out the Cross of Christ Crucified as that Tree of Life which satisfied the world’s heartsick hope. And if it suffices to slake a world’s desire, whose desire sufficeth it not to slake. (pp. 80–1) Christ, the heart’s desire, is already present in this world, and the working out of our salvation must be here: A life of hope deferred too often is A life of wasted opportunities. (p. 23) Maria is also a strong presence in Time Flies, again teaching lessons of wisdom and love. Incidents unremarkable in themselves become focal points of giving and receiving spiritual gifts. Typical of Time


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Flies is the overflow of message into spontaneous poetry or prayer, often on the theme of love: February 17 One whom I knew intimately and whose memory I revere once in my hearing remarked that unless we love people we cannot understand them. This was a new light to me. Another time, after she had taken a decisive step in religion, a friend appealed to her not to be alienated from her regard: and she answered that goodness wheresoever found she thought she loved more than ever. Thus in her lips was the law of kindness. Wisdom rooted in love instructed her how to give a right answer. Love is all happiness, love is all beauty, Love is the crown of flaxen heads and hoary. Love is the only everlasting duty, And love is chronicled in endless story And kindles endless glory. (p. 34) Her Aunts Charlotte and Eliza15 are present also, the former the ‘good unobtrusive Christian’ of 12 October, the latter the ‘exemplary Christian’ of 4 December, whose words suggest a practical way to deal with criticism we feel is unwarranted (p. 232). The pragmatism of Rossetti’s message would have been particularly empowering to the Victorian woman, stemming from the kinds of experiences that made up the greater part of her life. The volume is the fulfilment of Rossetti’s early appeals to sisterhood, the reassurance that ‘there is no friend like a sister’, from Goblin Market. She echoes the same advice in Time Flies, extending the circle to include men also because, she claims, ‘there is scarcely a greater help to one’s own running than to lend a hand to a halting brother or sister’ (p. 151). Rossetti is not simply suggesting the transference of women’s wisdom from one generation to the next, but doing it. She is not insisting that women’s lives must remain tied to children and home, and recognises the abuse which women have suffered by being limited in this way, but is drawing on the wisdom accumulated through years


of caring. Woman’s spiritual strength, as we see in the volume, is manifest in her ability to foster community, to care for others and for the environment. Although relatively weak physically, she is spiritually strong: In common parlance Strong and Weak are merely relative terms: thus the ‘strong’ of one sentence will be the ‘weak’ of another. We behold the strong appointed to help the weak: Angels who ‘excel in strength’, men. And equally the weak the strong: woman ‘the weaker vessel’, man. This, though it should not inflate any, may fairly buoy us all up. For every human creature may lay claim to strength, or else to weakness: in either case to helpfulness. ‘We that are strong’, writes St. Paul, proceeding to state a duty of the strong. We who are weak may study the resources of the weak. (p. 57) Rossetti plays on the double meaning of ‘men’, often a feature of her most subversive passages. The male (rather than humanity) needs the help of angels and of women. Whilst St. Paul claims the strength of a man, Rossetti herself claims that of a woman, her emphasis on ‘We’ suggesting at least parity, or even superiority. Modern feminist definitions of spirituality sound remarkably similar to Rossetti’s examples. Ursula King, for example, in Women and Spirituality, spells out the power of sisterhood to foster spiritual strength: Sisterhood can be both a powerful experience and an equally powerful symbol of the togetherness, the relatedness of all women – their relatedness in suffering and oppression, in giving birth and life, in nurturing and caring, in joy and ecstasy. Sisterhood has the potential of widening out into larger circles of community. Authentically lived experience rooted and grounded in wholeness and greater reality radiates power, the power of spiritual energy and strength, of a large continuous life web and rhythm of which the individual pattern forms an integral part. We must ask what resources women possess to live an authentic existence and find the strength to create a more caring community.16


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Possibly the most significant aspect of all in Rossetti’s theological work is that her devotional volumes were extensively read, and not read and enjoyed by women only. They were much loved and became extremely popular; there is evidence that her influence was so widespread that her theology found its way into the pulpit.17 Rossetti’s tendency to view men and women in separate spheres may be inimical to some, but she clearly believed that as a woman, sister and daughter at the heart of family and community life, she had a very specific spiritual message to convey. And her message did in fact reach and was valued by her reader. Again, Ursula King’s description of women’s spiritual resources seems to mirror Rossetti’s offering of her own resources in Time Flies: These are resources primarily linked to woman’s biological, emotional and psychic attributes and abilities. There is perhaps first and foremost the immense resource of suffering as a source of strength to overcome adversity and affliction. There are the pain, the tears, the agony, the immense labour in bringing new life into the world and attending with equally immense patience to its slow and imperceptible growth. These are the roots for women’s resources of compassion, of insight, and ultimately of wisdom. There is also women’s attention to detail, to the minutiae of life, the faithfulness to the daily round of duties which ensure personal and social wellbeing and make the smooth running of ever so many activities in the world possible and bearable. Then there is women’s power of listening, of pacifying, of soothing and healing many a wound and settling many a quarrel and dispute. There is the strength of an encouraging smile and the gentle touch of love, the experience of generous selfless giving, of comfort, warmth, patient encouragement and recognition, the adaptability to people and their personal needs, the caring concern and understanding of others. Peace, love, joy and harmony are all fruits of the spirit found in people of spiritual power and presence. They are not qualities unique to women but women, by the very nature of their traditional tasks and experience and by the social pressures and constraints put upon them, have often developed and embodied these qualities to an unusual degree.18


As in her other volumes, Rossetti found it necessary to defend her theology by disclaiming any learning or qualifications. Her modesty disarms: Scrupulous persons, – a much tried and much trying sort of people, looked up to and looked down upon by their fellows. Sometimes paralysed and sometimes fidgeted by conscientiousness, they are often in the way yet often not at hand. The main pity is that they do not amend themselves. Next to this, it is a pity when they gratuitously attempt what under the circumstances they cannot perform… These remarks have, I avow, a direct bearing on my own case. I am desirous to quote here or there an illustrative story or a personal reminiscence: am I competent to do so? I may have misunderstood, I may never have understood, I may have forgotten, in some instances I cannot recall every detail. Yet my story would point and clench my little essay. So here once for all I beg my readers to accept such illustrations as no more than I give them for; true or false, accurate or inaccurate, as the case may be. One perhaps embellished if I have the wit to embellish it, another marred by my clumsiness. All alike written down in the humble wish to help others by such means as I myself have found helpful. (pp. 3–4) Rossetti may humorously refer to ‘scrupulous persons’ as tiresome and ineffective, but elsewhere she does not temper her scruples when it comes to vain controversy, vivisection or the abuse of women. Her ‘humility’ is tempered by a clear understanding of what she is actually claiming. In her entry for 16 March she hints at a superseded patriarchy: The Impious Cudweed, – how can any weed have earned so grim a title? In a very simple manner. This cudweed puts forth a blossom which in its turn puts forth around itself other blossoms. The first-formed blossom stands like a father encircled by his children, their stock and source.


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But the blossoms of the second generation lengthen their necks, and hold their heads high: they overtop their parent: in a figure, they look down on him. For which loftiness our wise forefathers stigmatised this plant as the Impious Cudweed. (pp. 53–4) Rossetti is conscious that her theology is different and that she is claiming space for it in the male-dominated practice of theology. It has its root in personal experience, in particular in women’s experience; she is forming her spiritual lessons from the ground roots up, from life within a community. She knows also that she is addressing a need. At a time when Christians were losing heart and faith, confused by the many bitter controversies in the Anglican Church, her work held out hope. She was loved by her readers because she understood how theology might be lived in the community. The Church today has not even begun to consider her role, or the role of many other women theological writers like her, in the healing of spiritual wounds within the church towards the end of the century. For women particularly, Rossetti offered the possibility for spiritual development outside the Church and a revaluation of women’s daily activities as source of spiritual wisdom. She never spoke against church worship, was a regular churchgoer herself and fully believed in the profound significance of the Eucharist.19 However, she recognised the need for spiritual empowerment for women: the same spiritual fulfilment that was offered women through the convents which had sprung up earlier in the century, but without the isolation, without the violation of femininity and without the male-dominated power structure they involved. Her entry for 18 February shows her skill at turning even the most humble activity into an opportunity for spiritual growth. It is worth quoting in full because it shows her method: the movement from a description of a mundane though friendly interchange of words, through the consideration of her friend’s motives and the effect they may have on someone else, to a final spiritual truth considered in terms of Christian law: ‘What a good thing my feet are large, for so anyone can wear my boots:’ such a remark I once heard made by one of the kindesthearted of my friends.


A quaint remark and humorous, as she uttered it. I do not think she entertained an idea that she was propounding any high or deep or spiritually helpful truth. Yet such surely we may find it to be: a key at least in part to the why and the wherefore of some irremediable blemishes, a comfort under the depression of lifelong inferiority. For oftentimes our disadvantage promotes the welfare of others, or our weak-point nerves them to endure their own. If really and truly we loved our neighbour as ourself, such aspects of our sorry plight would brighten its gloom and blunt its sting. If only we could and would estimate every blameless blemish in ourselves, not as a personal hardship, but as a helpful possibility; as, so to say, large feet in doubly available boots! (p. 35) The volume is full of similar practical advice on how the Christian should think and behave in day-to-day experiences. Personal influence, for example, is an important aspect of living in a community, like rings in a pool of water when a pebble is dropped in. We may not even know when our example may inspire, ‘like a date palm which lived a long while green and barren. One year without apparent cause it bore fruit. Wherefore? Because out of sight a remote kindred palm shed its fructifying pollen, and this the wind bore to impregnate the barren tree’ (p. 158). The ‘covetous grasping Christian’, on the other hand, ‘is like a quick-sand: the surface smooth, the depth unceasingly on the suck and gulp’ (p. 214). Encouragement in the midst of sorrow and bereavement is the message of one of the most moving entries, describing the funeral of her sister: November 7 One of the dearest and most saintly persons I ever knew, in foresight of her own approaching funeral, saw nothing attractive in the ‘hood and hatband’ style towards which I evinced some oldfashioned leaning. ‘Why make everything as hopeless looking as possible?’ she argued. And at a moment which was sad only for us who had lost her, all turned out in harmony with her holy hope and joy. Flowers covered her, loving mourners followed her, hymns were sung at her grave, the November day brightened, and the sun (I vividly remember) made a miniature rainbow in my eyelashes.


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I have often thought of that rainbow since. May all who love enjoy cheerful little rainbows at the funerals of their beloved ones. (p. 213) Towards the end of the volume, as the Church moves into Advent, the tone becomes graver and there is an urgency about Rossetti’s homilies. As the title of her volume tells us, ‘time is short and swift and never returns. Time flies’ (p. 180) – not only our own individual time, but we look forward to the Apocalypse and the ending of all time. Obedience and love are the two lessons which dominate the last pages. Obedience is ‘the key of knowledge’ coupled with humility and simplicity, and will prevent Eve’s mistake. ‘It was a masterstroke of guile’, Rossetti claims, ‘by which the serpent cajoled Eve into believing disobedience to be the key of knowledge’ (p. 237). Like the wise virgins, we need to be guided by God’s wisdom, not our own. From a Latin anthem ‘O Sapienta’ Rossetti takes the words ‘O Wisdom, Who cometh out of the Most High, reaching from one end to another mightily, and sweetly ordering all things, come and teach us the way of understanding’ (p. 242).


5 The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. (Rev. 12:1) In the previous chapters we have seen how Rossetti recognised the potential of contemporary developments in Anglican theology and used them in the formulation of her own methods of critical enquiry into the scriptures. In The Face of the Deep, her last and perhaps most audacious volume, she found the Tractarian emphasis on emotional and imaginative freedom1 particularly helpful in her need for a woman’s response to a ‘masculine’ text. Although the Tractarians were against ‘indiscriminate Bible reading’2 Rossetti’s close friend, Rev. R.F. Littledale, had strongly promoted access to the scriptures3 despite the increasing debate on how the scriptures should be read. Literal translation had been thoroughly discredited in the wake of the Essays and Reviews controversy, and the more liberal methods of interpretation which followed (despite Pusey’s violent antagonism) also influenced Rossetti’s work. Her method owes much not only to the Tractarian Isaac Williams, but also to the imaginative and inspirational emphasis of Pusey’s arch enemy, Benjamin Jowett. Some earlier attempts at scriptural commentary, probably written in preparation for The Face of the Deep,4 show not only her fascination with the figurative power of language, as we saw as early as Annus Domini where she celebrated the power of metaphor and symbol in the opening up of the text to a multiplicity of reader-based interpretations, 111


but also a growing reliance on the inspirational nature of the text itself. In her unpublished notes on Genesis, the marginal comment for Genesis 2:22 provokes a response in keeping with her defence of Eve. Although she is aware of the standard typological association, Eve associated with the Church, the Bride of Christ, she feels able to comment on any part of the text which speaks to her: Margin ‘builded’ He a woman: opens the whole subject of the Church born & built from our Lord’s side. Also consider His parallel with Adam casting in His lot with his lost bride. ‘Yet without sin’. Also the female cast out of sin? Is it so? First, as we saw in Seek and Find, she is interested in the relationship between a word and what it signifies. Her focus is on the word ‘builded’ and on the tension between God’s creation of Eve and the physical building of a church. Her musings on the word and her imaginative input then give her access to a whole series of possibilities which she can then interpret in any way she finds meaningful. She ends with the daring suggestion, in her use of ‘cast out’, that Eve’s sin had its origin in the sinful flesh of Adam from which she was made. The frequent use of underlining (shown here in italics) especially in the last question, ‘Is it so?’, is evidence of strong convictions, but may also indicate a certain amount of fear that she was going too far. This tension between her need for a meaningful response and her fear of overstepping the limit is characteristic of The Face of the Deep, as we shall see. Throughout the book, Rossetti follows two or more lines of the biblical text with a commentary, which may be several pages in length – the volume is 552 pages of densely packed script – and may take the form of comment, anecdote, poem or prayer. Often, as we saw in the unpublished notes, her focus is on one image or one word: 1. The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him, to show unto His servants things which must shortly come to pass; and He sent and signified it by His angel unto His servant John: 2. Who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.

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‘Things which must shortly come to pass’. – At the end of 1800 years we are still repeating this ‘shortly’, because it is the word of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ: thus starting in fellowship of patience with that blessed John who owns all Christians as his brethren. (p. 9) The word on which Rossetti focused, ‘shortly’, initially has a pivotal function and allows her to include herself in an ‘expanded’ text. It was ‘shortly’ for John, ‘the channel, not the fountain-head’ of Revelation, and it is still ‘shortly’ for the present generation. Rather than attempt to define the word and so give it meaning, she admits we have no way of knowing what actual time-value the word carries. However, by ‘thoughtful reception; as blessed Mary, herself a marvel, kept mysterious intimations vouchsafed to her, and pondered them in her heart’, we receive the special meaning relevant to our needs, as the word itself becomes productive in the imagination. It also brings to mind, through association and analogy, other scriptural passages which build a circle of reference and relevance around it. Then finally, as a broadened concept, it is appropriated personally in prayer: With time, Thy gift, give us also wisdom to redeem the time, lest our day Of grace be lost. For our Lord Jesus’ sake. Amen. (p. 13) Rossetti has still not specifically defined the word, but through the lateral interplay of symbolic representations, she and her readers recognise the urgency of salvation contained in the word, and are moved to action. The justification for her method is contained mainly in her opening chapter, and above all in her development of the doctrine of inspiration – the logical outcome, perhaps, of her emphasis on the activity of the Spirit in Time Flies, and also in keeping with some of the theological developments of her time. Where Newman, for example, sees the living community of the Roman Catholic Church as providing authority on the interpretation of symbol, Rossetti’s emphasis on the activity of the Spirit leads her to the safety of Divine Inspiration. Rossetti’s use of inspiration owes much to the work of Benjamin Jowett, who rejected the distortion of Luther’s claim that the words of scripture must be understood literally. A literal reading of the Bible


became too often a way of hiding from the challenges of a modern world. From Jowett also Rossetti learnt how to make full use of her literary background in working on the Bible and to work confidently despite her lack of a ‘learned’ theological background. In his controversial article on inspiration in Essays and Reviews, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, he writes as a post-Coleridgean,5 suggesting ‘commonsense’ rules for interpretation, and at the same time confirming the validity of individual and personal interpretation: The office of the interpreter is not to add another (meaning), but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the words as they first struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard and read them. He has to transfer himself to another age; to imagine that he is a disciple of Christ or Paul … . The greater part of his learning is a knowledge of the text itself; he has no delight in the voluminous literature which has overgrown it. He has no theory of interpretation; a few rules guarding against common errors are enough for him. His object is to read scripture like any other book, with a real interest and not merely a conventional one. He wants to be able to open his eyes and see or imagine things as they truly are. The clear influence of Coleridge on Jowett’s use of symbol is evident in his description of its ‘doubling’ action: The double meaning which is given to our Saviour’s discourse respecting the last things is not that ‘form of eternity’ of which Lord Bacon speaks; it resembles rather the doubling of an object when seen through glasses placed at different angles. To get inside that world is an effort of thought and imagination, requiring the sense of a poet as well as a critic – demanding much more than learning a degree of original power and intensity of mind.6 Rossetti also brings her experience as writer of fiction into play, in a sense creating an emotional journey through Revelation. Led by St. John, she enters his vision and beckons to the reader to participate also: We who have no door set open before us into visible Heaven, may yet look in with St. John’s eyes. And with his heart as well as his


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eyes, then shall we too be rapt into celestial regions and among harmonies superhuman. (p. 192) Revelation is unfolded as a series of symbolic panoramas, similar to different perspectives of the same object: As when years ago I abode some where within sight of a massive sea rock, I used to see it put on different appearances: it seemed to float baseless on air, its summit vanished in cloud, it displayed upon its surface varied markings, it passed from view altogether in a mist; it fronted me distinct and solid far into the luminous northern summer night, still appearing many and various while all the time I knew it to be one and the same, – so now this Apocalypse I know to be one congruous, harmonious, whole. (p. 174) Rossetti is using the language of diversity in unity, which we saw her using in Letter and Spirit. Revelation is like a universe stretched out before her, and she is lost in wonder: ‘As children may feel the awe of a storm, the beauty of a sunset, so at least I too may deepen awe, and stir up desire by a contemplation of inevitable, momentous, transcendent’ (p. 146). The imaginative and emotional apprehension of the symbolic is upheld by the scriptural endorsement of analogy: The Son of Sirach observes: ‘All things are double one against another’. This suggests that everything cognizable by the senses may be utilized as symbol or parable. To such an exercise certain minds see, strongly drawn. Their horizon thereby recedes, depth is deepened, height heightened, width widened. Underlying any measurable depth, overtopping such height, encompassing such width, they apprehend that which nothing underlies, nothing overtops, nothing encompasses. To them matter suggests the immaterial; time eternity. ‘One day telleth another: and one day certifieth another’. (p. 215) Words draw us in through their beauty and imaginative power; our emotional involvement is part of God’s plan to lead us towards His own beauty: In the Bible God condescends to employ multiform overtures of endearing graciousness, wooing, beseeching, alluring, encouraging.


We love beauty; He lavishes beauty on the sacred text. We desire knowledge; He tells us much, and promises that one day He will tell us all. We are conscious of feelings inexpressible and as yet insatiable; He stirs up such feelings, at once directing them and guaranteeing their ultimate satisfaction. He works on us by what we can and by what we cannot utter; He appeals in us to what we can and to what we cannot define. (p. 432) Here the lack of theological learning is a positive advantage, and the only prerequisite a poetic imagination. Evidence of this kind of imaginative transfer to Biblical times is frequent in the unpublished Genesis notes: XXVI.3 Perhaps the blind old father was remembering how his handsome son used to look setting off to the chase: ‘take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow –’ Her closest model in terms of biblical commentary, however, is Isaac Williams, whose work also utilises the symbolic and imaginative approach and carries with it the authority of the Church Fathers. Rossetti acknowledged his influence in the introduction to Seek and Find, and here we see her using his recommended approach of reverend enquiry, together with the search for correspondence and analogy as a means of making the scriptures live in the mind of the reader. There are many parallels between Williams’ accounts of Genesis and Revelation and The Face of the Deep. Williams’ insistence on Truth as ‘independent of any mere cultivation of the intellect’7 is echoed again and again: ‘Faith alone’, Rossetti tells us, commenting on the faith of the prophets, ‘not knowledge, seems essential to the miracle’ (p. 19). In particular, the emphasis on wisdom and (as in Jowett) the blessedness of ignorance was attractive to one who had been denied theological learning: Good for us is this sense of our ignorance, which comes upon us on the first opening of the Bible. It teaches us to feel how little man is, how great is God. ‘All great knowledge’, says St. Augustine, ‘is this for man to know that he himself by himself is nothing; and that whatever he is, he is from God and on account of God.’ … This meets us at the very threshold of Revelation. It is written, and being written, it is read. But it is not understood, except by faith.8


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Backed by the authority of St. Augustine, Williams assures his readers that the seeming obscurity of the scriptures is an invitation to the study of them. ‘It is the habit of scripture’, he tells us, ‘to leave many things obscure to invite us to the inquiry’. This advice comes with a warning not to indulge in speculation – ‘Seek not out the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things that are above thy strength’ – but also carries the reassurance of the ‘self-interpreting text’ of the Protestant reformers. Rossetti herself clearly states, in much the same way, that those who do not understand the dogma may even in ignorance glean wisdom and instruction from the surface meaning of the words. The Ethiopian Eunuch did not understand the scriptural passage he was reading, but already had the beginning of illumination ‘his in a measure to enjoy, respond to, improve, even before his father in God preached Christ unto him’ (p. 12). The words of the text are active participants in the reading process, revealing unknowable divine things in forms available to human understanding, and in a way which suits the particular needs of the reader (in this case the female reader as the echo of the Magnificat in the following passage suggests): ‘I am Alpha and Omega’. – Thus well-nigh at the opening of these mysterious Revelations, we find in this title an instance of symbolic language accommodated to human apprehension; for any literal acceptation of the phrase seems obviously and utterly inadmissible. God condescends to teach us somewhat we can learn, and in a way by which we are capable of learning. So, doubtless, either literally or figuratively, throughout the entire Book. Such a consideration encourages us, I think, to pursue our study of the Apocalypse, ignorant as we may be. Bring we patience to our quest, and assuredly we shall not be sent empty away. (p. 23) The words of scripture are symbols in the Romantic definition, and are therefore in themselves valuable in that a symbol always partakes of that to which it points, its divine referent accessible to the imagination of a devout believer through the redemption of Christ and the operation of the Spirit. The incarnational poetics formulated in Letter and Spirit and Time Flies are here applied directly to God’s word. This, then, is the theological context of Rossetti’s commentary in The Face of the Deep, and she takes advantage of the opportunity to


practice scriptural interpretation helped rather than hindered by her lack of academic learning. Her volume is written much later than those of Williams – in 1892 – but the tendency in interpretation towards the end of the century was for even less ‘learned’ scholarship and even greater emphasis on imaginative perception and inspiration.The central issue of the Modernist controversy in the Roman Catholic Church in the early years of the twentieth century was exactly this, the symbolical nature of biblical language.9 In ‘A View from “The Lowest Place”’ Colleen Hobbs is right when she says, ‘Rossetti’s strategy is to base her authority precisely on her lack of erudition’,10 but one must also take into account the value which the Tractarians and post-Tractarians placed on inspiration and faith. The more Rossetti is humble about her lack of learning and stresses her utter dependence on faith within this tradition, the more her authority grows. She may in faith ‘investigate’, thereby sidestepping St. Paul’s ban on women’s teaching. The Face of the Deep in fact is full of alternative names for what she is doing: St. Paul has written: ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach’. Yet elsewhere he wrote: ‘I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith … which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice’. To expound prophecy lies of course beyond my power, and not within my wish. But the symbolic forms of prophecy being set before all eyes, must be set for some purpose: to investigate them may not make us wise as serpents; yet ought by promoting faith, fear, hope, love to aid in making us harmless as doves. ‘Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it’: – God helping us, we all great and small can and will run. (p. 195) The quotation of an unpalatable, oppressive viewpoint, followed by ‘and yet’ or ‘but’ in order to introduce her own views, is typical of Rossetti’s commentaries, and one should be wary of accepting her initial statements without looking closely at her qualifications of them as the above quotation shows. She has to be extremely careful in what she says and must certainly have known about the ridicule and abuse afforded earlier women theologians.11 The fact that her work was published regularly shows how well she succeeded in making


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her ideas acceptable to ecclesiastical authority. The ‘harmless as doves’ is, of course, to reassure her male ‘teachers’ that she will not usurp their position of authority although, as we shall see, she is also genuinely afraid that she will repeat Eve’s mistake. Such humility has its price, however, and at times there are hints of her bitterness at having to assume such a lowly position: ‘The subtlest and profoundest of men cannot explain mysteries; the simplest person can appropriate and exult in them’. Elsewhere she denies any superiority of one over another in studying the Bible: Yet, after all, neither knowledge nor ignorance is of first importance to Bible students; grace is our paramount need; Divine grace, rather than any human gift. Acquirements and deficiencies sink to one dead level when lacking grace. (p. 114) Of the ‘synagogue of Satan’ (Rev. 3:9) she comments, ‘They asserted what was in their own intention a claim to superiority; in doing so, they lied’ (p. 114). Despite evidence of occasional lapses into anger, however, The Face of the Deep is remarkable because Rossetti is interpreting the Bible primarily, although not exclusively, for women, and because she is also attempting to formulate a method of interpretation that is distinctly feminine. She is reading consciously for gender, developing a way of studying the scriptures which is available exclusively to women. The wisdom texts, and her familiarity with the role of wisdom in revelation, as we saw in Chapter 3, become her guide. She unobtrusively emphasises the role of wisdom in revealing the message of the inspired text and claims that because personified wisdom is female, through her womankind has a special relationship with scripture. This privilege brings great joy and understanding, but also entails much selfdiscipline and responsibility. As we saw in the unpublished notes, every word of scripture is a rich source of wisdom and Rossetti’s claim is that ‘although the Father of lights may still withhold from us knowledge … he will not deny us wisdom’ (p. 23). Freed by the emphasis on imagination in scriptural interpretation, Rossetti is able to use her experience as a woman: daughter, sister and friend. She sets before her readers the role of ‘The Virtuous woman’ of Proverbs who ‘openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness’, claiming for


all women a special kinship with her: ‘Wisdom, then, associates with kindness: to cultivate kindness is to frequent the society of wisdom. A clue especially vouchsafed to us women’ (p. 405). Moses (and John) may have had direct visions, but writing about the scriptures is woman’s work, as women are traditionally creative and imaginative: Whereas ‘Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise-hearted man, in whom the Lord put wisdom and understanding to know how to work all manner of work for the service of the sanctuary’, so wrought: ‘all the women who were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen. And all the women whose heart stirred them up in wisdom spun goat’s hair’. (p. 405) She calls on Christ, both ‘Wisdom and the Word’, to help her study the words of scripture and to discern wisdom: ‘whatever word be too hard for us, yet vouchsafe to us the wisdom hidden in that word’ (p. 170). Wisdom, although not necessarily superior to understanding, is a grace accessible and available to all. She comments on Rev. 13:18, ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast’: For the special purpose in question, he ‘that hath understanding’, excludes, I should surmise, most men, and very likely all women. For the masses Wisdom resides elsewhere, is an immediately practical grace, and is far more readily accessible … Whoever by loving submission turns intellectual poverty into voluntary spiritual poverty, has discovered a super-excellent philosopher’s stone, apt to transmute ignorance into wisdom. (pp. 349, 350) Wisdom is Rossetti’s ‘philosopher’s stone’, her stepping stone, her inheritance from the Tractarians claimed now as her authority and her guide. Her model for the activity of interpretation, however, her foremother in enquiry, is Eve. She claims a direct parallel between Eve’s use of the intellect to search out knowledge and her own desire to study the scriptures. Eve desired knowledge and, as we saw in Letter and Spirit, exercised her mind as to theoretic outcomes, but allowed


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herself to be convinced by the false logic of the serpent. In words reminiscent of her anger against contemporary Bible controversies, Rossetti explains that Eve was ignoring what she knew to be the true, the obvious meaning of ‘Thou shalt surely die’, and indulging in speculation, led on by Satan: ‘Not till she became wise in her own conceit, disregarding the plain obvious meaning of words, and theorizing on her own responsibility as to physical and intellectual results, did she bring sin and death into the world’ (p. 310). She ‘courted death by bye-path of knowledge’ (p. 76) and speculated to her cost. Rossetti’s repeats almost obsessively her fear of searching out knowledge in a way that would repeat Eve’s mistake. She seems to be reinforcing the status quo of gender repression, but what she is actually doing is attempting to force open a crack in the male-dominated biblical studies using the Tractarian emphasis on obedience and faith. She will, of course, not repeat Eve’s mistake; knowledge is not her aim. Wisdom is, however, and may itself sanctify knowledge: Whether any given knowledge will prove profitable or unprofitable is a question by itself, independent of any debate as to its authenticity. However beguiled, Eve learned the difference between good and evil: So in his turn did Adam, of whom it is expressly stated that he was not deceived. What they learned was so far genuine: all the same it proved fatal. Knowledge and wisdom are quite distinct, though not necessarily sundered. (p. 252) ‘Humble ignorance’, Rossetti claims, ‘secures the essentials of wisdom’ (p. 266) and legitimate knowledge may then follow. She embraces her ‘Providential’ ignorance, ‘happy … inasmuch as I cannot, like my mother Eve, gratify my curiosity’ (p. 294). Once she has made a pact as it were with ecclesiastical authority, she claims the rights it brings. She is not deploying ‘subversive strategies’12 but rather, as Westerholme suggests, is agreeing to an unwritten contract with her culture and with her Church, knowing that she will be able to claim far more than they perhaps realise. Westerholme sees Rossetti as not abiding by the contract she had made, but engaging ‘in serious and scholarly biblical interpretation, assuming a man’s role according to the standards of the time’.13 Rossetti did, however, abide by the rules she agreed to, ‘ever to write modestly under correction’ (p. 177). She may have bursts of anger in The Face and even of self-pity,


her ‘proud waves’ may ache to burst their bounds, but she can never be sure that those rules were not in fact instituted by God Himself. Hence the tension that is nearly always present in her work. There is no doubt that her final comment in concluding the volume is genuine, especially coming as it does after John’s words of Rev. 22:19. Her half-playful, half-fearful words ‘If I have been overbold in attempting such a work as this, I beg pardon’ (p. 551) are typical of her approach. But she was not interested in ‘a man’s role’ and makes this quite clear. She writes primarily for a female readership (‘we women’) and from the outset of The Face insists on equal participation in the glories revealed. To the command ‘Behold’ of Rev. 1:18 she responds ‘“Behold”, He saith. Who shall behold? Shall St. John and shall not I? I also; because for me no less than for St. John He lived and was dead and is alive for evermore’ (p. 43). Having accepted the ban on a search for ‘knowledge’ (with relief, I imagine, given that she loosely identifies this knowledge with the endless Victorian squabbling over different interpretations) and embraced her identity as daughter of Eve, Rossetti is free to re-invent the form of Biblical commentary as she wishes. She combines prayers, poetry, litanies, scriptural parallels (which to a certain extent replace the quotations from the Church Fathers, which abound in Williams’ work), personal dialogues with Christ, working these into a ‘patchwork of scriptural citations, meditations, admonitions, studies of spiritual climate, and self criticism’14 which to some may not seem to have anything to do with Revelation itself, in her establishment of an alternative, feminist, hermeneutic which responds creatively to the sacred text. She is also free to comment as she wishes on the words of Revelation, inviting her readers to join with her in a ‘pilgrim caravan’, ‘in fellowship of patience with that blessed John who owns all Christians as his brethren’ (p. 9). The work is entitled a ‘devotional commentary’, and in one of her few references to Mary, the mother of Christ, Rossetti outlines a possible feminine approach to the prophecy of Revelation: It suffices not to read or hear the words of this prophecy, except we also ‘keep those things which are written therein’. How keep them? One part in one way, another part in another: the commandments by obedience, the mysteries by thoughtful reception;


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as blessed Mary, herself a marvel, kept mysterious intimations vouchsafed to her, and pondered them in her heart. (p. 12) Any ‘historical coincidences’ Rossetti leaves to ‘the authoritative handling of her teachers’, claiming instead that ‘meditation’ whilst reading the text ‘is lawful to all of us’, and that ‘the eyes that look are the eyes likely to see’ (p. 267). The title of The Face of the Deep proclaims its lowly status, as does Rossetti’s Prefatory Note: If thou canst dive, bring up pearls. If thou canst not dive, collect amber. Though I fail to identify Paradisiacal ‘bdellium’, I still may hope to search out beauties of the ‘onyx stone’. It is simply ‘a surface study’ Rossetti claims elsewhere, and ‘if it incites any to dive deeper than I attain to, it will so far have accomplished a worthy work. My suggestions do not necessarily amount to beliefs; they may be no more than tentative thoughts compatible with acknowledged ignorance’ (p. 365). Meditation on the surface for the ignorant, reading and hearing the words, even if not understanding is well within the tradition of the Church Fathers and endorsed by Williams and stated at the beginning of his own study of Revelation: There is a deeper knowledge often appealed to; but even to the unlearned the very reading and hearing is blessed; the ears catch the sound of unearthly wisdom, and the heart is soothed and sobered. The Divine words are as a healing charm, says Origen, to the soul, though the mind perceived it not.15 Once Rossetti has protected herself against accusations of pride or incompetence by remaining within an acceptable tradition, she is able to write freely, following lines of thought which otherwise might earn her criticism or ridicule. One of her major achievements in interpretation is to examine the text in terms of gender, picking up gender codes within the narrative, and valorising or exposing for criticism those aspects which relate to women. The best known of these is the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ of Rev. 12:1, which Rossetti sees as a central part of the glories of the New Jerusalem, and which, as she points out, holds significance particularly because it is female: ‘I perceive the


marvel of “a woman” (for such is the figure, whatever may be the signification) appearing at the centre of such concurrent glories’ (p. 371). Rossetti’s comment on the figure is worth quoting in full, because it shows her approach through the ‘self-interpreting’ text, which calls up a response from within the experience of the reader. Then we see her subtle move from the figure as a participant in the apocalyptic vision, to an emblem of woman’s strength in this world: Of this Apocalypse the occult unfulfilled signification will be new; the letter is old. Old, not merely because these eighteen hundred years it has warned us to flee from the wrath to come; but also because each figure appeals to our experience, even when it stands for some object unprecedented or surpassing. A rose might preach beauty and a lily purity to a receptive mind, although the ear had not yet heard tell of the Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valleys. ‘A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’. – Whatever else may here be hidden, there stands revealed that “great wonder”, weakness made strong and shame swallowed up in celestial glory. For thus the figure is set before our eyes. Through Eve’s lapse, weakness and shame devolved on woman as her characteristics, in a manner special to herself and unlike the corresponding heritage of man. As instinctively we personify the sun and moon as he and she, I trust that there is no harm in my considering that her sun-clothing indicates how in that heaven where St. John in vision beheld her, she will be made equal with men and angels; arrayed in all human virtues, and decked with all communicable Divine graces: whilst the moon under her feet portends that her sometime infirmity of purpose and changeableness of mood have, by preventing, assisting, final grace, become immutable; she has done all and stands; from the lowest place she has gone up higher. As love of his Lord enabled St. Peter to tread the sea, so love of the same Lord sets weak woman immovable on the waves of this troublesome world, triumphantly erect, despite her own frailty, made not ‘like unto a wheel’, amid all the changes and chances of this mortal life. (p. 310) D’Amico sees Rossetti here as ‘looking beyond time to eternity’, when finally women would gain equality,16 but this interpretation


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does not take account of the very definite move to the present in the passage. The woman of Revelation becomes a symbol of womankind in the present and her triumph comes while still in the world, empowered by a love of Christ. Rossetti did not take her interpretation of this figure from Williams, who predictably follows St. Augustine and who sees the Church ‘as intended by the Woman clothed with the sun, while the man-child is Christ born in His members’. That is not to say that she refutes the interpretation of the woman as the Church. She simply emphasises its female attributes. Her appropriation of the figure as representing woman continues, but expands to include the Church as mother, and the child who is seen as both Christ and new converts to the faith. Rossetti’s interpretation, however, seems to come from a rather different tradition from the Tractarians’. Hobbs suggests as origin for her study the tradition of Christian mysticism with its ‘disruptive, revisionary power’.17 Although there is an affinity with these mystics, as I have mentioned elsewhere, Rossetti has even closer links with the millenarian tradition,18 which was derived from the prophesies of Revelation, and is closely linked to the evangelical tradition. The evangelical revival brought with it some very challenging attitudes towards women and morality and, through the evangelical background of her mother, Rossetti must certainly have been aware of them. She herself inherited to a certain extent the typical ambiguity towards the role of women (so much a part of the Victorian ‘woman question’) where renunciation of the (female) self happily coexists with a belief in woman’s moral and spiritual power, and ‘a feeling which seems implanted in our nature by the Almighty, to rebel against oppression’.19 At the beginning of the century Joanna Southcott, a domestic servant, had claimed to hear voices proclaiming her the new Saviour, the ‘woman clothed with the sun’, and her theology of a female messiah lived on in a milder form well into the century. It is interesting to note Southcott’s equation of Satan with sexual abuse, which might explain the complex fusion of theology and sexual abuse in ‘Goblin Market’: ‘In her writings, Satan was castigated as “the liar”, the “betrayer of women” who, when he was not masquerading as a serpent, was busy philandering with innocent girls’.20 An interesting comparison may be made also with interpretations of the figure in Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible, published in 1898


in America. Matilda Joclyn Gage renames the book of Revelation Re-veilings, and sees it as comprehensible only through astrology, although her attitude towards it is positive. It refers, she claims, ‘largely … to woman, her intuition, her spiritual powers, and all she represents’.21 Any such astrological interpretation would have been unacceptable to Rossetti, but there is a similarity here in the approach of the two women, who see the text as a celebration of woman’s spiritual power. Gage’s interpretation, however, participates in the soul/body duality which we have seen Rossetti trying to avoid: Clothed with the sun, woman here represents the Divinity of the feminine, its spirituality as opposed to the materiality of the masculine; for in Egypt the sun, as giver of life, was regarded as feminine, while the moon, shining by reflected light, was looked upon as masculine. With her feet upon the moon, woman, corresponding to and representing the soul, portrays the ultimate triumph of spiritual things over material things-over the body, which man, or the male principle, corresponds to and represents.22 The feminine here holds sway over the spiritual only, and because of this limitation, Gage is unable to claim woman’s body, making it very difficult to locate any social or historical victory for women. The book for her remains ‘a Secret’. Stanton herself has little to say about Rev. 12:1, restating the popular interpretation of the Church ‘watched and persecuted by the emissaries of the Papal hierarchy’.23 In England, after the succession of leading Anglican figures to Roman Catholicism, hatred of Rome reached new heights,24 yet although Rossetti never considered joining the Roman Church she remained sympathetic to those who did, admiring their strength of devotion (p. 302). Rome as the Whore of Babylon at least diverted popular attention from the fact of a female representation of the figure, but Stanton notes it and her reaction to it is one of rejection rather than of retrieval: No one can describe the pomp, splendor and magnificence of the Church of Rome. The cup in the woman’s hand contained potions to intoxicate her victims. It was the custom of that time for public women to have their names on their foreheads, and as they represented the abominations of social life, they were often


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named after cities. The writers of the Bible are prone to make women the standard for all kinds of abominations; and even motherhood, which should be held most sacred, is used to illustrate the most revolting crimes … Why so many different revising committees of bishops and clergymen should have retained this book as holy and inspiring to the ordinary reader is a mystery. It does not seem possible that the Divine John could have painted these dark pictures of the struggle of humanity with the Spirit of Evil. Verily, we need an expurgated edition of the Old and New Testaments before they are fit to be placed in the hands of our youth to be read in the public schools and in theological seminaries, especially if we wish to inspire our children with proper love and respect for the Mothers of the Race.25 Although justifiably angry at the way women are represented, Stanton sees the damage in terms of public profile: these figures could lead to a lack of respect for women, and for the role of motherhood. Rossetti, on the other hand, because of her appreciation of the inspirational nature of the scriptures, knows there is a lesson for woman herself in the text, and trusts also that it will be appropriate and of genuine value to her and to her readers. She is able, therefore, to attempt to retrieve the lesson from such a negative figure. Unlike Stanton, she can face the physicality of the Whore, its implications in terms of the abuse of the body from within and from without, exploring the different relationships between the protagonists of the tragedy, both in the world of the text and in her own, and placing all in the context of God’s final judgement. The strength of her feminist hermeneutic lies in her ability to wrestle with the text, refusing to let go, forcing it to yield meaningful lessons for the women of her day. Her treatment of the Whore tends to embarrass the modern Rossetti critic, as she seems in this figure to be holding up the female body to be despised as the epitome of sensuality and lust, ‘the particular foulness, degradation, loathsomeness, to which a perverse rebellious woman because feminine not masculine is liable’, and warning women to beware of themselves. ‘Solomon’, she tells us, ‘by warning man against woman has virtually warned woman against herself’ (p. 400). She seems to be reiterating the very victimisation and blatant misogyny which angers modern feminist theologians.


In defence of Rossetti, D’Amico argues that the harlot figures should not be seen ‘as representative of lust’, but rather as ‘emblems of female disobedience, of diverting the mind from God’.26 However, whilst Rossetti certainly does see the Whore as an example of female disobedience, her discourse is considerably weakened when, as in D’Amico’s study, isolated examples of her argument are torn from their context in her commentary. The central part of the discussion of the Whore in The Face of the Deep relates to the power of the female body, and its use and misuse. Rossetti makes it clear that she is speaking about lust, but lust as the misuse of such power. The greater the power the greater the potential for misuse: We daughters of Eve may beyond her sons be kept humble by that common voice which makes temptation feminine. Woman is a mighty power for good or for evil. She constrains though she cannot compel. Potential for evil, it becomes her to beware and forbear; potential for good, to spend herself and be spent for her brethren. (pp. 357–8) Rossetti claims the power of the traditional World/Woman figure, but in her treatment of the Whore takes care to distinguish between the Whore’s female self, with its potential integrity and strength, and the construct which she has become after having been abused and made object of male desire and lust for power. It is clear that for Rossetti this corrupt and corrupting lust comes from without. Firmly dismissing the traditional historical reading, in favour of a personal appropriation of the figure, Rossetti uses her own interpretation of the commandments from Letter and Spirit to define lust. As before, the sins of the flesh are grouped as idolatry, the preference of a tangible object to God, but in this case her attention is on the way these sins are hidden from the eye, and their surface beauty presented as ‘art’. These sins are not seen as originating from the Whore herself who is presented as the victim, but are located in Rossetti’s own world and the predominantly male artistic circle in which she herself moved. Evil becomes sensual indulgence overlaid with a veneer of sophistication:27 ‘voluptuousness of music, fascination of gesture, entrancement of the stage, rapture of poetry, glamour of eloquence, seduction of imaginative emotion’ (p. 399). We need to ‘strip sin bare’, she tells us, so that we know it for what it is. It becomes


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clear as Rossetti’s discourse proceeds that we are in the familiar thematic territory of ‘Eve’ and Goblin Market, where sin is allowing the ‘serpent’ to exercise power and seduce womankind over again: Wherever the serpent is tolerated there is sure to be dust for his pasture: he finds or he makes a desolate wilderness of what was as the garden of Eden. Only an illusion, a mirage, can cause a barren desert to appear in our eyes as a city of palaces, an orchard of fruits … . The woman and the beast by a foul congruity seem to make up a sort of oneness, after the fashion of a snail and its shell. If she removes, he is the motor; she is lifted aloft to the extent of his height; her stability depends on his. In semblance he is her slave, in reality her master. (p. 399) The much-hated Whore is a pawn in the obscene power-game of the beast on which she sits. She has been deceived into thinking that the ‘barren desert’ is an ‘orchard of fruit’ and has been seduced by the illusion of power held out to her. Although she in turn seduces, it is the desperate seduction of the abused prostitute: ‘In the day of her foul attractiveness the lost woman was idol, mistress, plaything: in the day of her decay she becomes a prey, and there is none to help her’ (p. 411). Unlike the woman clothed with the sun, she is cut off by the beast from the natural world, which then loses the power to help her. Rossetti presents the whole canvas of female suffering, as we see our foremothers also gaze on the tragedy, powerless to end it. Their answer is to be patient, but their passive acceptance is unbearable: Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful; Our Sisters gracious in their life and death; To each unforgotten memory saith: ‘Learn as we learned in life’s sufficient school, Work as we worked in patience of our rule, Walk as we walked much less by sight than faith, Hope as we hoped despite our slips and scathe, Fearful in joy and confident in dule’. I know not if they see us or can see: But if they see us in our painful day, How looking back to earth from Paradise


Do tears not gather in those loving eyes? – Ah, happy eyes! Whose tears are wiped away Whether or not you bear to look on me. (p. 401) The plight of women seduced and betrayed, like the Whore, merges in the poem with the oppression of womankind in general, the ‘painful day’ that even the speaker suffers. Rossetti’s burning question is ‘Why?’ Why has God allowed this to happen? What is the ‘Mystery’ which is written on the forehead of the Whore? At this point Rossetti finds herself trapped by the limits she has imposed on her study: ‘A revealed unexplained mystery is (as it were) my Tree of Knowledge accessible whilst forbidden; a theme for prayer, not a bait for curiosity. Ignorance by virtue of good will takes rank as part of obedience. To be of one mind with God is universal knowledge in embryo’ (p. 401). Whilst she does not allow herself to question God’s motives, Rossetti is not afraid of demolishing commonly held interpretations of the scriptural text, as we have seen so far, with her refusal to condemn the Whore. She ends her discourse on the figure by briefly distancing herself from the ‘meaning’, and looking at Revelation as a constructed text. Ultimately, the Whore and what she stands for do not need to be seen as female at all: ‘The “woman” who now of a sudden we encounter: have we under a different aspect already met her?’ (p. 403). Rossetti points to a male image of the sea beast in Rev. 13:14, 15: ‘Can this image be a diverse presentment of the woman? So much in the kingdom of darkness seems an awful mockery of the Divine Kingdom, that I think the image and woman assume a possible interchangeableness when we recall St. Paul’s sentence: “A man … is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man”’. Taken out of context, Rossetti’s quotation of the words of St. Paul may seem to uphold woman’s submission, as they have been traditionally used to point out the derivative nature of womankind, but she in fact very cleverly subverts the common usage. The Whore, her use of the words spells out, is an image which is derived from man and which has been created out of the beast itself; it is not a woman but a perversion, a male fantasy. Whilst the end of the woman ‘is made abundantly clear’, Rossetti draws her reader’s attention to the fact that the fate of the beast which carries the woman has been omitted, and that ‘the substance of this present vision seems authoritatively displaced’ (p. 404).


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Rossetti’s ability to see Revelation as a text, reflecting the assumptions and limitations of its day, and her ability to recover its message for her own time and gender, foreshadows the work of feminist reconstructionist hermeneutics. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, recognises the importance of imaginative participation, which we have seen is fundamental to Rossetti’s method. In her study of Revelation Schüssler Fiorenza emphasises the value of a literary approach: ‘Exegetes and theologians still have to discover what artists have long understood: the strength of the language and composition of Revelation lies not in its theological argumentation or historical information but in its evocative power inviting imaginative participation’.28 Revelation itself, she argues, ‘must be understood as a poetic-rhetorical construction of an alternative symbolic universe that “fits” its historical-rhetorical situation’. Just as Rossetti is able to locate the images of the text in her own time, seeing the Whore as a tragic example of the abuse of woman’s body, Schussler Fiorenza emphasises the importance of the reading subject, ‘the interpreter’s agency, subjecthood, contextuality, stance and perspective’.29 Rossetti is able to transcend the limited male perspective of the text, where the writers of The Woman’s Bible could not. Stanton’s recoil from the use in Revelation of women figures to illustrate all kinds of abominations is also present in the work of more recent feminist theologians, still acting as a barrier to their acceptance of the text. Mary Daly sees Revelation as unrecoverable because of its negative portrayal of women and finds the Whore ‘a scapegoat, a victim for dismemberment’.30 ‘The Apocalypse’, we learn also, ‘is not a safe space for women’.31 The ‘erotic tension’ in the destruction of the Whore, ‘the ultimate misogynist fantasy’, is seen as a message of death to the affirmation of female desire. For Rossetti, however, the ability to see Revelation as a constructed text, belonging to a particular time and culture, and which carries lessons beyond the limitation of time, allows her the freedom of interpretation which makes sense of the figure. She can see how the Whore functions as a male parody of women: what women could become if they allow themselves to be drawn into the male fantasy. The destruction of the Whore may then be seen as a warning against an oppressive slavery in which women become objects of male desire, and Rossetti makes it clear how easy it is for a woman to become enmeshed in the seduction of men’s adulation.


Rossetti’s anger, however, is directed not only towards men, but also against those women who exploit the power of their own body in this way. Woman’s power may not consist of physical strength, but her force of persuasion through mind or body is great and necessitates corresponding self-control. Satan directed his attack through Eve, recognising in her feminine power his greatest prize, and we see the route of Babylon as a deadly re-enactment of the deception of Eve: ‘For Satan is the showman of her goodly show: he who can himself appear as an angel of light understands how to inflate her scale, tint her mists and bubbles with prismatic colours, hide her thorns under roses and her worms under silk. He can paint her face, and tire her head, and set her on a wall and at a window, as the goal of a vain race, and the prize of a vain victory’ (p. 357). Women must use their gifts responsibly and not ‘tempt’ for evil. The greater power they hold should call forth greater responsibility, and so Rossetti’s celebration of woman’s power concludes with a strong warning against its abuse: In the Bible the word tempt (or its derivatives) is used in a good or in an evil sense, according to the agent or to the object aimed at. The wisest of three wrote: ‘Women are strongest’; and said: ‘Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women’. ‘Babylon is fallen’, saith the angel: he saith not, Is cast down. Though she be cast down, yet is the impulse of her casting down in herself; she hath undermined herself. (pp. 357–8) In a rare direct reference to women’s rights, Rossetti suggests that the oppression of woman is a result of the male abuse of physical power, which has produced a brutal society. A woman’s strength, like that of Christ, is the refusal to use force, and to ‘work mightily through weakness’ (p. 409). Women reject violence: And I think that in these days of women’s self assertion and avowed rivalry with men, I do well to bear in mind that in a contest no stronger proof of superiority can be given on either side than the not bringing into action all available force. As yet, I suppose, we women claim no more than equality with our brethren in head and heart: whilst as to physical force, we scout it as unworthy to arbitrate between the opposed camps. Men on their side do not scout physical force, but let it be. (p. 410)


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She describes the role of men and women in her own society, not only highlighting the physical violence inflicted on women, but also the possibility that roles may one day be reversed: Society may be personified as a human figure whose right hand is man, whose left woman; in one sense equal, in another sense unequal. The right hand is labourer, acquirer, achiever: the left hand helps, but has little independence, and is more apt at carrying than at executing. The right hand runs the risks, fights the battles: the left hand abides in comparative quiet and safety; except (a material exception) that in the mutual relations of the twain it is in some ways far more liable to undergo than to inflict hurt, to be cut (for instance) than to cut. Rules admit of and are proved by exceptions. There are lefthanded people, and there may arise a left-handed society! (p. 410) Rossetti does not exclude the possibility of the establishment of a more just society dominated by women32 and ends her discourse on the Whore of Babylon with a direct attack on the evils of Victorian Britain: ‘The woman … is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth’. – ‘Without controversy’ who then, what then, is she? She seems to include or invite all which tempts man at his earthly proudest and mightiest: ambition shedding blood as water, with garments rolled in blood scarlet as her array; enervating luxury, as she herself sits inert on her scarlet beast; sensual excess foul as her cup; licence that is not liberty, but is chains and fetters like her bravery of gold and pearls and precious stones. Woe to her dupes! … … Alas England full of luxuries and thronged by stinted poor, whose merchants are princes and whose dealings crooked, whose packed storehouses stand amid bare homes, whose gorgeous array has rags for neighbours! (pp. 411, 422) Apart from a fresh look at the more controversial figures in Revelation, Rossetti’s study searches out spaces which leave room for personal identification with Christ, with the female Church, or with the feminine nature of God. She finds an opening, for example, in the ‘white stone’ of Rev. 2:17, ‘which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it’, and her discourse shifts entirely to the feminine. A saint


today ‘will recognise not herself … but in the beatified life it shall be otherwise. When Christ shall call each happy, heavenly soul by name, as once He called “Mary” in an earthly garden, then each will perceive herself to be that which He calls her, and will no more question her own designation than did those primitive creatures whom the first Adam named in the inferior Paradise’. Adam’s inferior ‘naming’ of woman, Rossetti suggests, is overruled by the name which Christ holds concealed, a ‘love-name known to both and endeared to each, as it were a name (I mean) expressive of what He was and is to that one soul, and what that one soul is to Him, and which as regards all others will pass man’s or angels’ understanding’ (p. 73). Although few and far between, such passages are deliberate in their use of the feminine. Another example coincides with Rossetti’s emphasis on the feminine nature of God: ‘while Thou art our loving Father to correct us, Thou art still as our mother to comfort us’ (p. 136). She attempts to achieve a balance between the two sexes, although there is no doubt where her emphasis lies: ‘Whoso clothes the poor, weaves for himself (still more obviously weaves for herself) a white garment’ (p. 138). The birth of the child in Rev. 12:2 suggests to Rossetti the Church as a mother, and she hints that in ‘holy Church’ as mother, a woman’s dependence on a man for motherhood is surpassed: Eve, the representative woman, received as part of her sentence ‘desire’: the assigned object of her desire being such that satisfaction must depend not on herself but on one stronger than she, who might grant or might deny. Many women attain their heart’s desire: many attain it not. Yet are these latter no losers if they exchange desire for aspiration, the corruptible for the incorruptible: ‘Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married’. … the childless who make themselves nursing mothers of Christ’s little ones are true mothers in Israel. (p. 312) She further emphasises the feminine nature of the Church, which she sees as playing a central part in the triumph of Revelation, and as before sees specific relevance in her presentation as a woman: ‘I perceive


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the marvel of “a woman” (for such is the figure, whatever may be the signification) appearing at the centre of such concurrent glories’ (p. 371). The bride of Rev. 19:7 allows her to bring to the forefront the women of the Bible, and because the Church is seen as feminine, all souls being led to Christ in her volume are types of early biblical women characterised by special qualities of love: Eve, Rebekah, Rachel, and ‘as the daughters of Zelophehad were espoused by their near kinsmen, so to blessed souls Christ deigns to say, “My sister, My spouse”’ (p. 433). After a lengthy list of women from the Old Testament, Rossetti continues to the New, adding a passing comment that women are continuing true to the type, where men have failed: As everything that is masculine is or should be typical of Christ, so all that is feminine of the Church. Why then break off our parallel with the galaxy of holy maids and matrons memorialised in the Old Testament, and not carry it further by help of their sister saints in the Gospel. (p. 434) New Testament women had the privilege of a direct relationship with Christ, and Rossetti joyfully abandons any figurative meaning for an elaboration of imaginative and emotional detail: Mary, His mother: Elizabeth, whose glory ‘was her worship of His unseen Presence’; the woman of Samaria to whom ‘He announced Himself as Messiah’; and the many others whom he loved, healed or consoled, including all ‘nursing Fathers and nursing Mothers’ of the Church. The image of the bride continues into the present, with the charity work women continued to do in the Victorian Church, coming forth ‘from the thousand battle-fields of the fierce fight of her afflictions. Beds of weariness, haunts of starvation, hospital wards, rescue homes, orphanages, leper colonies, fires of martyrdom, in these and such as these did she set up mirrors whereby to fashion herself after Christ’s likeness’. She finally quotes from Proverbs 31:31, ‘Give her of the fruit of her hands’, before linking herself and her reader to the ‘one fair unbroken web’ (p. 436). When the New Jerusalem descends in Rev. 21:2 Rossetti is able to make much of the New Jerusalem’s identity as bride of Christ, ‘in tenderness His dove, in likeness His sister, in union His spouse’, and reminds her reader that ‘Her perfections are thy birthright; thou art


what she was, what she is thou mayest become’ (p. 481). However, there is a bitter note to Rossetti’s discussion of the Holy City: ‘The Bride’ appears not under the semblance of a woman, but as a ‘great city’ beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, the city of the Great King: thus repelling mortal frailty from any sensual, equivocal, unworthy image of transcendent spiritual truths which demand purged hearts for their contemplation, purged lips for their utterance. (p. 497) Whilst superficially her lines appear to consent to the notion of the unworthiness of a woman’s body to represent ‘transcendent spiritual truths’, as with her discussion of the Whore of Babylon, Rossetti’s observation carries an understanding of the text as an imperfect construction, which despite this carries a divine message. Her words here strongly suggest that she holds the male writers of the text unable to achieve the purity of heart necessary to describe anything but an ‘unworthy image’ of New Jerusalem. Her next words are bitter indeed: ‘Not Holy Jerusalem but obscene Babylon flaunts forth under the figure of a woman’ (p. 497). As before, she can only fall back on faith and the limits she has set for her enquiry: ‘Lord Jesus, show us what Thou wilt, that above all else we may prefer Thee. Hide from us what Thou wilt, that we may fall back on Thee. Show us not what would hide Thee: hide not what would reveal Thee. Say unto us, “It is I”; and if it please Thee say unto us, “Be not afraid”’ (p. 497). With this observation, the joy seems to fade from her description of New Jerusalem, but nevertheless, given the image of a city, she makes it familiar and homely, ‘a genuine home, with recognizable features and amiabilities of a home’ with Christ ‘that Great Householder Whose house is the universe’ (p. 498). The closing chapters of The Face of the Deep show a renewed fear that in giving her own interpretation to the divine text she has repeated Eve’s sin: Curiosity though it be not a sin forms a highway for sin. The curiosity of Eve brought sin into the world and death by sin. Curiosity may have seduced Lot’s wife into looking back, whereupon she became a pillar of salt. These two instances suggest Curiosity as a feminine weak point inviting temptation, and doubly likely to facilitate a fall when to


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indulge it woman affects independence. Thus we see Eve assume the initiative with Adam, and Lot’s wife take her own way behind her husband’s back. (p. 520) The sharing of theology and biblical interpretation between the sexes which these two cases suggest seems reasonable enough, but there is sadness in Rossetti’s depiction of Lot’s wife, who, Rossetti’s words tell us, must work out her salvation on her own, out of sight. There is an echo of Lot’s isolation in the desolation of some of Rossetti’s observations at the end of the book: I pursuing my own evil from point to point find that it leads me not outward amid a host of foes laid against me, but inward within myself: it is not mine enemy that doeth me this dishonour, neither is it mine adversary that magnifieth himself against me: it is I, it is not another, not primarily any other; it is I who undo, defile, deface myself. True, I am summoned to wrestle on my own scale against principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places; but none of these can crush me unless I simultaneously undermine my own citadel. That tremendous endowment of Free Will which can even say nay to God Almighty, is able tenfold to say nay to the strong man armed. Nothing outside myself can destroy me by main force and in my own despite: so that as regards my salvation the abstract mystery of evil concerns me not practically; my own inherent evil is what I have to cope with. Thus the universe seems to stand aside, leaving me already all alone face to face with my Judge; at once and for ever as utterly alone with Him as I can be at the last day when set before His Tribunal. (p. 490) As her volume draws to a close, Rossetti draws attention once more to the urgency of the message. Despite the fact that ‘no insight or profundity of mortal man ever has been adequate to the full exploration of this Apocalypse’ its message ‘is as clear as day: “Worship God”’ (p. 531). In Rev. 22:10 the book is left unsealed, and can now never be shut: ‘Our eyes we can open or shut; but the opened book never can we shut. Whom it cannot instruct it must judge’ (p. 532). The Face of the Deep ends with a parting comment which shows Rossetti’s real fear that she herself has overstepped the line: ‘If I have been overbold in attempting such a work as this, I beg pardon’.


6 Conclusion

For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands. (ll.562–7) By the time she writes her last volume, The Face of the Deep, Rossetti has come a long way from her early Pre-Raphaelite days, when with the publication of Goblin Market she was hailed ‘High Priestess of PreRaphaelitism’ and the ‘Jael who led their (Pre-Raphaelite) hosts to victory’.1 Yet she remains remarkably true to the vision of many of her early poems: of Goblin Market itself, but also of poems like ‘The Lowest Room’, or her early novel Maude. Sisters and friends share joys and sorrows alike, gardens blossom and blow, barren landscapes alternate with wholesome or luscious fruit, anguish and want with satisfaction and satiety, all within small cameos of daily life and communal transactions, mainly by women. Her later devotional prose springs from this web of women’s experience, from the wholeness and sense of relatedness of all things, which, although initially located in marginal figures, like Mary in Maude, grows stronger as Rossetti gains confidence in the development of her own theology. A stumbling block in the appreciation of Rossetti’s devotional texts has long been the critical preference (at least as far as Rossetti’s work is concerned) for the negative values of renunciation, of mental anguish 139


and of frustrated women figures dwindling or locking themselves away from the world in horror. Rossetti’s vision, on the other hand, looks beyond this stereotype and is able to recognise it as both cause and effect of a repressive theology which denies the relevance of woman’s experience. Rossetti’s constant reference to the book of Proverbs has been noted; D’Amico in particular comes close to identifying Rossetti’s reliance on the figure of wisdom. In her discussion of Goblin Market she suggests that the last lines of Laura’s advice to the children gathered around her ‘recall in both form and content the wisdom literature of Proverbs and the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus’.2 D’Amico has correctly identified the inversion of form, where ‘Instead of having a wise man of the world speak to a “son”, as in the pattern in both Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, Rossetti offers in the form of a Christian fairy tale an experienced woman speaking to daughters’. But we also need to recognise that Rossetti has, so to speak, ‘deconstructed’ the wisdom texts, in the sense that she is able to remove the figure of wisdom from its limited context as subject of a father–son pep-talk. In allowing wisdom herself to speak through sisters and friends in her work, and later in assimilating the wholeness and harmony associated with the figure, Rossetti is able to construct a new world vision in her theology and to speak with a new authority. She is able not only to revalue women’s religious and spiritual experience, but also to restore a wholeness and homeliness to the spiritual understanding of many individual Christians, even those not of the Anglican faith. For the literary critic it becomes hard to follow and appreciate these developments, especially when in her writing established forms break down and become secondary to religious experience. Here theology, and particularly feminist theology, can assist. Modern developments in feminist theology have done much to highlight the importance of women’s experience, and the damage done by theological stereotypes. Long-held beliefs about the nature of womankind are held up against woman’s own feelings of self, ‘used as a norm for or judge of any theology insofar as that theology tries to limit woman’s abilities and roles by caricaturing women or by stereotyping them or by setting forth plain falsehood about women as truth’.3 In the study of Rossetti’s theology, feminist theology provides a ground map and a critical vocabulary. Her early wisdom-figures, in Goblin Market, for example, or in ‘The Lowest Room’, may be recognised as representations

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of positive femininity and spiritual strength, creating a female space for her women readers within their practice of Christianity. Similarly, through wisdom’s mediating role in our relationship with God and his creation we see emerge her criticism of ‘humanocentrism, that is, making humans the norm and crown of creation in a way that diminishes the other beings in the community of creation’.4 From this position of strength are developed the parallel yet interlocking universes of nature and humanity we see in Called to Be Saints, past and present also in unity through the study of the saints as once living people involved in their own communities. From here also Rossetti constructs the harmonious and unified vision of all creation united in praise of God that we see in Seek and Find. All things are connected, working outward from the central unity of God – even language itself. In Annus Domini Rossetti recognises the potential of renaming God in terms of personal experience, of charging the words of scripture with new contemporary meaning, which speaks to women also because derived from the realities of their lives. Language also becomes the focus of her scrutiny in Letter and Spirit. Language is subject to the law just as actions are, but language is also a meeting point with God. We appeal to God through prayer, and through language God is revealed in the scriptures. Misuse of language has characterised a male theology, where the plain obvious meaning of words as they relate to physical realities or living communities, has been manipulated or misrepresented. Spirit without the concrete reality of the letter is meaningless, as is a love of God which is not manifested in love of neighbour. Similarly, a repressive patriarchal theology which has rejected physical matter as feminine and unclean is also rejecting Christ who was so intimately linked both to the physical world and to His mother. Rossetti’s idea of spirit can be likened to Melissa Raphael’s thealogy, ‘a spirituality that locates the spirit/soul within the body, rather than, as in the Cartesian dualism, as opposite to it’.5 As in Rossetti’s work the ‘letter’ of scripture points us towards living communities and is seen as a record of the spirit moving through the realities of their daily lives, so the focus of her theology becomes the life of the spirit in her own daily experience. In Time Flies small homely rituals become opportunities for learning wisdom in our relationships with one another and the rest of the material world. Spiritual life grows out of daily interaction with one another in the world, and spiritual lessons are not learnt in isolation. They often


spring unawares from the frustrations and challenges of community life. Worse than any suffering through weakness or through error is a self imposed separation from God and from the rest of humanity: The wilfully dead sever themselves from the Tree of Life, the wilfully foul from the holy city. Dreadful were it simply to be shut up with self in the darkness of a grave-like solitude. (The Face of the Deep, p. 550) It is notable that although Rossetti has taken much of the material of Time Flies from her interaction with her mother, aunts and sisters, she does not use the word ‘sisterhood’ or any other word which would mark the volume as a record only of feminine experience. She is not simply substituting female experience for male, but is searching out lessons in all areas of daily life, taking her place as a woman, a teacher and an interpreter within the community of Christians, contributing her own wisdom and that of her foremothers. Her final volume, The Face of the Deep, allows her to interpret one of the most challenging books of scripture from her own particular place of wisdom and experience. In faith and humility she searches for lessons which speak to her own gender or to her own time, confident that God’s message will be revealed in a form suitable for herself and her readers. In the degradation of Babylon we glimpse the glittering but corrupt world of London’s high society and its victims: the prostitute, once fêted, now abandoned, the vain, overdressed society belle, the wordsmith of empty words, and the greed and corruption which produces an ever widening gap of rich and poor. Against this spiritual desolation, Rossetti holds up the Holy City of Revelation and ‘the Tree of Life, which represents to us Jesus’ (p. 549): O Thou Who art as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds, revive our drooping souls as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain, springing out of the earth toward Thee. (p. 550)

Notes Introduction 1. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). 2. See Sue Waslin, ‘The Significance of Mary Daly’s Thought for Feminist Theology’, in Talking it Over: Perspectives on Women and Religion, 1993–1995 ed. Alison E. Jasper and Alastair Hunter (Glasgow: Trinity St. Mungo Press, 1996), pp. 169–193, for a more detailed overview of Daly’s post-Christian theology. 3. Daly, Beyond God the Father, pp. 13, 164, 133, 149 and 161. 4. After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation, ed. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 60. 5. See Ruth Y. Jenkins, Reclaiming Myths of Power: Women Writers and the Victorian Spiritual Crisis (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), for an excellent introduction to the attempts of Victorian women to reclaim spiritual authority. 6. For a more detailed introduction to feminist christological enquiry, see Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus – Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (London: SCM Press, 1995). 7. Daly, Beyond God the Father p. 69. Quoted also in Fiorenza, Jesus – Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, pp. 43–4. 8. For example, G. Faber, Oxford Apostles (London: Faber, 1954); A.O.J. Cockshut, Anglican Attitudes: A Study of Victorian Religious Controversies (London: Collins, 1959); and Religious Controversies of the Nineteenth Century (London: Collins, 1966); Owen Chadwick, The Mind of The Oxford Movement (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960); and The Victorian Church (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970); R. Chapman, Faith and Revolt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). 9. Pusey, ‘A Letter to His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury’ (London: Parker, Rivington, 1842) p. 75. 10. ‘The Danger of Riches: Seek God First and Ye Shall Have All’, Two Sermons Preached in the Parish Church of St. James Bristol (Parker: Oxford, 1850) p. 29. Pusey is commenting here on Gen. 3: 6. 11. Tertullian (AD 202). In Barbara J. MacHaffie (ed.), Readings in her Story: Women in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Augsberg Fortress, 1992) p. 27. Quoted also in Grace Jantzen Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 47. 12. Elizabeth Johnson, SHE WHO IS: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 153. 13. Chr. Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, Christian Womanhood and Christian Sovereignty: A Sermon (London: Rivington, 1884) pp. 20–1. Wordsworth

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144 Notes

14. 15. 16. 17.

1

uses 1 Cor. 21:10, 1 Cor. 16:34, 1 Pet. 3:4, I Tim. 2:11 and Eccles. 3:19 to support his argument. RuthY. Jenkins, Reclaiming Myths of Power (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 26. F. Nightingale, Cassandra (New York: Westbury, 1979) p. 53. Jenkins, Reclaiming Myths of Power, p. 63. Melissa Raphael, ‘J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual Feminist Foremother’, Feminist Theology, no.13 (September 1996), pp. 94, 93. Hopkins’ recognition of her sacred mission amongst prostitutes is vital in our understanding of the theological importance of Rossetti’s Goblin Market.


1. Frances Thomas, Christina Rossetti: A Bibliography (Hanley Swan: SelfPublishing Association, 1994), pp. 9–10. 2. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, with Memoir and Notes by W.M. Rossetti (London: Macmillan,1904), pp. x, lxviii, lv. 3. See Joel Westerholme, ‘I Will Magnify Mine Office: Christina Rossetti’s Authoritative Voice in Her Devotional Prose’, Victorian Newsletter, No. 84 (Fall 1993); and Lynda Palazzo, ‘The Poet and the Bible: Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Hermeneutics’, Victorian Newsletter No. 92 (Fall 1997). 4. Dodsworth was to go over to Rome in 1850. 5. Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), Chapter 5. 6. ‘Dodsworth (1798–1861) is deservedly best known as a follower of Pusey and Newman who, during the 1840s, conducted at Christ Church one of the most distinctively High Church ecclesiastical programs in London, and who in the wake of the Gorham Case controversy at the end of 1850 resigned his curacy, became a Roman Catholic layman and published pamphlets attacking his old friend Pusey.’ John O’Waller, ‘Christ’s Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the Premillenialist William Dodsworth’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 73 (1969), p. 466. 7. James A. Kohl, ‘A Medical Comment on Christina Rossetti’, Notes and Queries (1968) p. 423. Cited in Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 52. 8. The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti with Some Supplementary Letters and Appendices, ed. W.M. Rossetti (London: Brown Langham, 1908). Letter to DGR, 2 December 1881. 9. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 64. 10. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, pp. 9, 11, 12. 11. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, pp. 9, 11, 12. 12. ‘The inspiration for the revival of religious orders came from the Early Church, and the mysoginist tradition of the Fathers with its adulation of submissive virginal femininity was incorporated into the ideal of sisterhood life – as was the emphasis upon the authority of an exclusively male priesthood.’ Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London: SPCK, 1994), p. 157. ‘Jerome,

Notes 145

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

arguably one of the most misogynist of all the patristic writers was also most preoccupied with woman’s sexuality, deploring it even when it was expressed within marriage (which he referred to as “vomit”). According to him, “women with child offer a revolting spectacle”’ (Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 54). H.P. Liddon, The Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols. (London: Longman Green, 1884), vol. 3, p. 6. Letter to E.T. Richards, 1845. In ibid., p. 31. In Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism Jantzen describes their state as that of ‘honorary men’, having renounced the supposed weakness and corruption of female flesh and put on the Christ-like state of maleness. R.W. Crump, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 11. From now on page numbers from Crump will be given in the main text. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, pp. 53–4. David W.F. Forrester, ‘Dr Pusey’s Marriage’, in Perry Butler (ed.), Pusey Rediscovered (London: SPCK, 1983), p. 136. An account of the death of Jane Ellacombe, an inmate of the Park Village Sisterhood, told by her sister, Mrs. Welland, found in Keith Denison, ‘Dr Pusey as Confessor and Spiritual Director’, Pusey Rediscovered, ed. Perry Butler (London: SPCK, 1983), p. 223. Apart from ritual fasting and the wearing of sackcloth, the sisters also submitted to the ‘discipline’, a knotted whip used to strike the shoulders. Denison, ‘Dr Pusey’, p. 221. Liddon, Vol. 3, p. 99. E.B. Pusey, ‘The World, an Ever-living Enemy’, Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between AD 1859 and 1872 (Oxford: Parker, 1872) sermon xvi, p. 396. Maude: Prose and Verse, ed. R.W. Crump (London, 1897; rpt. Hamden: Archon Books, 1976). Preface to 1897 edition of Maude (new edn. p. 79). A hint that Rossetti was trying to express more than the final text actually contains can be seen in the scraps of writing remaining after attempts at erasure on the manuscript, such as ‘The language is so against us’, Maude, Notes, p. 89. Maude, p. 80. Diana Apostolos-Cappadona, ‘Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites from the Perspective of Nature and Symbol’, JPRS 2 (1) (1981), p. 96. E. B. Pusey, ‘The World, an Ever-Living Enemy’, Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between AD 1859 and 1872 (Oxford: Parker, 1872), sermon XVI, pp. 396, 399, 398 and 396. The well-read copy of Keble’s Christian Year would suggest that she was familiar with the idea of a sacramental universe. Her relationship to Keble’s ideas will be discussed in a later chapter. D. Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 23, 21 and 22.

146 Notes

31. Waslin, in ‘The Significance of Mary Daly’s Thought for Feminist Theology’, p. 174 quoting Daly. 32. In ‘A Triad’ the women are guilty of ‘soulless love’, but this is not the case in Maude or in ‘The Lowest Room’. 33. George Herbert, whose work Rossetti is known to have admired, was one of the Tractarians’ favourite poets. 34. A.H. Harrison suggests 1858 or 1859 as the date of her first meeting with Barbara Bodichon, although it is probable that she was a corresponding member of the Portfolio Society even earlier. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, Vol. 1 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 134. Rossetti’s association with the Society and members of the Langham Place Circle of feminists would suggest that she supported their cause, in principle at least. 35. H.W. Burrows, ‘The Conflict with Impurity’, in The Enduring Conflict of Christ with Sin that is in the World (Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1865). 36. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography, p. 155. A.H. Harrison’s reading of the poem as presented by ‘a specifically male self-inquisitor trying to resist an archetypal Eve figure who is an agent, if not a specter, of Satan’, is more accurate in its perception of Rossetti’s ironic social comment. Christina Rossetti in Context (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1988), p. 91. 37. H. Judge, Our Fallen Sisters: The Great Social Evil (London: E. Marshall, 1874), p. 33. 38. John Armstrong, ‘The Church and Her Female Penitents’, Christian Remembrances (January 1849), in D’Amico, ‘Equal Before God’, Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, eds. A. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (Northern Illinois University Press, 1992). 39. Rosemary Ruether, New Woman–New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: Crossroad, 1975), in Sallie MacFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM Press, 1982), p. 148. 40. D’Amico, ‘A Possible Source for Christina Rossetti’s “World-woman”’, JPRS 1(2) (1891), pp. 126–8. She also notes that ‘In Proverbs, we also find a counterpart to Rossetti’s world-woman – the figure of Wisdom’ (p. 127). 41. See D’Amico, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for “the weary heart”’, Victorian Newsletter 72 (Fall 1987), pp. 36–42. 42. J. Keble, The Christian Year (London: Macmillan, 1864). 43. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 564, 566 and 367. 44. An odd assertion to make about Christ’s attitude towards evil, which suggests a severe limitation in Gubar’s understanding of Christian theology. 45. Gubar ultimately dismisses the whole concept of a female Christ as ‘didacticism’ (The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 566). 46. Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, ELH 58 (1991) p. 926. 47. Janet Galligani Casey, ‘The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, VP, vol. 29, no. 1 (1991), p. 74.

Notes 147

48. A recent example of this critical abuse (besides the abuse of the poem in Playboy, see Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 232) can be seen in Joseph Bristow’s ‘“No Friend Like a Sister”?: Christina Rossetti’s Female Kin’, VP, vol. 33 (1995), pp. 257–81. 49. ‘The change from a monarchic, centrally administrated society to a society oriented towards the needs and interests of families and extended households was positively expressed in the image of the ideal Israelite woman in Proverbs 31 and in praise of Woman Wisdom who builds her cosmic house (Prov. 9).’ Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus – Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, p. 134. 50. A full discussion of the latest developments in the study of Wisdom/ Sophia would be out of place here, but an accessible account may be found in Schüssler Fiorenza’s Jesus – Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. 51. I take the date of Rossetti’s voluntary work from Marsh, p. 218. ‘From House to Home’ was composed on 19 November 1858. 52. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 220. 53. In her article on the work of Hopkins (FT, no. 13, September 1996, p. 91) Melissa Raphael notes that domestic work was possibly just as enslaving as prostitution. 54. The Magdalen’s Friend vol. i, 1860, pp. 13–14, in Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 228. 55. Diane D’Amico gives a detailed account of the activities which Rossetti would have been engaged in at Highgate, and establishes the link with Goblin Market in ‘“Equal Before God”: Christina Rossetti and the Fallen Women of Highgate Penitentiary’, Gender and Discourse in Victorian Poetry and Art, eds. Antony Harrison and Beverly Taylor (Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 67–83. Jan Marsh further develops the connection in ‘Christina Rossetti’s Vocation: The Importance of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 32 (1994), pp. 233–48. 56. Melissa Raphael, ‘J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual Feminist Foremother’, Feminist Theology, No. 13 (September 1996), pp. 83, 84, 87, 89. 57. Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), pp. 69 and 82. 58. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 233. 59. ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, The Poetical Works, ed. W.M. Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 330. 60. Janet Galligani Casey in her article ‘The Potential of Sisterhood’, through her comparison with Nightingale’s Cassandra, has reached a similar conclusion: ‘In the poem she subverts Christian allegory in order to allow women to participate equally in the positive roles of Christian mythology: they are not limited to being Eve figures, can achieve new dignity as Mary/Martha figures, and may even go so far as to become Christ figures’ (p. 75). However, Casey is unable to envisage anything more than a literal interpretation of the domestic metaphor at the end of the poem: ‘a domestic reality, to be sure, but an “improved” domesticity in which the woman’s role as nurturer achieves dignity and respect’ (p. 75).

148 Notes

2 Later Poetry, Including The Prince’s Progress and Annus Domini 1. An account of feminist theological activity in America and in Britain can be found in Elizabeth Helsinger et al., The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883 (New York: Garland, 1983) vol. II (Social Issues), pp. 165–211, 231–6. She discusses amongst others Sarah Grimke, On the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (Boston, 1838), Julia Evelina Smith, the translation of the Old and New Testaments, begun in 1853 and published in 1876, Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record (New York, 1853) and Eliza Farnham, Woman and Her Era (New York, 1864), 2 vols. In England Catherine Booth had also recently published her Female Ministry: or Women’s Right to Preach the Gospel in pamphlet form, later to republish it in Papers on Practical Religion (London, 1879). 2. Published in 1870 in Commonplace. 3. Diane D’Amico, ‘Christina Rossetti and The English Woman’s Journal’, JPRS (New Series) (1994), pp. 20–4. 4. Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford, 1992) p. 14. 5. Barbara Bodichon, Women and Work (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1857), p. 7. 6. Bodichon, Women and Work, pp. 19, 9, 48 and 6. 7. A good summary of the debate may be found in Caine, Victorian Feminists, pp. 16 and 17. Caine cites Joan Scott, ‘Deconstructing Equality-versusDifference: Or the Uses of Post-structuralist Theory for Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 14 (1988), p. 43. 8. ‘There are towns in which the worst of trades has become a vested interest, and exerts weight in vestries and poor-house management.’ The Conflict with Impurity (London: Parker, 1865), pp. 93, 95, 91, 95. 9. ‘The Half-Century of Christ Church, Albany Street’ (London: Skeffington, 1887). 10. ‘He was a High Churchman, never an advanced Ritualist, but avowedly and decidedly belonging to the school of the movement which began with the Oxford Tracts. Yet from the extravagances of party his natural fairness of mind made him recoil.’ Elizabeth Wordsworth, Henry William Burrows: Memorials (London: Kegan Paul, 1894) p. 160. 11. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 417, quoting from The Religious Education of Women (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1874), p. 12. 12. Littledale, The Religious Education, pp. 10–15, 25, 20, 33–4. 13. Linda Peterson, ‘Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina Rossetti and the PRB’, VP Vol. 32 (Autumn–Winter 1994), pp. 220 and 223. 14. Dawn Henwood, ‘Christian Allegory and Subversive Poetics: Christina Rossetti’s Prince’s Progress Re-examined’, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 1997), p. 92.

Notes 149

15. Quoted in Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 47, and Helsinger et al., The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883, Vol. II, p. 170. 16. Elizabeth A. Johnson, SHE WHO IS: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroads, 1996), p. 259. 17. Clitoridectomy was thought to be an effective way of curing a certain kind of ‘insanity’ which attacked a young woman at the onset of puberty, and which manifested itself through ‘the patient desiring to escape from home, fond of becoming a nurse in hospitals, “sisters of charity”, or other pursuits of a like nature’. Isaac Baker Brown, ‘Curing “Insanity” through Clitoridectomy’, p. 130, in Brown, On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy and Hysteria in Females (1866). 18. Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 124. 19. Quoted from L.M. Packer, Christina Rossetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 330. 20. Taken from Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 399. 21. Fiorenza, in Jesus–Miriam’s Child (p. 58) quotes the whole speech, from Erlene Stetson, ed., Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1740– 1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 24f. 22. Fiorenza, Jesus – Miriam’s Child, p. 59. 23. Helsinger, The Woman Question, Vol. II, p. 172. 24. (London: Parker, 1874). 25. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 228. 26. Marsh, for example, has overlooked this point, and sees Rossetti as simply ‘choosing texts on which to hook her collects’. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 413. 27. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM Press, 1982), p. 3. 28. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 224. 29. See also the study of symbol in Time Flies. 30. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, p. 374. 31. Littledale, The Religious Education of Women, pp. 41–2. 32. As already mentioned, science had already become an instrument for perpetuating the idea of woman’s emotional nature and her tendency towards depravity. Rossetti later angrily attacked science for the cruelty of vivisection. 33. For an account of the study of hermeneutics, especially in relation to the use of metaphor, to facilitate a feminist interpretation of the scriptures, see Sandra Schneider, The Revelatory Text (New York: Harper, 1991). 34. McFague says of Daly: ‘it verges on madness at times’ (Metaphorical Theology, p. 159). 35. ‘A Letter to His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury’ (London: Parker Rivington, 1842), p. 32. 36. One has only to think of the fate of Benjamin Jowett, who was especially hounded by Pusey himself. 37. Kent and Stanwood, Selected Prose, p. 197; Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 414.

150 Notes

3 Called to Be Saints and Seek and Find 1. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) p. 246. 2. On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Father of the Church, Tract 89 in Tracts for the Times, vol. VI (London: Parker & Co. Repr. 1868), p. 153. Keble is quoting from de Libero Arbitrio II.41. 3. On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge, Tract 80 in Tracts for the Times, vol. IV, p. 21. 4. On Reserve, p. 28 (from Proverbs 1: 20–1). 5. On the Mysticism, p. 146. 6. Elizabeth Johnson’s summary of the power of Sophia, from the Wisdom of Solomon, in SHE WHO IS: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1996), p. 89. 7. Origen, Comment, St.Matt. tom.xii.36. in On Reserve, p. 25. 8. On Reserve, p. 3. 9. On Reserve, p. 28. 10. On Reserve, p. 69. 11. On Reserve, pp. 76 and 79. In Rossetti’s Seek and Find we find the exact opposite. All creation – including humanity – glorifies God through the fulfilment of its natural function. 12. A.H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988), p. 31. 13. J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols (London: George Allen, 1900), vol. I, p. 30. 14. Frederick Kirchoff, ‘A Science against Sciences’, in Nature and The Victorian Imagination eds. Knoepflmacher and Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) pp. 257 and 391. 15. Melissa Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), p. 282. 16. Johnson, She Who Is, p. 62. 17. Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs, ed. Matthew Fox (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear and Co., 1987) p. 23. Quoted in Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 225. 18. Showings, trans. Edmund College and James Walsh. Classics of Western Spirituality (London: SPCK, 1978), p. 183. Quoted in Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 239. 19. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, p. 228. 20. Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 135. 21. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 127. 22. The Articles Treated on in Tract 90 Reconsidered and their Interpretation Vindicated (Oxford: J.H. Parker; London: Rivington, 1849). 23. L. Byrne, ‘The Spiritual Exercises: A Process and a Text’, in P. Sheldrake (ed.), The Way of Ignatius Loyola: Contemporary Approaches to The Spiritual Exercises (London: SPCK, 1991), pp. 17–27 (20). Quoted in Beth R. Crisp, ‘Heretical or Necessity?: The Relationship between Imagination and Transforming Theology’, Feminist Theology, No. 18 (September 1998).

Notes 151

24. W.D. Shaw, ‘Projection and Empathy in Victorian Poetry’, Victorian Poetry, 19: 4 (1981), pp. 324, 325. 25. Rosemary R. Ruether, Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), p. 120. 26. The Beginning of the Book of Genesis with Notes and Reflections (London: Rivington, 1861), p. 64. 27. Minutes of the GLC 28 November 1879 (p. 182). 28. Minutes of the GLC 14 March 1879 (p. 148). 29. See Mary Arseneau and Jan Marsh, ‘Intertextuality and Intratextuality: The Full Text of Christina Rossetti’s “Harmony on First Corinthians XIII” Restored’, VN 88 (Fall 1995), pp. 17–26. 30. Rossetti may have made use of G.C. Child Chaplin’s Benedicite: or, The Song of the Three Children, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1866). 31. Keble, On the Mysticism, p. 146. 32. Joel Westerholme, ‘“I Magnify Mine Office”: Christina Rossetti’s Authoritative Voice in her Devotional Prose’, VN (Fall 1993), pp. 13, 15. 33. ‘No graver slur could attach to my book than would be a reputation for prevalent originality’ (Called to Be Saints, p. xvii). 34. After the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860), which advocated a more liberal approach to the interpretation of scripture, Benjamin Jowett, author of ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ was singled out for particularly harsh treatment by Pusey. Bishop Colenso became an even more controversial figure for his Preface to the Pentateuch, and a passage of Rossetti’s original manuscript for Seek and Find which shows evidence of his influence was rejected by the SPCK. See L. Palazzo, ‘The Prose Works of Christina Rossetti’, Unpubl. PhD. Thesis, University of Durham, 1992. 35. Like the fate of Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truths, which even Jowett himself declined to edit. Reclaiming Myths of Power, p. 37. 36. Although Bible reading was generally encouraged, for the ordinary reader there was serious confusion about how the Bible was to be read. A literal reading became impossible in the light of modern scientific knowledge, and its message seemed confusing and at times morally unacceptable: It was impossible with perfect honesty to defend every tittle contained in the Bible. Most of the points which give moral offence in the book of Genesis I had been used to explain away by the doctrine of progress; yet every now and then it became hard to deny that God is represented as giving actual sanction to that which we now call sinful … . The doctrine of the verbal infallibility of the whole Bible, or indeed of the New Testament, is demonstrably false. Frances William Newman, in Phases of Faith (London:1881 rpt. edn. and introduced by U.C. Knoepflmacher New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 65. See also L. Palazzo, ‘The Prose Works of Christina Rossetti’, ch. 5.

152 Notes

37. ‘Religious feminists celebrate the mediation of the divine presence by ordinary natural things as opposed to special sanctified objects which have been set apart from daily life.’ Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 23. 38. ‘The apocryphal “Song of the Three Children”, has a curious place within the Anglican community, included as an alternative text within Morning Prayer, and thus familiar, but not believed as authoritative as the ancient texts surrounding it. Perhaps such an ambiguous text could be a woman’s text to Rossetti’s Anglican audience’ (Westerholme, ‘I Will Magnify Mine Office’, p. 13). There is evidence also that Rossetti was studying the other texts of the Apocrypha also, quoting for example, from The Wisdom of Solomon (see p. 155) and from Tobit (p. 112). 39. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 35. Raphael quotes from Gyn/ Ecology, p. 47. 40. As we saw in Westerholme’s claim. Robert Kachur limits Rossetti’s achievement in a similar way: ‘Rossetti and her sectarian counterparts use inherited Tractarian doctrines to suggest that it is “male” biblical exegesis – not the Bible per se – which hinders women’s own attempts to become interpreters of the Word’. VP 35:2 (Summer 1997), p. 194. 41. Douglas John Hall and Rosemary Radford Ruether, God and the Nations (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 87. 42. See Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context, pp. 29–36, for a discussion of Rossetti’s use of Ruskin’s work. 43. ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Helpmeet”’, VN (Spring 1994), p. 25. 44. ‘… women M.P.’s are only right and reasonable’. Mackenzie Bell, M. Christina Rossetti, p. 124. 45. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R.W. Crump (3 vols.) (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), vol. 2, p. 169. 46. See Westerholme, ‘I Will Magnify Mine Office’, p. 15. 47. Rossetti shares with recent feminists her comparison of female power with the chaotic forces of the cosmos. Raphael, for example, uses the same lines from Job (Thealogy and Embodiment, p. 279). 48. Letter to Dante Gabriel, September 1875. See Marsh Christina Rossetti, (pp. 433–5) for an account of the campaign against vivisection. 49. God and the Nations, p. 88. 50. A romanticised view of nature has been seen by ecofeminists as sinister, abusive and patriarchal. See Chaia Heller, ‘For the Love of Nature: Ecology and the Cult of the Romantic’, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 219–42.

4 Letter and Spirit and Time Flies 1. From the General Literature Committee of the SPCK, Rossetti’s work is now being considered by the Tract Committee (see her title-page). 2. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 504. 3. For a concise and accessible discussion of the origins of the debate, see Tibor Fabiny, The Lion and The Lamb (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 26–9.

Notes 153

4. ‘Today historical critics emphasise what they understand to be the “literal” at the expense of the spiritual sense’, The Lion and The Lamb, p. 29. 5. Marsh singles out this passage for similar reasons: ‘This was a surprising but revealing admission of having appealed to Christ while cowering from God, aligning herself as his victim, pleading for intercession. Here, she explicitly named the paternal God as one to be feared and appeased’ (Christina Rossetti, p. 507). 6. Kent and Stanwood comment on the ‘caustic shrewdness’ which was noted by A. Simcox in his review in The Academy (9 June 1883). See Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 266. 7. Westerholme, ‘I Will Magnify Mine Office’, p. 16. 8. The collection of essays published in Essays and Reviews in 1860 challenged the literal interpretation of the Bible, and promoted a more liberal interpretation, which took account of modern developments in science. Pusey in particular was angry at the publication of the volume, which he saw as an attack on the authority of the Bible and showed much animosity towards Benjamin Jowett. See Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970), pp. 77–100. 9. From the original manuscript of ‘Treasure Trove’ in The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. By permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum to whom rights in this publication are assigned. 10. Marsh sees Rossetti as ‘celebrating spinsterhood over wifehood’ in this passage. See Christina Rossetti, p. 507. D’Amico, on the other hand, sees the figures as ‘Rossetti’s questioning of the Victorian celebration of marriage’, in Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 60. 11. Lectures on Poetry, trans. E.K. Francis, 2 vols (Oxford: 1912), vol. 2, p. 480. 12. ‘The Statesman’s Manual’, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 30. 13. Troxell Collection, folder 27. Reprinted in Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 392–3, n.181. 14. Charlene Spretnack, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday & Co., 1982), p. xv. Quoted in Ursula King, Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 231. 15. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, p. 395n, contains a record of Rossetti’s own marginal annotations. 16. King, Women and Spirituality, pp. 20, 90. 17. D’Amico’s copy of Time Flies appears to have been used by a Methodist Minister (Christina Rossetti, p. 148n). My own copy of The Face of the Deep also shows evidence of having been used in the preparation of sermons. 18. King, Women and Spirituality, pp. 92–3. 19. A useful account of Rossetti’s ideas concerning the Eucharist can be found in D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time, pp. 77–8.

154 Notes

5 The Face of the Deep 1. ‘That “heart religion”, “play of mind, and elasticity of feeling” which Newman later defined as vital elements of the Tractarian ethos.’ Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 197–8. 2. R. Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 223. 3. See Palazzo unpublished PhD Thesis, pp. 60–1. 4. I am indebted to Mrs. Joan Rossetti for the notes on Genesis and also to Professor Diane D’Amico for help in tracing their whereabouts. See Palazzo unpublished PhD Thesis, Appendix A, and pp. 62–5. The notes on Exodus can be found in L.M. Packer’s biography of Rossetti. Packer (p. 330) suggests a time immediately before Seek and Find, but not only is the method of commentary virtually identical to that in The Face of the Deep, but some ideas from the notes appear almost unchanged in her commentary on Revelation: p. 87 (Gen. 22:13), pp. 345, 377 (Gen. 8:9) and p. 463 (Gen. 49:31). 5. For a discussion of the influence of Coleridge on Rossetti’s work, see Palazzo, Unpublished PhD Thesis, pp. 98, 121–4. 6. Benjamin Jowett, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Essays and Reviews (London: J.W. Parker & Son, 1860; repr. Gregg International, 1970), pp. 338, 384. 7. Tract 80, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), p. 65. 8. Isaac Williams, The Beginning of the Book of Genesis, with Notes and Reflections (London: Rivington, 1849), pp. 1, 2, 5, 6. 9. See Palazzo, Unpublished PhD Thesis, p. 140. 10. Colleen Hobbs, ‘A View from “The Lowest Place”: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Prose’, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 32 (1994), p. 416. 11. Barbara Taylor describes some of the abuse these women had to suffer in Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), ch. 5. 12. A.H. Harrison, ‘Christina Rossetti and the Sage Discourse of High Anglicanism’, Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed. Thais E. Morgan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 95. 13. Westerholme, ‘I Will Magnify Mine Office’, p. 14. 14. P. G. Stanwood, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Prose’, The Achievement of Christina Rossetti (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 246. 15. Apocalypse, p. 3. 16. D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time, p. 137. 17. Hobbs, ‘A View from “The Lowest Place”’, pp. 414–15. Hobbs is quoting from Dorothee Soelle. 18. See ‘Christ’s Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the Premillennialist William Dodsworth’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 73 (1969), pp. 465–82.

Notes 155

19. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p. 125. 20. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p. 164. 21. Elizabeth Cady Stanton The Woman’s Bible (Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974), p. 176. 22. Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, pp. 182–3. 23. Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, p. 183. 24. There is a touch of hysteria in Bishop Wordsworth’s Is the Church of Rome the Babylon of the Book of Revelation? (London: Rivington, 1850). 25. Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, p. 184. 26. D’Amico, Christina Rossetti, p. 128. 27. Rossetti had long been aware of the sensual excess which lay behind the wholesome veneer of Pre-Raphaelitism. See L. Palazzo, ‘Christina Rossetti’s “A Birthday”: Representations of the Poetic’, JPRS, 7:2 (May 1987), pp. 94–6; and ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”: The Sensual Imagination’, Unisa English Studies, 26:2 (September 1988), pp. 15–20. 28. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgement (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), p. 22. 29. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 13. 30. M. Daly, Gyn-Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1990), p. 105. 31. M. Daly, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 80, 67. 32. It is no wonder, then, that she objected to an emancipation which she felt would destroy woman’s power. D’Amico points out that although Rossetti signed a petition against woman’s suffrage, the wording of the document was ambiguous. Rossetti was in fact for votes for women, and for women MPs. D’Amico, Christina Rossetti, pp. 130–1.

6

Conclusion

1. Sir Edmund Gosse and A.C. Swinburne respectively, in Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Thomas Burleigh, 1898). 2. D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time, p. 82. 3. Pamela Dickey Young, ‘Women’s Experience as Source and Norm of Theology’. In Feminist Theology/Christian Theology: In Search of Method (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), ch. 3, p. 66. 4. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 1983), p. 20. 5. Kathleen McPhillips, ‘Ritual, Bodies and Thealogy: Some Questions’. Feminist Theology No. 18 (May 1988), p. 11.


Select Bibliography Apostolos-Capadona, Diana. ‘Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites from the Perspective of Nature and Symbol’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 2:1 (1981) pp. 90–110. Arseneau, Mary, and Marsh, Jan. ‘Intertextuality and Intratextuality: The Full Text of Christina Rossetti’s “Harmony on First Corinthians XIII” Restored’, Victorian Newsletter No. 88 (Fall 1995) pp. 17–26. Burrows, H.W. ‘The Half-Century of Christ Church, Albany Street’. London: Skeffington, 1887. Burrows, H.W. The Conflict with Impurity. London: Parker, 1865. Burrows, H.W. The Enduring Conflict of Christ with Sin that Is in the World. Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1865. Butler, Perry (ed.). Pusey Rediscovered. London: SPCK, 1983. Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Casey, Janet Galligani. ‘The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”’, Victorian Poetry 99:1 (1991) pp. 63–77. Chadwick, O. The Mind of the Oxford Movement. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970. Chadwick, O. The Victorian Church. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970. Chapman, R. Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970. Christ, Carol P. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997. Cockshut, A.O.J. Anglican Attitudes: A Study of Religious Controversies. London: Collins, 1959. Cockshut, A.O.J. Religious Controversies in the Nineteenth Century. London: Collins, 1966. Coleridge, S.T. Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Crisp, Beth. ‘Heretical or Necessity?: The Relationship Between Imagination and Transforming Theology’, Feminist Theology No. 19 (September 1998) pp. 99–118. Crump, R.W. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, Vol. I. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Crump, R.W. Maude: Prose and Verse. London 1897; rpt. Howden: Archon Books, 1976. D’Amico, Diane. ‘A Possible Source for Christina Rossetti’s “World-woman”’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 1:2 (1981) pp. 126–8. D’Amico, Diane. ‘Christina Rossetti and The English Woman’s Journal’ Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (New Series) 1994.

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D’Amico, Diane. ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Helpmeet”’, Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1994) pp. 25–9. D’Amico, Diane. ‘Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for “the weary heart”’, Victorian Newsletter 72 (Fall 1987) pp. 36–42. D’Amico, Diane. Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Daly, Mary. Gyn-Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon, 1990. Faber, G. Oxford Apostles. London: Faber, 1954. Fabiny, Tibor. The Lion and the Lamb. London: Macmillan, 1992. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler. Jesus – Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology. London: SCM Press, 1995. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler. Revelation: Visions of a Just World. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler. The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgement. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Gaard, Greta. (ed.) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Gill, Sean. Women and the Church of England from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. London: SPCK, 1994. Hall, Douglas John, and Ruether, Rosemary Radford. God and the Nations. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Harrison, A.H. and Taylor, B. eds. Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art. Northern Illinois University Press, 1992. Harrison, A.H. Christina Rossetti in Context. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1988. Harrison, A.H. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, Vol. I. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. Helsinger, Elizabeth et al. The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883, Vol. II Social Issues. New York: Garland, 1983. Helsinger Elizabeth. ‘Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, ELH 58, 1991. Henwood, Dawn. ‘Christian Allegory and Subversive Poetics: Christina Rossetti’s Prince’s Progress Re-examined’, Victorian Poetry 35:1 (Spring 1997) pp. 83–94. Hobbs, Coleen. ‘A View from the “Lowest Place”: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Prose’, Victorian Poetry 32 (1994) pp. 409–28. Jantzen, Grace. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Jasper, Alison E. and Hunter, Alastair eds. Talking it Over: Perspectives on Women and Religion. Glasgow: Trinity St. Mungo Press, 1996. Jenkins, Ruth Y. Reclaiming Myths of Power: Women Writers and the Victorian Spiritual Crisis. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Johnson, Elisabeth A. SHE WHO IS: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroads, 1996.

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Jowett, Benjamin. ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, Essays and Reviews. London: J.R. Parker & Son, 1860. Rpt. Gregg International, 1970. Judge, H. Our Fallen Sisters: The Great Social Evil. London: E. Marshall, 1874. Kachur, Robert M. ‘Repositioning the Female Christian Reader: Christina Rossetti as Tractarian Hermeneut in The Face of the Deep’, VP 35:2, Summer 1997. Keble, John. Lectures on Poetry. Trans. E.K. Francis, 2 vols. Oxford: 1912. Keble, John. On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church. Tract 89 in Tracts for the Times, Vol. VI. London: Parker and Co. (repr.) 1868. Keble, John. The Christian Year. London: Macmillan, 1864. Kent, David A. and Stanwood, P.G. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. King, Ursula. Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise. London: Macmillan, 1989. Knoepflmacher, U.C. and Tennyson, G.B. eds. Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Leigh Smith (Bodichon), Barbara. Women and Work. London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1857. Liddon, H.P. The Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey. 4 vols. London: Longman Green, 1884. Littledale, R.W. The Religious Education of Women. London: Henry S. King & Co. 1874. MacFague, S. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. London: SCM Press, 1982. MacFague, S. Models of God in Religious Language. London: SCM Press, 1982. MacHaffie, Barbara J. Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. Minneapolis: Ausberg Fortress, 1992. Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. Marsh, Jan. ‘Christina Rossetti’s Vocation: The Importance of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, VP 32, 1994. McPhillips, Kathleen. ‘Ritual, Bodies and Thealogy: Some Questions’, Feminist Theology, No. 18, May 1988. Morgan, Thais E. (ed.). Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Nightingale, Florence. Cassandra. Rpt. New York: Westbury. 1979. Nockles, P.B. The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. O’Waller, A. ‘Christ’s Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the Premillenialist William Dodsworth’, Bulletin of The New York Public Library, 73 (1969) pp. 465–82. Packer, L.M. Christina Rossetti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Palazzo, Lynda. ‘The Poet and the Bible: Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Hermeneutics’, Victorian Newsletter No. 92 (Fall 1997) pp. 6–9. Palazzo, Lynda. ‘Christina Rossetti’s “A Birthday”: Representations of the Poetic’, JPRS 7:2, May 1987.

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Palazzo, Lynda. ‘Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market: The Sensual Imagination’, Unisa English Studies, 26:2, September 1988. Peterson, Linda. ‘Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina Rossetti and the PRB’, Victorian Poetry 32 (Autumn–Winter 1994) pp. 209–27. Pippin, Tina. Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John. Louiseville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. Pusey, E.B. ‘A Letter to His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury.’ London: Parker, Rivington, 1842. Pusey, E.B. Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between AD 1859 and 1872. Oxford: Parker, 1872. Pusey, E.B. The Articles Treated on in Tract 90 Reconsidered and their Interpretation Vindicted. London: Rivington, 1849. Pusey, E.B. Two Sermons Preached in the Parish Church of St. James, Bristol. Oxford: Parker, 1850. Pusey, E.B. ‘A Letter to His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury.’ London: Parker Rivington, 1842. Raphael, Melissa. ‘J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual feminist Foremother’, Feminist Theology No. 13 (September 1996), pp. 73–95. Raphael, Melissa. Thealogy and Embodiment: The-Post Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Rosenblum, D. Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Rossetti, Christina. Annus Domini. London: Parker, 1874. Rossetti, Christina. Called to be Saints. London: SPCK, 1881. Rossetti, Christina. Commonplace and Other Stories. London: F.S. Ellis, 1887. Rossetti, Christina. Letter and Spirit. London: SPCK, 1883. Rossetti, Christina. Maude: Prose and Verse ed. R. W. Crump. London, 1879; rpt. Hamden: Archon Books, 1976. Rossetti, Christina. Seek and Find. London: SPCK, 1879. Rossetti, Christina. The Face of the Deep. London: SPCK, 1892. Rossetti, Christina. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, with Memoir and Notes by W.M. Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1904. Rossetti, Christina. Time Flies. London: SPCK, 1885. Rossetti, W.M. (ed.). The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti with Some Supplementary Letters and Appendices. London: Brown Langham, 1908. Ruether, Rosemary R. Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology. London: SCM Press, 1983. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. New Woman-New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Crossroad, 1975. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, 5 vols. London: George Allen, 1900. Schneider, Sandra. The Revelatory Text. New York: Harper, 1991. Shaw, W.D. ‘Projection and Empathy in Victorian Poetry’, VP 19:4, 1981. Spretnack, Charlene. The Politics Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982.

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Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman’s Bible. Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, repr. 1974. Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. London: Virago Press, 1983. Thomas, Frances. Christina Rossetti: A Bibliography. Hanley Swan: Self Publishing Association, 1992. Van Leeuwen, Mary Steward. After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993. Westerholme, Joel. ‘I Will Magnify Mine Office: Christina Rossetti’s Authoritative Voice in Her Devotional Prose’, Victorian Newsletter No. 84 (Fall 1993) pp. 11–17. Williams, Isaac. On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge. Tract 80 Tracts for the Times. Williams, Isaac. The Apocalypse, with Notes and Reflections. London: Francis and John Rivington, 1852. Williams, Isaac. The Beginning of the Book of Genesis, with Notes and Reflections. London: Rivington, 1861. Wordsworth, Chr. Christian Womanhood and Christian Sovereignty: A Sermon. London: Rivington, 1884. Wordsworth, Elizabeth. Henry William Burrows: Memorials. London: Kegan Paul, 1894. Young, Pamela Dickey. Feminist Theology/Christian Theology: In Search of Method. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990.


Index analogy, 115 see also symbol Anglican sisterhoods, 6–8 animal rights, 99–101 see also vivisection atonement, doctrine of, 26, 59 see also Tractarian Babylon, whore of, 126–33, 136, 142 see also Harlot Bell, Mackenzie, 1 Benedicite, 71 see also Seek and Find Bodichon, Barbara, 32–5 Booth, Catherine, 42 Burrows, Rev. H.W., 14, 15, 24, 35, 56 see also Christ Church 1 Corinthians, 59, 61, 66, 70, 78, 92, 93 2 Corinthians, 85 Caine, Barbara, 32, 35 Christ centre of cosmos, 68 female, 13, 23, 25, 27, 42 gift of symbol, 95–7 incarnation, 23 male, xii–xiii, 22, 27, 38, 42 redemption, 26–9, 82 resurrection, 25 the fulfilment of wisdom, 57–8, 65, 74, 120 tree of Life, 142 Christ Church, Albany Street, 2, 3, 24, 35–6 Christ, Carol P., 66–7 Christian Year, The, 16–18, 27 Church Fathers, 46, 85, 116, 123 Colenso, J.W., 91 Coleridge, S.T., 98, 114

community, 107–8 see also sisterhood D’Amico, Diane, 25, 44, 124, 128, 140 Daly, Mary, xi, xii, 25, 55, 74, 131 Deuteronomy, 81, 82 Dodsworth, Rev. William, 3, 14 see also Christ Church Ecclesiastes, 9, 19, 23, 26, 83 ecofeminism, 69 English Woman’s Journal, The, 31 Essays and Reviews, 91, 111, 114 Esther, 31 Evangelical Movement, xii Eve, xii, xiii, 8, 15, 19, 26–7, 39–51, 65, 88–9, 109, 112, 120, 121, 132, 136, 129 Exodus, 44, 79, 81 Fall, xii, xiii, 26, 39, 41 fallen woman, 35, 55 see also prostitute Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler, xii n6, 46, 131 Gage, Matilda Joclyn, 126 Genesis, 41–2, 46, 48, 49, 78, 79, 82, 112–16 Grimke, Sarah, 41, 47 Gubar, Sandra, 21 Harlot, 16 see also prostitute Harrison, A.H., 61–2 Henwood, Dawn, 38–9 Highgate, 27 see also penitentiary Hildegard of Bingen, 48, 64 Hopkins, J. Ellice, xiv, 24–6 Hobbs, Coleen, 118, 125 163

164 Index

imagination, 67 inspiration, 113 Isaiah, 55, 78 Jantzen, Grace, 7, 48 Job, 56–7, 75–6, 78, 80 Johnson, Elizabeth, 59 n6, 63 n16 Jonah, 80 Joshua, 91 Jowett, Benjamin, 72, 111, 113–14 Julian of Norwich, 52, 64 Keble, John, 2, 8, 58, 72–3, 85, 98 Kent, David, 58 King, Ursula, 104–5 Kings, 81 Lamentations, 79 Langham Place Circle, 32–3 language, misuse of, 92–3, 141 Littledale, R.F., 35–8, 53, 55, 70, 111 Lot, 137 Luther, Martin, 113 Marsh, Jan, 3, 4, 15, 25, 35, 36 Mary, mother of Christ, 45–6, 48, 52, 63–5, 122–3, 135 McFague, Sallie, 51, 53 metaphor, 53–5 Millenarian, 125 Milton, 37 Modernist controversy, 118 Newman, John Henry, 113 Nightingale, Florence, xiv Origen, 60, 85 Oxford Movement, xii, 3, 11 see also Tractarian Parker, Bessie, 31, 32 penitentiary, 35 Peterson, Linda, 38 Portfolio Society, The, 14, 15, 31 post-Christian feminism, xi Pre-Raphaelite Movement, 11, 26, 27, 32, 38

prostitute, 15, 17, 24, 25 see also fallen woman Proverbs, 14, 16, 20–3, 26, 37, 58, 60, 83, 90, 102, 119, 135, 140 Psalms, 50, 59, 78, 98 Pusey, Edward B., xii, xiii, 2–3, 56, 62, 67, 111 renunciation, 5, 7, 8, 11, 20 sisterhoods, 6 Tract on Baptism, 7 Pusey, Maria, 7 Raphael, Melissa, 62, 141 re-imaging, 3, 4, 28, 67, 71, 88 Religious Education of Women, The, 36–8 re-naming, 51, 54 renunciation, doctrine of, 21, 22, 25, 139 reserve, doctrine of, 68 retrieval, 74 Romans, I, 77, 80, 82, 83, 91 Romanticism, 4, 69 Rosenblum, Dolores, 12, 13, 22 Rossetti, Christina ‘A Christmas Carol’, 45, 53, 63 ‘A Helpmeet for Him’, 77 ‘A Royal Princess’, 31 ‘A Testimony’, 9–10, 20 ‘A Triad’, 14 Annus Domini, 35, 47–56, 61, 141 ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock’, 31 Called to Be Saints, 57–69, 71, 76, 141 ‘From House to Home’, 23, 28 Goblin Market, 22–31, 39, 47, 125, 139–40 ‘Good Friday’, 68 ‘Hero’, 32 ‘LEL’, 32 Letter and Spirit, 85–94, 95, 101, 117, 120, 128, 141 Maude, 10–14, 16, 95, 139 Prince’s Progress, The, 38–40, 44 ‘Repining’, 4–6, 11

Index 165

Rossetti, Christina – continued Seek and Find, 68–84, 91, 97, 98, 112, 141 ‘Shut Out’, 18–19 ‘Symbols’, 12, 74 ‘The Convent Threshold’, 6–7, 9, 13 The Face of the Deep, 60, 111–37, 142 ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children’, 40–1 ‘The Lowest Room’, 19–21, 26, 28, 139–40 ‘The Martyr’, 3 ‘The Prince who arrived too late’, 31, 38 ‘The World’, 14–16, 62 Time Flies, 94–109, 113, 117, 141 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 3, 26, 27, 38, 62 Rossetti, Frances, 4, 35, 102 Rossetti, Maria, 102 Rossetti, William Michael, 1, 10, 11, 24, 33 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 80 Ruskin, John, 61, 62, 76

spiritual strength, xi, 6, 104–5, 107 Spretnack, Charlene, 102 n14 St. Andrew, 65, 66 St. Augustine, 58, 101, 116, 117 St. Jerome, 99 St. John, 66, 84, 113, 114, 122 St. Luke, 76, 78, 84 St. Mark, 29, 30 78, 82, 84, 86, 90 St. Mary Magdalene, Highgate, 15, 23–4 St. Matthew, 52, 69, 83, 86, 95 St. Paul, 60, 61, 66, 77, 104, 108, 130 St. Peter, 66, 78 St. Thomas, 65 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, xii, 2, 125–7, 131 Stanwood, P.G., 58 suffrage, 77 symbol, xii, 98, 115, 117

1 Samuel, 51 sacrality, 25 sacramental universe, 85 Samaria, woman of, 84, 135 Schneider, Sandra, 54 n33 Scott, William Bell, 35 Shaw, W.D., 68 Sheba, Queen of, 81 sisterhood, 7, 25–7, 103–4, 142 social criticism, 50, 133, 142 Sojourner Truth, 46 Solomon, 76, 81, 127 Song of Solomon, 51 Southcott, Joanna, 125 SPCK, 70

vivisection, 79 vanity of vanities, 5, 8–10, 21, 19, 59 Victoria Magazine, The, 32

1 Timothy, 78, 84, 88 Tertullian, 41 Tractarian, xii, 56–61, 69, 73, 85–6, 111, 118 Trinity, 87–8

Webster, Augusta, 77 Westerholme, Joel, 72, 73, 90, 121 Williams, Isaac, 58, 60, 69, 73, 111, 116, 118, 123 Wisdom, 20–3, 37, 55, 58–61, 73–6, 83, 86, 109, 115, 120, 140 Woman and Work, 33–5 Woman Question, The, 33–5 Woman’s Bible, The, 125–7, 131 Wordsworth, Bishop C., xiii

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