Abusing Christina

“Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life”

By Jan Marsh

Viking

634 pp.; $27.95

Twelve years before she died, Christina Rossetti–a fervent Christian as well as one of Victorian England’s finest poets–chastised those who would slander the dead: “It is no light offense to traduce the dead, to blacken recklessly their memory, to cultivate not tenderness for them, helpless and inoffensive as they now lie.” Given the rising number of sensationalistic biographies then being written about well-known families like her own (the flamboyant pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was her brother), Rossetti had reason to be concerned.

As it turns out, no such biography about Christina Rossetti emerged in the years immediately following her death in 1894–but recent decades have witnessed a revival of scholarly interest in her work, which has laid Rossetti open to labels that would, no doubt, have pained her. On one hand, she has been cast as a fanatically pious and reclusive Christian; on the other, as a socially engaged feminist who necessarily, perhaps even reluctantly, used biblical language as a resource. Readers from different corners, it would appear, have had a stake in defusing either her Christian or feminist identities.

Although such polarized portraits may have dismayed Rossetti, they represent an improvement over how she was treated for much of this century. Rossetti enjoyed literary acclaim in her own day, but early twentieth-century critics, put off by her “simple” expressions of faith, largely neglected her work. About 30 years ago, when her poems again began to be studied more seriously (her devotional prose work has only recently begun to be reread), the complex artistry of her verse was acknowledged more widely. Yet she often suffered the same humiliating treatment as Emily Dickinson and other unmarried female artists: literary critics and biographers characterized her as a lovelorn spinster whose lyric cry was motivated by sexual frustration.

With the advent of feminist criticism, Rossetti has largely shed her “frustrated spinster” image, at least in academic circles. Yet the tendency to try to read her work and her life through one familiar lens–Rossetti as pious Victorian Christian, Rossetti as disruptive feminist, Rossetti as conservative, Rossetti as progressive–has lingered. In “Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life,” British biographer Jan Marsh articulates and seeks to explain the seeming contradictions behind Rossetti’s complicated identity as a would-be Christian feminist–a profoundly devout, orthodox Anglican who tried, with varying degrees of success, to integrate her feminist impulses and her faith. In doing so, Marsh helps us understand why a growing number of Christians and feminists finds Rossetti’s work at once appealing and resistant to full understanding. Because she embraces Rossetti’s contradictory impulses rather than trying to explain them away, Marsh ends up portraying a forebear of the biblical feminists who have only recently found welcome within certain evangelical circles, and whose spiritual genealogy remains sketchy.

Although Marsh’s portrayal of Rossetti as a woman caught between Christian and feminist impulses is impressive, “A Writer’s Life” will probably not be remembered for that, but rather for an explosive claim that, although carefully introduced, fairly leaps off the page. Drawing on Rossetti’s literary work, private correspondence, and others’ observations of her behavior, Marsh speculates that the poet was sexually abused as an adolescent, most likely by her father.

This contention, though by Marsh’s own admission impossible to prove, has tremendous explanatory power. Rossetti suffered a dramatic mental breakdown in her early teens that has never been satisfactorily accounted for. Her personality changed dramatically after months during which she was left alone for long periods of time to care for her mentally and physically ailing father. The child noted for her vivacity suddenly became morose, prone to episodes of depression, self-loathing, and mysterious physical symptoms that revisited her throughout her life.

It was out of this pain, in fact, that Rossetti’s poetry emerged: it seemed to bring her a measure of relief to write, and the intensity of her lyric voice quickly set her apart as a poet of great promise.

Marsh explores how Rossetti’s poetry, faith, and eventual expressions of female strength helped her work through feelings now understood as being particularly common to sexual-abuse survivors. Fathers, for example, when they appear in Rossetti’s work at all, are feared. In one piece, a woman is tortured by nightmares of “distorted spectres of the past” who are “always impossible to escape from”; her fears eventually become focused in an irrational terror that her dead father’s body will wash ashore on the seacoast where she walks. Correspondingly, in Rossetti’s devotional work, God the Father is conspicuously absent; until very late in life she feared him excessively, focusing instead on the promise of mercy in Christ. And her later assertions of female strength often take root within the context of male abuse: where men have abused their privileges, God has raised women, the weak and foolish things of this world, to get his work done.

In introducing the subject of sexual abuse into literary conversations–and conversations, no less, about a Christian poet from a “good” home whose lyric cries of aspiration for moral purity remain unsurpassed–Marsh’s biography accomplishes much. It not only breaks the taboo of silence that contributes to survivors’ sense of shame, but refuses to focus only on Rossetti-as-victim, emphasizing how she “took charge,” finding a degree of relief by channeling her pain into art and faith. Just as important, Marsh’s speculations undergird her attempt to help readers get beyond seeing Rossetti as a one-dimensional figure–a fate to which female and Christian artists are still particularly vulnerable.

The rubric of Rossetti as a sexual-abuse survivor can help those interested in her faith and those interested in her idiosyncratic feminism to find common ground: Marsh offers a picture of how an individual can marshal seemingly contradictory impulses as she struggles for emotional healing.

But Rossetti-as-survivor is still only a rubric–and a potentially dangerous one. Marsh’s work could have the ironic effect of putting Rossetti studies back a few decades, inadvertently encouraging readers to yield to the old temptation to read her fervent, intense verse as displaced sexual feeling, and displaced sexual feeling only. A year ago, when Marsh unveiled her theory to a group of Rossetti scholars of which I was part, her revelation did, indeed, have an overwhelming effect. Although Marsh, a highly regarded scholar, presented her findings in an understated, no-nonsense manner, many of us found it hard to think or talk about anything else for some time afterward. This was partly because sexual abuse explains so much that has been hard to explain about Rossetti’s life and work, but only partly. It was also because the subject of sexual abuse is so highly controversial right now–the stuff of lawsuits, countersuits, and talk shows. It at once deeply disturbs and fascinates many of us and thus threatens to trump all other considerations.

Certainly, Marsh tries to work against our reducing Rossetti to a one-dimensional “sexual-abuse survivor”; she waits to make her claim until halfway through the book, and then is careful to discuss the pain that drove the poet within the context of other forces that helped shape her. Nevertheless, for the time being at least, Marsh’s decision to give Rossetti the identity of “survivor” may undercut her efforts to present a nuanced portrait of a woman and a writer who has too often been seen in caricature.

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 17

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