Monday, May 17, 2010

Norming the Female Body: Discourses of Sexuality in Christina Rossetti (Second Part) by Lai Sai Acon Chan


Christina Rossetti’s representations of the mid-Victorian female body challenge the normative notions about sexuality embodied by her brother’s angels and monsters.  She transforms the dominant definition of the Victorian fallen woman in her depictions of a woman who, dis-eased with her biological circumstances, provides the seed for the 1890s New Woman, someone akin to the madwoman who thinks for herself, has a career and a story to tell, seeks internal enlightenment, challenges accepted ideas, and creates artistic works (Moi 58).  Actually, in The Madwoman in the Attic Gilbert and Gubar contend that the literature of the nineteenth century portrays female characters and reveals female authors who apparently develop illnesses on purpose to purge their guilt, denounce their anger, find an outlet for their desires, or express their self-worth.  In Bloomian terms, women writers in particular suffer from a kind of anxiety of influence, which when transposed to the realm of female creativity causes women an anxiety of authorship, “an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex” (Gilbert 51).  Many of these groundbreaking women becoming precursors in fields traditionally dominated by men, put such a strain on them that their bodies, circumscribed by the “regulatory ideal,” produced diseases such as claustrophobia, agoraphobia, amnesia, aphasia, madness, and eating disorders, to further constrain them and keep them in their proper place.  However, in many cases, argue Gilbert and Gubar, the female bodies reappropriated those maladies and turned them into dis-eases, that is, ways to signal nonconformity to sexual norms of the time.
In her attempts to transcend pre-fixed, essentialist labels, Rossetti portrays the female body as agonizingly trying to reshape itself, particularly through supernatural means.  Her use of the preternatural in works such as “Goblin Market,” some of her ghost poems, some of her death poems, and stories like “Maude,” “Nick,” “The Lost Titian,” and “Hero” put in evidence the female body’s desire to escape the patriarchal prison of the flesh.   Maude is a heroine trying to escape the prison of her body, indulges herself in dreams of rematerialization and provides a model for the New Woman.  Torn between socially acceptable roles such as marriage and seclusion in a convent, Maude cannot avoid feeling guilty of the chosen path.  She is burdened by a gift to write poetry that is rarely bestowed on other young women of her generation:  “people thought her clever, and that her little copies of verses were handed about and admired.  Touching these same verses, it was the amazement of everyone what could make her poetry so broken-hearted as was mostly the case” (“Maude” 253).   Overwhelmed by the constant attention to her verse, she envies the simplicity and happiness of her cousins and friends, destined to fulfill patriarchal expectations.   She constantly looks pale, “languid and preoccupied to a painful degree” (253) as a typically ill woman from the nineteenth century—in particular a female creator—must have looked like.  She seems to use her malady to project the anxieties of being trapped in a normative woman’s body.  Unlike Laura and Lizzie, she is not destined to fulfill the role of her cousin Mary nor does she hear the call of God, like her acquaintance Magdalen.  Neither embroidery nor prayer is in Maude’s mind, but writing.  However, writing is not a source of pleasure and tranquility, but something that reminds her of her abnormalcy in the eyes of Victorian patriarchy:  “You cannot mean for the present that you will indulge in vanity and display; that you will court admiration and applause; that you will take your fill of pleasure until sickness” [. . .] (267).  And yet, unlike her successor, the literary New Woman, Maude does not flaunt convention, ruin her honor, upset her family, or refuse to repent for alleged sins.  The accident that keeps Maude bedridden is a symbol of her wish to escape from her prison:  “she had been overturned; and, though no limb was broken, had neither stirred nor spoken since” (270).   She develops both agoraphobia and aphasia in her unconscious attempt to confront the realization that she was moving away from the normative.  Since she cannot cope with the guilt of being both so talented a poet and a woman, she gradually withers away until she breaks free from the constraints of the regulatory ideal and free from labels, even from the future New Woman label.  While  Maude’s anxieties are not a supernatural way of transcending patriarchal labels, they might reveal why Christina Rossetti had a proclivity for poems about ghosts and death and tales of transmutation.
Poems like “Chilly Night,” “The Hour and the Ghost,” “The Ghost’s Petition,” “A Nightmare,” and “At Home” are the type of poems that deal with spirits that transcended their prisons of flesh, while poems like “Death Before Dead,” “After Death,” “Remember,” “Song,” and “Sleeping at Last” deal with human beings who are only too glad to leave their bodies behind.  Perhaps because they are narrative poems, the ghost poems do not seem to offer clues about those spirits’ former lives that made them glad they were finally set free, but it might be said that Rossetti’s inclination to write about them seems to indicate that fleeting to the realm of ghosts is just one possibility to transcend the lily/rose dichotomy. Then, like the New Woman or the madwoman in the attic, these ghosts demonstrate that even those who slipped into oblivion have a story to tell, unsavory opinions, or are willing to defy conventions.  Some of the ghosts come back from the afterlife to disturb those they once knew. Yet, others make themselves visible to mortal eyes because they are more disturbed than when they were among the living. “The Ghost’s Petition” is the story of Robin, a spirit who, ailed by his former wife’s pain, pleads her not to grieve for him anymore:  “I could not rest if you would not moan / Hour after hour; I have no power to shut my ears where I lie alone” (46-48) laments the ghost.     In “The Hour and the Ghost,” a spirit comes back from the afterlife to exact a woman’s promise on her wedding day, despite her reluctance and revulsion:  
Come with me, fair and false,
To our home, come home,
It is my voice that calls:
Once thou wast not afraid
When I woo’d, and said,
‘Come our nest is newly made’— 
Now cross the tossing foam. (11-17)
Unlike this outspoken ghost, the ghost of the speaker’s mother in “A Chilly Night” speaks without a voice and stares without seeing, a sad reminder that for the friendless speaker, “Living had failed and dead had failed/And [she/he] was indeed alone” (49-50).  The ghost “At Home” returns to her/his old house only to discover her/his friends in lively gatherings:  “’Tomorrow,’ said they, strong with hope,/And dwelt upon the pleasant way,/’Tomorrow,’ cried they one and all,/While no one spoke of yesterday” (17-20).  That is, the former self of the ghost was forgotten and was “Like the remembrance of a guest/That tarried but a day” (31-2). Like the troubling, yet equally troubled New Woman, the deceased people’s new state in the ghost poems is sometimes welcomed. Other times the new state is despised or rejected (and by extension the New Woman), and even makes some spirits long for their previous existence.
 



No comments: