More on Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti was a prolific poet and was encouraged in her artistic work by her family.  Her brother William, a civil servant, supported her and their mother, out of a modest salary... so that they could stay home and not have to work.  He himself postponed marriage for some time, because he had the responsibility of supporting his female relatives.  He also was good hearted enough to help their brother Dante Gabriel, who was an impecunious artist who frequently needed financial support.

 Christina did hope for marriage.  All the same, her devotion to her art was such that married life was not the only career that she felt was possible, as a middle class girl.  She always had her poetry.  Unlike her older sister Maria, she was not “learned”.  However, she was a reader, self-educated and interested in the arts… though not to the same extent as William and Gabriel. 

She was a complex character, shy and often prudish, but also in some ways very dogmatic.

Her brother William was an agnostic and when he married, in middle age, his new wife, Lucy was more strongly “anti-religious” than himself. 

This caused tension between him and Lucy, and the very devout female Rossettis, particularly Christina.  He wanted his sisters and mother to share a house with him and his bride, but it didn’t work out very well.  Christina tried to be tolerant and not to criticise her sister in law for her different beliefs, but in practice she didn’t find it easy to get on with someone so much opposed to herself in outlook.   Although she wrote children’s poetry, and loved her brother’s children, she at times found “real life” children hard to tolerate, especially as her health declined.

One of her best known and most complex poems is “Goblin Market.” It tells of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, and seems to be about “forbidden fruit”.  It is not easy to decipher what it really “means”.  Is the forbidden fruit sexual knowledge for women?  Or just sensual gratification of food?  Or is it about education and knowledge which was denied to women, on the grounds that it would make them unfeminine or unfit for their womanly duties.

  Laura buys fruit from some ugly “goblin men” who seem bestial and evil.   She eats it and is happy for a time but then sickens and becomes ill.  She longs for the fruit but she can no longer hear the goblins.   Her sister Lizzie has tried to discourage her from dealing with the goblin men, reminding her that another girl, Jeanie, ate goblin fruit and died.

However, when Laura becomes ill and depressed, Lizzie is determined to rescue her sister.  She goes to the goblin men and tries to buy fruit from them.  They refuse to sell to her, unless she will eat some, but although they try to force her, she refuses to eat the fruit. She stands up to their violence and eventually comes back to her sister with the fruit all over her skin.  She begs Laura to taste the fruit, by eating it from her body, in hope of a cure. 

Laura obeys and the fruit now works as an antidote, curing her illness and ending her longing to eat it again.   This of course can be seen as a female taking on a heroic role of rescuing a damsel in distress, or even as Lizzy being a Christ figure who offers her body to Laura to help her.  Many feminist critics have seen it as such.

Christina was in many ways conservative.  Her High Church religious views and Victorian strictness made her accept that a woman should be modest, retiring, humble and obedient, and so she was not a strong supporter of women’s rights, in terms of issues like women’s suffrage.

 However she did have liberal views on some subjects... She was against slavery and also horrified by vivisection and did try to work against it.

 Some of her biographers believed that her essentially passionate, very emotional nature warred with her sense of propriety and her Victorian upbringing, creating a lot of strain for her. 

 Her brother William felt that her religiosity did not make her especially happy.  He thought that it only made her feel guilty and over-particular about propriety.  He was distressed that when she was very ill, and on her deathbed, she was tormented by guilt about small faults and mistakes in her distant past.   She told him that she was unhappy that many years ago; she had gone against William’s wishes, and had met with Cayley, her admirer, and had lunch with him... but that she had been “so very fond of him.”

William could not help but feel that her life was narrow and rather sad and that her strict conformity to “Victorian propriety” for women and to her religious beliefs added to the restrictions of her life.