Christina Rossetti in Context by Anthony H. Harrison (review)

Book Reviews101 and of characters' sources at the narrational level; nor does Maupassant's language possess a windowpane's clarity in allowing the reader to observe reality. The heart and strength of this volume lies in a triptych of essays devoted to Flaubert. The title essay and "Madame Arnoux's Coffret: A Monumental Case" discuss how Flaubert's well known use ofparticular leitmotifs (in these instances the color blue and a silver box) is a critical factor in creating the illusions that guide the characters' lives. In "History and Illusion in Flaubert's 'Un Coeur simple' " Haig's central task is to examine "how the historical shell [of this work]—its framing within the linear temporal flow of History—is shattered by the triumph of a fictive, imaginary world whose discourses supplant the 'objective' ones of History and impose personal event—indeed illusion—as the gauge of truth value" (118). Haig's essays are briefbut dense, concentrating on revealing the significance of selected details and scenes. While such close focus will be of particular interest to specialists, nonspecialists as well will find these pieces informative and accessible. Most chapters begin with a capsule review ofprevious, related scholarship, which serves as a helpful perspective for the discussion that follows. Also, Haig draws on his impressively broad knowledge of French literature and culture to suggest many parallels that the reader might profitably draw with other authors and works. The citations considerately appear in both French and English, thus providing access for a diverse audience. The Madame Bovary Blues is a pleasure to read for the thought-provoking insights it offers. It is best approached as a collection of essays, since the introduction and afterword do not quite succeed in pulling the pieces into a unified study. This is not a serious objection, however, especially when the volume includes such masterful gems as the commentary on Flaubert's "Un Coeur simple." JOAN M. WEST University of Idaho ANTHONY H. HARRISON. Christina Rossetti in Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. 233 p. This study ofChristina Rossetti repositions the "marginalized" poet to center stage, and the critical contribution is acute, critically judicious, and frequently brilliant. Taking Rossetti's artistic vocation with gratifying seriousness, Harrison examines the philosophical roots ofher Pre-Raphaelitism with greater sensitivity than do many longer studies of the Brotherhood's more notorious membership. His thorough examination of Rossetti's poetics is enhanced by allusions to contemporary poetry, further illuminating the Pre-Raphaelite contribution to Victorian literary history. Harrison argues that Christina Rossetti's "aesthetic" principles, drawn from the Brotherhood, were consciously corrected by ascesis or self-restraint, an 102Rocky Mountain Review asceticism revealed in her poetry's conciseness and its intertextual dialogue with earlier literary models. Balancing the aesthetics of John Ruskin and the ascetic impulses derived from Tractarian and medieval hermeneutics animated the poetic vocation that dominated Rossetti's life from 1854-1871. Harrison's opening chapters demonstrate Rossetti's serious commitment to poetry, exploding the sentimental myth that William Michael Rossetti established about his sister. Harrison also rejects earlier, dismissive assessments ofRossetti's poetry as veiled autobiography, an occasion for neo-Freudian analysis, or no more than the peculiar attractions of the PRB's poetic technique—decorative symbolism, medieval subject matter, and depiction of the noumenous through pictorial realism. Instead, through an organization scheme only occasionally difficult to follow, Harrison demonstrates how the Tractarian-influenced aesthetics of Ruskin's theory of Beauty and Rossetti's own Anglican hermeneutic provide the emblematic correspondences between spiritual and material worlds that animate Rossetti's poetry. After Harrison's careful contextualizing, the strained narrators, anaphora, metrical regularity, and archaisms of Rossetti's verse become subtly evocative of "silences" and blanks between the physical world and a spiritually immanent one With considerable skill and historical savvy, Harrison steps between critics G.B. Tennyson and Jerome McGann in chapter 3 by positioning Rossetti at the nexus of evangelical and Anglican impulses, co-contributors to her "devotionalist ideology." His best discussion, chapter 4, "Aestheticism and the Thematics of Renunciation," underscores Rossetti's divergence from the Romantics' wariness ofisolation to a philosophy of self-perfection derived from Plato, Dante, and Augustine, a journey from Pre...