The Pre-Raphaelites

During 2013 the writings of the Pre-Raphaelites continued to inspire steady interest, as critics and scholars focused on the relationship between biography and literary creation, and the publication contexts and visual qualities of PreRaphaelite literature. As in past years, interest centered on the philosophical and religious nuances of Christina Rossetti’s poetry, and in addition, Elizabeth Siddal’s writing received rare and welcome critical scrutiny.

The Rossettis and Elizabeth Siddal:

Frances Dickey’s The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (University of Virginia Press) outlines a trajectory of Victorian and modernist poems that explore complexities of individuality and selfhood. In chapter 1, “Portraiture in the Rossetti Circle: Window, Object, or Mirror,” Dickey contrasts the “portrait poems” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which assume a painting’s intelligibility as an index of the soul, with Rossetti’s two poems titled “The Portrait” and Swinburne’s “Before the Glass,” written in response to Whistler’s “Symphony in White.” Rossetti’s “Portraits” offer contrasting approaches; whereas his sonnet “The Portrait” attributes subject-like capacities to the painting itself, subsuming both artist and subject within its beautiful surfaces, his 12-stanza interior monologue broods on the gap between portrait and memory, as the speaker’s self dissolves into the mirroring portrait and his present identity into that of the past. Similarly Swinburne’s poem denies any unified interiority to the woman represented in Whistler’s painting, celebrating instead the many forms of reflection suggested by her image. Dickey notes that this “interspatial” sense of identity—formed between persons and between persons and objects—anticipates that of twentieth-century modernists, who valued “multivocality, non-narrativity, and a system of surface reflections” (46). Dickey’s discussion of portrait poems of the 1860s and 70s might usefully have been supplemented by considering an alternate tradition of mirror/self-portrait poems by women such as Augusta Webster and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, however, and its swift historical slide from male Pre-Raphaelites to male modernists could benefit from attention to intermediary portrait/mirror poems by Michael Field, Mary Coleridge, and other fin de siècle poets.

In Christina Rossetti’s Gothic (Bloomsbury), Serena Trowbridge argues that poetry is “a form positioned to manifest elements of Gothic, since it is by nature fractured” (23) She interprets Rossetti’s poetry as an expression of such a Gothic sensibility, seen as “a collective term for an assortment of tropes and styles,” (1) which include preoccupation with death, the grotesque, and haunting. Although many of the features Trowbridge identifies as Gothic also fit well within other interpretive contexts, her readings provide an alternate approach to the many discussions of Rossetti’s theology per se.

In chapter 1, “The Spectrality of Rossettian Gothic,” Trowbridge reviews theoretical insights on haunting, ghosts, and other spectral phenomena offered by Freud, Derrida, Terry Castle, Alison Chapman, and others, and applies these definitions to several Rossetti poems in which a speaker expresses terror at a haunting presence or crosses a tabooed threshold. She notes that Rossetti’s ghost poems are most often “fragments of narrative—the thoughts of the speaker, or a ballad with a story only hinted at” (51–52). In chapter 2, “Early Influences: Rossetti and the Gothic of Maturin,” Trowbridge argues for the importance of Rossetti’s eight early poems based on novels by Charles Maturin. She observes that Maturin provided Rossetti with models of strong-minded heroines trapped in convents, torn between earthly and spiritual love, or suffering from their own as well as others’ transgressions, all situations that recur repeatedly throughout her later works. Unlike their tormented or transgressive originals, however, Rossetti’s Maturin-based heroines achieve redemption, and Trowbridge remarks that for Rossetti, “the shadow of the fallen world of the Gothic novel serves only to indicate the eternal glories of heaven” (87).

In chapter 3, “Rossetti, Ruskin and the Moral Grotesque,” Trowbridge defines Ruskin’s “grotesque”—distortion, excess, and ugliness—in relation to concepts of the sublime: “the presence of an object which is perhaps unexpected or even absurd, but which represents a sublime truth in a symbolic manner” (98). This rather...