Form Unformed: Elizabeth Siddall's Poetics of Decreation

I am excess …        Creature whobreaks the silence of heaven,        blocks God's view of his beloved creation            and like an unwelcome third between two lovers        gets in the way.

—Anne Carson, "Decreation Aria"¹

In 1895, thirty-three years after her death, Elizabeth Siddall made her poetic debut. One of her poems appeared in a collection of her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti's letters, published by his brother William Michael Rossetti. Not known as a writer in her lifetime, Siddall the poet first features in a missive from D. G. Rossetti to his sister, encouraging Christina to publish a few of Siddall's poems in The Prince's Progress (1866).² Yet, according to W. M. Rossetti, Christina—herself often "arraigned for excessive melancholy"—ultimately decided they were "too hopelessly sad for publication en masse" in The Prince's Progress, gently turning down her brother's request.³ And, as Constance Hassett has noted, self-appointed family executor W. M. Rossetti seems to have concurred with his sister, declining to ever publish Siddall's poetic corpus in its totality.⁴ The small assortment of fifteen poems and a few fragments did not appear as a full collection until Roger Lewis and Mark Lasner's 1978 Wombat Press edition and were not published in their original form until Selena Trowbridge's 2018 Victorian Secrets Press edition. For although W. M. Rossetti's versions have become the standard, he fundamentally altered the poems with heavy emendations and inserted conventional punctuation, formatting, spelling, and titling.⁵ The Trowbridge edition attempts to rectify his interferences by following the poems' manuscript forms, free from edits inevitably implicated in nineteenth-century ideals of class, gender and, for Rossetti specifically, family loyalty.

Since the initial correspondence between D. G. Rossetti and Christina, the melancholic mood ubiquitous in Siddall's poems—and, crucially, her eventual laudanum overdose—have defined the few critical studies of her literary production. This hermeneutic twisting of Siddall's poetry into an extended body of suicide notes plagued her from the outset: in a 1903 biography of "Mrs Dante Gabriel Rossetti" (p. 292), W. M. Rossetti portrays Siddall as a poète maudit irreparably plagued by illness and melancholy—a characterization of inevitable expiration that would color many subsequent studies of Siddall. Until 1984, when a seminal essay by art historians and feminist scholars Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock called attention to the dehumanizing treatment of Siddall as a "cipher" of male artistic genius by previous criticism,⁶ she was primarily known as the model-muse of D. G. Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and others in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, often posing as particularly tragic or ethereal heroines (Ophelia, Dante's Beatrice, Princess Sabra, etc.).⁷ In the past twenty-five years, there has been a revival of interest in Siddall's poetry led primarily by Constance Hassett, Beverly Taylor, and Trowbridge. Such studies examine Siddall's poetry for its literary merit apart from its author's iconic status.⁸ As Taylor puts it, "reading [Siddall's] painting and poetry through a biographical lens … occludes [the] feminist critique" at the heart of critical projects such as her own, Hassett's, and Trowbridge's (p. 29).

Yet, these studies, the most comprehensive of the slim body of Siddall criticism, devote the majority of their attention to the balladic form and medieval content of her poetry and painting. Like her Pre-Raphaelite compatriots, Siddall drew heavily from medieval sources for the balladic subjects—the Lady of Shallot, Clerk Saunders, Lady Clare—of her work. Much of Siddall's medievalism is filtered through contemporary retellings: Alfred Lord Tennyson's interpretation of the medieval ballad La Damigella di Scalot inspired her painting "The Lady of Shallot," and two volumes of Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border inscribed "Eliz. E. Siddal" survive (Hassett, p. 448). By stripping the dominant confessional affect from her poems in favor of the balladic, well-intentioned scholars evade the mawkish biographical readings of W. M. Rossetti and early Siddall scholars such as Violet Hunt,⁹ but rely on the scaffolding of medievalism instead of addressing the...