Rossetti, Christina: General Commentary

views updated

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI: GENERAL COMMENTARY

LYNDA PALAZZO (ESSAY DATE FALL 1997)

SOURCE: Palazzo, Lynda. "The Poet and the Bible: Christina Rossetti's Feminist Hermeneutics." The Victorian Newsletter 92 (fall 1997): 6-9.

In the following essay, Palazzo argues that in her religious prose Rossetti attempts to recover for the woman reader the hidden realities in the Christian scriptures and thus that her hermeneutics are feminist.

With the anniversary of Christina Rossetti's death in 1994, there has been renewed interest in her work, with an entire volume of Victorian Poetry devoted to her poetry and prose, revealing a perceptive and sometimes subversive intelligence at work. However, critical accounts of her theology are still very few, and even fewer those which examine the theology of her devotional prose. One of the more promising articles in the volume, Linda Petersen's "Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of the PRB," after an exciting introduction suggesting a reaction in Rossetti's theology against the "subtle yet insistent cultural exclusion of women as active readers of, and writers about, the sacred scriptures" (212) ultimately disappoints by neatly sidestepping the devotional prose and engaging with Rossetti's poetry instead. The reader is left without a confirmation of Rossetti active herself as reader and interpreter of the sacred text. Rossetti is indeed an active participant in the theological developments of the last century, and her approach, imaginative and intuitive rather than "scientific," is closely linked to the religious controversies of her time. She recognizes the potential of controversial developments in nineteenth-century Anglican theology, and although always careful to avoid overstepping the bounds of what she considers legitimate enquiry, develops a method of scriptural interpretation which satisfies both her intellectual need for an imaginative and transformative encounter with a living text, and her personal need as a woman to interpret and understand a "masculine" text.

An earlier article by Joel Westerholm comes nearer to showing Rossetti's active engagement with the scriptural text, especially in his discussion of her response to gender issues. However, he has not placed her satisfactorily within the context of Victorian Anglican theology and consequently is unable to determine the method of her operation. Her "authority" in fact comes from the knowledge that she is working within a rapidly expanding, although at times controversial, field. More credit must be given the SPCK than to assume that they were unaware of any "serious and scholarly biblical interpretation" (14) in her work. There is no evidence either that "in prefaces and editing the church tried to place her back in the contexts it found acceptable" (16). The editing of her work by the SPCK appears to have been minimal (see note 4). The Anglican Church in the nineteenth century was surprisingly open ended and Rossetti's close friendship with such figures as the fiery R. F. Littledale would have kept her up to date with the latest controversies, It is not, as Westerholm suggests, her courage we need to admire, although she certainly had that, but the razor sharp intellect and vision that identified in contemporary theological developments the potential for feminine and feminist theology.

Rossetti's place, in terms of method, is amongst the post-Coleridgeans such as J. H. Newman, Isaac Williams, to whom she acknowledges a debt in the prefatory note of Seek and Find, and Benjamin Jowett, in his "On the Interpretation of Scripture." There is evidence in Seek and Find and Letter and Spirit of a lively interest in controversies such as those that followed the publication of Essays and Reviews.¹ Like Jowett, she was fascinated by metaphor and symbol, and the role of the imagination in relation to the scriptures. The methodology of both in fact foreshadows some of the most important developments in modern hermeneutical study, for example Paul Ricoeur in his use of metaphor.

Possibly her earliest attempts at biblical commentary, her unpublished notes on Genesis and Exodus,² show her moving away from the popular typological orientation, towards an evaluation of the figurative power of language. As does Coleridge in his "Statesman's Manual," Rossetti notes the potential of metaphor and symbol in the opening up of the text to a multiplicity of interpretations, reader-based interpretations, which make the Bible live in the contemporary mind, as "living educts of the imagination" (29).

She remarks on a marginal comment for Genesis 2:22:

Margin "builded he a woman: opens the whole subject of the Church born & built from our Lord's side. Also consider His parallel with Adam casting in His lot with his lost bride. "Yet without sin." Also the female cast out of sin? Is it so?

Rossetti is aware of the standard typological association, Eve, type of the Church as bride of Christ, but her focus is on the metaphor "builded," which highlights the tension between God's creation of Eve and the physical building of the church. She is allowing the metaphor to open up imaginative access to a whole series of possibilities, ending with a daring suggestion in her use of "cast out" that Eve's sin had its origin in the sinful flesh of Adam from which she was made.

Her comment on the use of the word bow" found in Genesis 9:13 indicates again that she is exploring the way metaphor gives access to meaning through association with the familiar in the mind of the reader: "13. "My bow"—would this suggest bow and arrows as an antedeluvian mode of hunting, & thus familiar and intelligible?" (see note 2). The author's reference to "bow," Rossetti suggests, is chosen specifically because it would facilitate an imaginative connection between the text and the vocabulary of the familiar, thus establishing meaning.

George Landow sees the "deformation" of the popular type into allegory, symbol or correspondence as characteristic of high church exegetes like Keble and Pusey (59), but Rossetti's agenda is different from that of the great Tractarians. She certainly learnt from Keble, and even in later years continued to use her copy of his Christian Year, but even her youthful illustrations to his poems in this volume show a very different sensibility from his. Diane D'Amico in a discussion of these illustrations draws our attention to, on the one hand, Rossetti's subjective reading of Keble, "responding to, if not looking for, what in the poetry of The Christian Year would serve to mirror her own hopes and fears," and on the other to her use of the feminine figure "when we would expect to see a male figure as the subject of an illustration" (37). More important in terms of her theology, we also see that her choice of emphasis does not correspond to Keble's own. In her illustration of Keble's "Fifth Sunday after Epiphany" she fixes upon a few words only from the epigraph from Isaiah 59: "your iniquities have separated between you and your God." She interprets these in a literal sense, cutting them off momentarily from their immediate referent, and then reproduces them in a figuration of her own: a medusa-like demon, reminiscent of her own "The World," obscures the figure of Christ on the cross. The resulting image, despite its childish characters, is unsettling and provoking. Her brother William Michael noted in his memoir to her Poetical Works the "very literal manner" with which she was wont to construe the biblical precepts" (liv), but this was not, as he perhaps thought, the consequence of a closed mind. Rather, it was her fascination with words, and the pictures they conjured up in her imagination. Her method here is as follows: focus on the surface meaning, once the word has been given symbolic or metaphorical status, allows it to be imaginatively transferred from its original context to become active in the individual mind, producing a corresponding metaphor. Benjamin Jowett describes a similar action in his comments on the use of symbol and imagination when he speaks of "the doubling of an object when seen through glasses placed at different angles" (381). In a bolder step than he himself would have dared, the correspondences of Keble's sacramental universe have been transferred to the words of scripture. Language itself has become sacrament. Rossetti follows Jowett (and Coleridge), as she "read[s] scripture like any other book" (338), with "an effort of thought and imagination requiring the sense of a poet was well as a critic … demanding much more than learning a degree of original power and intensity of mind" (384). It is an opening up of the mind to the text, an empathy which probes the "is" and "is not"³ of each metaphor.

Rossetti is aware of a tendency to devalue the text in biblical study and has harsh words to say in Letter and Spirit about those who denigrate the face value of scripture: "We protrude mental feelers in all directions above, beneath, around it, grasping, clinging to every imaginable particular except the main point" (85). She is not, as her brother thought, falling into the trap of literalism, nor is she naively adhering to the idea of "common sense" linguistic transparency. We need to grasp the surface of the text, its literal value, in order to have access to meaning. Even so the mind is waylaid by the need to translate into fact, to prove physical truth or falsity: "What was the precise architecture of Noah's Ark?" Rossetti quotes, "Clear up the astronomy of Joshua's miracle.⁴ Fix the botany of Jonah's gourd. Must a pedestal be included within the measurement of Nebuchadnezzar's 'golden image'" (86-87).

Rossetti's final volume of devotional prose, The Face of the Deep, an exegetical commentary on Revelation, is particularly interesting in that we see Rossetti working directly on the scriptures. The title itself, taken from Genesis 1:2, proclaims its revaluation of the individual word as an access point to personal revelation. Her prefatory note proposes a search of the surface of the sacred text: "If thou canst dive, bring up pearls. If thou canst not dive, collect amber. Though I fail to identify Pardisiacal 'bdellium,' I still may hope to search out beauties of the 'onyx stone'" (7).

The metaphorical nature of the individual word allows her, through grasping its "surface," to glimpse the theological referent, and then as an interpreter, to substitute another "metaphor" taken from her own experience. She begins her commentary by opening her mind and imagination to the language of the text, appropriating words or phrases from it which have called up echoes from her own experience—words which orthodox biblical commentaries may in the past have considered unimportant. Then in her text she restores, not the words themselves, but the figures they have produced in her own mind.

For example in Revelation 1:1 from the phrase "must shortly come to pass" she appropriates the word "shortly," which has a pivotal function, allowing her to include herself in an expanded text: "'Things which must shortly come to pass.'—At the end of 1800 years we are still repeating this 'shortly'" (9). It was this "shortly" for John, "the channel, not the fountain head" of Revelation, and it is still "shortly" for the present generation. But Rossetti doesn't attempt to define the word in her commentary, or explain its meaning; rather she explores the tension between the totally opposite poles it represents. The word has become metaphoric, the figurative sense pointing to a barely glimpsed divine meaning which in turn challenges the literal, forcing the reader to find ways in which such meanings can co-exist, realigning the self as the word becomes productive in the imagination.

Particularly important to Rossetti is the capacity of such a method to satisfy her own need as a woman working in a field almost exclusively dominated by men. The Face of the Deep is not addressed exclusively to women, but the frequent use of the address "we women" suggests that, especially in her description of the female figures, she has her female readership in mind. Certainly some of the more prominent figures in Revelation are examined in terms of gender distinction, becoming patterns which Rossetti is able to trace in her own world. Her comment on the "woman clothed with the sun" of Revelation 12:1 is perhaps the best known of these, as it fits well with the "lowest place" theme of her poetry: "she has done all and stands; from the lowest place she has gone up higher … triumphantly erect, despite her own frailty" (310). But Rossetti's definition of this frailty gives us more than an echo of her poetry. It is physical weakness, certainly, the lot reserved for women, "unlike the corresponding heritage of man" (310), but is also Eve's punishment for intellectual daring. Rossetti's description of Eve's intellectual sin has the characteristics of her own objections to contemporary Biblical controversy, but the interpreter of the text is female: "Not till she became wise in her own conceit, disregarding the plain obvious meaning of words, and theorising on her own responsibility as to physical and intellectual results, did she bring death into the world" (310).

Protagonists who stand ranged on each side of the gender divide give Rossetti the opportunity to provide guidance in male-female relationships, and there are no doubts as to where her sympathies lie. The outcome on earth of the "war in heaven" of Revelation 12: 7 comes perilously close to a war between the sexes, the newly delivered woman fleeing from the pursuing flood of the (male) dragon. But she avoids the simplistic and uses such generalizations only to highlight important issues for her woman readers.

Rossetti's hermeneutic can be defined as a feminist one in the way she attempts to recover for the woman reader those hidden or suppressed realities of the text. She accepts with humility the feminine implications of even that most loathsome of creatures, the whore of Babylon, whom she admits as "illustrating the particular foulness, degradation, loathsomeness, to which a perverse rebellious woman because feminine not masculine is liable," but her scrutiny picks out the relationship between the whore and the (male) beast upon which she is seated. Since the sacred text is inspired⁵ and therefore active "to teach us somewhat we can learn, and in a way by which we are capable of learning" (23), a physical detail of this nature may be considered symbolically and interpreted within the personal circumstance of the reader: "If she removes he is the motor; she is lifted aloft to the extent of his height; her stability depends on his. In semblance he is her slave, in reality her master" (399). In the discussion which follows, on the misuse of physical force, there is an ill disguised bitterness:

As yet, I suppose, we women claim no more than equality with our brethren in head and heart; whilst as to physical force, we scout it as unworthy to arbitrate between the opposed camps. Men on their side do not scout physical force, but let it be.
(410)

She thus is able to foreground sections of the text which may have seemed irrelevant to earlier commentators, but which in her own discourse gain meaning. The "kings of the earth" for example, the seducers of Babylon, regret the fall of the whore, but as Rossetti points out, "Adam seems not to have found one word to plead for Eve in the terrible hour of judgement" (418). We are reminded here of her comment from the Genesis notes, "Also the female cast out of sin?" and her anguished "Is it so?" Cast from the flesh of Adam, Eve's sin is derived from his, but he shows no compassion for her in her suffering. As Rossetti moves her meditation to her own day, the corrupt seducers of Babylon assume contemporary identity:

Now they are the wicked who stand callous amid the fears, torments, miseries of others; not investigating human claims … not heeding the burning questions of their day, neighbourhood, nay sometimes their own hearths.
(418)

But it will not always be so. "Society" Rossetti claims, "may be personified as a human figure whose right hand is man, whose left woman.… Rules admit of and are proved by exceptions. There are left-handed people, and there may arise a left-handed society!" (409).

In what she perceives as a world blind in the main to the suffering of women, Rossetti derives comfort from the feminine identity of the Church and its relationship to Christ. In her response to Revelation 19:7 she illustrates the love between Christ and the Church by a revaluation of Christ's own relationship with women; his love, acceptance and consolation, defending her use of this literal interpretation of the feminine identity of the Church, "because it is so lovely a privilege to have stood really and truly in some direct relation to Christ that it may well take precedence of aught figurative" (434). Adding imaginative and emotional detail she fills in the feminine mindset, finally bringing her discourse into the present where womankind "comes forth from the thousand battlefields … beds of weariness, haunts of starvation, hospital wards, rescue homes, orphanages …" (436).

As Revelation draws to a close and St. John returns to address the Churches, as at the beginning, Rossetti allows the words of St. John to span the centuries and become directly meaningful to her own discourse. His warning in Revelation 22:18-19, "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life," elicits the response "O Lord, if I myself have fallen into either deadly error against which Thou here testifieth: 'I acknowledge my transgressions'" (548), and for the reader Rossetti adds, "if I have been overbold in attempting such a work as this, I beg pardon" (551).

Rossetti's method has enabled her to bridge the gap between a text increasingly under fire as inaccurate, irrelevant and incomprehensible⁶ and the average Victorian sensibility, bewildered in a world fast becoming "modern" at the end of the century. In this she is forward looking to Karl Barth, to Gadamer and to modern hermeneutical trends, but she looks past them also, in her exploration of feminist hermeneutics, which a hundred years later seeks to liberate the Biblical text from participation in the oppression of women, through, as Schneider terms it, an "integral interpretation … engaging it in such a way that it can function as locus and mediator of transformative encounter with the living God" (197).

Notes

See for example my discussion of the two volumes in "The Prose Works of Christina Rossetti."
They were probably written some time before Seek and Find. See Packer (330) and Palazzo (62). I am indebted to Mrs. Joan Rossetti for the notes on Genesis, and to Professor Diane D'Amico for help in tracing their whereabouts. See also Palazzo 89, notes 17, 18, 20, and Appendix A, for a reproduction of the notes.
Schneider (29). Sandra Schneider uses modern developments in the study of hermeneutics, especially in relation to the use of metaphor, to facilitate a feminist interpretation of the scriptures.
Joshua's miracle in particular must have caught her imagination as she attempted to publish a more detailed comment on it in Seek and Find. The SPCK [Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge] rejected the passage, but otherwise the editing of the manuscript appears minimal. See Palazzo Appendix B.
The nature of the inspiration itself was a controversial topic of the period. Rossetti is closest in her treatment of inspiration to the method of Isaac Williams and his Apocalypse and Genesis.
Attacks on literalism, although useful in correcting the worst excesses of fundamentalism, ultimately tended to devalue the language of the text, for example Matthew Arnold's classification of the words of scripture in his God and the Bible as expendable "husks" (156).

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. God and the Bible. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1970.

Coleridge, S. T. "The Statesman' Manual." Lay Sermons. Ed. R. J. White. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

D'Amico, Diane. "Christina Rossetti's Christian Year: Comfort for 'the weary heart.'" Victorian Newsletter No. 72 (Fall 1987): 37-41.

Jowett, Benjamin. "On the Interpretation of Scripture." Essays and Reviews. London Parker & Son, 1860; Greg International, 1970.

Landow, George. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Packer, Lona Mosk. Christina Rossetti. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963.

Palazzo, Lynda. "The Prose Works of Christina Rossetti." Unpubl. Diss. U of Durham, 1992.

Petersen, Linda. "Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of the PRB." Victorian Poetry 32, 3-4 (Autumn-Winter, 1994): 209-27.

Rossetti, Christina. The Face of the Deep. London: SPCK, 1892.

——. Letter and Spirit. London: SPCK, 1883.

——. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti with memoir and notes by William Michael Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1904.

——. Seek and Find. London: SPCK, 1897.

Schneider, Sandra M. The Revelatory Text. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991.

Westerholm, Joel. "I Magnify Mine Office: Christina Rossetti's Authoritative Voice in Her Devotional Prose." Victorian Newsletter No. 84 (Fall 1993): 11-17.

Williams, Isaac. Apocalypse with Notes and Reflections. London: Rivington, 1852.

——. The Beginning of the Book of Genesis, with Notes and Reflections. London: Rivington, 1861.