Victorian Literature April 2014 Youssef Latash

Question: Discuss the transgression of gender norms in ONE of the set texts.
Text: Christina Rossettis poetry - At Home, After Death and The Hour and the Ghost.
Legally, they claimed few rights, their identity here subsumed into that of their husbands;
domestically, they were venerated for their motherhood, they were the angel at the hearth, but
socially, they were denied any participation in public life. In many ways, the Victorian woman,
dispossessed from the material reality of every day life, was idealised in terms of passivity, a life
devoted to serving her husband, an uncomplaining receptical for male fantasies. Given these limits,
norms and expectations, for women, to transgress is to attain their individuality, their autonomy,
the free expression and pursuit of their desires and impulses. Indeed, reconciling the tension between
the idealisation of women, largely by men, as these ghostly, non-corporeal figures and the physical
reality of their body and its associated libidinal jouissance, produced, in the art of the period, a
sentimentalisation of the dying or dead woman. While for some, this meant fetishisation of the
corpse, for the women who were to adhere to the gender norms in their daily life, the ghost story
became a passage into a world where they could express that which their society preferred they did
not have. Christina Rossettis poetry provides an interesting case study, for when her transgressions
of gender norms are overtly depicted, she often concludes with an affirmation of the status quo, and
when she makes available a reading that is comforting to the Victorian gender norms, she skilfully,
subtlely and ironically undermines this reading as she skirts the boundary between tradition and
transgression. Whether it be the strict adherence to the gothic in The Hour and the Ghost or
the lyrical verse of At Home and After Death, we observe a transgression of the gender norms
that were held in society through her depiction of ghosts.
Through the use of the gothic, nineteenth century Victorian writers were able to encode the horror associated with our most intimate apocalypses, those which gender norms effectively subverted
from expression. For Rossetti, her gothic poetry can be viewed as emerging out of the schisms
between the religious, moral and ideological codes that defined expectations for women and the
persistent narcissistic impulses that sought expression in dangerous and abject formations [2]. The
Hour and the Ghost is a powerful example of Rossettis exploration of the division between illicit,
abject gratification and conformity to social conventions, highlighting the consequences of transgression from the latter. The poem is constructed as two overlapping conversations, one between
a bride and a bridegroom and one between the same bride a ghost who attempts to draw her away
from her marriage to his rugged place beyond the hills and pines. This ghost has knowledge of
the brides desires, as he bids her, Come with me . . . to our home and reminds her of a prior
time when she wast not afraid; he also refers to the brides fair frail sin, of having previously
submitted to the ghosts wooing, thus making irresistible appeals to both her desire and her guilt.
While the ghost distorts the words of the marriage ceremony to imply that she is already bound to
him, For better and worse, / For life and death . . . / Come, crown our vows, the bride attempts,
for as long as she can, to resist the call. Finally, she speaks to her groom as though she were dying,
telling him Perhaps I may come to thee. The groom fails to comprehend the cause of his brides
drifting and demands Who spoke of death or change but aught of ease?. Indeed, the death that
threatens the bride is not real death but a far worse living death in the nebulous zone of limbo,
where she and the ghost will toss and howl and spin in the outcast weather. The ghost who is
it at once the brides seducer and her jailer thus becomes the paradigm of a character who invokes
moral authority for an immoral end, which is to trap his subject in permanent isolation [5]. Indeed,
the ghost deceptively lures the bride away from conventional happiness, not only by offering her
a desireable alternative, but also by coercing and deceiving her, for despite assuring her that she
may lean on [him], he guides her to a solitary cell where no love awaits. As the ghost proceeds to
torment the bride with the consequences of the infraction against normality, Rossetti demonstrates
how the conditions that tempt women to transgress the norms ultimately weild punishments for
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those who accede to them, suggesting that temptations by imaginary libido should be resisted.
Indeed, while Rossettis gothic mode tends to dramatize the fantasies that are abjured in her other
poetry, they also tend to recommend solidyly against these fantasies, illustrating how women must
learn to recognise, forgo, andif necessaryrecover from the diverse attractions and compulsions
of narcissistic transgression to claim the benefits of symbolic transcendence.
In contrast to the damaging impact that results from overt transgressions of gender norms as seen
in her gothic poetry, Rossettis lyrical, Romantic poems achieved transgression much more subtly.
While she upholds the depiction of women as dead, they depart from the predictably unhearing,
blind and silent dead of the female-corpse tradition. Indeed, Anne Jamison describes Rossettis
ghosts as a lively bunch who have consciousness and language: they have the upper hand. In
After Death, we see an inversion of the traditional depiction of genders, whereby it is the surviving
male who is blinded, weeping and silenced, while the female corpse watches, listens, interprets, and
speaks through the poem. Throughout the poem, she is subject to no illusions predicated on
desire, stating flatly that He did not love me living; but once dead / He pitied me, after which
she triumphantly professes how very sweet it is / To know he is still warm tho I am cold. Though
cold, she is quite comfortable, privy to pivileged information, and possessed of unclouded vision
and insight, while he still suffers, weeping, without access to the knowledge and vision that would
reveal his true situation. Sneaking up from behind her shroud, the corpse claims a limited but
unyielding autonomy, finding satisfication in the contemplation of the living and enjoyment of her
newly found detachment. Jamison argues that Rossetti constructs a model of poetry that features
a beautiful, passive and female surface governed by an informing but inaccessible, intellectual but
unemotional guiding consciousness for whom it is very sweet / To know while the man watches,
emotes and weeps [1]. Throughout the poem, we have a sense of duplicitousness conveyed through
Rossettis choice of language: the title of the poem suggests a two-sidedness, the setting, with
its half-drawn curtains and floor, creates a world in which everything is, according Reynolds,
half covered, both revealed and concealed, not light, nor dark, but both at once [3]. Similarly, the
thoughtful consciousnes, although it seems to tell hidden truth, reveals little about the content
of its thought: it seems less concerned that we know what it thinks than that it thinks. Such
thoughtfulness is odd in a corpse, and to a similar extent, a female poet and indeed the Victorian
woman herself, where the presence of a thinking, reflective consciousness might be for many readers
the biggest surprise of all. Thus, through her recasting of the female-corpse tradition, exorcising
the silence and passivity associated with that ideal and replacing it with a female corpse who is
expressive, reflective and independent, Rossetti transgresses this dominant gender norm present in
the literature of the day.
In Christina Rossettis At Home, the dead woman is poised in a transitional or liminal state,
but represented as fully conscious, lingering forlornly, acutely aware of her exclusion from on-going
life. This poem is a classic example of how Rossetti simultaneously makes the comforting, accessible
reading readily available to her audience, but through subtle techniques, achieves a completely
transgression of gender norms[4]. The scene here is a garden party, where friendship is represented
metaphorically as a joyous and abundant feast. The pleasure to be found in the company of friends
is expressed through images of shared eating and drinking, where they sucked the pulp of plum
and peach and they pushed the wine. The notion of the personas spirit haunting the familiar
house highlights her attempts to reconnect with those with whom she once belonged, as [her] spirit
turned / To seek the much-frequented house and share, once more, their company. However, this
initial depiction is qualified with each subsequent stanza, where the speakers death and apparent
absence grant her insight and capabilities that evade the living. Those she listens to apparently
speak only to each other, but neither the verbs associated with them said or cried nor
the content of their utterances offer them any evidence that they are heard or responded to by
the other living speakers. Indeed, they speak in turn and on a common topic, but in a strangely
disconnected manner. While the first speakers profession, Tomorrow we shall be / Plod plot along
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the featureless sands and coasting miles and miles of sea, might seem to be engaging in a little
speculation about mortality, the second speaker if responding at all seems to interpret the image
on the basic theme of trust in future achievement. Tomorrow comes to function less to name a
specific time or even to indicate futurity, and more as a refrain, a unifying chant in another roup
sound. Such speech is strongly assocaited with the other bodily functions their mouths perform,
feasting and sucking, and also with the ritutal function of language that affirms community and
reciprocity without any real substance. Ironically, it is the dead womans ghost that is differentiated,
and only she is identified with activies that suggest perception or reception, as [she] saw and [she]
listened.
Rossetti, with each utterrance, suggests an overt, hopeful meaning and an ironic, undercutting
meaning not attended by the listeners, only by the ghost of the woman. The group in the poem finds
contentment and unity in the prospect of a harmonious and prosperous future together. This image
of optimism created when they, one and all, cry Tomorrow. . . strong with hope. However, their
faith in the inevitable continuity of temporal progression from present to future distracts them from
any insights they might derive from remembering the death of their friend and so blinds them to
the very inevitability that infinite time must one day out-progress them in finite life. Their silence
about yesterday, which at first seems an exclusion specifically of the speaker, in turn underscores
their lack of integrated temportal awareness. While they cry tomorrow five times throughout
the poem, they make no move forward. Rather, their life stood full at blessed noon, where the
substitution of the expected phrase stood still with stood full draws on an association between
plentitude and statis. Gorging on pulp, wine and unreflective language has led them to an impasse.
The polar ideas of unity and seclusion, fulfilment and dejection, confidence and irrelevance, that
are contrasted on virtually every other line in the third stanza ( Tomorrow and today, they cried;
I was of yesterday) seem to suggest that the speaker envies her old friends and their plentitude.
But as we move into the final stanza we observe that the speaker, in spite of her disconnection, has
certain advantages, among them clarity of vision, autonomy, temporal understanding, and freedom
of movement. Jamison observes that with no understanding of the past, the living can have no
clear idea of hte future, whose only true certainty is death, and the raucous speakers remained
enclosed in their individual collective delusions interacting neither with each other not with the
past[1]. Indeed, Rossettis choice of verbs further emphasises this imbalance, whereby it is the
persona of the woman that turned and passed as opposed to the observed speakers who only
dwelt and stood. Thus, what initially seems as a poignant expression of loss and separation in
At Home in fact can be read as a powerful expression of the autonomy and clarity the ghost of
the woman has found in death. In their powerlessness, the Victorian woman in life is a cold corpse
or a statue, but in Rossettis poetry, they are animated and decisive figures.
In critiquing the use of the gothic in The Hour and the Ghost, examining the expressive and
reflective corpse in After Death and exploring the autonomy and insight granted to the ghost
of a dead woman in At Home, it is clear how Rossettis poetry transgresses the gender norms
of Victorian society. While these transgressions are sometimes re-evaluated by highlighting the
destructive consequences of such behaviour, in other texts, they are subtly encouraged by depicting
their benefits.

References
[1]

Anne Jamison. Passing strange: Christina Rossettis unusual dead. In: Textual Practice 20.2
(2006), pp. 257280.

[2]

Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. US: Columbia University Press,
1982.

Victorian Literature April 2014 Youssef Latash

[3]

Margaret Reynolds. Speaking un-likeness: The double text in Christina Rossettis After
Death and Remember. In: Textual Practice 13.1 (1999), pp. 2541.

[4]

Dolores Rosenblum. Christina Rossetti: the poetry of endurance. US: Southern Illinois University, 1986.

[5]

Suzanne Waldman. The Superegoic Demon in Christina Rossettis Gothic and Fantasy Writings. In: Dynamics and Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(2008).