NOWHERE OR SOMEWHERE?

(DIS)LOCATING GENDER AND

CLASS BOUNDARIES IN CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S SPEAKING
LIKENESSES

by anna despotopoulou

This article attempts a novel reading of Christina Rossetti’s little known children’s
narrative, Speaking Likenesses (1874), through an examination of the socio-historical
background, and specifically the Victorian debates on prostitution and child pros-
titution, which had reached their peak in the years surrounding the conception of
the story. Rossetti employs fantasy in order, firstly, to allegorise contemporary social

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issues faced by women of that period and, secondly, to satirise the mixed and often
contradictory Victorian attitudes concerning childhood. With her juxtaposition of
two different social contexts, middle and working class, in which little girls grow up,
Rossetti is testing out the degrees of independence granted to young girls of dif-
ferent classes, questioning the middle-class fear and suspicion of a girl’s/woman’s
autonomy. Both social settings described disrupt Victorian expectations concerning
impulses, behaviour, and degrees of safety that each one fosters. Through a con-
flation of the dangers (competitiveness, aggression, abuse) encountered in both
settings, Rossetti is able to cast doubt on the supposed virtues of middle-class
seclusion and overprotection. In this sense, ‘Nowhere,’ the name she gives to her
frightening imaginary site, is more likely to be ‘Somewhere,’ the real, middle-class
locus of familiar threat.

How do we account for images of physical violence in the work of Christina

Rossetti? Celebrated for her deeply religious sentiment which instigated a
number of devotional works full of pious humility and moral consciousness,
Rossetti is nevertheless enigmatic as a character and as a poet who indulged in
the macabre, visions of death and physical decay (‘mortuary imagery’, it has been
called by Lona Mosk Packer1), and also in a playfulness with which she blends the
spiritual with the physical, the religious with the sexual. ‘Goblin Market’ has
attracted most attention and has in the past twenty years been closely read from
biographical, religious, psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and historicist angles,
proving Angela Leighton’s thesis: ‘In the end, the secret of Rossetti’s poetry,

Thanks are due to my Department at the University of Athens for granting me a three-
month leave which enabled me to complete my research for this article, to the Kapodistrias
Programme of the University of Athens, which funded my necessary research travels, and
to the anonymous RES reviewers for the very constructive comments that helped me revise
this piece for publication.
1 Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Cambridge, 1963), 129.
The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 61, No. 250
ß The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/res/hgp063 Advance Access published on 16 September 2009
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 415

like all the tantalising secrets of her life, is one which she playfully, loquaciously,
and inventively kept’.2 What seems to me profoundly mystifying in Rossetti’s texts
is the paradoxical blend of violent fantasy with moralism, the often delirious flights
of a brutally agitated imagination with the sober ethical purpose which can be
found not only in her verse but also in her short fiction and especially in the works
she produced for children. Speaking Likenesses (1874), which has been described
in the Times Literary Supplement (1959) as a ‘peculiarly revolting’ text for chil-
dren,3 is more frightening than playful, its inventiveness more nightmarish than
comforting. Writing under the influence of Carroll’s Alice stories, Rossetti seems
to reproduce the atmosphere of aggression and anarchy that characterises
Wonderland. However, in Rossetti’s ‘Nowhere’, the name of her imaginary
land, little girls are exposed to unmitigated violence rather than wonders.
‘Nowhere’ is the site where a little girl’s subjectivity is threatened with obliteration,
her agency annulled, and the intactness of her body constantly attacked.
Speaking Likenesses has received considerable attention from Nina Auerbach and

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U.C. Knoepflmacher, whose editorial and critical work has been exceptional in
bringing to the surface the text’s contradictions and challenges.4 Both critics have
examined the tale in comparison with Carroll’s, linking and juxtaposing the texts’
thematic concerns and structural devices. In Knoepflmacher’s words, ‘Speaking
Likenesses is an antagonistic work’, a conscious imitation of the Alice books which
aims at contesting the fantasy world the latter works construct.5 More recently,
Kathryn Burlinson has read the violence of the text as representing the author’s
own tension between her radical impulse to resist female subordination, on the one
hand, and her puritanical conventionality, on the other, expressed through the
repulsive images of female and male sexuality found in the story.6 On the other
hand, Julia Briggs has scrutinised the ironic tone of the narrative, adding a social
dimension to the interpretation, claiming that ‘Speaking Likenesses should take its
place not beside Carroll’s Alice . . . but rather beside those other central Victorian
classics whose fantasies were associated with social conscience: Charles Kingsley’s
The Water-Babies . . . ; or George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind’.
Considering the social differences between the children portrayed in the three
parts of Rossetti’s text, Briggs views the story as a criticism of ‘the middle-class
child, encouraged to play in the walled rose garden and protected from any

2 Angela Leighton, ‘ ‘‘When I Am Dead, My Dearest’’: The Secret of Christina Rossetti’,

Modern Philology 87 (1990), 373–88: 388.
3 Qtd. in Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London, 1994), 418.
4 Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York,
1986; Nina Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher (eds), Forbidden Journeys. Fairy Tales and
Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago, 1992).
5 U.C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Avenging Alice: Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll’, Nineteenth-
Century Literature, 41 (1986), 299–328: 311, 316.
6 Kathryn Burlinson, ‘ ‘‘All mouth and trousers’’: Christina Rossetti’s Grotesque and
Abjected Bodies,’ in Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds), Women’s Poetry, Late
Romantic to Late Victorian (Houndsmills, 1999), 301.
416 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

knowledge of the poverty and deprivation beyond’.7 However, Briggs’s analysis

merely introduces this idea, without further exploring the complex dimensions of
Rossetti’s social critique.
In my reading, Speaking Likenesses utilises fantasy in order to allegorise con-
temporary social issues faced by women in the mid-Victorian period, while, at the
same time, satirising the mixed and often contradictory Victorian attitudes con-
cerning childhood—female childhood, in particular. With its dual purpose, the
story, acknowledging that the female self is socially defined, daringly attempts to
deconstruct the artificial binary logic which upholds Victorian class and gender
ideology. Rossetti’s refusal to add her name to a petition in favour of women’s
suffrage is quite infamous;8 yet, rather than proving her patriarchal Puritanism,
this gesture, along with writings like the prose piece in question, suggest a pro-
gressive social insight into the drawbacks of women venturing uncritically and
unreservedly into the public sphere. In this sense, the negation immanent in the
name of her imaginary land, ‘Nowhere’, in which children face for the first time

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the aggressive impulses of the public sphere, perhaps conveys her distrust in the
possibility of women attaining a free and uninhibited voice within the confines of
rigorously policed ideological boundaries, be they of the private or the public
sphere.

By the time Carroll and Rossetti wrote their tales for children, the genre of
children’s fiction had changed dramatically. Early nineteenth-century texts on the
education of children as well as fiction aimed at children avoided fairy lore and
fantasy on the grounds that such tales could become potential sites of ‘danger’ and
‘impropriety’.9 Promoting a middle-class agenda which stressed utility, industry,
obedience, and often strict evangelical piety encompassing humility, patience, self-
restraint, and constant praying, such texts presented didactic samples of exemplary
or unruly behaviour which was supposed to be correspondingly imitated or
avoided by children. One of the best examples of such writing is Mary Martha
Sherwood’s History of the Fairchild Family, published in three volumes between
1818 and 1847. In the first volume, the stories narrated by the Fairchild parents
are meant to prepare the souls of their children for redemption from original sin
and ultimate salvation. The lines, ‘Our hearts by nature . . . are full of hatred’ and
‘there is no child that can be said to have a good heart’,10 are the premises upon
which both parents base their choice of moral preachings, punishments and nar-
rated stories. Thus the Fairchild children are exposed to mostly horrific tales

7 Julia Briggs, ‘Speaking Likenesses: Hearing the Lesson’, in Mary Arseneau, Antony
Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (eds), The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female
Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Athens, OH, 1999), 212–31: 229, 212.
8 Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational
Poetics (Basingstoke, 2004), 36.
9 Andrew O’ Malley, ‘The Coach and Six: Chapbook Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century
Children’s Literature’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 24 (2000), 18–44: 19.
10 Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family (London, 1818), 60, 97.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 417

whose moral corresponds in an exaggerated way to the particular ‘sin’ they may
have committed. So, for example, in order to illustrate to his children how wrong
it is to quarrel with one’s siblings, Mr Fairchild takes them to see the rotting
corpse of a hanged man, who was condemned to such a punishment for stabbing
his brother out of envy and hatred. Later on, the children are again obliged to
painfully hear that one of their neighbourhood’s playmates, Miss Augusta Noble,
got burned alive by accident because she liked to play with fire despite warnings of
its dangers. Nevertheless, the fire that burns Miss Augusta acquires symbolic
overtones, representing the reckless life that she and her parents led, which
was, according to the Evangelical agenda of Sherwood’s text, a preparation for
hell rather than heaven. Miss Augusta gets burned not only because of her mis-
chievous nature, which leads her to play with fire, but most importantly because
she is too worldly, preoccupied with her fine dresses, showing off in front of
children and adults, and disobeying her caregivers; she lacks the impulse for
self-effacement, humility, and restraint which the Fairchild children have been

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infused with. Such stern children’s stories, including the ones narrated by the
parents within the Sherwood book, left no room for fantasy, whose principle of
self-indulgence would go against their moralistic didactic purpose.
However, as the century progressed, many critics started defending fantasy
which was finding its way back into children’s books: one such commentator
states in The London Review in 1868 that ‘The rehabilitation of the fairy tale in
days which are called peculiarly businesslike and utilitarian is a very amusing as
well as a very instructive circumstance’. Indeed fairy tales were reinstated on the
grounds that ‘childhood is a time of enjoyment, and the great object of books, toys,
and such devices is, after all, to make the little ones happy’, according to Joshua
Fitch in 1860. In Dickens’s 1855 edition of Household Words we come across the
following claim: ‘The fancy of a child is—for the first six or seven years at least, of
childhood—by a great deal the broadest channel through which knowledge and
wisdom can be poured into the mind’.11 In Rossetti’s prose for children we find a
mixture of attitudes towards children and a critique of the instability of cultural
signification as regards their nature. On the one hand, according to
Knoepflmacher, she disliked such didactic anti-fantasies like Sherwood’s,12 on
the other, we cannot disregard the paradigmatic nature of her text, which, like
Sherwood’s, utilises as a framing device the stern figure of the story-teller who
keeps children in their place and invents stories which are supposed to chastise the
child listeners and redeem them from their sinful instincts. At the end of the first
part of Speaking Likenesses, Rossetti’s narrator blatantly utilises threat (even of
death) to instil in her listeners the ethic of moral improvement, demonstrating her

11 ‘Fairy Tales and Nursery Traditions’, The London Review, 17:439 (28 November 1868),
589–591: 589; Fitch quoted in Jennifer Geer, ‘ ‘‘All sorts of pitfalls and surprises’’:
Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books’, Children’s
Literature 31 (2003), 1–24: 3; ‘The School of the Fairies’, Household Words Conducted by
Charles Dickens 11:275 (1855), 509–13: 509.
12 Knoepflmacher, ‘Avenging’, 313.
418 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

belief in fear as the best tactic in teaching children how to control their impulses,
how ‘to be obliging and good-humoured under slight annoyances’:
And I think if she lives to be nine years old and give another birthday party, she is likely on
that occasion to be even less like the birthday Queen of her troubled dream than was the
Flora of eight years old. (p. 339)13
Continuation of life is shown to be contingent on moral improvement. Moreover,
Sherwood and Rossetti utilise common little trifles and preoccupations of child-
hood (like quarrelling with one’s friends and siblings and playing with fire) as
points of departure from which to expound a moral lesson. On a surface level we
could say that Rossetti reconstructs a few of the grotesque stories she finds in
Sherwood through fantasy in order to mask her own didactic purpose. After all,
the result seems the same: at the end of the first two tales, the little girls of her
story feel shame and humiliation for their actions; the stories manage to instil self-
discipline, which contributes towards the formation of the self-regulating subject.

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As Andrew O’Malley has argued, ‘Instilling discipline [mostly mental discipline],
and ideally the mechanisms for self-discipline, was as essential to the discourse of
middle-class pedagogy as it was to the discourse of medical management.
Discipline was necessary to promote the regularity of thought and habit in the
young that would allow the morality, economic practices, and, in short, the ideol-
ogy, of the middle classes to take root successfully in the rising generation’.14 In
this sense, the stories in Speaking Likenesses may be seen as metaphorical parallels
of the medical treatment/advice that Christina Rossetti herself received as an
adolescent,15 whose goal, as Antony Harrison claims, was to force ‘obedience to
culturally dominant, and one might add generally repressive standards of conduct
and behaviour in every aspect of a young girl’s life’.16 But to what extent does the
author identify with the story-telling aunt and her model of power? To what extent
is the violence narrated an acceptable, for Rossetti, means of disciplining unruly
children, and girls in particular?
At this point I need to say a few words about the structure and the content of
this little known narrative. Divided into three parts, it tells the stories of three
girls, Flora, Edith, and Maggie, through the framing medium of an aunt who
invents them supposedly on the spot, for a group of girls, who, at their aunt’s
command, sew, draw, and darn while listening. Flora’s is the most horrific tale, in
which this little girl, after behaving in a domineering way at her own birthday
party has an Alice-like dream in which the little discords of the party are experi-
enced a hundred times more violently, and unfairly, in a land of Nowhere, where

13 Parenthetical references are to Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses, in Poems and

Prose, ed. Jan Marsh (London, 1994), 325–53.
14 Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature in the Late
Eighteenth Century (New York, 2003), 101.
15 See Marsh, Christina Rossetti, 50–4.
16 Antony H. Harrison, ‘Christina Rossetti: Illness and Ideology’, Victorian Poetry, 45
(2007), 415–28: 424.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 419

the games played involve body damage, incarceration, surveillance, and stone-
throwing. With horrific vivacity Rossetti’s language conveys the physical pain
inflicted by monstrous children, living embodiments of weaponry—‘natural
advantage[s]’ they are called (p. 34)—such as hooks, quills, angles, and slime,
who relentlessly and thirstily involve themselves in games of piercing, slitting,
cutting, and rubbing. To survive, as readers, the excruciating experience of
Flora is, in the words of Christopher Ricks, to become ‘aware of how instinctively
corporeal . . . the tissue of Rossetti’ is.17 In the second story, Edith, while not
exposed to similar physical violence, faces her own incompetence as a child in a
boring story in which she fails to light a fire. Boiling a kettle is indeed an adult’s
job, but what poor Edith experiences the most is humiliation and the indifference
of the grown-ups who hardly notice her efforts. Finally Maggie, whose adventures,
like Flora’s, involve grotesque figures of violent children, is rewarded through her
victory over temptations and seduction. What all three stories have in common is
the absence of adults from this imaginary site where children venture into the

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unknown, embarking on a quest to prove their independence. What they all
encounter is an anarchist world of savage impulses, violence, and absurdity, in
which rather than independence, survival becomes the main concern.
In this sense, the purpose of Rossetti’s story seems much more complex and
enigmatic than that of Carroll’s. In the Alice texts, the sleeping child envisages
herself battling, successfully, a confusing and confused world of authority figures,
who stand for particular adult counterparts and social institutions. As various
critics have pointed out, Carroll mocks the ‘aggression and desire for power that
underlies the traditional parent-child relationship’,18 and gradually transforms
Alice into a potent critic of the authorities that try to limit her. Rather than
asserting their common sense in the midst of an absurd and anarchic world, not
unlike Carroll’s, Rossetti’s little heroines succumb under the violent pressures
either of figures who resemble them (e.g. the birthday Queen figure in Flora’s
dream, who is just another little girl) or of other children who antagonise them (the
violent, monstrous boys and girls at Flora’s dream party) or of improper impulses
within them (Edith’s fancy to light matches). In other words the battle for author-
ity taking place in Nowhere is not between little girls and incomprehensible adult
institutions, but between children themselves, the ‘likenesses’ of the title, who
through their precocious behaviour are aspiring likenesses of grown-ups as well.
The children in Nowhere have internalised adult power relations with which they
organise their microcosm, disturbingly performing practices which aim at suppres-
sing, silencing, and subjugating the other. All the games entail the pitiless victi-
misation of the weakest player through the ruthless employment of physical
weapons, which, like the aunt’s sharp words, destroy the comforting picture of

17 Christopher Ricks, ‘Christina Rossetti and Commonplace Books’, Grand Street, 9 (1990),
190–8: 191.
18 Elaine Ostry, ‘Magical Growth and Moral Lessons; or, How the Conduct Book
Informed Victorian and Edwardian Children’s Fantasy’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 27
(2003), 27–56: 35.
420 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

childhood innocence. Even the middle story, the most unadventurous and painless
of the three, expresses the child’s wish to emulate adult behaviour, witnessed first
in Edith’s sharp retort towards the cook (‘Cook, you’re not attending to what I say’
[p. 341]) and second in her wish to achieve something beyond her limited physical
and mental capabilities; forgetting all about her doll (p. 341), she embarks on her
promethean quest to light a fire in the woods. In Rossetti’s view, therefore,
children and adults are not mutually exclusive categories. With her representation
of precocious children in this story, she challenges essentialist views of childhood
as expressed, albeit antithetically, by both the Romantics, on the one hand, and the
Calvinists, like Sherwood, on the other. Children are neither inherently good nor
inherently evil: rather, they are prone to social construction and are, therefore,
dependent on the class-related values and customs instilled in them from birth;
hence, the difference in impulse and behaviour between the upper-middle class
Flora and Edith and the working-class Maggie.
Before examining more deeply Rossetti’s attitude towards children and the

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purpose suggested by her gender and class inflected narrative, it is important to
briefly review her ambiguous view of womanhood, which has often been negatively
criticised by feminists. Her poems and prose, despite their Christian piety, moral
austerity and often self-castigating attitude, reveal her as particularly sensitive and
resistant to the mutually exclusive labels of angel or prostitute conferred on
women in the mid-Victorian period. ‘Goblin Market’, with its exaggerated
images of erotic and sensual gratification, attests to her inability to draw a dividing
line between the woman susceptible to falling and the woman capable of saving her
fallen sister. The poem refuses to disclose why Laura cannot avoid temptation
while Lizzie, her almost identical sister, can. A number of critics have researched
the ways Rossetti’s voluntary involvement for more than ten years at the Highgate
Penitentiary for fallen women might have affected her literary aesthetics and
politics.19 As a woman of ‘a very passionate temper’ herself,20 perhaps Christina
felt, during her Highgate years, that it was merely her social position that saved her
from the street. As Marsh writes, ‘In her inner heart, Christina felt a strong affinity
with the sister who succumbs’.21 The highly erotic imagery that permeates both
her poetry and prose invites speculation about a submerged sexuality, which often
found controversial expression in nightmarish or guilt-ridden sexually threatening
Nowheres that she constructed.
In view of her close interaction with fallen women, the origins of her ambiguous
and precarious position on women’s sexuality may also be traced in the contro-
versy over prostitution which had reached its peak in the years surrounding the

19 See Marsh, Christina Rossetti; Diane D’Amico, ‘ ‘‘Equal before God’’: Christina Rossetti
and the Fallen Women of Highgate Penitentiary’, in Antony Harrison (ed.) Gender and
Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art (DeKalb, IL, 1992), 67–83; and Scott Rogers, ‘Re-
Reading Sisterhood in Christina Rossetti’s ‘‘Noble Sisters’’ and ‘‘Sister Maude’’ ’, SEL 43
(2003), 859–75.
20 Rossetti qtd. in Marsh, Christina Rossetti, 50.
21 Marsh, Christina Rossetti, 238.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 421

conception of Speaking Likenesses, within the context of the Contagious Diseases

Act of 1866. The work of William Acton, among others, was largely responsible for
transforming sexually transmitted diseases into a metaphor concerning the
‘Condition of England’, prostitution being one of its many ills. In the words of
the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Contagious Diseases Act
published in the Westminster Review (1869), ‘Of all the maladies with which
humanity is afflicted, prostitution is, we believe, the worst’. This Report, which
starts by prompting women to take a stand in this debate by abandoning their
silent, withdrawn position, insinuates that it is partly middle or upper class
women’s fault that prostitution is ‘destroying the lives of a large proportion of
the adult male population’. For social propriety, though a ‘sacred’ feminine trait, is
a ‘false delicacy’, when it averts the female gaze from the sin in question: ‘there are
occasions when even true delicacy must suffer violence if the lives and welfare of
others, or self-preservation, cannot be otherwise insured’. The Report continues
that it is woman’s responsibility to ‘ennoble’ the sexual relation: ‘if passion shall

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ever be so restrained as to become only the intensest expression of affection, if love
shall ever be so purified and hallowed as never to degrade and sacrifice, but always
to exalt and bless its objects, women will assuredly be the chief agents of the
change’. Through its appeal to women to channel the physical into the emotional
and even completely purge their body of its threatening desires, the Report reveals
an anxiety lest women should get too comfortable abandoning their role as emo-
tional or spiritual redeemer of the male sex. What is most intriguing in the Report
is that it involves all social classes of women, disclosing a fear that it is not only
working-class women who are abandoning their angelic role: ‘thousands upon
thousands, chiefly of the lower classes, but partly of the higher, are the innocent
and defenceless victims of a pestilence whose march is so secret’. The Report
suggests that there existed two ‘classes’ of prostitutes, the ‘lower’, ‘regular’ pros-
titutes, ‘infesting low neighbourhoods throughout London’, and the ‘upper’,
‘superior’ kind of prostitutes who are well-dressed, well-behaved and seemingly
above suspicion. It then concludes that ‘the number of well-dressed women walk-
ing the streets is increasing at more than double the rate at which that of the ‘low’
class is decreasing’.22
The ambiguity created by the mixed discourse concerning class and sexuality,
the fact that the Report does not make clear from which social class these ‘upper
class’ prostitutes originate, seems to encapsulate the dilemmas and prejudices of
the whole debate concerning women’s—and girls’—sexuality. This sociological
public document allows uncertainty about the nature of womanhood, acknowl-
edging that women of all classes, and not just the working classes, are apt to
succumb to improper sexual urges. Moreover, as Sally Shuttleworth argues,
‘Sexuality, and specifically female sexuality, appeared to lie at the heart of the

22 ‘Prostitution in Relation to the National Health: Report from the Select Committee of
the House of Lords on the Contagious Diseases Act, 1866’, Westminster Review, 36 (1869),
179–234: 179, 180, 181, 180, 188, 188.
422 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

corruption of the industrial social body’23—the purposeful blend of psychological,

medical, and social discourse in such documents suggesting the extraordinary
proportions this problem had taken and the authorities’ critical concern with
instilling into the public the dangers of prostitution at all levels. Medical texts
had already shown that the ‘rhetoric of drains and sewers’ was applicable to the
inner workings of the female body;24 therefore, all women, with their inability to
control their bodily fluids, were seen as harbouring potential for dirt, waste, and
disease, in a physical but also in a metaphorical sense, as they were deemed
responsible for the social ills that reports like the one quoted here presented.
Rossetti must have witnessed this discursively orchestrated conflation of biological,
psychological, and social potentials of womanhood during her work with fallen
women at Highgate and may have identified with her ‘sisters’, realising that class is
irrelevant to sexual desire and that fallenness is not necessarily the result of
economic deprivation.
The same Report quotes from William Acton’s Prostitution, Considered in its

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Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in order to sensitise the public to the young age
of these delinquents: ‘Certain quarters of London are positively infested by juve-
nile offenders whose effrontery is more intolerably disgusting than that of their
elder sisters. These young things spring from the lowest dregs of the popula-
tion’.25 Indeed, as early as in the 1850s (Acton’s study was published in 1857),
newspapers and journals demonstrated a growing concern with child prostitution,
an anxiety which seemed to stem from the threat this phenomenon posed to the
normative definition of childhood and the great symbolic importance that it sus-
tained. While the romantic ideal of childhood as a period of innocence, purity, love
and tenderness was maintained by authors like Ruskin who viewed it as a senti-
mental abstraction,26 in the late Victorian period, according to Deborah Gorham,
‘many people who were concerned with the welfare of children also found them-
selves uncertain about how the boundaries of childhood should be defined’.27 To a
great extent the debate on the age of consent during those same years had to do
with child prostitution, which brought into question the presumed vulnerability of
children, suggesting, on the contrary, an unwelcome sexual emancipation. To what
degree was it possible to police and discipline the sexual impulses of children, who,
according to Acton, were seduced ‘with their own consent’?28 Acton’s paradoxical
coupling of two contradictory words, ‘seduction’ and ‘consent’, attests to the

23 Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge, 1996), 75.
24 Ibid., 73.
25 ‘Prostitution’, 186.
26 ‘When Romanticism waned, childhood remained Romantic’, writes Anne Higonnet,
Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York, 1998), 39.
27 Deborah Gorham, ‘The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-Examined: Child
Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 21
(1978), 353–79: 355–6.
28 Qtd. in ‘Prostitution’, 186.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 423

ambiguity surrounding the agency of children, the extent to which they are, firstly,
responsible for their actions and, secondly, aware of a sexuality which Victorian
separate spheres ideology deemed non-applicable.29 In her study of the idea of
childhood in the late Victorian era, Gorham suggests that child prostitution was
largely considered to affect the lower social ranks, resulting from the inability of
working-class parents to sufficiently supervise their children. While middle-class
families could afford to keep their children throughout the period of childhood,
offering them financial and emotional stability, ‘working-class families could not
afford the luxury of extended dependence’, leading children, and girls in parti-
cular, to find ways of earning their wages on their own.30 Faced with the challenge
posed by the flaunting of female sexuality through unashamed prostitution,
Victorian medical and social texts defined the sexual licentiousness witnessed in
juvenile prostitution as the pathological result of unwanted ‘independence’, of the
absence of authority figures to control the excesses of the ‘independent’ young
girls’ unpredictable bodies. Constructing young women as unable to suppress their

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impulses and as possessing uncontrollable libidinal energy in dire need of constant
male regulation, such studies concluded that financial self-support in the case of
these girls could only lead to disaster.31 Justified through medical and social
reasoning which outcast such women and validated male authority, therefore,
the threat that female prostitution posed to the ideology of natural feminine
renunciation, chastity, and voluntary domesticity was gradually and methodically
neutralised.
The abundant discourse on female sexuality in the mid and late Victorian era,
therefore, emphasised the importance of restricting a bourgeois girl’s/woman’s
impulses through enforced domestication and covert disciplining tactics like con-
stant surveillance, which ensured the safety of a young woman and by extension
the safeguarding of Victorian gender and moral ideology. Yet, Rossetti’s story
upsets and ultimately reverses the dichotomy of middle-class safety versus work-
ing-class danger. Her involvement with the Highgate Penitentiary and, in the
1870s, with the ‘Girl’s Protection’ petition,32 which aimed at raising awareness
and changing legislation concerning the traffic in young girls, show her as parti-
cularly attuned to the exploitation of women, and more specifically to the exploita-
tion of the sexuality of women, be they twelve or eighteen years of age, be they
working-class or middle and upper-class. By juxtaposing middle with lower class

29 For a comprehensive discussion of the Victorian debate on children’s sexuality, see Janet
Oppenheim, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New
York, 1991), 259–61.
30 Gorham, ‘Maiden Tribute’, 372.
31 Sally Shuttleworth has delineated the baffling social logic concerning women, a logic
whose sole purpose was the establishing of male superiority and authority: Self control was
shown to be harmful to woman as it could lead to nervous disease of insanity; therefore,
male supervision of the female body was necessary as it would ensure woman’s well-being,
Charlotte Brontë, 91–3.
32 See Marsh, Charlotte Brontë, 514–22; and Harrison, ‘Christina Rossetti’.
424 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

girls, Speaking Likenesses questions many facets of Victorian ideology in which

gender and class are intertwined. The story depicts two different social settings
which disrupt Victorian expectations concerning the impulses, behaviour and
degrees of safety that each setting fosters. It interrogates the extent to which the
education, leisure, and socialisation enjoyed by middle-class girls in heavily super-
vised settings provided sufficient protection against sexual aggression from with-
out, but also, disturbingly, from within. And, conversely, it examines the degree to
which the premature independence and financial deprivation of a working-class
girl should make her more prone to sexual exploitation or even susceptible to
‘improper’ sexual urges, which had been constructed as an essential part of the
female bodily economy, according to Shuttleworth’s findings. In this sense the
story discloses a paradox in Victorian mentality: while various reforms aimed at
ameliorating the treatment of children, through improved education, attention to
play, and the reinstatement of fairy tales, the increased monitoring tactics led to an
endangering naiveté and a stifling sense of repression, especially as far as girls were

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concerned.

The narrative structure of Speaking Likenesses as well as the backdrops that it
constructs illustrate the drawbacks of domestic vigilance within a middle-class
setting. The framing device of the story-telling aunt first and foremost aims at
satirising the disciplining tactics used by parent figures to tame the impulses of
their children. With her monitoring of her nieces’ activities, the aunt performs all
the protective measures that serve to construct boundaries around female beha-
viour from infancy onwards. Through her authoritarian attitude (a ‘tyrannical
bully’ she is called by Auerbach and Knoepflmacher33), practised through her
constant alertness to the listeners’ submission to her promptings and admonitions,
she becomes the gatekeeper of these boundaries. Her ‘spontaneously’ invented
stories about little girls who get disciplined through experiences of physical pain
and humiliation are meant to discipline, through identification, the real young
nieces to whom she is narrating. Rossetti, thus, suggests that although cultural
attitudes towards the raising of children seem to have developed towards a more
favourable view of childhood than in Sherwood’s time, in reality the techniques for
inspiring self-discipline have not in essence changed. Just as in The Fairchild
Family the mother tries to impose discipline by narrating examples of horrific
physical pain and death drawn supposedly from real life, in Speaking Likenesses the
aunt creates fantastical childlike figures which become warnings of the psycholo-
gical, physical, and social disasters that may befall an aberrant girl. However,
throughout the tale these nieces have been participants in the story-telling process
by intruding, asking questions, and even directing the type of story to be narrated.
For instance, they ask their aunt to invent a frog story and later a winter story. The
aunt seems to be testing the subject positions of her nieces by firstly inviting them
to share a sense of power, for example, by complying with their requests, and later

33 Auerbach and Knoepflmacher, Forbidden, 319.

 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 425

exerting her own authority within the stories by constructing normative roles
which conform with Victorian didactic purposes and gender ideology.
Nevertheless, the girls’ questions disrupt the story-telling flow, calling attention
to the arbitrariness of the ideological framework that supports the narratives as
well as to the constructedness of discourse, which is, therefore, subject to dispute.
For example, when Jane asks, ‘How come the toad to be so much cleverer than his
neighbours, Aunt?’ (p. 344), the aunt is able to offer a reply that is as hypothetical
and arbitrary as every moral imposed on the story. Half of this narrative’s attrac-
tion is derived from the constant confrontation between narrator and listeners,
during which Rossetti purposefully blurs the boundary between childish nonsense
and adult wisdom. While the girls often ask the aunt to justify her choices through
reason, explanation, or elaboration, the aunt takes refuge in evasion, absurd gen-
eralisation, or iteration of socially acceptable roles:
What apple, Aunt? The Apple of Discord, Clara, which is a famous apple your brothers

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would know all about, and you may ask them some day . . . (p. 328)
How many children were there at supper?—Well, I have not the least idea, Laura, but they
made quite a large party: suppose we say a hundred thousand. (p. 335)
In other words, with their questioning the girls contest the dominant middle-
class modes of thought which have interpellated the aunt and activated her
imagination.
Moreover, the stories themselves reveal the harsh disciplinary child-rearing
tactics which subdue spontaneity and wonder while indoctrinating normalising
principles. The framing device illustrates that social practices as simple and
innocent-like as story-telling aim at instilling class and gender hierarchies and ulti-
mately constructing children who, rather than combating, full of potency, in the
Alice style, every social institution that tries to stifle them, readily imitate its
practices. In this sense, it is too late for children to rebel against adult authority,
as the adults responsible for their rearing make sure that even the fairy tales that
they invent perpetuate gender ideologies which construct woman as passive, vul-
nerable, ineffective, subject to display and exploitation, but at the same time
susceptible to dangerous desires. The boys, for example, in Flora’s real and
imaginary parties seem to have internalised the power thirst of male grown-up
figures, enacting it in vicious and exaggerated ways in their relationships with their
peers. Parodying the principles of Samuel Smiles’s 1859 Self-Help, Rossetti has
the children invent a game with that name where the boys with their pointy bodily
protrusions are allowed to help themselves to the smooth surfaces of the girls. The
males are authorised by the birthday Queen to exercise their right to self-improve-
ment at all costs, by depriving the girls of bodily intactness and independence. The
abuse of the child’s body, therefore, parallels the invasive upbringing of the
parents, the tight surveillance of children in middle-class settings, and the uncon-
scious brainwashing and silencing that such adult figures were liable to exercise
while perpetuating unequal relations between the sexes. As Kathryn Burlinson
argues, ‘The fact that ‘Self-Help’ is a children’s game . . . suggests concern at the
426 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

cultural saturation of ideologies hostile to women and other oppressed groups’.

Rossetti’s ‘games’ expose ‘the outrageousness of the normal’.34 Yet Rossetti’s
cutting criticism extends even further. These children, with their hideously
mutated bodies, are far from exemplary samples of self-improvement; their phy-
sical degeneration (girls not excluded) seems to denote Rossetti’s belief in the
moral degradation that ensues from self-help techniques employed indiscrimi-
nately in the public sphere, as this has been constructed by patriarchal cultural
and social institutions.
Flora’s counterpart in the dream sequence, the birthday Queen, is a satirical
exaggeration of the Victorian ideal of womanhood, captured, in the words of
Ruskin, as ‘majestic childishness’,35 a combination of power and helplessness.
Like the other girls at her party, the Queen is the antithesis of Victorian con-
ceptualisations of women by male artists like Rossetti’s brother who usually appro-
priated mythical (water-nixies, medusas, fairies) or religious figures (the Virgin
Mary or Mary Magdalen) in their work. Instead, Rossetti concentrates on her

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mundane features (‘this time she looked ugly’ [p. 331]), thus criticising the ten-
dency to represent woman as mysterious other. Similarly, the depictions of Slime
and Sticky, the two girls who ooze bodily fluids, parody typical descriptions of the
workings of the female body found in abundance in medical texts, which suc-
ceeded in producing a sense of disgust for its fluid producing mechanisms.
Moreover, the diminutive Queen encapsulates Rossetti’s main criticism of child-
rearing tactics which instil adult mores. This adult-imitating figure performs and
consolidates her class authority by callously ordering games which rather than
protecting the female species constantly subject Flora to inhumanity, body
damage resembling rape, forced starvation, objectification, incarceration, and sur-
veillance. The Queen’s preferred games perpetuate social and gender hierarchies
in which, as the aunt says, ‘the boys were players [and] the girls were played’
(p. 334). And lest Flora or the listening auditors of the aunt’s stories should think
too highly of the little Queen’s authority, the aunt quickly dismisses the intelli-
gence of this domineering girl, rendering her mute, unable to answer back in any
original way to the boys’ insults: ‘the girls all alike seemed well-nigh destitute of
invention’, she says, after having the Queen repeat the linguistically impoverished
name-calling (‘You’re another!’) uttered by the boys (p. 337). The story therefore
exposes the contradictions of gender ideology by confusing the reader as to the
demands forced on middle-class women and girls. The doubling device—the
birthday Queen being Flora’s double—serves to illustrate woman’s impossible
double position of Queen and victim. Through her multiple replication in the
five hundred mirrors of the room, she is omnipresent and omniscient; yet, the
mirrors also represent her imprisonment, as they have replaced the exit, making

34 Burlinson, ‘All Mouth’, 297, 299.

35 John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, in G. E. Hollingworth (ed.), Sesame and Lilies
(London, 1932), 50–82: 64.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 427

escape impossible. The sovereign female self, though ubiquitous, through this
multiplication, is powerless to breach the boundaries set up paradoxically by her
own magisterial powers. Towards the end of the dream sequence the mirrors
become glass walls that the Queen builds around herself and Flora, once again
choosing a game that undermines the powers of her own sex. Rossetti suggests that
women and girls have internalised the mechanisms of seclusion and surveillance to
such an extent that they become partly responsible for these mechanisms’ imple-
mentation and perpetuation. The aunt ironically names this last confrontation
between the children a ‘battle of giants’ (p. 338); indeed the injury caused by
these children is disproportionate to their size. However, no one is allowed to win
as the nightmare ends in medias res with the Queen in the act of hurling a huge
stone at a boy and Flora in mid-air trying to stop its expected damage (p. 338). In
this way, the aunt successfully re-establishes the silence and ultimate ineffectuality
of the birthday-Queen, whose magisterial powers have gone a little too far.
With her story of Flora, the most Carrollesque of the aunt’s inventions, Rossetti

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may also be satirising Carroll’s notion of what little girls dream of. Unlike Alice,
Flora does not dream of power, courage, and resolution with which she withstands
the absurd adult world to which she is juxtaposed. Rather, she is haunted by a
nightmarish world of fearsome and violent child-like creatures, who are her own
speaking likenesses, mirror images of what she is gradually becoming, exposed as
she and the young listeners of her story are to discourses which reinforce cultural
values. In other words, Rossetti shows that Alice’s victory over the institutions that
figure in Wonderland is the product of a male imagination with little access to a
real girl’s dreams. Like Carroll, Rossetti does achieve a subversion of adult notions
of childhood. But the female interiority that she constructs has little of the
potency, bravado, and majesty that his little girl was equipped with. Rossetti in
fact reverses Carroll’s relegation of Alice’s activity/passivity to the dream/reality
sequence, respectively: while Carroll has Alice return to a world of passivity and
domestic order after her unruly behaviour in the dream, Rossetti makes the dream
an opportunity for chastisement, where Flora is rendered a passive recipient of
violence after daring to raise her voice too high at her real life party. For Carroll,
the dream is a site of independence; for Rossetti it is the locus of victimisation and
punishment. Flora’s dream suggests that the feeling of security cultivated within
the seemingly safe domestic enclosures she has been raised in is false, as the
inevitable socialisation of children within the middle-class drawing-room may in
fact conceal, through its civilised and civilising practices, aggression—social, eco-
nomic, or even sexual.
The last game played by the monstrous boys and girls in Flora’s Nowhere most
compellingly conveys Rossetti’s critique of social and gender ideology. The game
involves building square blocks from within, raising walls made of coloured glass
bricks. The effect, the aunt acknowledges, is quite striking:
Not merely were the glass blocks of beautiful tints; so that whilst some houses glowed like
masses of ruby, and others shone like enormous chrysolites or sapphires, others again
428 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

showed the milkiness and fiery spark of a hundred opals, or glimmered like moonstone: but
the playground was lighted up, high, low, and on all sides, with coloured lamps . . . lamps
like illuminated peaches, apples, apricots, plums . . . (p. 336)
The setting clearly illustrates the limitations of the gilded drawing-rooms, which
though glittering with wealth and means of satiating every desire, are inescapable:
‘gradually the walls rose and rose around [Flora]’, leaving ‘no hope of her ever
being able to clamber over them back into the road home, if indeed there was any
longer such a road anywhere outside’ (emphasis added, p. 336). Flora’s despair stems
as much from the claustrophobic imprisonment as from the suspicion that there
exist no alternatives to this beautified captivity, that there is no road of possibility
and advancement outside. In this sense, Nowhere has more in common with
Barrie’s ‘Never-Neverland’ than Carroll’s Wonderland, the negation in both sug-
gesting the impossibility of escape and the ‘lostness’ (consider the ‘lost’ boys) of
children dwelling in a site with such immovable borders. Rossetti, thus, satirises
the middle-class tendency to segregate children into nursery worlds of seemingly

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utopian or edenic values. In reality, the isolated space of Nowhere is nightmarish,
harbouring unheimlich instincts of domination, greed, and sexual desire. In other
words, the dream proposes that the middle-class private sphere did not adequately
protect the ideal of childhood that had been inherited from the romantic period. It
is as if the aunt herself acknowledges that covert abuse is part of children’s every-
day experience,36 an expected part of a girl’s socialisation within the home, natu-
rally surfacing in exaggerated forms in dreams. After all, Rossetti’s Nowhere is not
as public as Carroll’s dreamland. In fact, by avoiding the use of such public
settings as a court of law or a palace garden, Rossetti suggests that violence,
abuse, and indifference are more probably and frequently experienced at home
in familiar and domestic surroundings, within one’s immediate circle, rather than
in settings to which few women, and certainly no little girls, would have access. As
the aunt tells her nieces, ‘who knows whether something not altogether unlike it
has not ere now taken place in the Land of Somewhere? Look at home, children’
(p. 334). By prompting the girls to identify with Flora’s predicament and place
themselves hypothetically within a very plausible land of ‘Somewhere’, the aunt is
indeed insinuating that the home is the most likely locus of such abuse. This line,
in my view, best corroborates Marsh’s speculation that ‘incestuous abuse’ ‘offers a
convincing explanation of the dark and disturbed aspects of [Christina’s] inner
life . . . her teenage breakdown, personality change, inexplicable rages and recur-
rent depression’.37

36 In her discussion of women’s and children’s sexuality in Victorian England, Janet

Oppenheim claims that incest was a common offence which took place not only in over-
crowded working-class homes. ‘Wherever it occurred—in homes, in schools, or in broth-
els—adult exploitation of children’s sexual appeal was a shocking and sinister reality that
very few Victorians, including medical practitioners, were prepared to confront’, Shattered
Nerves, 260.
37 Marsh, Christina Rossetti, 260.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 429

Flora’s nightmare, therefore, suggests not an extraordinary potential for rebel-

lion but a very ordinary subjectivity constructed out of fear, discipline, and
inequality, products not only of various normalising discourses prevailing in
society, but most intriguingly and disturbingly also of women’s own upbringing
of their girls. The narrator who invents these tales and who frames the narrative is
a woman, an aunt, who imparts fear and passive obedience to her fictional product,
Flora, and discipline and dutiful work (sewing, drawing, and darning) to her
nieces, thus constructing heavily monitored boundaries around the idealised
middle-class version of womanhood she is supposed to help rear. As Ruth
Parkin-Gounelas argues, Speaking Likenesses ‘repeats this same split between the
industrious bourgeois consumer of narratives and the passive heroines’ of fantasy
or romance.38 Similarly, the story of Edith, another spoilt little girl, illustrates the
potentially harmful effects of these middle-class boundaries, as they leave girls
virtually unprotected against the threat from both external sources and their own
undirected and hence dangerous impulses. Edith’s illusion of independence, her

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fancy to light a fire in the woods in order to boil a kettle and her complete failure to
do so (she is unable to successfully light the matches, and even the kettle is empty)
reveals yet another danger from the combination of too much pampering and
surveillance: Edith is utterly incompetent to venture outside the boundaries of
the edenic space figured as her home; she lacks the motivation, the skills, as well as
the self-knowledge that would facilitate a successful use of one’s independence. In
this sense, her story once again alludes to the drawbacks rather than the virtues of
middle-class girls’ dependence and overprotection. Rossetti seems to imply that in
such a vigilant child-rearing context it is difficult to distinguish between the aims
of moral management and those of social order, as the claims of the former are
employed in order to uphold ideological structures which secure the latter. In the
first two stories, Rossetti successfully shows that in her time moral imperatives (the
moral lessons that girls like Flora and Edith receive—that one must not be greedy,
impatient, selfish, and ambitious) were in reality used in the service of patriarchal
social control.
The third story in Speaking Likenesses differs from the first two in many sig-
nificant ways. In a revision of Little Red Riding-Hood, the aunt invents the story
of working-class Maggie who ventures through a forest with her little basket of
goodies, which she has to deliver to a doctor’s house, and on the way confronts
various temptations as well as dangers which threaten her physically. She returns
home victorious having succeeded in her mission as well as being rewarded with
three little pets (a wood-pigeon, a kitten, and a puppy) to keep her company. No
doubt the aunt offers this story as a successful example of self-discipline and
restraint. However, read in comparison with the other two tales, the story becomes

38 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, ‘ ‘‘Speaking Likenesses’’ – and ‘‘Differences’’: The Prose

Fantasies of Christina Rossetti’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 23 (1995), 147–57: 152.
430 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

a parable which highlights firstly the endurance of working-class girls in the face of
social dispossession and secondly their emotional strength and independence
which makes them more in charge of their bodies and sexuality. One significant
difference between Maggie and the other two girls is that she is an orphan raised
by a charitable, frugal, and devoted grandmother in a home setting that is scarcely
populated, compared to the heavily supervised domestic environment of Flora and
Edith, whose household includes parents, siblings, relatives, and servants. By
juxtaposing the social situations of these three girls and their physical ventures
into the unknown land of Nowhere, Rossetti is testing out the degrees of inde-
pendence granted on young girls of different classes, questioning the middle-class
fear and suspicion of a woman’s autonomy. While Flora and Edith, used to
dependence and externally imposed control, are unable to handle their temporary
freedom, falling victims of external and internal threats, Maggie, through her
brave walk in the woods at dusk, flouts Victorian expectations, by combining
independence with self-control. Rather than proving that roaming alone in

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the streets at night equals delinquency, Maggie shows that her upbringing,
with its emphasis on work and frugality, has better equipped her to face the
dangers of the street. Rossetti therefore seems to blame Victorian family ideology
and class expectations for the sexual victimisation of womanhood both in the
middle-class drawing-room and in the streets. Could her interaction with prosti-
tutes have made her feel that these women were actually better in control of their
bodies than women like herself who had to suppress either desire or insidious
abuse?
Moreover, in this story Rossetti is challenging sociological studies of her day
which generally branded working-class girls as unruly. Gorham quotes from late
Victorian studies which attribute the ‘wildness’ of the young girls in question to
their surroundings: ‘no quiet; never in all their lives have they known what it is to
be alone’.39 Another study from 1868 narrates the story of a low-class ‘pretty,
innocent child, just entering on womanhood’, who, due to illness, was brought to a
workhouse and placed in a bed next to ‘a most depraved and desperately wicked
woman’; this woman ‘so inflamed the imagination of the poor child by her lying
tales, that whilst still scarcely recovered [the child] left the workhouse in the
company of her detestable companion, and took to a vicious life’.40 Both studies
acknowledge bad influence as the main cause of fallenness, refusing to view
seemingly uncontrollable behaviour as a sign of economic panic and unfulfilled
emotional desire. Yet, the stories in Speaking Likenesses question which kind
of influence leads to more efficient self-control. Of the three girls described,
it is working-class Maggie who, though the most independent, is the most
well-behaved, while her two middle-class counterparts are susceptible to unruly

39 Qtd. in Gorham, ‘Maiden Tribute’, 375.

40 ‘Our Poor Law Administration’, The British Quarterly Review, 94 (1 April 1868), 314–26:
316.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 431

tantrums, insubordination, and naughtiness. It is Flora and Edith who are the
‘wildest’, while Maggie is better able to control her body from threats from with-
out but also temptations arising from within. The leaping children, who invite her
to play with them, the ‘mouth-boy’, who wants to eat the chocolate in her basket,
and the sleepers, who arouse in her an overpowering drowsiness, all represent
temptations and influences to which normally, according to Victorian class and
gender beliefs, a working-class girl would have succumbed. In particular, the
temptation to participate in games, similar to the ones Flora is forcefully obliged
to play, is defeated by a strong sense of purpose that both Flora and Edith lack.
The boy with the wide mouth and no eyes could stand for the threat from
procurers that working-class girls were constantly faced with. The boy pretends
to be a starving beggar accosting Maggie, but, noticing his ‘stouter and sleeker’
look (p. 350), she is quick to discern the entrapment she is subjected to and to
escape his snare. Finally, the sleepers represent the temptation to accept and
adopt, silently and without judgment, the behaviour that society had already

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normalised in relation to low-class girls, the temptation to uncritically accept
influence.
Despite her poverty and her need to assist her grandmother in the economic
maintenance of their basic living means, Maggie appears more innocent, unaf-
fected, and ‘childlike’ than the other two heroines, who have internalised discourse
and ideology from the adult world.41 Maggie’s wish to carry the forgotten goodies
to their destination across the forest is instigated by her longing to catch a glimpse
of the doctor’s Christmas tree, which she has not been privileged enough to
experience at home. However, Maggie is rebuffed from the doctor’s house without
looking at the tree. As Julia Briggs has argued, ‘It seems that the doctor’s children,
like Flora and Edith, have no sense of the labor of a world beyond, through which
their toys, sweetmeats, and Christmas candles reach them’.42 Rossetti is aware of
the contradiction examined by Gorham, that the labour of the working girls helps
maintain the leisure of the middle-class girls.43 The doctor’s daughters seem
oblivious of Maggie’s existence as well as the difficulties she has undergone in
order to deliver their forgotten shopping. Maggie’s desire to derive emotional
fulfilment from simply gazing at the tree is contrasted to Flora’s and Edith’s
more superficial and whimsical desires which involve too much play and too

41 In his 1869 preface to German Popular Stories, Ruskin had detected a similar change in
middle-class children: ‘In the best stories recently written for the young there is a taint
which is not easy to define, but inevitably follows from the author addressing himself to
children bred in school-rooms and drawing-rooms instead of fields and woods—children
whose favourite amusements are premature imitations of the vanities of elder people, and
whose conceptions of beauty are dependent partly on costliness of dress’; in David Sandner
(ed.), Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Westport, 2004), 59–63: 60.
42 Briggs, ‘Speaking’, 226.
43 Gorham, ‘Maiden Tribute’, 378.
432 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

much food;44 notice the biting severity in the inventory of the counted delicacies
that the birthday Queen consumes:
. . .the Queen consumed with her own mouth and of sweets alone one quart of strawberry
ice, three pine apples, two melons, a score of meringues, and about four dozen sticks of
angelica, as Flora counted. (p. 335)
Maggie’s self-sufficiency is rewarded with the acquisition of three little animals
which as Briggs has argued, are ‘associated with the spiritual, physical, and social
needs of the child . . . the dove . . . corresponds to the child’s need for spiritual
sustenance, the kitten to her need for food and physical nurture, and the puppy
to her need for companionship and play’.45 Maggie’s story, therefore, teaches
the listening girls more than abstinence and self-restraint: it stresses the ability
of those lower-class children who have been fortunate enough to be rescued by
a devoted parent figure to be better prepared to reject ephemeral and
perishable pleasures. The ‘loving welcoming hug’ and the ‘light and warmth’

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that Maggie and her new-found pets receive on her return (p. 353) contrast
with the scathing, impatient comments of the middle-class adults in the other
two stories and prove that it is this stark but strictly feminine community, free
of social and consumerist desire, that has constructed Maggie as such a little girl
whose potency exceeds Alice’s and whose self-discipline is a product of trust
in herself and not fear.
It is in support of and as reward for her unaffected nature and self-reliance that
Rossetti has Maggie finally enjoy a luxurious colour sequence produced by the rare
phenomenon of northern lights (pp. 353–4) that illuminate the sky just before she
returns home. The limitless expanse of the glittering sky and the spiritual grati-
fication that it offers Maggie contrast with the claustrophobic effect produced by
the beautiful but worldly, contingent, and breakable materials that make up Flora’s
incarceration in the first part of the story. Under the delusion of class sufficiency,
Flora and Edith show no need for emotional or spiritual fulfilment. They are being
raised to become consumers and socialites within a culture where even the domes-
tic sphere is tainted by violent drives and marketplace principles such as competi-
tiveness and exchange. But as Rossetti had already shown in ‘Goblin Market’,
consumable delights undoubtedly consume the body and mind. In Erica Carter’s
words, ‘the market offers itself to women and girls as a stage for the production of
themselves as public beings, [but] on particularly unfavorable terms’.46 Rossetti

44 Perhaps, in her critique of indulgences, Rossetti was influenced by Kingsley’s The Water
Babies (1863), which explored the possibility of a Darwin-inspired physical degeneration in
children who played too much, while extolling work and toil as the means of spiritual
fulfilment.
45 Briggs, ‘Speaking’, 218.
46 Erica Carter, ‘Alice in the Consumer Wonderland: West German Case Studies in
Gender and Consumer Culture’, in Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava (eds), Gender and
Generation (Basingstoke, 1984), 185–214: 198.
 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ’ S SPEAKING LIKENESSES 433

suggests that these unfavourable terms apply to women from a young age through-
out a growing-up process in which they are initially encouraged to emulate adult
behaviour, but then, as girls, punished for expressing their desire too strongly.
Maggie, on the other hand, seems unaffected by society’s preconditioning. Like
Lizzie in ‘Goblin Market’ she seems aware of the fact that giving in to ephemeral
desires entangles one in a world of consumables, where women can never be
players. That part of the public sphere accessible to women, the marketplace,
could bring nothing but victimisation.47
Speaking Likenesses closes with Maggie going to bed, with no mention of the
aunt or the real girls to which ‘Maggie’ has been narrated. Interestingly, the frame
does not close all around the narrative. While it sufficiently introduces as well as
interrupts all three components of the narrative, the frame remains open-ended
like our interpretation of the story. How did these girls like this last story, and how
did it affect them? Does their silence at the end suggest a final compliance with the
redeeming qualities of Maggie, the most successful of the three heroines? What is

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most intriguing about this ending is that the aunt herself is silenced by the potency
of the little girl she has finally created. Maggie seems to go against the aunt’s
intention as she is rewarded not through self-sacrifice, fear, and humiliation, but
through resilience and an obstinate refusal to be constructed as a girl who, like the
stereotypical Victorian fallen woman or femme fatale, is victimised by her own
desires and dangerous animal impulses. Dorothy Mermin has written that ‘Goblin
Market’ shows women ‘entering but finally rejecting [the imaginative world that
male eroticism has created]’, discovering that ‘sisters and daughters can live happy
lives together’.48 Speaking Likenesses ends with a similar revelation. Not limiting
itself to adolescent sexual desire, the story suggests that woman’s nature is from a
very young age socially and medically constructed as susceptible to falling, and
only very few female communities can withstand such constructions. Maggie
epitomises Rossetti’s realism and hope: this little girl conceptualises, on the one
hand, childhood at risk by domestic abandonment, child labour, and poverty and,
on the other, hope of resistance, endurance, and survival. The community of
Maggie and her grandmother is indeed utopic,49 fairy-talish, trying to make us
forget the self-negating and body-endangering decisions that lower-class women
were often forced to make out of fear of destitution, starvation, or even death.

47 See Elizabeth Helsinger for a wide-ranging analysis of the dangers of the marketplace
and consumerism for women in ‘Goblin Market’ ; ‘Consumer Power and the Utopia of
Desire: Christina Rossetti’s ‘‘Goblin Market’’ ’, ELH, 58 (1991), 903–33.
48 Dorothy Mermin, ‘Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market’, Victorian Poetry, 21 (1983),
107–18: 117.
49 In a recent study, Scott Rogers shows that Rossetti’s work at the Highgate Penitentiary
prompted her to detect the political structures and patriarchal hierarchies that undermined
female relationships even within strictly female communities; ‘Re-Reading’, 872. In this
sense, Maggie and her grandmother’s community illustrates even more forcefully Rossetti’s
resistance to patriarchal structures which endangered woman’s subjectivity in the private
and public spheres.
434 ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU

But it does express Rossetti’s resistance to those ‘technologies of gender’ such

as fairy-tales and games, which concealed predatory middle-class threats, carefully
disguised as benign drawing-room social practices—practices that rendered
women controllable victims of emotional and physical abuse as well as unknowing
subjects of an ideology that is impossible to change.
University of Athens

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