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My small heroines perpetually encounter “speaking (literally speaking) likenesses” or embodiments or

caricatures of themselves or their faults…

Christina Rossetti, letter to Macmillan, 1874

On 4 March, Christina Rossetti writes the following entry in Time Flies:

My first vivid experience of death (if so I may term it) occurred in early childhood in the grounds of a cottage.

This little cottage was my familiar haunt: its grounds were my inexhaustible delight. They then seemed to me spacious, though now I know them to have been narrow and commonplace.

So in this grounds, perhaps, in the orchard, I lighted upon a dead mouse. The dead mouse moved my sympathy: I took him up, buried him comfortably in a mossy bed, and bore the spot in mind.

It may have been a day or two afterwards that I returned, removed the moss coverlet, and looked… A black insect emerged. I fled in horror, and for long years ensuing I never mentioned this ghastly adventure to anyone.³⁶¹

In a way, this passage could serve an illustration of Rossetti’s own initiation into the liminal – the changing spatial and temporal setting (spacious grounds turning out to be narrow, and Rossetti refers to it as haunting and delightful at the same time); the orchard (one of those enclosed spaces that are so close to liminality); the encounter with the dead and the burial; and finally, the ultimate and unnerving transformation from death to life. And even the movement of first shutting the dead body out in the grave and then uncovering it to discover a black monster emerging from it reads like another variant of Rossetti’s spring, albeit this time with animate and embodied forces. It also emphasizes the traumatic shock and ensuing loss of speech (she never related this experience to anyone), and the inevitable change it brought about within her (by the end of the entry she confirms that with years she changed her attitude towards death, from

361 Christina Rossetti, Time Flies (London: Society for promoting Christian Knowledge,1897), p. 45.

physical disgust to relief). All those key moments in their various aspects I have explored in the previous chapters, and in this last chapter, I would like to develop in more detail the moment of the encounter with the supernatural elements and explore its transformative effect on Rossetti’s characters. I argue that transformation in Rossetti’s characters comes about in two ways, objectification of the self and likening it to the void and the unfulfillment, and projection of the self onto the monstrous figure, producing a split that is never to be healed. Any encounters in the liminal space are usually linked to transformation of the neophyte through understanding (or at least, questioning) new knowledge about the world. As Victor Turner puts it, “[t]his arcane knowledge…obtained in the liminal period is felt to change the inmost nature of the neophyte, impressing him [sic], as a seal impresses wax, with the characteristics of his new state.”³⁶² Thus, as we have seen with Rossetti’s speakers, they are changed by the experiences they retell. Though Turner distinguishes between three ways of communicating this new knowledge - notably, exhibitions (what is shown), actions (what is done) and instructions (what is said) - in relation to Rossetti’s poetry I set out two different patterns of communication: direct interaction with “the heart of the liminal matter” (objectification) and the encounter with the communicator of liminal knowledge.

The texts describing this transformative liminal experience from the first person singular always have an inherent split of identity within them, be it linked to the speaker’s sleeping/ dying/ dead state, crossing the threshold or being shut out of the world. The moment they are poised between life and death, silence and sound, or even sleep and awakening, is also a moment of their encounter with the mirrored image of discarded self, the one given up when a choice is made between the two options. As I have observed in the second chapter, at the moment of awakening there is a certain split in the sleeping person, allowing it to be both an active observer of the world and a passive body stripped of all connection with reality. This dichotomy of absence/

presence of consciousness and will, self and self, observing each other, appears in a number of Rossetti’s texts. It appeals to split and rivalry of identities within one body,

362 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (eds), Reader in Comparative Religion (New York: Harper and Row Publications, 1979), p. 239.

and yet also repeats the imagery of sacred and homoerotic doubling, that is referred to in Turner’s twinship rites as we have seen in chapter two. In the same way as the thresholds and mirrors in Lady Hawarden’s photographs, this doubling acts as a point of invitation and departure. Yet for Rossetti it has always the hesitation, the longing, the momentary unity before the separation that attracts her attention. From the liminal point of view, she re-enacts in her speakers the inherent duality of a liminal persona: “[t]he essential feature of these symbolizations is that the neophytes are neither living nor dead from one aspect, and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox”. Yet this duality is also ideal for resurgence of all possible configurations. As the “threshold people” are at the same time pre-structured and de-structured, they represent nothing but a random combination of fragments. At various instances in Rossetti’s work, we have a feeling that her overlapping narratives are almost random, but nevertheless, combined into a structurally coherent development throughout the whole span of her writing, as they re-enact the choices of the liminal stage shutting the protagonists out of the “real” world.

The other major point of this chapter that is also related to overlapping identities deals with the monstrous. Before proceeding further with tracing the monstrous in Christina Rossetti’s writings, I need to determine my idea of the monstrous here, because, if anything, Rossetti definitely was not engaged in defining the nineteenth-century gothic monster, racial or scientific, that was important for many of her contemporaries. The monstrous was, indeed, a major preoccupation in the nineteenth century which, according to Miranda Gill, initiated “a cultural re-evaluation of monstrosity in all its forms.”³⁶³ The monster was becoming “invisible and potentially ubiquitous”³⁶⁴ and its guises increasingly protean as monstrous features were discovered in ordinary and respectable people. The monster is per se a liminal creature, since it not only inhabits the margins of the accepted world presenting an impediment to national, social, political, and scientific progress, but is often structurally undefined, being cast as a new,

363 Miranda Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 211.

364 Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson, “From Hideous to Hedonist: The Changing Face of the Nineteenth-century Monster” in Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate 2012), 237-257, p. 238.

unknown re-combination of familiar elements. The idea of monstrosity in the nineteenth century is centred on the dichotomy of the visible (physical) and the invisible (moral, genetic), which brings us back to the ideas expressed in the first chapter. As Kearney puts it, monsters are in the end “tokens of fracture within the human psyche. They speak to us of how we are split between conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other.”³⁶⁵ The deeper the split in our inner self, produced by the changing environment, the more it tells about our fears and convictions.

On the other hand, the monster being the embodiment of culturally specific fears, desires, anxieties and fantasies,³⁶⁶ it is an inductor of culture-specific knowledge in the way that Turner defines its function in a rite of passage. And although one can find in Rossetti’s texts visible monsters, such as apocalyptic beasts or the goblins, I am mostly interested in the invisible monsters, those who hide behind the familiar masks and settings. Appealing to Kearney again, monsters operate “as a limit-experience for humans trying to identify themselves over and against others” and signal “borderline experience of uncontainable excess, reminding the ego that is never wholly sovereign.”³⁶⁷ The more grotesque the monster, the more it reflects ourselves.

I concluded the previous chapter with the analysis of “The Thread of Life,” noting the inexplicable and haunting crystallisation of a part of the individual self which becomes the objectified abject. In this chapter I focus on the final stage of the liminal passage, the encounter with the mirrored image of the self which will bring about the ultimate transformation, and the distortion it produces. I have noted that mirrors in Victorian texts are rarely true to the original; instead, they “communicate” the world to the one who looks into them, and as such, they introduce the performative aspect of every transformation. In this way, they become projections of the interior self. On the contrary, the moments when the speaker is facing a monster or visited by a spirit, are cases of exterior projection of the self, the bifurcation into the ‘I’ and the Other, where the

365 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London and New York:

Routledge, 2003), p. 4.

366 See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 4.

367 Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, opus cit., p. 3.

monster is both “a multivocal [symbol], a semantic molecule with many components”

(implying its ragged and unwholesome nature) and “an object of reflection.”³⁶⁸ Contrary to the expected, monsters are neither intrinsically threatening, nor unyielding in their difference from us, but instead represent a constructed entity with a transformative power, that helps the speaker to transgress herself.

“A Pause of Thought” (1848, two other parts of the triptych 1849, 1854) and “Memory”

(1857, 1865) explore interior “left-overs” – the objectified essence of selfhood as opposed to Rossetti’s emerging communal sense. Be it vestiges of pre-liminal memories or suppressed emotions, Rossetti solidifies them into material form to dwell in and control the speaker so that those memories become the mirror against which the speaker measures up the world and herself. The Self can also be alienated through being projected into a figure of a monster or a saint, and Rossetti rarely differentiates between the two. In my reading of her poetry, both stand as the opposite of human and thus simultaneously a threat and a tool of education.

To illustrate this point, I analyse “So I Grew Half-Delirious and Quite Sick” (1849) and

“Who Shall Deliver Me” (1864) in order to show Rossetti’s speakers approaching and self-projecting onto the monsters. Space does not permit including a close reading of her short stories for children in this thesis, yet I would like to confirm that her grotesque transformations, when she allows their existence, follow the same rules in her prose – trying to fit angles into circles, and circles into squares, as she once explained. At the same time, stepping aside from the gothicized writing, she makes her monsters wear a more acceptable mask, turning them into sleepers, saints or people on the verge of death, that is, categories of marginalized existence which incorporate a not-exactly-human perspective at the same time as they conforms with the human form. In this function they are both the threshold dwellers and the supernatural forces brought to deliver a message to the speaker and the reader. Yet even whilst being ‘humanized,’ her liminal monsters keep their functions of warning and awakening the speaker’s true selves from the unspiritual routine of everyday life.

368 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” opus cit., p. 239.

In the previous chapter, using the example of the “fort-da” game, I showed how the object of desire can initiate a split and objectification of self, while the constant movement back and forth between sending it away and bringing it back produces a liminal experience that is hard to overcome. “A Pause of Thought” (1848) embodies this experience almost literally as verbs of non-fulfilment in the poem - “I looked for that which is not, nor can be” - draw our attention to otherworldy liminal experiences of the speaker. The poem was initially entitled “Lines” – “In memory of Schiller’s ‘Der Pilgrim’” and published in The Germ No 2 (February 1850) under the title “A Pause of Thought.” However, in my analysis I will use it as a part of the triptych “Three Stages,”

as published in William Michael’s posthumous collection of his sister’s work.

The Schiller original, written in 1803, is literally about the failure of a quest. The

“higher things” that the pilgrim wants to reach remain unattainable for him, and thus fit Turner’s definition of pilgrimage and ensuing liminality. But where Schiller concentrates on the figure of the pilgrim and his quest, Rossetti seems to focus on the nature of the thing her speaker strives to attain. Kathryn Burlinson suggests “that the object is not human, but related to Schiller’s spiritual or metaphysical ‘higher things’”; I would go further and suggest that Rossetti evokes neither a human nor a being of a higher order, but describes a liminal non-thing, similar to the void centres and empty spaces I have analysed in the previous chapters. As I have argued in chapters four and five, the non-space of the liminal denies all previous identifications and cancels out all attempts to re-establish one’s identity. Burlington links Rossetti’s passive watching and waiting to the gender reworking; following Rosenblum, she believes that the “tenacious and obsessed watcher” is Rossetti’s idea of women’s ability to fight back. I see no direct reference to the gender of the speaker in “A Pause of Thought.” What I suggest instead is that writing a poem “in memory” of another poem exemplifies the recovery of language which I referred to in my previous chapter. The speaker is not only passive and watching, but also deprived of language. It is the existence of this unattainable non-thing that empowers her to speak, and hence the whole poem is not about the quest to attain, but the quest to define.

“A Pause of Thought” starts with a startling description which defies both physical perception and sense of reality - “I looked for that which is not, nor can be,/ And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth” (1-2) – and moves on to state the futility of hope.

The liminal lagging of hope is expressed through the juxtaposition of “hope deferred”

and years “passed” (3). On one hand, we have this tenacious will to hope; on the other, hope is equalled to sickness of the heart. There are two main points that interest me here from the point of view of liminality – the process of waiting and the object of desire.

Strictly speaking, we cannot say that the poem is scarce in verbs, but most of them are not verbs of action. Together with the speaker, we are locked from the contact with the outer world, being too engrossed in the object of desire. Hence little changes around us (or little do we notice). There is no hint as to whether the speaker is actively trying to get the mysterious thing. Rossetti refers to the speaker as “watching and waiting;” the only active verb of movement – “flee” – refers to the object.

There co-exist various frames in the poem. On one hand, the object is framed in the gaze of the speaker – we are tempted to think that there is no escape from this gaze; no matter how far the object flees, the speaker is still fixated on it and thus fixes it in space.

On the other, the speaker’s existence is framed by the object – whatever is done, is done with the object in mind. This feeling of entrapment is emphasized through the organization of the poem by various levels of repetition. In stanza two, we have epanaleptical “I watched and waited,” repeated in the first and in the last lines. Stanzas three and four start with anaphoric “sometimes I said” and end with a haunting repetition of “give” in opposite meanings: “never gave it over” (12) and “gave it all the same” (16). This all intensifies the limits and futility of this suspense – and, as is usual with Rossetti’s poetics of layering, gives us no clue as to the nature of “it.”

The poem rightfully belongs to the network of Rossetti’s other non-scapes and unfullfillments. The reference to the passage of years reminds us of “May” – “as it is it came to pass.” In a similar way as in “Cobwebs,” Rossetti starts piling up negative characteristics of the inconceivable object: “This thing shall be no more” (9), “It is an empty name” (13). Burlinson stresses Rossetti’s use of “object” and “thing” in stanzas three and four: “although ‘thing’ could not be read as the object of desire, since it is already possessed (‘shall be no more’),” the boundaries between the desiring subject and the desired objects are blurred all the same.³⁶⁹ With this in mind, I still suggest that

369 Kathryn Burlinson, ‘Speaking Silences: Indeterminate Identities in the Writings of Christina Rossetti,’

(unpublished PhD thesis, Birbeck University, 1994), pp. 58-59.

the act of possession is questionable and most likely fleeting and unfulfilled – in a similar manner to the goblins’ possession of Laura or the Princess’ framing of the Prince which I have discussed previously. The threshold between possessing and being possessed is no longer respected. True, the speaker seems to have known “the thing,”

but this knowledge does not give her power over it. From here we get the impossibility to cease, to resign; actually to stop desiring it would mean dying in the same way as Laura was dying when deprived of the goblin fruit. The unnameability of “the thing”

also stresses the speaker’s liminality, as transitional beings have nothing, possess nothing and are defined by no structural relationships of the everyday world.

In the fourth stanza the physical “thing” is taken out and we are left with “an empty name” (13). Once again, similar to Margaret’s situation in “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children,” the empty name seems to acquire vampiric characteristics as it sucks “the peace of all the days I have to live” (15), and yet stays void, lifeless and incomplete. It is, by definition, a non-thing, as all its characteristics are based on negation. Jamison reads it as “a specific bounded impossibility,” its main function being

“to extend desire over time”; if the speaker gave up on the “thing”, it would have ended the state of indeterminacy (and the poem).³⁷⁰ Yet for the speaker her life is in this indeterminacy of both absence and presence of the object; similar to the “fort-da” game I have previously discussed, she feigns control over the object of her desire. No matter how much she longs to give it up, she never resigns – “Though knowest the chase useless, and again/ Turnest to follow it” (19-20) – which allows Rosenblum to call this poem “the anatomy of pure desire without object or end” and the speaker “a parody of heroic quester.”³⁷¹

The poem ends with an address to an undefined ‘thou’ (self? God? the inconceivable

The poem ends with an address to an undefined ‘thou’ (self? God? the inconceivable