Brett’s Portraits

The Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham currently have an exhibition, Objects of Affection, of John Brett’s “Pre-Raphaelite” portraits. Brett, usually only really thought of as a landscape artist, produced a wide range of portraits, many of which seem to be of people he was emotionally engaged with – family and friends, or women with whom he was infatuated. In many ways he is an impressive portraitist: his clarity of conception combined minute attention to detail and texture (familiar from his landscapes) make him a sensitive painter of portraits.

The pencil sketches included in this exhibition are particularly fine – especially as he seems to use his drawing techniques to demonstrate his romantic attachments, concentrating on the eyes and facial expressions of his sitters as well as his Pre-Raphaelite attention to the fall and sheen of fabrics, to patterns and to symbolic backgrounds. For Brett, there’s no doubt that portraiture is an intimate mode, offering a side of him not seen in his landscapes – although, as Waldemar Januszczak suggests in today’s Sunday Times, he is certainly more consistent as a landscape painter.

Of course, for me the focus of the exhibition had to be his unfinished 1857 portrait of Christina Rossetti (right) (currently on posters all over Birmingham advertising the exhibition, which pleases me!) There is much speculation about Brett’s potential courtship of Rossetti, and Jan Marsh has suggested that the 1858 poem “No, Thank you, John”, is Rossetti’s rejection of his suit. This might explain why the portrait was never finished; but it remains one of the most beautiful portraits of Rossetti, I think; her deep seriousness and glossy hair may give her the face of a medieval angel, but there is a determination around the set mouth which demonstrates a strong character, and the eyes, appropriately, seem focussed on a heavenly horizon. The exhibition notes suggest that the feather which appears in the background may refer either to her recent poem “My heart is like a singing bird”, or represent a quill as a reference to her poetry. Whatever the relationship between Brett and Rossetti (and whatever his feelings, it is extremely unlikely that she seriously considered him as a potential husband), nonetheless the portrait speaks of affection and trust between the artist and the sitter.

Desperate Romantics

We are reaching the end of the series of “Desperate Romantics” – just one more to go, and I for one am glad – I don’t think I can take much more of it. I’m really glad that lots of people out there have enjoyed it, because the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is an interesting subject – and indeed there are grains of truth to be found in even the more salacious aspects of the programme. And it has made me laugh, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, I suspect. But there are so many crucial flaws in the programme, and it is so self-consciously saturated with sex, that it is difficult to relax and enjoy it if one knows anything about the subject. Of course, the PRB were rebellious, and probably DG Rossetti did have that much sex; it’s just that there was rather more painting going on than the programme implies. And while his poem “Jenny” was indeed written about a prostitute, what the programme doesn’t really show is that it is actually a very interesting and seriously-thought-out poem which provided genuine social commentary on the double standards of contemporary constructions of gender.

I am still rather disappointed by the absence of Christina Rossetti – I suppose she just wasn’t sexy enough; the quiet sister who wrote poetry – and indeed I should probably be thankful that she hasn’t been paraded with her assumed lesbianism (one of the potential readings of “Goblin Market”, though not one I agree with). And I am still concerned with the creation of Fred Walters, who was invented by the writers because the other potential narrators (William Michael Rossetti, Fred Stephens, Walter Deverell) had too much “backstory” of their own. Which may be true, but now Fred Walters has his own, what with writing articles to promote the PRB, and falling in love with Lizzie Siddal, among other instrumental roles. I can’t stop myself from shouting at the TV, “You don’t exist!”

Of course, so many people who do exist have been left out. I appreciate that the other four members of the Brotherhood (WM Rossetti, FG Stephens, James Collinson and Thomas Woolner) probably seem less sexy than Rossetti, Hunt and Millais, but this programme does suggest that the PRB only had three members (plus the later hangers-on, Burne-Jones and Morris). But then, “Desperate Romantics” is clearly very much the Rossetti show; the others are only supporting actors – which is probably how the man himself saw it, but art historians usually disagree with this. Aidan Turner is just a little too desperately romantic, I think; the women are more sensitively portrayed.  The factual errors are too numerous to mention – and, to be fair to the writers, I think are usually there deliberately for dramatic purposes – but it is all misses the point for me; as far as I can see, the PRB, for all their preoccupation with sex, with drinking and laudanum, baiting Ruskin and whatever else they do on “Desperate Romantics”, were all about the art, and that is just missing here, and leaves a gaping hole.

Poetry for children

The latest chapter of my thesis is about Sing-Song, Christina Rossetti’s book of nursery rhymes, and it has taken me into whole new worlds, of children’s literature and, slightly worryingly, of child psycho-analysis (having read Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, I will never see a baby the same way again). Sing-Song was published in 1872, and was popularly used in nurseries until some time in the 1930s, when it fell out of favour due to its  frequent “dead babies”, to quote a critic.  There are quite a few “dead babies”, though perhaps this is less surprising when one considers that in the latter part of the 19th century, 153 in every 1000 babies died in infancy, so death of a sibling would be sadly familiar in many nurseries. And one critic writing in Household Words in 1851 on nursery rhymes, comments on  “Hush-a-by Baby” : “Bravo! excellent fun – a smashed baby! – well done old Nursery Witch! In short, the grand staple commodity of the nursery songs and tales of England…is death, or the excitement of killing something.” In fact, Rossetti deals with child mortality in quite a gentle way; she makes the mother’s love appear unconditional, as though waiting for reunion with a dead child, and also proposes spiritual comfort, as in this poem (below).

There are a few dead mothers, too – well, I didn’t expect Victorian poetry for children to be cheerful, although there are many delightful nonsense poems (“If a pig wore a wig” etc), many of which poke fun at social conventions, and also many poems exploring nature, teaching the child about the world around it.

So my research into Sing-Song has not been particularly surprising to me. What did surprise me, however, is some of the other literature for children. Watts’ Divine Songs for children (1715), offers “A Meditation of Death”: “Horrid Darkness, sad and sore,/And an Eternal Night;/Groans and Shrieks;/ and Thousand more/In the want of glorious Light…/Every corner hath a Snake/In the accursed Lake…” Perhaps children, with their innate love of gruesome things, actually get a Gothic thrill from it, but I bet at least as many again are just plain terrified.

Another revelation was the poetry of Jane and Ann Taylor. Rhymes from the Nursery is mostly slightly preachy but not too scary, although I was hugely amused by a poem that tells the infant to behave, or else:

And when you saw me pale and thin,
By grieving for my baby’s sin,
I think you’d wish that you had been
A better baby.

The idea that a baby could wish to be anything, let alone to be “a better baby” is slightly hilarious, though not as uncomfortably so as “The Last Dying Speech and Confession of Poor Puss”, a miserable tale which is clearly meant to encourage children to be kind to animals, but instead tells a tale of woe of a cat who has been cut with knives, beaten, whipped, had her kittens drowned, and is now dying of wounds inflicted by an angry child. I can’t imagine that such tales would be seen as appropriate by parents now; but what people try to teach children through literature gives one an eye-opening sideways glance at history.

Twilight is not good for maidens…

This is the abstract of the paper I’m currently writing. Don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun with a conference paper! This is for Adapting the Nineteenth Century at the University of Lampeter, August 22-24 2008.

“Twilight is not good for maidens”: The Twilight World of ‘Goblin Market’
‘Goblin Market’ remains Rossetti’s most-studied poem, yet has presented problems for critics since its publication. An early reviewer asked, “Is it a fable – or a mere fairy story – or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love – or what is it?” In this paper, I shall discuss how a poem which was arguably constructed from elements of multifarious sources created its own world which drew readers in and opened up to a wide variety of interpretations. In the late twentieth century, it was the aesthetics of faery, of landscape and primarily of Gothic, which prevailed in interpretations of the work. While serious critics comment on the religious, moral and typological aspects of the poem, it is the alternative aspects of this constructed world, such as fairytale and vampirism which have elicited the most creative responses. My paper will consider two of these responses, and examine the elements of ‘Goblin Market’ which have made such diverse interpretations possible. The illustrative work of the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft has tapped into a dark vein in the work. Appearing in Playboy in 1973 as part of their “Ribald Classics”, ‘Goblin Market’ was presented as “a nursery classic” and a “pornographic classic”. By juxtaposing the visual and the verbal, the poem appears as indicative of repressed Victorian sexuality. This is perhaps explained best by Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock:

In these decades [the 1960s and 1970s], the Victorian era became a site for the
renegotiation of definitions of sexuality. It was characterized as a period of
public virtue and private vice, of sexual hypocrisy, an age of prudery and
respectability with a hidden underside of perversion, pornography and
prostitution.

The illustrations are loosely based on those by Arthur Rackham, but draw on the sexually charged language Rossetti uses in her poem. I propose to examine how Craft draws this out in nuanced illustrations which gesture towards Victorian art, whilst appearing in Playboy.
Recent literary criticism is beginning to attempt reconstruction of the original world Rossetti created, but an alternative space has opened up between critical and creative responses. My paper will explore the aspects of Rossetti’s poem which have attracted an interpretative response, and demonstrate the differing aspect of these two interpretations of ‘Goblin Market’.

Next Poet Laureate?

Tee hee (from the Times Books section last week)

The current laureate is Andrew Motion, but as it’s now a decade-long post rather than a life-time position, we’re nearly due another one. There have been calls for the first female laureate, detailed here, but many of the women have said they wouldn’t be interested (see here). Of course, the first female laureate should have been Christina Rossetti, on the death of Tennyson, but Queen Victoria wouldn’t countenance a woman laureate (and probably Rossetti would have declined it anyway) so instead they appointed the truly unmemorable Alfred Austin.

Research proposals

At the moment, I’m going through the infamous mid-Ph.D. slump, when I’d rather do pretty much anything (including marking GCSE papers, and, apparently, updating my blog) than actually get on with my thesis. However, this is what my thesis is supposedly about:

Thesis title: Christina Rossetti and the Influence of Gothic
Director of Studies: Professor Fiona Robertson
My original title was “Representations of Pre-Raphaelitism in Criticism and Fiction”, and I proposed to examine the myth-making process instigated by the Brotherhood themselves, and subsequently perpetuated by their biographers, who were often related to members of the group or had axes to grind. It became apparent early on in my research that such a study would not be manageable in the context of a Ph.D. Having reviewed recent secondary literature in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and the Rossettis, I concluded that there is increasing critical interest in Christina Rossetti’s poetry, but that existing scholarship neglects the important influence of Tractarianism and Gothic literature on her work, and tends to ignore her both her early poems and also her later explicitly devotional poems. I thus decided to make Christina Rossetti the main focus of my research, since this is an area which touches on several developing trends in nineteenth-century studies, such as the increased attention paid to Victorian women poets and the “poetess tradition” since the mid-1990s, and the associated revival of interest in nineteenth-century religious culture, within which women played a central role.
Further research into Rossetti’s poetry from her early poems, often dismissed as juvenilia, which refer to her reading of the Gothic novels of C R Maturin, and the apocalyptic prose of her last years, suggest a Gothic sensibility. Few critics have examined her early engagement with the Gothic, notably through the works of Maturin and Ann Radcliffe, and also through ‘The Vampyre’, a tale written by her uncle, John Polidari. Both her poetics and her subjects reflect this interest in Gothic literature, and my research will cover much new ground by considering Rossetti’s poetry in terms of the Gothic, and exploring her use of the tropes of Gothic, such as fallen women, doubles and spectres.
My planned chapters are:
Christina Rossetti and Gothic Literature (Introduction and literature review)
The Maturin poems and the early influence of Gothic
‘Goblin Market’ and its multiple interpretations
Spectres and spectrality
Gothic and Rossetti’s devotional poems and prose
Gothic, Sing Song and children’s literature

Books in Lincoln

I have recently returned from a lovely trip to Lincoln. I’d never been there before, but have a friend who recently moved there, who lured me to visit him by supplying me with a brochure for the Lincoln Book Festival. I’m pleased to say that Lincoln struck me as a remarkably literary city, but my view may be warped by the things I did while I was there…So many excellent secondhand bookshops! I particularly liked this one, halfway up Steep Hill (they’re not kidding) – Reader’s Rest; how appropriate! I’d hardly been in Lincoln for two hours when I went to my first event, a talk by Joanne Harris about her new book, The Lollipop Shoes, which I have to admit I haven’t read yet, but she’s an engaging speaker whom I’ve been to hear before (and you can read about that here). She suggests her new book is about fear, and managing what we are afraid of, which is often reflected in fairytales and European folklore, which has permeated Western thinking and affects every story we tell. Perhaps we’re not as sophisticated as we’d like to be, she says; we still believe there are monsters out there, be they disease, stalkers or other threats; and so we also need to think that there are people who can fight for us and vanquish these dangers. As she put it, we’re still sitting round the campfire hoping the light will extinguish the darkness.
The next day I went to a discussion on A S Byatt’s Possession, one of my very favourite books. Actually I didn’t feel it covered a great deal that I didn’t know, though I was intrigued by the suggestion that Christabel LaMotte is signposted by Byatt as being based on Christina Rossetti by referring to her as the “Monna Lisa” instead of the “Mona Lisa”, thus referencing Rossetti’s sonnet sequence “Monna Innominata”. Much could be made of that, in terms of gender roles in romantic relationships etc, but this was sadly skipped over – and besides, Byatt says she intended to base LaMotte on Rossetti but eventually settled for Emily Dickinson (for rather odd reasons, I think, but I won’t go into that now!). What did strike me from the talk, though, is how you can read Byatt’s book as a kind of puzzle she’s set, for those with the patience to unravel it. It’s an enormously intertextual, referential, erudite volume, drawing on classical and Norse mythology, Victorian literature and history, genre boundaries, academic mores and so on – you could spend a lifetime unravelling it.
After an exciting day of bookshops, tea and the cathedral, of which Ruskin said: “I have always held and proposed against all comers to maintain that the Cathedral of Lincoln is out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles”, we went to hear the linguist David Crystal lecture. Like most linguists that I have come across, he is afflicted with an enormous fascination for place names, with which he entertained us for a while (did you know that Bricklehampton is the longest place name in the world – I think – that is a first order isogram?) We also learned some interesting terms such as an unkindness of ravens, a puddling of ducks (really!), and a wisp of snipe (which may be specific to Snitterfield.) I was fascinated to hear about the Americanisation of Harry Potter, which has changed crisps for potato chips, crumpets for English muffins, wastepaper basket for trashcan, and so on, but his (and my) favourite is that the nicely English “That’s a bit rich coming from you!” has been changed to “You should talk!” American English seems so pointless when you compare it like that…We also heard about naming places (why don’t we have a town called Shakespeare? The Russians even renamed a town Gagarin, to honour Yuri). Equally, why do we name objects? In the course of researching his book, Crystal came across Yorrick the Yucca (Alas, poor Yorrick…but apparently he lived longer than the owner anticipated); Tardis the garden shed, Cedric the ashtray, and a butter knife called Marlon. The best, though, is a car called Simon because of the Rattle…and a teddy called Isaiah, because one eye’s higher…I have to confess, I went through a stage in my teens of calling things Engelbert; the last, I think, was Engelbert XIII, who was a potted baby Christmas tree. I loved the Victorian phrases that people learning English were taught: “Unhand me, Sir, for my husband, who is Australian, waits without.” “The postillion has been struck by lightning.” But the most uproarious moment of the evening must have been Hamlet’s soliloquy delivered in words which began with H, concluding with “Head holy housewards!” I have a feeling I may be working on King Lear with words starting with L…

Firing at the Canon…

At the moment I’m writing a paper ambiguously titled “Christina Rossetti and the Problem of the Canon” for a conference, and I’m finding it remarkably easy to be side-tracked by the canon debate, so here are a few of my overflow thoughts…
The online OED describes a canon as “a list of literary works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality”. I could take issue with that, but will resist for the moment. Actually, no, I won’t resist, it seems a good starting point. The canon is generally accepted as being works (of fiction – I can’t cope with anything else now!) which are deemed to be of such high quality and lasting value that they are always in print and – the key bit – available to the reading public (so although the canon is a notion that only academics care about or debate, it’s meant to be much wider than that). So far so good – and everyone (that I’ve read) more or less agrees that Shakespeare is the centre of the canon – as Harold Bloom says in The Western Canon, Shakespeare invented us, or how we think of us and are constructed as social creatures – so it stands to reason he should be the spider who created the web, as it were. But the canon changes (hence my taking issue with the OED). No work, no author, can be assured of a permanent place in the canon. The secular canon (as opposed to the somewhat inflexible list of books in the Bible) is by definition an open canon – in many ways (more of this to come) it follows fashions, it’s subject to constant change. Some authors are always there, some come and go.
My paper points out that initial reception is no guarantee of a lasting place in the canon: not many people read the once immensely-popular Felicia Hemans now, for example. (Though they should, in my opinion). The problem with Rossetti’s work is that it comes and goes – very popular, then rather sneered at by the Moderns (though Virginia Woolf deigned to patronise her), then seen as sweet and flowery, a bit of a period piece, in the middle years of the 20th century – and then, trumpets, put out the flags, she’s rescued by the feminists because she was a victim of patriarchal repression…Yes, she was. Well, aren’t we all? (I’m very much the feminist, but feminist criticism can’t encompass everything). But this means that the most- (if not only-) read of her poems is ‘Goblin Market’ – which is amazing, and both precise and ambiguous in a way which has lent itself to pornography (yes, PlayBoy 1978), opera, lesbian interpretations, depictions of a female Christ, and so on. All no doubt valid in their way, but what about her other work? Germaine Greer said that apart from ‘Goblin Market’, Rossetti ‘wilfully’ wasted her life – but how dare anyone say that a life of faith – which produced some devotional poems comparable to George Herbert, precise, witty, structured yet personal poems – is wasted? So although Rossetti’s now canonical, really it’s only a handful of her poems which are – those which serve a social purpose, that of feminism.
And this is Bloom’s biggest concern about the canon. Surely the canon should be largely about aesthetics – encompassing works which are generally agreed to be ‘great’ works, poetry and novels which change lives and world-views, which use language sublimely and rescue us from the moral mires of contemporary society? Yes, but then…we have to teach literature, and the predominant way of teaching seems to be in historical context (valuable) but often to the exclusion of admitting the beauty of the work (pointless). So, Bloom argues, we are ‘reducing aesthetics to ideology’, promoting content over form, turning literature into no more than social documentation – and it also means, of course, that the canon is beginning to encompass work that (ahem) isn’t that good, because it makes a point (the favourite points being the repression of women, post-colonialism, ethnicity and so on). This is mere tokenism, and is as insulting to the writers who become ciphers for a social agenda as it is to those who have earned their place in the canon.
So should there be more than one canon, since the canon already seems so fractured? (People sometimes argue there shouldn’t be a canon at all, especially feminists since the canon is a patriarchal institution like…marriage? but then, you can destroy the word, the idea, but you can’t actually stop certain books being read and taught more than others. It’s not as though there’s a website somewhere that lists all the books in the canon, which you can just shut down.) A multiplicity of canons would allow for a feminist canon, a religious canon (broken down into different religions?), a canon of ethnic writers (again subdivided), oh, there could be so many…And who would ever read it all? You’d only end up with a canon of canons.
Finally, what is the relation of the canon to popular literature? Where do the (widely-read and available, but not that aesthetically agreeable) books in the best-seller lists of the day fit in?
I don’t have any answers; this is just a way of musing, really. If there’s anyone out there reading these, please let me know what you think!

Read more about The Western Canon: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html