The Relationship Between Sisters - Book Report/Review Example

 The Relationship Between Sisters Literature often provides a useful tool for the study and understanding of complicated concepts in a variety of fields. In addition to helping bring concerns to the surface, literature examines multiple aspects of a given phenomenon from a ‘lived’ perspective – that is, the characters must experience the event as it occurs, the action must be believable and the results must follow logically. This is as true in poetry as it is in fiction. Social theorists and academics have often turned to literature as a means of examining the affects of such events as colonialism and cultural hybridity in the formation of our concept and expression of the ‘other’. As these concepts are difficult to define or explain, literature provides examples and analogies that bridge gaps in understanding as well as pose new questions to be answered. It also helps us to understand how these ideas were being formed and reinforced within the society in which these texts were written. Written from within and about the ‘other’ in the form of the female figure during the Victorian era, Christina Rossetti continues to be a poet with much to say regarding female relationships and female roles, particularly as one begins comparing her works such as “Goblin Market” (1859) and “Sister Maude” (1860) to determine how her ideas changed with her increased experiences. On December 5, 1830, Christina Rossetti became the youngest of four children born to Gabriele and Frances Rossetti. Although the family was Italian, to the point that Gabriele reportedly “always spoke Italian in the family, never English; and the children from the earliest years, as well as his wife, answered him in Italian” (Bell, 1898: 4), they lived in London where Gabriele worked as Professor of Italian at King’s College London and as Italian teacher at King’s College School. Her oldest brother was the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti while her closest brother was William Michael Rossetti, a writer and critic who worked diligently to collect and preserve his baby sister’s work. The remaining sibling was Maria Francesca Rossetti, who was also an author and later an Anglican nun. As a child, Christina and her brothers and sisters benefited not only from the dual languages they had to learn in England but also from the excellent instruction of their mother, who had been a governess prior to her marriage and who was determined to give all of her children a strong education. “At an early age Rossetti developed a scrupulous manner which meant, her brother teased, that ‘she would soon become so polite it would be impossible to live with her’” (Arseneau, Harrison & Kooistra, 1999: 8). This begins to illustrate the conflicts with gender that affected her life. Rossetti spent much of her life with her mother, living in her mother’s house and working alongside her mother in a failed attempt to start a small school as a means of supporting the family after her father lost his vision. She did receive two marriage proposals, both of which she refused for religious reasons. The first of these was James Collinson, an engagement she broke when he reverted to Roman Catholicism. The second man in her life was Charles Cayley, who turned out not to be a Christian and was therefore unacceptable. “Her presumed disappointment in love has been seen as the key to a body of work noted for its purity of form, dualism of outlook, and obsession with death and loss” (Flowers, 1987: 358). Her later life was characterized by recurring bouts of illness, yet she continued to work on her writing and, on and off, at the Highgate Penitentiary, a place where prostitutes were removed from the streets and retrained to take up positions as domestic workers. She died at age 64 of cancer. Having spent much of her time in the company of women, Rossetti had a great deal to say about the relationships that developed among women, concepts that are reflected in her poetry. For example, she presents a Garden of Eden of female desire in her poem Goblin Market. In the poem, sisters Lizzie and Laura are tempted each day by the fruit of the goblins. When Laura finally succumbs to this desire, she does so by sacrificing a part of herself in the form of a lock of hair, typically given to a loved one upon parting, and a tear, the outward expression of her innermost emotions, in order to purchase all the fruit she can eat. After gorging herself, she describes the fruit she tastes to Lizzy in sexual terms: “You cannot think what figs / My teeth have met in, / … / What peaches with a velvet nap, / Pellucid grapes without one seed; / … / and pure the wave they drink, / With lilies at the brink / And sugar-sweet their sap” (173-183). The imagery presented thus builds by stages into a ‘sugar-sweet’ sexual climax. This interpretation is reinforced by her behavior after eating the fruit, which is much like the behavior of a young woman in love. She can think of very little else other than acquiring more of the Goblin fruit. It is believed Rossetti’s strict control of her own desires in preference of her religious ideologies led to such masterful use of language and imagery. “Either by relinquishing the desired object and moving on or by closing the gap between desire and its object, the self would lose the desire that defines the self and motivates language” (Rosenblum, 1986: 176). The reaction of Laura represents the acquiring of the desired object, which leads to the destruction of the self. She pines away under the cruel burden of unrequited love as she can no longer hear the call of the Goblins. However, as she fades away, her sister, desperate to save her, struggles to purchase fruit from the Goblins to save Laura. However, Lizzie attempts to do this not with her own flesh, as Laura has, but instead with a pure silver coin, removing the object of desire to a further plain, ‘relinquishing the desired object and moving on’ and finding life and light beyond. Lizzie’s refusal to succumb to the temptations of the Goblin fruit angers the Goblins, causing them to try forcing her to eat the fruit and also reinforcing the idea that a good woman is a chaste woman. That women were gaining some strength in society is shown in Lizzie’s ability to avoid eating of the fruit despite the Goblin’s best efforts. Laura’s graphically illustrated feeding off of Lizzie reinforces the concept of the evils of carnal desire as the fruit juice “spread through her veins, knock’d at her heart, / Met the fire smouldering there / And overbore its lesser flame; / She gorged on bitterness without a name: / Ah! fool, to choose such part / Of soul-consuming care!” (507-512). Not only does Rossetti bring up the concept of the ‘other’ female, the one who has passion and desire, but she also addresses the taboo subject of lesbian love in the method of Laura’s salvation, saved through the love of her sister, suggesting in the process that perhaps even this seemingly unnatural act might have some goodness in it. Finally, she illustrates the importance of women supporting and succoring each other as the only ones who might save themselves from the evils of the outer world. “In ‘Goblin Market’ (composed in April 1859), Rossetti seems to advocate women’s collective activity and friendship, insisting that women’s communities are not only viable, but also that the instabilities that emerge within them are the direct result of male forces working outside the female community” (Rogers, 2003). This was slightly before she began working at the Penitentiary. In this depiction of the women in “Goblin Market”, Rossetti is obviously a follower of the predominant Anglican beliefs that women were naturally the nurturers of the world as demonstrated through their instinctual behaviors. “Women may be the prime agents of God in the regeneration of mankind … she is not, however, to teach virtue but to inspire it” (Helsinger, Sheets & Veeder, 1983: 5). Because this is instinctual in her and because her childhood was full of such examples from her mother and her sister, Rossetti assumes that it is also instinctual in all womankind. As the examination of her biography illustrates, her early years were not characterized by a great deal of experiences held outside the home and therefore it is not likely that she would have encountered many women outside of her own social sphere until she began working at the Penitentiary. Understanding the church’s teaching that “Maternal love [is] the only purely unselfish feeling that exists on this earth … nothing can check the flow of maternal love” (Helsinger, Sheets & Veeder, 1983: 5), Rossetti further understands the natural behavior of women to be the forgiving, sacrificing and life-giving actions of God himself. “By intrusting to woman such a revelation of himself, God has point out whom he intends for his missionaries upon earth – the disseminators of his spirit, the diffusers of his word” (Helsinger, Sheets & Veeder, 1983: 5). However, this vision was not the vision that confronted her upon her entry into the ‘real world.’ It was in her capacity as Sister Christina at the Highgate Penitentiary that Rossetti finally experienced the ‘real world’ of lower class women who had found it necessary to work for a living. It is believed that she wrote “Goblin Market” as a morality tale for the women she would meet at the penitentiary and to communicate her vision of what a woman’s society could be. As a volunteer, she “undertook the work of reclaiming the fallen. They would ‘by sympathy, by cautious discipline, by affectionate watchfulness … teach them to hate what has been most pleasant to them, and to love what they have despised, that so after a while they may go forth again into the world and be able to serve amid the ordinary temptations of life, the merciful Saviour whom they have learnt to serve and love in retirement” (Wilson, 2004: 315). Despite the high ideals of such reformatories, though, Rossetti undoubtedly came to realize the discriminatory nature of the institution in which increasingly restrictive guidelines were enforced that sent pregnant and older women away in deference to younger women who might still be ‘saved’ from the work they had selected. In discussing the general practices of the penitentiaries, Bartley illustrates how management committees “had come to the conclusion that it was useless to receive any woman over 30 years of age’, not only because they were thought irreclaimable but because they alledgedly had an adverse influence on younger inmates” (Bartley, 2000: 36). The younger women housed in the penitentiaries coupled with the oversupply of workers to meet limited domestic demand and a strong focus on the importance of marrying well, meaning finding a husband that would support his wife, necessarily created a highly competitive environment that undoubtedly had an effect on the way in which these women behaved toward each other. This highly competitive and back-biting environment could not help but have an effect on the way in which Rossetti envisioned women’s relationships. The sisterly relationship seen in “Goblin Market” is a quite different relationship from that depicted in her poem “Sister Maude.” The storyline in this poem reveals that one sister, having attracted the attentions of a particular man, is doomed to a lifetime of sorrow as a result of her sister’s interference. The speaker begins by asking, “Who told my mother of my shame, / Who told my father of my dear?” (1-2) and then answers both questions with the same response, “who but Maude, my sister Maude, / Who lurked to spy and peer” (3-4). In direct response to the shame brought upon the family through the relationship that Maude reveals to the father in secret, the lover is killed, “Cold he lies, as cold as stone … the comeliest corpse in all the world” (5, 7) while plunging all their souls into damnation all for what is suggested to be mere jealousy and competitiveness. “Though I had not been born at all, / He’d never have looked at you” (11-12). Rather than a society of women working together for their common good while resisting the efforts of men to break them up, these women are seen to actively pursue men and to vigorously compete for them regardless of the men’s inclinations and with no concern for the other’s welfare. “The radically different treatment of sister relationships Rossetti offers in … ‘Sister Maude’ suggests that her attitude toward communities of women changed dramatically following her experience at Highgate” (Rogers, 2003). This antagonistic relationship is concluded in the poem with the speaker’s hope that Sister Maude will live forever with “death and sin” rather than the Paradise expected for the rest of them. As a direct result of her happy childhood and her amicable relationships with her mother and her sister, Christina Rossetti was able to envision a world in which women cared for one another with care and compassion. This is shown throughout “Goblin’s Market”, where the care and compassion of one sister serves to save the soul of the other. At the same time, men are seen as the source of much evil in the world, as the Goblin’s tempt Laura and nearly destroy her. After her experience at the Highgate Penitentiary, Rossetti seems to have revised her opinion of possible female relationships to one that is much more adversarial. Men are also the source of problems in “Sister Maude”, but they take a much more passive role. The primary source of wrong-doing stems not from the male influence, but instead from the jealousy and competitiveness of the female influence. Rather than seeing one sister sacrificing herself for the salvation of another, “Sister Maude” portrays one sister, Maude, going out of her way to harm another and the second actively advocating pain and suffering on Maude for the actions of betrayal in which she engaged. Because of the close proximity in time during which the two poems were written, composed within a year of each other, the only available explanation for Rossetti’s significant change in opinion regarding female relationships remains her experience at Highgate. While she retained the strength of her faith and apparently also remained in a close relationship with her mother and sister, Rossetti seems to have understood that women in general have a much more adversarial relationship among themselves than she had understood throughout her youth – an understanding that is immediately communicated through her poetry. Works Cited Arseneau, Mary; Harrison, Antony H. & Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen (Eds.). Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics & Victorian Contexts. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999. Bartley, Paula. Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914. New York: Routledge, 2000. Bell, MacKenzie. Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study. Cambridge: Roberts Brothers, 1898. Flowers, Betty S. “Review of Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance by Dolores Rosenblum.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 6, N. 2, Women and Nation (Autumn, 1987): 358. Helsinger, Elizabeth K; Sheets, Robin Lauterbach & Veeder, William. The Woman Question: Society & Literature in Britain & America 1837-1883. Vol. 1, (1983. Rogers, Scott. “Re-reading Sisterhood in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Noble Sisters’ and ‘Sister Maude.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. (September 22, 2003). Rosenblum, Dolores. Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997. Rossetti, Christina. “Sister Maude.” Selected Poems. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002. Wilson, A. N. The Victorians. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. Read More