The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti

Azelina Flint

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000416800
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In an unprecedented comparison of two of the most important female authors of the nineteenth century, Azelina Flint foregrounds the influence of the religious communities that shaped Louisa May Alcott's and Christina Rossetti's visions of female creativity. In the early stages of the authors' careers, their artistic developments were associated with their patrilineal connections to two artistic movements that shaped the course of American and British history: the Transcendentalists and Pre-Raphaelites. Flint uncovers the authors' rejections of the individualistic outlooks of these movements, demonstrating that Alcott and Rossetti affiliated themselves with their mothers and sisters' religious faith. Applying the methodological framework of women's mysticism, Flint reveals that Alcott's and Rossetti's religious beliefs were shaped by the devotional practices and life-writing texts of their matrilineal communities. Here, the authors' iconic portrayals of female artists are examined in light of the examples of their mothers and sisters for the first time. Flint recovers a number of unpublished life-writings, including commonplace albums and juvenile newspapers, introducing readers to early versions of the authors' iconic works. These recovered texts indicate that Alcott and Rossetti portrayed the female artist as a mouthpiece for a wider community of women committed to social justice and divine communion. By drawing attention to the parallels in the authors' familial affiliations and religious beliefs, Flint recuperates a tradition of nineteenth-century women's mysticism that departs from the individualistic models of male literary traditions to locate female empowerment in gynocentric relationships dedicated to achieving a shared revelation of God.

1 “I am Even I”: Rossetti and Alcott Resisting Male Authority

In his 1904 memoir of Christina Rossetti, Some Reminiscences, William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919) described his sister’s transition from childhood to adolescence as a period in which she increasingly forced herself to subdue her passionate emotions: “Her temperament and character, naturally warm and free, became ‘a fountain sealed’” (lxviii). This interpretation of Christina’s early life was echoed by her other brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), in his 1877 chalk portrait of Christina and their mother, Frances: Christina Georgina Rossetti; Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti (nee Polidori). The portrait shows both women in side-profile and emphasizes their austerity and inscrutability. Each gaze inclines away from the viewer in a frown, while the lips of both women are set severely and appear to eschew the expression of emotion—something that is also emphasized by the muted blue and grey palette. When discussing this portrait in his memoir, William Michael again linked it to his sister’s enforced self-repression: “Whenever I set my eyes upon it, the lines from her poem, ‘From House to Home’ come into my mind—‘Therefore in patience I possess my soul; / Yea, therefore as a flint I set my face’” (lxv).

William Michael’s interpretation of Dante Gabriel’s portrait as a straightforward representation of their sister’s inner life encapsulates the ways in which Christina’s theology of renunciation has been interpreted by succeeding generations of critics. Christina’s religious faith has historically been read as stifling and repressive, a symptom of the period in which she lived. Likewise, Louisa May Alcott is remembered as ‘Duty’s Faithful Child,’ a nickname given to her by her father commemorating the sacrifice of her ambitions for his own. The authors’ theologies of renunciation have historically been read as coercive outlooks that deny their agency and ability to engage in informed discourses with their male relatives. Yet as this chapter shows, by exploring the authors’ engagements with their male relatives and the wider Pre-Raphaelite and Transcendentalist movements, both women champion the importance of spiritual accountability: each person must strive to attain eternal salvation through acknowledging their responsibility to others. In correspondence and life-writing, collaborative literary projects and autobiographical fiction, Christina and Louisa reject ideologies of individualism contingent upon the female subject’s subservience to the male artist.

William Michael’s biographical reading of his sister’s verse has influenced subsequent interpretations of her poetry,¹ while Dante Gabriel’s portrait, as a surviving visual representation, is often circulated as a reliable depiction of her character.² Barbara Garlick interprets Christina’s identification with the image of “the frozen fountain” as a reference to her virginity and “the loss of selfhood involved in repressed sensuality” (105), while Dolores Rosenblum conflates Christina’s impenetrable demeanor with her role as a Pre-Raphaelite model, claiming her severe facial expression “becomes a … mode of aggression, as this seemingly stoical declaration reveals: ‘Yea, therefore, as a flint I set my face’” (85).

Twentieth-century critical readings of Christina’s verse often portray her as suppressing her sensual nature, fostered by the Pre-Raphaelites, to meet the requirements of the religious beliefs she shared with her mother and sister. Donald Sturge uses William Michael’s description of Christina as a “fountain sealed” to support his claim that she experienced an “inner conflict” reflecting diverging familial influences, which can be “divided into two categories, ‘religious’ and ‘intellectual’ corresponding to the predominate interests of mother and father respectively” (193). R.A. Bellas likewise argues Christina withdrew into herself because of her religious belief-system, which he describes as an “imposition of a code of life—a way of thinking, feeling, and acting—that did not satisfy the needs of Christina’s personality or adequately explain her experiences” (43).³ Yet, Christina’s stoical demeanor, perceptible in the flint-like facial expression of Dante Gabriel’s portrait, belies a hidden depth—as can be observed in her poem “Flint” (251): “An opal holds a fiery spark; / But a flint holds fire” (7–8).

Louisa May Alcott’s early reception was likewise overshadowed by her father’s published evaluation of her character. Specifically, in his 1882 Sonnets and Canzonets, Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) included a tribute to his daughter, which described her as “Duty’s faithful child” who had “vexed a sprightly brain” to “cherish kindred dear” (qtd. in Matteson 404 9–14). As William Michael’s assessment of his sister’s character has influenced subsequent readings of her poetry, so has Bronson’s description of his daughter shaped successive critical responses to her life and writing. Early reviewers praised Louisa’s submission to her father’s will with an 1888 obituary claiming she would be remembered as “the devoted daughter, on whose arm leaned for support that white-haired sage from whom her separation in life has been so pathetically brief.”⁴ This tradition of interpretation continued into the 1970s with Carol Gay claiming that Louisa was unable to mature as a thinker because her relationship with her father infantilized her.⁵

Leona Rostenberg’s 1943 discovery of Alcott’s pseudonymous horror fiction and Madeline B. Stern’s subsequent 1975 landmark edition of Alcott’s forgotten thrillers, Behind a Mask, strengthened the conflation of Alcott’s literary output with her dutiful relationship with her father. Much has been made of Alcott’s jesting admission in an 1886 interview that she obscured her “lurid style” for fear that her subversive characters might go “cavorting at their own sweet will” in front of “dear Mr. Emerson” and her “own good father” (qtd. in Paola Giordano 146).⁶ Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant argue that Louisa’s pseudonymous work embraces the Transcendentalist ideals of “self-expression, self-reliance and self-exploration” (99) and is veiled under a pseudonym because Alcott anticipated her father and Emerson disapproving of a woman embracing these principles (100).⁷ As recently as 2012, Meg Jensen has similarly contended that Alcott’s work implicitly expresses her sense of repression under her father’s “intrusive surveillance” (10). While Jensen acknowledges that Alcott “critiqued” Bronson’s philosophy in her writing, she claims Alcott nonetheless “avoided … explicit public critiques” of her father, which is “in a Bloomian reading” evidence of “weakness” (5 10).

And yet, something of vital imporance is missed in these readings because they defer to prominent biographical fallacies about the authors inherited from their early critical receptions, shaped by their male relatives. For example, they place considerable emphasis on the change in temperament both women experienced during adolescence when they relinquished the passionate demeanors that characterized their early lives.⁸ In childhood, Christina was allied with Dante Gabriel as one of the ‘two storms’ of the family, as opposed to the ‘two calms’ of her other siblings: Maria and William Michael. Christina’s preoccupation with religious obedience and devotional practice followed her adolescent breakdown in 1845 when she was 15 years old. There has been much speculation about the possible medical causes of Christina’s reported breakdown, but now as in her own lifetime, these tend merely to deny her agency by viewing her religious faith as a symptom of her mental illness.⁹As a consequence, it is suggested here, we have come to know her through, essentially, misreadings of her life experiences.

Alcott’s childhood was subject to comparable fits of anger and frustration. Like Rossetti, who admitted to mutilating her arm with a pair of scissors in childhood after being reprimanded by her mother, Alcott’s journal expresses resentment of parental authority and surveillance.¹⁰ In adult life, Alcott relinquished this resentment to take on the role of family breadwinner, often assuming literary projects that were distasteful to her, such as the Little Women trilogy. Alcott’s sense of familial obligation is sometimes connected to her father’s disapproval of her fiery temperament; her theology of renunciation has been read as an attempt to win his approval.¹¹ In reality Alcott’s decision to become the family breadwinner reflects her lifelong dedication to and affiliation with her mother and the wider matrilineal community: Alcott provided the economic support her father was unable to offer in his career as a philosopher.¹² It will be seen that Alcott and Rossetti rejected the individualistic outlooks modelled by their male relatives to assert their conceptual independence as artists; they believed the individual should prioritize eternal salvation and service to others above public acclaim. Their correspondence with their male relatives partakes in lively debates concerning the role of the artist, demonstrating their wit, satirical skill and, at times, playfully independent thinking.

Currently, there are no studies comparing the influence of the male and female communities of the Rossetti and Alcott families, with the exception of Madelon Bedell’s The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (1980) and Dinah Roe’s The Rossettis in Wonderland (2011), exhaustive biographical studies that, by virtue of their genre, do not extensively examine familial debates concerning artistic identity. My recovery of the authors’ affiliation with their matrilineal communities demonstrates that Alcott and Rossetti advanced alternative models of female creativity to the figure of the poet as prophet championed by the Romantics and later taken up enthusiastically by second wave feminist critics. By placing Rossetti’s and Alcott’s theologies of renunciation alongside their male relatives’ ideologies of individualism, the work that follows illustrates that renunciation is practiced with the view of empowering women to safeguard and promote one another’s human dignity in the face of the male individualist’s solipsistic self-interest.

Alcott and Rossetti imagine a world where artists and philosophers collaborate with providence through adapting their visions to the changing circumstances of their lives. They interrogate the real-world implications of Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite values, and predict the future lives of their male relatives. Ironically, the authors’ summations of the fruits of an individualistic outlook prove to be more accurate than the male artists’ inspired visions: both women demonstrate that the incorporation of the female subject into the male artist’s ego is detrimental to both parties, as well as the wider community. As Alcott and Rossetti turn away from the artistic examples of their male relatives, we see them championing women’s spiritual authority, religious faith and renunciatory practice—qualities at the forefront of their collaborative writing within the matrilineal community, which I explore in later chapters of this book.

I begin here, however, by surveying the authors’ correspondence with their male relatives: drawing attention to their declarations of conceptual independence and the promotion of idiosyncratic literary styles that foreground the merits of women’s renunciatory theologies. In autobiographical fiction and literary collaboration, Alcott, and Rossetti skillfully mimic and ventriloquize the style, voice and tenets of Transcendentalism and Pre-Raphaelitism to expose the movements’ ideological dependence on the subjugation of women and the subordination of the wider community to the aspirations of the individualistic self. In work that explicitly evaluates the movements’ spirituality, Alcott and Rossetti stress the importance of abiding by an ethical code of conduct that tempers the moral excesses accompanying the pursuit of sublime experience. Ultimately, both women reorient our attention to the practice of renunciation espoused by female figures of spiritual authority. In concert with their wider matrilineal communities, both Alcott and Rossetti argue that artists should prioritize the redemption that is the fruit of service to others above personal fulfilment centered on the all-consuming gratification of self.

“I am Even I”: Christina Rossetti’s Assertion of the Female Poet’s Independence in Her Correspondence with Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Christina Rossetti’s correspondence with Dante Gabriel Rossetti reveals her intellectual engagement with the values of the Brotherhood and her development of a unique poetic voice that contests the individualistic vision of the Pre-Raphaelites. She resists her brother’s criticism of her work and reasserts her poetic identity, while endorsing the achievements of other female poets, who were subject to her brother’s disapproval. This can be observed in her critical commentary of the poetry of Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862), Dante Gabriel’s late wife. Christina considered a selection of Siddal’s poems, furnished by her brother, for inclusion in her upcoming 1865 volume of verse (C. Rossetti Letters 1 224) and favored the works that were most critical of her brother. Christina regarded Siddal’s poems as autobiographical,¹³ and claimed that her favorite was “Number III,” “Dead Love” (Letters 1 225 fn. 3), a poem that condemns the inconstancy of the narrator’s beloved:

Oh never weep for love that’s dead

Since love is seldom true

But changes his fashion from blue to red,

From brightest red to blue,

And love was born to an early death

And is so seldom true. (1–6)

In speaking of her especial admiration for “Dead Love,” Christina implicitly affiliates herself with Siddal’s critique of her brother. Dante Gabriel’s poetry and painting commonly features dead women who redeem their unworthy beloveds through prayerful intercession in the afterlife. Here, Siddal presents love, rather than the beloved, as dead and transforms the masterful personified figure of “Love,” conceived by Dante, and developed by her husband, into a foppish character who changes his color with the fashion of the moment.

When evaluating “Dead Love,” Christina daringly informs Dante Gabriel that she admires the poem because it is “piquant … with cool bitter sarcasm.” This is an audacious admission, given the fact she associates Siddal’s poetry with “Lizzie herself” (225). Unsurprisingly, Christina’s next letter indicates her brother does not agree with her positive evaluation of the poem.¹⁴ Christina implies that Dante Gabriel’s reaction belies his desire to control Siddal’s image after her death.¹⁵

Emily J. Orlando argues that Siddal’s poetry has been continually associated with that of Dante Gabriel as “products of the great artist’s influence” that are “decidedly secondary to his canon” (628). Orlando claims that this was because Dante Gabriel “continually put his stamp on how history would remember [Siddal],” suppressing the publication of her poetry, and even destroying her photographs, so she would be remembered solely through his paintings (628–629). Christina Rossetti’s letter simultaneously acknowledges her brother’s desire to control Siddal’s reputation, while implicitly supporting Siddal’s criticisms of his inconstancy.

Christina’s responses to her brother’s criticisms of her own poetry assert her independence and stress the uniqueness of her poetic identity. Anthony H. Harrison has argued that Christina refutes her brother’s criticisms through an illicit “strategy of depreciation” where she refers to alleged technical weaknesses to justify her rejection of her brother’s advice (95). However, a careful examination of Christina’s correspondence reveals that what may appear to be an affirmation of poetic weakness is a statement of poetic independence.

When responding to her brother’s request that she allow him to provide a list of recommended revisions for her upcoming volume of verse, Christina replies: “Please make your emendations, and I can call them over the coals in proofs:— only don’t make vast changes as ‘I am I’” (Letters 1 232). While at first glance this may appear to be an acknowledgement of her artistic limitations, Christina is, in fact, quoting her triptych of poems, “The Thread of Life” (330–331). In these poems, the narrator initially expresses a desire to join in the activities of those surrounding her,¹⁶ only to repudiate the desire by asserting the immanence of her personal identity:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “I am Even I”: Rossetti and Alcott Resisting Male Authority
• Part I: “Left-Handed Societies”: Women’s Life-Writing
• Part II: “A Loving League of Sisters”: Alcott and Rossetti’s Promotion of Christian Values through the Ties of Sisterhood
• Conclusion
• CODA: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Matrilineal Theologies of Renunciation
• Works Cited
• Appendices
• Index