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Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence
Sexuality, Belief and the Self
John Holmes
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence
Sexuality, Belief and the Self
John Holmes
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In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence The House of Life. The next thirty years saw the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study illuminates how leading sonneteers, including the Rossettis, John Addington Symonds, Wilfrid Blunt and Augusta Webster, and their early twentieth-century successors Rosa Newmarch and Rupert Brooke, addressed the urgent questions of selfhood, religious belief and doubt, and sexual and national identity which troubled late Victorian England. Drawing on the heritage of the sonnet sequence, the poetic self-portraits they created are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.
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Chapter 1
Dante Gabriel Rossettiâs Inclusiveness: Method and Meaning in The House of Life
âInclusivenessâ and the Inclusive Method
Dante Gabriel Rossettiâs most virulent critic, Robert Buchanan, sparked off the most persistent critical debate on Rossetti when he declared, in his witty, scurrilous and almost instantly infamous article âThe Fleshly School of Poetryâ:
In petticoats or pantaloons, in modem times or in the middle ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly person, with nothing particular to tell us or teach us, with extreme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a careful choice of diction (1871, p.339).
In an age when overt didacticism is out of fashion, the claim that Rossetti has nothing to teach holds out the refreshing promise of a poetry which allows us to make up our own minds. Yet there remains the implication that his work is barren and literally insignificant, a position which has been reiterated by generations of Rossettiâs critics. Buchananâs remarks, published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, were echoed the following year by William Courthope, who denounced Rossettiâs âmysteriesâ as ânothing but word puzzles or literary conceitsâ in the Quarterly Review (1872, p.69). Reviewing Rossettiâs next volume of verse, Ballads and Sonnets, John Addington Symonds could not but agree that Rossettiâs sonnets betrayed no more âthoughtâ than could be expected from âordinary men of feeling and intelligenceâ (1882b, p.324). With the modernist reaction against the eminent Victorians, the dominant thrust of twentieth-century criticism on Rossetti followed these same unsympathetic lines. Under the leadership of Graham Hough (1949) and Harold Weatherby, post-war critics repeatedly reproached Rossetti for concealing vagueness or emptiness beneath a veneer of symbolism, and by the 1960s it had become the critical orthodoxy that Rossetti had been unable to avoid what Weatherby called a âfailure of meaningâ (1964, p.13). Jerome McGann (1969) sought to turn this assumption on its head by arguing that the failure perceived by earlier critics was in fact Rossettiâs success. McGannâs case was that Rossetti deliberately excluded transcendental âmeaningâ from his symbols, elevating in their place exact perception and sensation. Ideas were thus purposefully sacrificed to experience. McGann paved the way for a nihilist reading of this alleged erasure of meaning, developed by Clyde Ryals (1970), Stephen Spector (1971) and McGann himself (1989), in which Rossettiâs poetry is held up as a bold confrontation with the absence of meaning itself. Rossetti emerges as both a victim of and a spokesman for the nineteenth centuryâs loss of faith. The meaninglessness of his verse is rendered, paradoxically, meaningful, embodying and thus disseminating a perception of the world at large as similarly meaningless.
Is Rossettiâs poetry necessarily so meaningless? Is emptiness, self-conscious or otherwise, all it can offer? And is a readerâs relationship with the text really as predictable as this model suggests? Rossetti himself saw the writerâs identification with the reader as âa part of the very act of productionâ (W.M. Rossetti, 1895, vol.1, p.417). Florence Boos has argued that the obliqueness and uncertainty of Rossettiâs poetic language âdirectly dictate a subjective response to the readerâ which is only effective if âoneâs inner correlativesâ are the same as the poetâs own (1976, pp.72, 75). Yet Rossetti himself pinpoints the fact that such âcorrelativesâ vary hugely from person to person in his sonnet Tnclusivenessâ:
The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soulâs board set daily with new food.
What man has bent oâer his sonâs sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?â
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sitâst in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its comers may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell. (The House of Life (1870 text), XXIX)
This sonnet stands at the very centre of Rossettiâs 1870 collection Poems, with fifty-one named units of poetry before it and another fifty-one after it. It stands too at the centre of the original text of Rossettiâs most complex and commanding poem, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, as the first of the sonnets after those which âtreat of loveâ (1870, p.188).
Ostensibly, the significance of this sonnet is that similar experiences can have radically different meanings for different individuals, or for the same individual at different times of life. One face watching another, a womanâs kiss, a room â each carries with it a range of associations that depend upon the person considering it. As Pauli Baum remarks, the idea is âa familiar one and not at all difficult to graspâ (1928, p.162). But Rossetti compels the reader to face it with a directness that the familiar is often denied, not only through the vivid horror of the last two lines, but also through the questioning that forms the second half of the octet. Baum, paraphrasing this sonnet, rephrases these questions as statements, declaring T have changed the questions of the original without, I think, altering the senseâ. Yet for Baum to substitute âA man will wonderâ for Rossettiâs âWhat man hasâŠ?â is indeed to alter the sense, and substantially. The implication of Rossettiâs rhetorical questions is not that men do commonly ask these questions but rather that they do not. The questions themselves are disturbing, Baum himself admitting that the first is âmorbid and almost pathologicalâ and the second â(heaven forgive the word) downright Freudianâ. Rossetti confronts his readers with a fact that they may know but will tend to repress â that the perceptions of others are dramatically, even frighteningly, at odds with their own.
Philosophically, âInclusivenessâ suggests a vision of the world in which no one vision of the world can claim primacy. As McGann argues in his recent book Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost, âEvery vantage point is provisional, relativity is the permanent rule of orderâ (2000, p.43). This appears to confirm Weatherbyâs view that Rossettiâs poetry has âno commitment to any single conception of valuesâ (1964, p.15). But it does not therefore follow that it has no positive commitments or values at all. Rossettiâs brother William suggests in a note to âInclusivenessâ that its title is misleading:
I question whether the word âInclusivenessâ quite indicates to the reader what the author meant to convey in this sonnet. The uncouth word âmany-sidedness,â or âdivergent identity,â might be more apt (D.G. Rossetti, 1911, p.655).
These suggested titles are merely descriptive, each giving a name to the psychological phenomenon recorded in the sonnet. The original title goes further. It guides the reader towards a reaction to this phenomenon, one of acceptance rather than rejection. In translating a sonnet by the thirteenth-century Italian poet Guido Guinizzelli, Rossetti writes âHe is a fool who deems that none has sought/The truth, save he alone, or knows it trueâ (1911, p.435). In Rossettiâs version, the sonnet is aptly entitled âOf Moderation and Toleranceâ, and in it the ethical and intellectual implications of âInclusivenessâ become apparent. To acknowledge and address differing perspectives, to accommodate and seek to comprehend possibilities and identities which seem at first alien or disturbing, is both Rossettiâs ethic and his method.
In the sonnet âInclusivenessâ, specific images â the sleeping face, the kiss and the room â generate a range of responses according to the experiences of the individual. By extrapolation, any image can be seen as capable of evoking a range of significances depending on the âinner correlativesâ, as Boos puts it, which have arisen from that individualâs life to date. This applies not only to direct perceptions and experiences in life, but also to reading, both as an experience in itself and in the perceptions of others which it conveys. Rossettiâs sonnet is reflexive, making a statement about poetry as well as experience. Rossetti acknowledges that the words he writes, the images he chooses to employ, will have different resonances for different readers. In so doing he alerts the readers themselves to this fact, encouraging them both to indulge in and to reflect on their own perceptions and interpretations, whilst asking them to accept that alternative and equally valid meanings may present themselves to other readers. In effect, he is positing a model of poetry which is open to and expressly anticipates a number of seemingly contradictory but ultimately complementary readings.
âInclusivenessâ is one of the sixty-one units of poetry which together comprise the first, unfinished version of The House of Life. This poem in this text embodies the values and strategies that the sonnet sets out. In Sonnets and Songs towards a Work to be called âThe House of Lifeâ to give it its full title, Rossetti uses four poetic devices in particular to create his inclusive approach to meaning. The first is his much-vaunted symbolism. By holding in tension different traditions and expectations, Rossetti is able to formulate symbols which carry a number of meanings at once. The most influential of these inclusive symbols, and a good illustration of the poetâs technique, is the child Love, born in âBridal Birthâ, the opening sonnet of the 1870 text:
As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and first
The mother looks upon the newborn child,
Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled
When her soul knew at length the Love it nursed.
Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst
And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay
Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day
Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst.
Now, shielded in his wings, our faces yearn
Together, as his fullgrown feet now range
The grove, and his warm hands our couch prepare:
Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn
Be born his children, when Deathâs nuptial change
Leaves us for light the halo of his hair. (I)
Ostensibly the personification of Love is constructed within the Classical tradition of Ovid and subsequently Dante. That this Love is an emblem of intense appetite and the potential for transcendence imagined in palpably bodily terms suggests too the Romanticism of Shelley and Keats. There is also, in the figure of the child, an allusion to Christ. Like Mary, the bride who is the mother of Love has yet to lose her virginity in the âmarried flowers to either side outspread/From the knit stemâ of âNuptial Sleepâ (V, 6f). Loveâs hair is identified as a halo, and his birth is brought about by a calling voice not far removed from an annunciation. His role as both the brideâs son and her father recalls the coexistence of the different persons of the Trinity within God, while the centrality of love to Christâs teaching is further grounds for associating the infant Love with the infant Jesus, in parallel with the identification of love with God in the First Epistle of John:
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. [âŠ] If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us (I John, 4. 7â12).
Rossettiâs Love, like the love that is the God of St John, exists in the speakerâs beloved and is made manifest in his love for her and in hers for him. It is pure, so its expression in sexual love within marriage is also pure. Finally, the association of love with Christianity is implicit in the idea, central not only to this sonnet but to the sequence as a whole, of a revelation taking place through the rebirth that is death. The figure of Love in The House of Life is not Christ, nor is it the Romantic lover writ large, nor indeed is it simply a motif borrowed from Dante. It is instead a new symbol which combines elements of each and alludes to all three. How one reacts to these different elements, and to Rossettiâs handling off them, will depend on oneâs own perspective. While a given combination can appear blasphemous or parodie, as Lothar Hönnighausen (1988, p.232) and George Landow (1980, p.201) respectively suggest, the appeal for Inclusiveness made by Rossetti in the middle of his sequence steers us towards more open and accepting readings.
The second tactic within Rossettiâs strategy of Inclusiveness operates not through imagery but through voice. The biographical thrust of so much criticism of Rossetti â which has always read his sonnets as personal poems and was quick to latch on to his romance with Jane Morris as their immediate source â has obscured the fact that there is a plethora of voices within The House of Life. The nineteenth-century sonnet had taken a line from the Romantic self-expression of Wordsworth and Keats, which had gone on to colour the sonnet sequence both through Elizabeth Barrett Browningâs deeply personal Sonnets from the Portuguese and through the growing number of biographical interpretations and editions of Elizabethan sonneteers (Holmes, 1999, pp.41â45). Rossetti, on the other hand, hoped in The House of Life âto put in action a complete dramatis personae of the soulâ (1965â67, vol.2, p.850). The immediate association is with the dramatic monologue, which he himself mastered in âJennyâ and âA Last Confessionâ, and which was the chosen form, to differing degrees, of the two older contemporaries whose poetry he most consistently admired, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. By employing dramatic voices, and borrowing from his friend George Meredithâs Modern Love the technique of switching from first to third person between sonnets, Rossetti allows for a range of signification depending on the readerâs perception of the speakersâ identities.
The third sonnet of the 1870 sequence, âLovesighf, is a love-sonnet open to a biographical reading but not demanding or expressly authorising one:
When do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through thee made known?
Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,)
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul its own?
O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,â
How then should sound upon Lifeâs darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Deathâs imperishable wing? (III)
As well as its openness to dramatic readings, this sonnet is open-ended, consisting of nothing but questions. This is the syntactic manifestation of Rossettiâs third inclusive technique. Through asking questions rather than making statements, he allows the reader the freedom to concur or not with such answers as may be implied within the text. As the form of a question pre-supposes an answer beyond itself, so a number of Rossettiâs sonnets close with a gesture towards a moment after that of the sonnet itself. In many, including âLovesightâ, the c...