ABSTRACT

ROSENBLUM’s book-length feminist study considers Rossetti specifically as a female poet, and suggests that Rossetti mythologizes the female consciousness of being seen, creating the figure of the enduring stone-woman who is both spectacle and witness, the watcher watched. Rosenblum links Rossetti with the “sentimental” tradition of Felicia Hemans and L.E.L. (Letitia Landon), and with the “aesthetic of renunciation”, which embraces denial and “self-canceling states of being”, arguing that Rossetti evolved her own “poetry of endurance” out of this tradition. Rossetti, says Rosenblum, engages the male artistic tradition in a deliberately parodic fashion, intentionally adopting and critiquing its reification of women. Rosenblum examines Rossetti’s female figures (mothers, daughters, sisters, brides, nuns, corpses, ghosts), and dedicates a full chapter to the pattern of desire, loss, and renunciation, and the figure of the nun who turns renunciation into valediction. Considerable attention is given to Goblin Market, reading it in the context of recurring motifs in Rossetti’s other poems-gardens and anti-gardens, appetite and sufficiency, the self as ungerminating kernel-stone and fruit-bearing tree. Rosenblum cogently argues a thesis that serves to unify Rossetti’s oeuvre; the drawback is that her study tends at times to be narrow.