ABSTRACT
In Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata", a sequence of fourteen sonnets and a prose preface, gender and poetic voice are interrelated concerns. This chapter attends to what Eric Griffiths outlines as "a double nature in printed poetry": in "the absence of clearly indicated sound from the silence of the written word," the text contains "hints at voicing" even as it is laid out in "an achieved pattern on the page." It explores the ways in which reflexivity operates not only through direct utterance in the sonnets, but also through implied exchanges with other poets, most evident in the framing of each sonnet with epigraphs of paired quotations from Dante and Petrarch. The chapter proposes that Christina tests the ideological boundaries of female orality through a daring and powerfully aural engagement with literary history, showing her acknowledgment of her debt to great and esteemed male voices within it even as she seeks to sing over and above them.
