ABSTRACT
Because they are nearly contemporaneous, Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems ask to be read in conversation with Christina Rossetti’s death lyrics, even though, as I hope to show, Rossetti’s death lyrics do not participate in the generically altering work of the self-elegy.1 In this chapter, I would also like to broaden the conversation to contrast the feminine self-elegy written by Brontë, Shelley, and Plath with Rossetti’s death lyrics, poems that place speech in the mouth of a newly dead narrator.2 The richness and brilliance of Rossetti’s work makes Rossetti’s death lyrics poems easily strong enough to adumbrate by contrast the formal implications of the feminine self-elegy, in which the speaker’s voice is presented as disembodied posthumous persistence. Drawing on Mary Arseneau’s important work on Rossetti’s faith, I suggest that Rossetti’s poetry’s sometimes implicit invocation of Christianity places her work in contrast to the religiously skeptical afterlife depictions in the troped posthumous works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath. Rossetti’s poems’ intellectually sophisticated struggle with questions of sin and redemption present the terms in a tradition that Wuthering Heights, for example, with its placement of heaven on earth and perhaps in the bodies of lovers, eschews. The typology of Christian afterlife is eschewed or skewed in the feminine self-elegy, which definitively presents death as a topos unknown except for its provision of oratorical space for the speaker. This elision of the Christian afterlife is significant not so much theologically as formally. In the feminine self-elegy, the formal implication of a topos set apart from traditional religious consolation, a topos unknown and unknowable, places feminine voice outside of gender structures. While Saint Paul argues that in Christ there is “neither male nor female,” the tradition of Christianity is clearly patriarchally marked. Rossetti may ironize and problematize this typology, but she does not elide it.3 By contrast, the disembodied speech of feminine self-elegy posits a topos outcast from the framework of Christian afterlife.4 If Rossetti’s oeuvre, as Antony H. Harrison persuasively argues, focuses a concern with the futility of passion and romance, often expressed in implicit contrast to concerns of sin and the eternal soul, nowhere does Rossetti more clearly present a cynic’s view of romantic love than in her poems rhetorically placed in the
mouths of women newly dead who are explicitly or implicitly addressing old suitors.5 In Rossetti’s “After Death,” for example, a suitor visits the fresh corpse of a woman just deceased and longs for her whom in life he ignored. The poem is exemplary of Rossetti’s deployment of a lush cynicism.6 It is spoken in the voice of the dead woman, but it does not envision a grotesque speaking corpse. Rather, the voice is anchored by the corpse, spectrally connected to the quite undisappeared body of the dead woman who speaks the poem. In Rossetti’s lyric, the moment in the poem’s drama that asserts the power of the speaker coincides with the very event that we might assume would entail a loss of power: the passage into death. But the power of the woman speaking after death is a power still utterly connected to her body’s beauty, which the suitor views. Rossetti’s “After Death,” like Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems, rejects the comfort of an afterlife in which the living can communicate with the dead. In “After Death,” the afterlife is characterized by a radical disorientation between the dead and the living. While Dickinson’s “The Soul selects her own Society” (Fr409) could be interpreted as defining Dickinson’s rejection of the female mortuarial forms popular in the late nineteenth century-poems that stage reunions through the emblems of corpse, grave, or angel-Dickinson’s poem eerily turns on its inclusion of audience in the society of the dead speaker. The dead communicate with the living, but the living cannot communicate with Dickinson’s dead speaker. Dickinson’s dead speaker pulls the reader into the topos of death. By contrast, Rossetti’s “After Death” and “Remember” focus the irony of the dead woman’s triumph over her errant suitor at the scene of her laid-out corpse, an irony dependent on the impossibility of the dead reaching the living. Both Dickinson and Rossetti alter the sentimental graveside poem by pointing out the illusory nature of the desire of the living to contact the dead, then, but Dickinson draws the living as audience for death, while Rossetti pushes the living audience into a recognition of the distance between the dead and the living. This ineradicable rupture of death Rossetti, unlike Dickinson, figures in the image of the body. Susan Conley clarifies the work of the female body as figure in Rossetti’s death lyrics. Rossetti’s focus on the female body’s beauty and that beauty’s unreachable status in death marks her death lyrics as formally different from the feminine selfelegy, which is not concerned with the body’s desirability but rather with the speaker’s desire to tie audience to her performance, which un-figures the figure. In their deployment of a disembodied posthumous voice, Plath and Dickinson, Brontë and Shelley differ from Rossetti in part because they take up the topos of death as a way to jar the lyric out of the frame of the domestic; the female body’s desirability is not central to their discourse. While the domestic scene is a locus of control and safety for Rossetti’s death lyrics, the troped posthumous works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath dramatize a collapse of the domestic. Rossetti, in teasing the space of death as a topos for feminine utterance, does not push the trope to contain a rejection of feminine decorum or the domestic scene as a feminine space, under the rubric of which beauty and desirability are lodged. The decorum of the
feminine voice anchored in the feminine body maintains an edgy domesticity in Rossetti, keeping the poems in a domestic space, the corpse as the edge of domesticity. Though she does not depict a grotesque speaking corpse, her posthumous feminine voice is anchored by the corpse. Indeed, the desirability of the woman in “After Death,” like the speaker’s former coquettish character implicit in “At Home,” focuses those poems, even though the woman’s desirability is ironically engaged as death-bound. The feminine stroke of the poems is not, in Kristevan terms, positional. Rather, it is operational: the body’s beauty effects memory and forgetfulness among the dead woman’s survivors. Here, femininity codes physical effect. Arseneau places Rossetti in the context of strong female familial alliances, while Alison Chapman refers to Rossetti as especially well mothered, “an eternal daughter-securely feminine.”7 In this respect, Rossetti differs from women writers who use the disembodied posthumous voice: Rossetti’s death lyrics do not draw on a stance of having been outcast from the maternal, feminine discourse of the body, the body’s beauty and the decorum of the body’s beauty. Strikingly, Chapman uses the term “eternal” daughter, which I take to signify Rossetti’s drawing of the afterlife as a space in which the femininity of the daughter is reiterated by her body’s beauty even when dead and also articulated by the feminine trappings of her burial-the flowers, the errant suitor who at last returns. Indeed, Chapman straightforwardly reads Rossetti as participating in the cult of the beautiful woman’s corpse theorized by Bronfen: “Elisabeth Bronfen […] persuasively argues that femininity is the metonym for death, absence, grief and loss[,] for in the dominant representational scheme the feminine signifies both the ground and the vanishing point of the Symbolic Order.”8 Rossetti’s poems “After Death” and “Remember” signify their intent to remain within the domestic order, the after-death scene implicitly linking back to the before-death reality of the woman’s role as desirable body. To take up Barbara Johnson’s interpretation of the concept of “mother-tongue” as linked to the mother’s allowing the child to speak by giving the child her voice, one might suggest that perhaps Rossetti does not write using the disembodied posthumous voice because she draws on a powerful mother tongue, a strong, conscious alliance with woman’s embodied power, a selfawareness of her place in feminine discourse.9 If in Rossetti the injunction to forget dissipates the link between the dead and the living, Dickinson’s troped posthumous lyrics, by contrast, attempt to instate the space of death as superceding life’s space, to pull audience into the speaker’s space of death as an enforcement of memory: she insists we remember her speaker as a speaker. Dickinson, pitting “Death’s Gifts” against the “Gifts of Life,” asserts the topos of death as that which becomes memory. Dickinson’s “For Death - or rather” (Fr644) presents death as that which offers goods, exchanging her speaker’s death for life, implicitly drawing her reading audience into a marketplace in which death becomes memory. The role of barter in Fr644 presents the daughter-as-speaker as a sort of prostitute figure, trading herself in so that she may speak and speaking from
death’s space as elision of other knowledge. The rejection of what Stuart Curran terms “quotidian” feminine topos puts Dickinson in dangerous terrain. By contrast, Rossetti’s dead speaker does not ask the living audience to become dead with her, nor does she use death’s space as metonymy for prostitution, taking up death’s topos as a way to speak when denied other grounds.10 If Rossetti’s dead speaker marks death’s topos as a feminine, indeed virginal, turn from male desire, the speaker’s feminine status in Dickinson is positional, codified by the speaker’s being lodged in a system that demands she prostitute one aspect of herself, her desirable life, to gain something that she wants-“Death’s Gifts”—including, significantly, a chance to address audience as an author, to have a “Name” (10, 8). Rossetti’s feminine dead speaker does not trade herself in; her feminine speaker’s body’s desirability is not traded for a chance to speak but is pointedly withheld from the economy of desire and withdrawn from memory. The corpse here is the beautiful corpse theorized by Bronfen, but Rossetti uses the moment of death as an ascendance that at long last allows the suffering woman to put others in their place. She employs what Bronfen assumes would be the woman’s most physically passive status, her corpse time, the time of her “laying out,” to subvert the power imbalance that caused her suffering while alive.11 Rossetti implicitly joins the enforced passivity of the woman speaker while alive with the extreme passivity of the exposed corpse, but she transgressively allows these two apotheoses of passivity to cancel each other out. In the death lyrics, the woman-as-corpse becomes powerful. The power is not quite that of the living dead, but, as Angela Leighton suggests, “thin lines are Rossetti’s favourite places”: Rossetti’s dead speakers gain power in death, bearing a transitional revenance.12 In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the woman’s power as corpse is the power of taking away her body from the lover. Her death puts her body out of his reach. In “After Death,” a suitor who did not love the woman speaker is fixed in his place by the loss of access to the woman’s body. The corpse, an emblem, also functions as a boundary and oscillates between boundaries, shifting from the space where the suitor could have touched her but instead abandoned her to the place where the suitor cannot touch her but must look at her. The undertow of violence that guides Rossetti’s Goblin Market surfaces similarly in “After Death” as the corpse’s violation of the male gaze: he must see the woman’s corpse. Here, the corpse uncannily focuses his desire in a way that the living woman could not. In Rossetti’s “After Death,” the woman’s body has power only when its sexual capacity has been put away. Unlike those troped posthumous poems in which Dickinson uses the topos of death to establish her speaker in a place of power over the reader, Dickinson’s dead speaker insisting on her desire to be heard and remembered, the feminine speaker of Rossetti’s poem does not push the power of the dead speaker beyond the ability of the beautiful corpse to allocate male desire. Rossetti’s “After Death” and “Remember,” then, strongly align with Bronfen’s theorization of the female corpse as the locus of male desire but paradoxically suggest that woman’s power is greatest when she can be viewed as an untouchable
corpse. Only in her “laid out” position as corpse can the speaker command the flower of the desirous, “warm” gaze that the male suitor withheld from the living woman; but she can command this desire because her sexual possibility is foreclosed. Desired at last, she cannot be had. In “After Death,” Rossetti uses an aesthetic obviously and rather bitterly linked to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of a desirable woman as a woman: “looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful […] A woman without parallel.”13 While Christina Rossetti implicates this aesthetic in the woman speaker’s pointless death, she does not remove that aesthetic from her lyrics. Rossetti’s death lyrics, inflected by irony, sustain the emblematic quality of woman’s corpse as a site over which the rights of speech are fought. Strikingly, the goal of the feminine dead speakers in “Remember” and “After Death” is the return of the male gaze to the woman’s body. Rossetti’s dead speaker in “After Death” and, more gently, in “Remember” engages this control of the male gaze, the pyrrhic gaining of male desire after female sexuality has vanished. Differing from Rossetti’s death lyrics by a conversion of the scene of sexuality to the scene of oratory, the self-elegy in Dickinson, Plath, Brontë, and Shelley focuses the feminine speaker’s unnatural hunger to speak, to address audience. Rossetti’s dead speaker, on the other hand, presents herself as satiated, as looking back at an audience that she can afford to shed. Angela Leighton, reading Rossetti’s “Echo” as an imaginatively posthumous poem, suggests that the poem typifies Rossetti’s imagination as “always […] posthumous to life.”14 Notably, the site of posthumousness is invoked in “Echo” as a means of organizing the loss of passion, the loss of sexual desire: life is given as that scene in which the feminine speaker would attract suitors. This mood of the backward glance also marks the feminine speakers of Rossetti’s death lyrics as newly dead and specifically contemplating their new distance from the hunger of the living. (“At Home” is centered around a dinner table.) In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the newly dead speaker is both no longer hungry and no longer desirous. Rather, she is newly able to cause and notice insatiable hunger or desire in the living. In “After Death,” the speaker’s deadness itself engenders the other’s desire for her, while in Dickinson’s selfelegies it is the speaker who is hungry for her audience. In Goblin Market, the heroine’s power inheres in her ability to strategically deploy her body as an object of the other’s hunger. Lizzie gains the authority of the poem by using her body to subvert the claims of death and of hunger, feeding her body’s juice to the feminine other because she herself is not hungry. In this difficult poem, death is the first allusion, the poem creating an economy in which to eat is to die. Lizzie is pictured as fat enough to resist eating; her very fingers are “dimpled” (67).15 But Laura has a Siddal-like emaciation, a preexisting hunger, perhaps even an opiate-induced sweet tooth, that pulls her to eat. Laura’s hunger is not predicated on previous eating but rather on previous starvation, in contrast to Lizzie’s plumpness, her “dimpled” fingers evoking a very well fed toddler’s hands. The state of hunger, of the feminine body’s elision-the state that Dickinson and
Plath use as a topos for self-inscription-is evoked in Goblin Market as the locus of an ascetic aesthetic that must be renounced if daughterly virtue is to be retained. In Goblin Market, the fat Lizzie is virtuous because she resists hunger for Goblin fruit, well fed earlier by mother’s milk. Indeed, the maiden’s work is to eat the most fattening foods, to gather “honey,” “milk,” white-flour cakes, butter, and cream (200-210). In Rossetti’s poem, the fall is not simply into hunger, but rather into hunger for a specific kind of food. The way to keep a maiden’s hunger at bay is to keep her fat on butter, cream, white cakes-the maternal element of creamy white substances, like breast milk. Only when Lizzie allows herself metaphorically to reach Laura’s emaciation, to “weigh no more,” can she enter the goblin economy of hunger and desire (322). Lizzie’s plumpness, her quality of already having been well fed, is emphasized in the passage describing the goblin men’s attack: their juice lodges in her “dimples,” while her neck quakes like “curd” (435-6). Following Chapman’s line of argument that Rossetti is an “eternal” daughter, well-mothered, I suggest that Rossetti’s Lizzie can resist the goblin men’s fruit because she is fat with mother-milk, her body emblematically drawn as a fat toddler’s, her hunger proleptically appeased by a generous mother. The abundance of mother’s milk also silences Lizzie, however, who in the end “utter[s] not a word” (430). It is Laura who, once grown, tells the story of the goblin market.16 In other words, while Rossetti’s poem suggests the danger of the trope of the posthumous voice, using the figure of Laura as the hunger artist who eats masculine discourse and deploys the dangerous terms of death to cast her speech, the poem also critiques this disembodied approach to discourse.17 In placing speech through Laura’s “hungry mouth,” Rossetti implies that what is “honey to the throat,” or what allows beautiful speech, is “poison in the blood” (492). After the trauma of Goblin Market’s gorgeous famine, it is Laura, a revenant of sorts, and not Lizzie who retains linguistic power, Laura who tells the story. This crucial difference between the death lyrics and the feminine self-elegy is the emphasis that Rossetti’s posthumous posturing places on the body as revelatory. By contrast, the afterlife in Plath, Dickinson, Brontë, and Shelley is not fleshed out. The rhetorical position of self-elegy as always already intended for readership, a conversation with its targeted-as-belated audience, claims as its uncanny topos this scene of being read as its only afterlife. The afterlife is not fleshed out in the feminine self-elegy, because the “death” mourned in the selfelegy is the death of the speaker’s capacity as a woman to address audience from canonical topos-not the death of the speaker per se but rather the too-early death of her access to central topoi and audience. By contrast, death is an empowering topos in Rossetti’s death lyrics because it offers the speaker a noli me tangere status: untouchable to her audience, she claims the omniscient view of a hypothetical afterlife. The trope of the posthumous voice in Brontë, Shelley, Dickinson, and Plath deploys the topos of death as a direct claim on audience, an
invocation that draws audience close. In reading the self-elegy, the audience is inscribed in this topos of death. The topos of death in the feminine self-elegy, then, invokes an epistemology of radical doubt. The disembodied posthumous voice finds audience by contaminating audience with death, a turn that ironically engages the terms of elegy, traditional male elegy as that turn which pushes against the contamination of life with death. The self-elegy in Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë claims death’s topos as that which will allow a generic, formal alteration of elegy, permitting the feminine voice to enter the male domain of traditional elegy.18 This critical deployment of audience as at once belated and crucially participatory in the genre demarcates the rhetoric of the feminine self-elegy from the corpse poem and from Rossetti’s death lyrics. If the self-elegy calls on the audience to participate in mourning the speaker’s lost topos-her chance to address audience through the canonical gesture of elegy-it does so by invoking the space of death as a marginal topos that in effect becomes central because the posthumous voice pulls audience into that fictive space with its address. This almost violent approach to audience, indicated meta-narratively by Mary Shelley’s Mathilda’s attempt to persuade Woodville, her audience, to commit suicide and suggested in Susan Dickinson’s comment about Dickinson’s poem Fr124-that after reading that poem’s first stanza she goes to the fire to get warm but “never can”—is the crucial gesture of the feminine self-elegy, which uses the speaker’s self-mourned death to implicate audience in mourning and in fear of what not mourning means.19 The deployment of death as a topos for the address of audience in the disembodied posthumous voice importantly shifts the speaker’s relationship with audience, making the relationship to audience the drama of the work. By contrast, the audience of Rossetti’s death lyrics is implicitly cast as onlooker, observer of someone else’s relationship with the speaker; reading Rossetti’s death lyrics, we are not threatened with the undertow, not pulled into death’s space ourselves. I agree, then, with Arseneau’s revaluation that Rossetti’s interaction with Christianity in her poetry is a source of strength in the poems, a strenuous engagement with the complexities of Christian dogma.20 Certainty of the existence of salvation, even if one remains uncertain of one’s own salvation, alters the topos of death as a tool of rhetoric. In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the implicit belief in a paradigm linking salvation and afterlife guides the poems; the audience can read the failure of the survivors to properly mourn the speaker from the stable topos of the dead speaker’s having reached a place from which she can observe the survivors she addresses with detachment. The stability of the dead speaker’s place of address has links to Rossetti’s belief system, I suggest-to her adherence to a structure of faith rather than of skepticism. The effect of that stability in the role it allocates to reading audience differentiates Rossetti’s death lyrics from the selfelegy, which rhetorically strives to destabilize the terms of symbolic and real death-to destabilize the place of address, the speaker’s and the audience’s places.
Rossetti’s “After Death,” spoken by a dead woman whose capacity to speak hovers above her own corpse, centers around the dead speaker’s body, its beauty synecdochically indicated by the rushes and the rosemary. While Susan Conley argues that the poem uses irony to criticize the male figure, placing her argument against other readings of the poem as an unappetizingly self-sacrificing performance of the feminine voice, it seems to me that the poem goes beyond irony and directly questions the value of the male lover’s love in the first place. The man who “did not love [the dead speaker] living” sweetens her cup with his belated display of grief, but, as Conley points out, what can this sweetness be worth now that the speaker’s beautiful body, the focus and locus of romantic love, is dead? The irony of the poem, I want to suggest, is not what Conley reads as the dead woman’s sharp commentary on her lover’s belatedness but a wholehearted questioning of the value of sexual desire centered on the beauty of the female body. With its couched placement of the terms “sweet,” “warm,” and “cold,” the poem suggests, as Harrison argues that Rossetti’s entire oeuvre suggests, that romantic love is not worth very much to begin with.21 That Rossetti, a sometime model for her brother’s paintings, is intensely aware of the role of female beauty as the sacrificial core of romantic love and that she questions this role strongly in her poetry may not be surprising. Rossetti centers the death lyrics on the fraught question of the woman speaker’s body’s beauty and what that beauty means for the speaker. The death lyrics harness a rhetoric that exposes romantic love. This center of romantic love, of the beauty of the woman that draws the desire of the male lover but never results in happiness for the woman, places the loss of woman’s body to death as the mourned “thing in itself” that focuses the death lyrics. Rossetti’s death lyrics center on the woman as object of romantic love, and her richly drawn domestic scenes emphasize, using irony, the hollowness of this role. By contrast, the self-elegies of Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë emphasize the always earlier terms of the death of the feminine speaker as speaker and mourn this rather different loss, deploying a dead speaker to draw attention to the feminine speaker’s metaphorical “death” as speaker before her actual death, to mourn the loss of canonical topos for feminine oratory that precedes any real bodily death. Developing from Harrison’s reenvisioning of Rossetti’s thematic of, as he puts it, the conflict between “amatory and aesthetic” claims, I want to look at the death lyrics through that lens of romance from which the speaker has ironically disengaged.22 Conley notes that “Poems such as ‘Song,’ (‘When I am dead, my dearest’), ‘Remember,’ and ‘After Death,’ are melancholy songs of lovers sundered by death, replete with decorative imagery and stylized archaisms.”23 In my reading of the poems, however, the lovers are not sundered first by death but rather by a betrayal that is then made permanent by death: the male lover who failed to love the woman while she was “living” first sunders the lovers, and death merely underscores and makes permanent his betrayal.24 Death, here, fixes human
frailty in an amber permanence that Rossetti captures in her adumbrated painterly death scenes. If Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems use death as a dramatic engine, a central force, what anthropologist Robert Hertz describes as an “active and contagious nothingness,” death is not active for Rossetti.25 In her “After Death” and “At Home,” human failings are sealed in death, made clear and permanent in death through the evocation of romantic passion as emblematic of the human capacity to betray. But the role of death is rather subsidiary to the human drama, acting something like a frame to set the scene of human failing. Despite the absence of clear Christian connotations in Rossetti’s “After Death,” death exposes the Christian belief that the wages of sin are death-that human sin comes before death both temporally and causally. The role of death in the drama of Rossetti’s death lyrics, then, is to clarify a permanent ethical meaning of human action. Conley notes that in Rossetti’s death lyrics “death becomes an opportunity for the dead woman to exercise power and control.”26 I suggest that the use of death as a source of power differs in Rossetti’s death lyrics from the self-elegy of Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë, insofar as Rossetti’s death lyrics retain an emphasis on the body’s voice, while the formal gesture of writing a speaker whose death precedes her text’s inscription is that turn which makes of the rhetorical device of “voice” a scene of what is written, estranged from the body. Feminine self-elegies emphasize their status as inscription to turn the speaker’s silence while alive into a rhetorical “voice” as trace that persists posthumously. By contrast, Rossetti’s death lyrics eschew evocation of their own textual status: crucially, for Rossetti’s death lyrics, the gaining of rhetorical voice is not what death accomplishes. The disembodied troped posthumous voice puts pressure on the division between what Derrida identifies as the metaphysics of the primacy of speech and the subsidiary role of writing. In the self-elegy, the disembodied posthumous voice becomes a tool through which the woman denied public voicea chance to address central ontological and cultural issues-subversively privileges the scene of text, the topos of the written word, as her mode of claiming a belated cultural centrality. This gesture claims mastery through the always already occulted “trace,” the Derridean “trace” that comes “before being.”27 In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the efficacy of writing as that which conveys the thoughts of the dead is not dramatized. Rather, her death lyrics dramatize posthumous thoughts hovering over a dramatically rendered body-as-scene. Occulted trace is not exposed as “a dissimulation of itself”; instead, the dissimulation is sustained by the rhetoric.28 The self-elegy in Dickinson, Plath, Shelley, and Brontë, on the other hand, dramatizes itself-its presence as inscription-by evoking inscription, a topos in which the rhetorical voice of the dead is never presented as disinvested from the scene of the inscribed text. In the self-elegy of Plath, Dickinson, Brontë, and Shelley, the controlling drama is the speaker’s assumption of the role of inscriber, that drama by which the belated audience of readership is invoked in the text, using to the fullest extent the
ghostly musculature of inscribed speech. I do not mean that the speakers are figuratively depicted in the act of writing. Rather, inscription as route to gaining voice is the drama of the self-elegy. What Derrida calls the “absence of an other here and now” is directly staged by the self-elegy, so that the moment when we read the self-elegy is performative, the moment when the trace evokes its history always already instituted. By contrast, Rossetti’s death lyrics assume the strength of the speaker’s voice and dramatize the speaker’s gaining of erotic power through her death, which transfigures her into sign. The speaker is not depicted as the inscriber, but as the inscribed. The triumph of the speaker of Rossetti’s “After Death” is not over us, the reading audience, but over the lover who betrayed her while she was alive and mourns her in a sensual “deep silence” after her death. Here, the speaker’s rhetorical gifts serve the purpose of exposing the man’s failure, not her own success. The drama of the poem is placed between the man and the woman, and we, the readers, are called on to observe her posthumous triumph over him, the man’s becoming “warm” precisely as the speaker turns irrevocably “cold.” The man’s belated sexual heatedness, his “warmth,” contrasts with the speaker’s ice-maidenly coldness, doubly placing her as the virtuous woman who was not “love[d]”—was not made love to-while “living.” Our role as readers is to consolidate the speaker’s position as a virtuous woman. Dickinson’s missed marriage poem, “The Soul selects her own Society,” by comparison, replaces the speaking body with an inscribed union; in the poem, there is no room where any body is laid out for view. Instead, the rejection of masculine others by the feminine “Soul,” while couched in the mortuarial trappings of a “low Gate” and “Valves of […] Stone,” turns on the living audience of the reader (6, 11-12). Only in our reading of the poem is the speaker’s refusal of others experienced. Strikingly, while the speaker of Rossetti’s “After Death” will feel “sweet” observing the betrayer weep regardless of an audience for her experience of sweetness, Dickinson’s “Soul” will only chose her “One” when a reader reads the poem, for the one she chooses implicitly is the reader already written into the poem. The only scene established in Dickinson’s poem is that of the reader reading the text in which the speaker rhetorically chooses the reader. Dickinson’s romance, if you will, is with the reader, who is always already engaged as a posthumous mate, a “One” who comes too late and comes right on time, entering the stone valves of the mortuarial scene, which inscription, as Derrida suggests, is the engravature that is the text.29
