The Pre-Raphaelites.

Boos, Florence S.

During 2013 the writings of the Pre-Raphaelites continued to inspire steady interest, as critics and scholars focused on the relationship between biography and literary creation, and the publication contexts and visual qualities of Pre-Raphaelite literature. As in past years, interest centered on the philosophical and religious nuances of Christina Rossetti's poetry, and in addition, Elizabeth Siddal's writing received rare and welcome critical scrutiny.

The Rossettis and Elizabeth Siddal:

Frances Dickey's The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (University of Virginia Press) outlines a trajectory of Victorian and modernist poems that explore complexities of individuality and selfhood. In chapter 1, "Portraiture in the Rossetti Circle: Window, Object, or Mirror," Dickey contrasts the "portrait poems" of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which assume a painting's intelligibility as an index of the soul, with Rossetti's two poems titled "The Portrait" and Swinburne's "Before the Glass," written in response to Whistler's "Symphony in White." Rossetti's "Portraits" offer contrasting approaches; whereas his sonnet "The Portrait" attributes subject-like capacities to the painting itself, subsuming both artist and subject within its beautiful surfaces, his 12-stanza interior monologue broods on the gap between portrait and memory, as the speaker's self dissolves into the mirroring portrait and his present identity into that of the past. Similarly Swinburne's poem denies any unified interiority to the woman represented in Whistler's painting, celebrating instead the many forms of reflection suggested by her image. Dickey notes that this "interspatial" sense of identity--formed between persons and between persons and objects--anticipates that of twentieth-century modernists, who valued "multivocality, non-narrativity, and a system of surface reflections" (46). Dickey's discussion of portrait poems of the 1860s and 70s might usefully have been supplemented by considering an alternate tradition of mirror/self-portrait poems by women such as Augusta Webster and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, however, and its swift historical slide from male Pre-Raphaelites to male modernists could benefit from attention to intermediary portrait/mirror poems by Michael Field, Mary Coleridge, and other fin de siecle poets.

In Christina Rossetti's Gothic (Bloomsbury), Serena Trowbridge argues that poetry is "a form positioned to manifest elements of Gothic, since it is by nature fractured" (23) She interprets Rossetti's poetry as an expression of such a Gothic sensibility, seen as "a collective term for an assortment of tropes and styles," (1) which include preoccupation with death, the grotesque, and haunting. Although many of the features Trowbridge identifies as Gothic also fit well within other interpretive contexts, her readings provide an alternate approach to the many discussions of Rossetti's theology per se.

In chapter 1, "The Spectrality of Rossettian Gothic," Trowbridge reviews theoretical insights on haunting, ghosts, and other spectral phenomena offered by Freud, Derrida, Terry Castle, Alison Chapman, and others, and applies these definitions to several Rossetti poems in which a speaker expresses terror at a haunting presence or crosses a tabooed threshold. She notes that Rossetti's ghost poems are most often "fragments of narrative--the thoughts of the speaker, or a ballad with a story only hinted at" (51-52). In chapter 2, "Early Influences: Rossetti and the Gothic of Maturin," Trowbridge argues for the importance of Rossetti's eight early poems based on novels by Charles Maturin. She observes that Maturin provided Rossetti with models of strong-minded heroines trapped in convents, torn between earthly and spiritual love, or suffering from their own as well as others' transgressions, all situations that recur repeatedly throughout her later works. Unlike their tormented or transgressive originals, however, Rossetti's Maturin-based heroines achieve redemption, and Trowbridge remarks that for Rossetti, "the shadow of the fallen world of the Gothic novel serves only to indicate the eternal glories of heaven" (87).

In chapter 3, "Rossetti, Ruskin and the Moral Grotesque," Trowbridge defines Ruskin's "grotesque"--distortion, excess, and ugliness--in relation to concepts of the sublime: "the presence of an object which is perhaps unexpected or even absurd, but which represents a sublime truth in a symbolic manner" (98). This rather broad definition nonetheless prompts interesting commentary on "My Dream," Rossetti's nightmare of an engorging crocodile. Trowbridge finds that Ruskin's more nuanced category of the "noble grotesque," in which the imagination is "overwhelmed by the extent of spiritual truths" (106), links morality and the sublime to portrayals of menace and decay, as in Rossetti's "The Dead City" and "The World," and she concluded, once again, that Rossetti's work "manifests an ennobling grotesque which is tailored to her own religious and poetic ends" (112).

In chapter 4, "'Goblin Market' and Gothic," Trowbridge explores the many Gothic features of Rossetti's best-known poem; among these are its fractured and changeable style; use of doubles and doubling; concern with "fallenness" and moral rectitude in women; intrusion of supernatural, magical, and fantastic elements; suggestions of vampirism; and of course, the monstrous qualities of the goblin men. Since this chapter provides a balanced overview of the poem's many themes, noting alternate possibilities for interpretation, it could serve as a useful critical introduction for students encountering the poem for the first time.

Finally, in chapter 5, "Shadows of Heaven: Rossetti's Prose Works," Trowbridge identifies Gothic/Christian features in Rossetti's eschatology, as seen most pervasively in The Face of the Deep, Rossetti's commentary on Revelations. Trowbridge notes Rossetti's frequent evocation of dark and threatening landscapes and preoccupation with the morbidity of physical death. Rossetti's commentaries also probe dualities of surface and depth, the crossing of boundaries, and the bifurcation of female character, as embodied in Eve, mother of humankind, and the corrupt and cruel Jezebel. Although Trowbridge suggests that Rossetti endeavors "to minimize ... the negative treatment of womanhood" (158), only some of her citations would seem to bear this out. She concludes that The Face of the Deep "enacts for the reader the genuine Apocalypse" (167), and that for Rossetti, the final threshold of death will expel the shadows and fears of the Gothic world.

In "New Contexts, New Meanings: Reprints of Dante Rossetti's and Christina Rossetti's Poetry in the American Press" (JTRS 22, Spring), Marianne Van Remoortel explores the hitherto little-noticed poetry by Dante and Christina Rossetti printed in American periodicals from 1858 onwards. Although Dante's poetry was carefully introduced in elite east coast art journals, later magazines and newspapers simply reproduced the poems of both siblings freely and without commentary. Christina's poems were far more popular than her brother's, and Van Remoortel demonstrates that when given altered titles or placed in new contexts her poems could assume quite different meanings; for example, the innocuous "Helen Grey" became an anti-suffragist defense of female subordination, and "Our Country" (originally "Mother Country") was reframed to suggest a nationalist patriotism rather than nostalgia for the poet's Italian birthplace.

In "Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Painter Paintings: Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, Fra Pace, and St. Catherine" (JPRS 22, Spring), D. M. R. Bentley continues his precise and historically informed commentaries on the sources and implications of Rossetti's intertwined poems and art works. Bentley traces the development of Rossetti's artistic ideals, first evinced in his symbol-laden "Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante" (1852), which proclaims faith that through "Art, Friendship, Love and Youth" (inscribed on the painting's frame), Rossetti and his fellow artists might renew an earlier epoch of sacred art. In a second stage influenced by Browning's poems on artists, "Fra Pace" (1856) portrays a monk who lovingly depicts the lineaments of a mouse, anticipating the Pre-Raphaelite conviction that the natural world manifests symbols of divine presence. Finally, in "St. Catherine" (1857), in which a bored society woman arranges for her portrait in the guise of a saint, Bentley descries Rossetti's critique of the contemporary appropriation of sacred art for commercial ends, thus adumbrating the next, more sensual, phase of his own art.

Bentley explores another aspect of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics in "Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Absurd,' Antiquarian, and 'Modern-Antique' Medievalism(s): Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The Bride's Prelude, and 'Stratton Water,"' (VP 51, no. 1 Spring), that of the potential tension between dual allegiances to realism and medievalism. Noting that Rossetti had later described his youthful painting "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" as filled with "absurd" medievalisms (that is, inaccuracies), Bentley traces ways in which Rossetti's paintings and poems from the late 1840s through the early 1860s develop from romantic anachronism to a resolutely "mediaeval and unmodern" Art Catholicism (119). Bentley next examines the blend of historical detail and psychological exploration in Rossetti's early poetic fragment "The Bride's Prelude," noting its sources in accounts of medieval costumery as well as Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. Finally, he considers Rossetti's neo-medieval ballad "Stratton Water" as a successful early instance of historical accuracy in form, diction, and phraseology that anticipates his later medieval artworks such as "The Blue Closet" and designs for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co.

In "Filling in the Blanks: Music and Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti," (VP 51, no. 4 Winter), Lorraine Wood considers Rossetti's use of musical allusions and images in his paintings and poetry. After adducing evidence for her intriguing claim that "inaccurate instruments and impossible performances are standard features of Rossetti's paintings," she postulates that this lack of realism was intentional, since both his poems and artworks portray the "problems of performative art." If Wood's claim that musical performance is also implied in instances where no musical instrument is directly portrayed may seem debatable, it nonetheless inspires insightful commentaries on the aesthetic intentions of "The Day-Dream," "How They Met Themselves," and other artworks. In the final section Wood examines allusions to music, performance, and sound within such poems as "The Sea-Limits," "The Monochord," and "For an Allegorical Dance of Women." Observing that Rossetti extends the "performative space" of his poems through a mixture of visual and temporal impressions, she concludes that he contributes to Victorian aestheticism by "framing art not as a material object, but as an interpretive process" (553).

Amanda's Paxton's "Love, Dismemberment and Elizabeth Siddal's Corpus" (JPRS 22, Fall) is one of few commentaries thus far on Siddal's poetry, as opposed to her biography or drawings. Paxton examines her poetry against the background of Pre-Raphaelite expectations that a model be portrayed both realistically and as a symbol of the ideal. She notes that Siddal's "A Year and A Day" reflects a sense of dismemberment, as the speaker is perceived only through her "hands," "face," "hair," or other reductive forms of synecdoche. Rejecting the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of love, Siddal's speaker instead finds the artist's gaze to be a "colonization of her inferiority" (16), and rejects the hope that love can exist in the present or had even existed in the past. Paxton concludes that Siddal's disillusionment anticipates "postmodern anxieties surrounding the detachment of the image and the referent," and that her poetry suggests that "until there is a move beyond the Romantic primacy of the transcendent ideal at the cost of the material real, traditional representational practices ... will continue to [portray] a two-dimensional face upon a canvas, a hand without a soul" (20).

In "Remembering Cayley: Christina Rossetti's 'Dearest Friend,"' Diane D'Amico provides a full account of Rossetti's relationship with the poet and Dante scholar Charles Cayley, whose proposal of marriage she declined in 1866. As D'Amico indicates, however, it is more useful to view their relationship as a treasured lifelong friendship rather than a failed romance. That both poets cherished this tie is clear; Cayley continued to visit the Rossetti household frequently until his death, and his will appointed Christina his literary executor and bequeathed to her any posthumous profits from his writings. In turn, Christina frequently sent him tokens of remembrance, such as a ticket to a garden show (a response to his expressed love of flowers), and several of her poems and prose writings embedded coded references to Cayley's writings and their relationship, for example, in "Il Rosseggiare dell' Oriente," "Parted," "My Mouse," "From the Antique," and her prose commentary Time Flies. These indicate Rossetti's (perhaps slightly inconsistent) faith that although Cayley's views on the incarnation and afterlife would in her view have precluded his entrance into a Christian heaven, as persons of sincere conviction who had loved one another, both she and her "dearest friend" would attain a shared spiritual closure and reunion (though not marriage) after death.

In "Christina Rossetti and the Economics of Publication: Macmillan's Magazine, 'A Birthday,' and Beyond" (VLC 41, no. 4), Marianne Van Remoortel examines the economic realities and motives behind Rossetti's periodical publication. Van Remoortel notes that during her lifetime Rossetti published 23 poems in Macmillan's, described in a letter to her brother as "pot-boilers," for which she received direct payment but was forced to relinquish copyright, and during the 1860s these payments constituted much of her income. That Rossetti cared about renumeration is confirmed by some rather sharp letters to her publisher when she felt ill-treated financially, and she expressed gratification when poems for which she still retained rights--as opposed to the wildly popular "A Birthday" and "Uphill"--were selected for reprinting or public performance. "A Birthday" was also used frequently in musical settings, cited in at least three novels of the period, and eventually, made the subject of comic parodies. It is pleasant to read that Rossetti found one such parody so amusing that she inserted it in her copy of Poems, 1875; Van Remoortel speculates that she took special satisfaction in the fact that although "A Birthday" had long since been sold to the publisher, the parody's engagement with the poem's intellectual substance confirmed that "her authorship and authority remained intact" (724).

In "The Forms of Discipline: Christina Rossetti's Religious Verse," (VP 51, no. 3 Fall), Joshua Taft asserts that critical distaste for the alleged repetitive and formulaic qualities of Rossetti's later religious poetry have not only hindered an understanding of their aesthetic principles but also deflected attention from the ways in which self-conscious discipline and restraint are similarly evident in her earlier work. Noting that during her lifetime these late religious poems were her most popular writings, Taft argues that Rossetti's religious verses use a repetitive but carefully varied style to model the movement from despair to resourceful activity. After identifing ways in which Rossetti's sonnets and short lyrics both embody and advocate a careful self-discipline in the service of active Christian endeavor, he then comments on more familiar earlier poems such as "Goblin Market," noting on their similar use of repetition, metrical restraint, and advocacy of moral discipline.

William and Jane Morris:

The year after the publication of Frank Sharp and Jan Marsh's Collected Letters of Jane Morris, Wendy Parkins's Jane Morris: The Burden of History (Edinburgh) offers the first full-length work on its subject since Jan Marsh's 1986 Jane and May Morris. Parkins's approach is thematic rather than chronological, with chapters devoted to "Scandal," "Silence," "Class," "Icon," and "Home." As befits her poststructuralist commitments, Parkins often seems less concerned with discerning an elusive historical Jane than with deconstructing the varied ways she has been viewed, appropriated or misjudged by a long line of observers, biographers, and critics. Although at times the text's methodological digressions can impede its progress, the committed reader can glean much from Parkins's compendious marshalling of previous sources, her zest for ferreting out contradictions, and her consistently engaged and spirited observations.

In chapter 1, "Scandal," Parkins sifts later attempts to conceal or probe evidences of Jane's two affairs, noting that Jane's own responses have been repeatedly occluded in favor of those of Rossetti. After a damming analysis of the Rossetti-worship that motivated Blunt's affair with Jane, she nonetheless concludes that Jane's "self-awareness as object of exchange between men complicates any simple portrait of either a proto-feminist heroine or a victim of patriarchal social structures" (52). In chapter 2, "Silence," Parkins attacks the view that Jane's proverbial reticence arose from self-absorption, documenting instances in which Jane demonstrated outgoing kindness, reflected on her own difficulties in expressing emotion, or minimized her health problems for the convenience of others. Chapter 3, "Class," considers Jane Morris's adaptations to a higher class status than that of her origins as "a process of the re-making of habitus" through acquiring new skills and an altered sense of self (91); to this end Parkins adduces Jane's avid reading habits, her friendships with reformist-minded women, her comments on current events, and her interest in alternate societies such as that of Jeffries's After London and Albert K. Owen's Topolobampo. Chapter 4, "Icon," catalogues the multiple instances in which Jane's appearance, dress, and manner evoked stereotypes and attracted celebrity, noting her own role in shaping preferred responses and deflecting excesses. The final chapter, "Home," holds special interest in documenting Jane's artistic collaboration with her husband, her original decorative artwork, including handmade books, her efforts to "home-school" May and Jenny during their early years, her concern for Jenny's health, and her harmonious and loving relationship with May during their later years at Kelmscott Manor.

Jane Morris: The Burden of History succeeds in defending Jane Morris's character and integrity against the class and gender biases that have obscured her agency in shaping her life, artistic persona, and later image. What Parkins dismisses as "traditional biography" remains a useful supplement to her approach, however, and readers may find a perusal of the Collected Letters a valuable complement--and on occasion a corrective--to Parkins's many insights.

Ingrid Hanson's William Morris and the Uses of Violence (Anthem Press) is the first monograph to single out for political and feminist critique the instances of violence which pervade Morris's creative work from his early tales through his late romances. Hanson scrutinizes the physical conflicts portrayed in Morris's early Oxford and Cambridge Magazine tales, the saga-based Sigurd the Volsung, and the later prose narratives that center on tribal conflict such as The Roots of the Mountains, and postulates that an eroticized and even celebratory identification with warfare and combative physical contact--respect for "the generative effects of extreme, disorienting physical violence"--is central to Morris's literary works. In my view, Hanson's revisionist arguments best fit Morris's early Oxford and Cambridge Magazine tales, in contrast to such saddened meditations on loss as The Pilgrims of Hope, his 1886 poem set during the Paris Commune. Hanson's selective focus also deemphasizes the many travel narratives and peaceful romance plots found throughout Morris's writings, his frequent alteration of medieval and legendary source material to deemphasize military themes in The Earthly Paradise and elsewhere, and the extent to which his portrayals of imagined medieval conflicts serve as allegorical representations of other forms of struggle. That Morris staunchly opposed imperialist wars from the late 1870s onwards adds mystery to his continued attraction to notions of individual heroism and "just wars," however, and Hanson's probing discussion calls attention to latent contraries within the imagination of a man who at various times celebrated the prospect of a cataclysmic "Great Change" and an ensuing "epoch of rest."

In "The Aristophanes of Hammersmith: William Morris as Playwright," (JWMS 2013), (an allusion to a phrase coined by a contemporary reviewer), Jo George considers Morris's dramatic practice as a reflection of his preference for premodern rather than melodramatic and realist modes of performance. Although medieval mystery plays were rarely performed during the Victorian period, Morris had access to several early Victorian printed versions, which George argues helped inspire poetic dramas such as "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery" in The Defence of Guenevere. Later, his Love Is Enough was self-consciously modeled on medieval morality plays. His comic play The Tables Turned similarly exhibits features of the morality play in its use of characterization, message, and song, at once harkening back to the past and anticipating some of the features of twentieth-century experimental drama.

In "William Morris and Robert Browning" (JWMS 20, no. 3), Peter Faulkner considers Morris's changing relationship with one of the contemporary poets he most admired. He traces the influence of D. G. Rossetti's enthusiasm for the then-obscure Browning on the youthful Morris's reading tastes, explores ways in which Morris's review of Men and Women in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine manifests a preference for character portrayal rather than literary analysis, and identifies Browning's influence on Morris's use of the dramatic monologue form in The Defence of Guenevere. Faulkner also recounts Morris's and Browning's later divergence in political commitments and literary tastes. Ultimately, Morris found Browning's later poetry uninspiring and prosaic, so that for Morris he became "a figure very different from the vigorous and demanding poet he had encountered with such excitement in 1855" (28).

In "'News from Nowhere in recent criticism' revisited" (JWMS 20, no. 2), Tony Pinkney postulates a change in critical responses to Morris's utopian romance over the past thirty years. Whereas once critics had approached Morris's work with a "hermeneutics of restoration" (that is, an attempt to recover the author's intended meaning), Pinkney finds more appropriate a "hermeneutics of suspicion," which seeks out unconscious gaps, inconsistencies, or problems within the text. Whether or not these two approaches are as necessarily divergent as Pinkney claims--since a hermeneutics of restoration would also include a study of reception, historical context, and contradictions or paradoxes within the writer's own consciousness--his "suspicions" enable him to read three passages in News from Nowhere--describing the elderly Old Hammond's claim to have suffered disappointments, Ellen's fear that another generation may forget the lessons of history, and Guest's belief that Ellen is more interesting than her fellow Utopians--as signs that Morris himself was frustrated by the static nature of his new society and its inhabitants. By contrast, Pinkney notes, Morris has created in the figure of Ellen the sign of the future, "generating new narrative and political possibilities ... beyond Morris's own death" (38).

In "Educating for Utopia: William Morris on Useful Learning versus 'Useless Toil'" (JWMS 201, no. 2), Phillippa Bennett examines Morris's varied writings on education to argue that these constitute an important aspect of his social theory. Comparing the complaints by Morris and other nineteenth-century socialists that the rigid, limited, workplace-driven education provided the Victorian poor merely prepared them to become docile slaves of capitalism, Bennett finds many parallels with contemporary critiques of recent British government initiatives that link higher education directly to economic outcomes, curtail humanities education, and foster a narrowly patriotic, nationalist view of history--all tendencies, it might be added, with parallels to current U.S. educational policies, such as the weakening of humanities and science curricula in order to "teach to the test." Bennett concludes that Morris is among the most radical of the Victorians in advocating an education of "social and personal transformation--a utopian practice in itself, and the only way in which utopias can be imagined and achieved."

In "The Aesthetic Self-Formation of Jane Morris" (Aesthetic Lives, ed. Benedicte Coste and Catherine Delyfer, Rivendale Press), Wendy Parkins considers Jane Morris's "active participation in the construction of a unique identity" (151) and public image--through her distinctive style of dress, ornament, manner, and more importantly, her participation with Rossetti in creating her self-image image through portraiture. Parkins documents Jane Morris's choice of the clothes and embroidery to be used in Rossetti's "The Blue Silk Dress" and other paintings, her cultivation of the distinctive features that made her both admired and parodied, and her occasional amusement at the extent to which the propagation of her image through painting, photography, and caricature had gained her international iconic status.

In "William Morris: An Annotated Bibliography 2010-11" (JWMS 20, no. 3), the sixteenth biennial installment of their guide to contemporary Morris studies, David and Sheila Latham provide concise summaries for 188 entries under the categories of "Works by Morris" [including translations], "General," "Literature," the "Decorative Arts," "Book Design," and "Politics." The category of the "Decorative Arts" attracts the most attention, with 51 entries, "Literature" follows with 41, "Politics" garners 19, and "Book Design" 10. The interdisciplinary nature of this bibliography makes it especially useful in recording material that would inevitably escape the notice of those in other fields of endeavor--for example, how many readers would be aware of the first appearance of a Morris work in Turkish translation (Hicbir Yerden Haberler [News from Nowhere], 2011)?

Peter Faulkner's Fifty Years of Morris Studies: A Personal View (William Morris Society, Kelmscott Lecture) provides a fitting bookend for this essay, since its thirty pages offer lively and coherent guidance through an impressive sampling of books, articles, and exhibitions of Morris's works issued since the 1930s. Faulkner himself first encountered Morris as a student at Cambridge in 1953, and a high proportion of his citations are of those he knew personally, complemented by memories associated with his own many publications, among them the still-valuable William Morris: The Critical Heritage (1973). His account is usefully arranged by decade, an emphasis that uncovers the originality of now-established approaches and places scholarly trends within the context of contemporary events. Admittedly no one could acknowledge or remember all the contributors to such a broad field as Morris studies over a period of 80 years, but I owe it to my compatriots to note a few salient omissions: Carole Silver, The Romance of William Morris (1982); Peter Stansky, William Morris (1983) and Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880's, and the Arts and Crafts (1985); Jeffrey Skoblow, Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics and Art (1993); and Jerome McCann, for several critical works of the 1980s and 90s that redirected attention to the radical aesthetics of Morris's poetry (e. g., The Beauty of Inflections, 1985; Black Riders, 1993), as well as the enormous publicity afforded all the Pre-Raphaelites by the Rossetti Archive. Indeed, that Faulkner devotes a major section of his review to scholarship on Morris's book design but fails to mention the increasing digitization of Morris's works or his wide internet presence would seem to reflect the seismic shift in academic publication venues over the past 20 years.

This year's overview concludes on a celebratory note. Last year I reviewed Elizabeth C. Miller's Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford), which offered an elegant, thoroughly researched exploration of the fin de siecle radical and alternative press to which Morris contributed through his serialized romances and editorship of Commonweal. This year the North American Victorian Studies Association has awarded Slow Print its prize for the best scholarly book of the preceding year. I am delighted to congratulate Elizabeth Miller on her award, and on her successful efforts to illumine this important aspect of the Victorian past.