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Eun-Jung Cha
University of Sussex

Christina Rossetti's Italy

This paper is to explore Christina Rossetti's critique on Victorians' construction of Renaissance Italy with particular reference to the time flight in her Monna Innominata. Though they acknowledge Rossetti's creative renovation in Monna Innominata, most critics focus on the renunciatory voice of the poet-speaker, reading the silence in the end in rather unproductive ways. My argument is that the poet-speaker's bodily withering and her silence are the focal point which make Monna Innominata as a meta-sonnet, a sonnet which critically examining the sonnet of the nineteenth century. By inserting the effect of time's erosion in the sonnet form which attempts to elude temporality, Rossetti shows that the vogue of the sonnet in the nineteenth century is a historical phenomenon, revealing that the Italy constructed by Victorians is the projection of the cultural and historical ideology of the Victorian period. With its various historical resources and the complex contemporary political situation, Italy provided a rich reservoir of historiography for Victorians who were obsessively preoccupied with the past and restoring that past. Especially for women poets, Italy is configured as an alternative soil for their poetic achievement, a forgotten matria where women poets can revive their creativity and identity. Rossetti, whose genealogy justifies her longing for Italy which she called 'mother land', nevertheless describes herself as a doomed expatriate who is never to reach home. In From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento, Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), Sandra M. Gilbert, comparing Rossetti with Elizabeth Barrett Browning who overtly struggle to 'revive and re-approach [. . .] the lost mother country of Italy,' interprets Rossetti's gesture of despair as 'aesthetics of renunciation' (32). Rossetti's ambivalent attitude towards Italy, however, needs more careful consideration. As a three fourths Italian, Rossetti is an expatriate in England; on the other hand, Rossetti cannot deny the cultural and ideological influences she inherited from the English soil where she belongs. This double alienation from both countries provides Rossetti a critical distance from her contemporaries who fabricated Italy in their own images, absorbing Renaissance Italy to Victorian culture and ideology. Monna Innominata is Rossetti's exploitation of the sonnet form to criticise Victorian's exploitation of Italian Renaissance. Rossetti shows particular concern for Victorians' ahistorical tendency implicit in their preoccupation with the past and history. In restoring and representing Renaissance Italy, Victorians were in fact reinscribing their own culture and ideology, depriving the pastness of the past. In this respect, the fact that the sonnet was in vogue in the Victorian period is not just a historical accident. The sonnet, a highly formalised love lyric which is characterised a genre that attempts to stop time, is suitable for exploiting the past for the construction of the present. Whether they aim at reinterpretation or subversion of the traditional form, Victorian poets deployed the sonnet to achieve 'a moment's monument,' 'memorial for the soul's eternity' as Dante Gabriel Rossetti puts it. In Monna Innominata, Rossetti boldly introduces temporality which has been erased throughout the sonnet tradition to criticise the implication of timelessness in Victorian poets' rediscovery of the sonnet.