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Chris Keirstead
University of Auburn

'Last Rites for a "Lost Ideal": "A Last Confession" and the Myth of Italy in Victorian Poetry'

When it was suggested to Rossetti that "A Last Confession" (1870) bore a strong debt to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, he protested, "Browning by travel and cultivation imported the same sort of thing into English poetry on a much larger scale; but the subject, if any, was my absolute birth-right" (Letters 3.1233). Cosmopolitan, multilingual, with an Italian father exiled for political poetry of his own, Dante Gabriel Rossetti could indeed assert a unique authority to address an English audience on the subject of the Risorgimento. Yet his comment also begs two questions: first, if the subject was so dear to him, why he did not write on it more often, and second, when he did, why the Risorgimento seems less a subject in its own right than a backdrop for more typically Rossettian kinds of concerns. Had the poem been written by someone without his background, "A Last Confession" could even be interpreted as a reactionary assault against the Risorgimento, since it features an Italian patriot driven to murder by a combination of patriotic zeal and jealous rage. In this paper, I take up the question of how to assess "A Last Confession," Rossetti's unique and complex contribution to a sub-genre of Victorian poetry with which he is not readily associated. The "Italian Question" obsessed poets as diverse as the Brownings, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Swinburne, as well as a significant number of more obscure figures, notably the "Spasmodic" Sydney Dobell, whose popular The Roman (1850) dramatizes the life of an unhinged Italian patriot of the kind portrayed in "A Last Confession." Placed within this historical and cultural context, "A Last Confession," I argue, can be read as a critical commentary on the standard rendering of Italy in poems like The Roman rather than on the Risorgimento itself. As Maura O'Connor suggests in The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (St. Martin's, 1998), the Anglo-Italian political debate was structured by two powerful cultural symbols: Italy as a beautiful but naive orphan-girl, and a dependant vision of the political effort to rescue her as a test of masculine honour, embodied in the celebrity-hero figures of Mazzini and Garibaldi. In "A Last Confession," Rossetti takes these symbols to their logical and melodramatic extreme, turning the poem into an allegory of how much the aesthetic ideal of Italy had become divorced from encroaching political reality. Like the daughter-figure of "A Last Confession," Italy was growing up, making the transition from perpetual tourist destination--a magnet for millennial visions--to European nation-state. The success of Italian unification would depend as much upon shrewd diplomatic manoeuvring and deal-making of the kind practiced by Cavour-and symbolized by the "betrayal" of the woman in the poem--as upon military heroics. "A Last Confession" thus exposes a problem inherent in nationalist poetry itself, in which the nation often becomes a depoliticized artistic canvas upon which any number of symbols and myths can be rendered. Published in 1870, the year that Italy finally achieved complete unification, Rossetti's poem sought to bury one Italy and invite the possibility of a new one--a nation that would be a full partner with Britain in Europe.