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Michele Martinez
Trinity College, Hartford

Christina Rossetti's Petrarch

Christina Rossetti's commentary on Dante's works have provided fascinating new contexts for reading her lyric sequences of the 1870s. Critics have focused primarily on Il Rosseggiar dell'Oriente and Monna Innominata which contains Rossetti's prefatory statement that Dante is the 'altisimmo poeta' and Francesco Petrarch 'a great tho' inferior bard.' Rossetti's comment may reflect her preference for Dante's Beatrice, the spiritual guide of The Divine Comedy over Petrarch's Laura, who in the lyric sequence Rime Sparse ('Scattered Rhyme') appears uncommunicative and iconic, a fusion of nature, myth, and art. Unlike Beatrice, whom many commentators (though not her father Gabriele) agreed was a real person, Laura's identity was (and remains) difficult to establish. Yet in a biographical entry published in Waller's Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-63), Rossetti quietly takes the side of a historical Laura in a flourishing 19th-century critical debate about her identity. Moreover, Rossetti's tacit affirmation of a 'flesh-and-blood' Laura derives from surprising sources: an abbé gallant, a Scottish lawyer, and a pamphlet with an apocryphal story relating Petrarch's possession of a 'veritable effigy of Laura, sculptured by the painter Simone Memmi.' In part one of the paper I will consider the significance of these sources, which at first glance appear to caricature the originator of the lyric sequence.

Rossetti's biographical entry reveals her intense fascination with what she sees as Petrarch's greatest virtue and flaw: his flair for metaphorical conceits which signify both the lover's struggle to transform erotic into spiritual love and his desire for literary fame. Many Victorian commentators felt that unlike Dante whose love was interpreted as philosophical rather than erotic, Petrarch sensationalized love's pleasure and pain, eschewed spiritual for material goals, and even compromised his masculinity. Yet as a poet, Rossetti recognized what Mary B. Moore in Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (2000) has described as the ' complexities of Petrarch's subject position [in the lyric sequence]-vacillating between experiences of agency and loss of potency, unity and fragmentation, knowledge and error' (11). The second half of my paper will explore Rossetti's secret embrace of Petrarchan lyric subjectivity and conceits in a poem called 'Memory,' which was composed at the time of Rossetti's biographical investigations. Typically, read as a confessional lyric about Rossetti's failed romance with James Collinson, 'Memory' as I see it, is closely related to poems from Rime Sparse, which she later acknowledges in the epigraphs to Monna Innominata.