Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, by Emma Mason

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith by Emma Mason Joshua King (bio) Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, by Emma Mason; pp. x + 212. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £30.00, $39.95. A new contribution to Oxford University Press's Spiritual Lives series, Emma Mason's Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith offers a groundbreaking and graceful account of Christina Rossetti's ecological spirituality. Rossetti's sophisticated theology, and, to a lesser extent, proto-environmentalism have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Yet Mason is the first to identify Rossetti's ecological view of grace as foundational to her faith, politics, and poetics. For Rossetti, Mason helps us recognize, grace is a divine energy that originates and sustains life in its interactive evolutionary development, drawing all things toward loving participation in each other and God in a renewal of creation at Christ's Second Advent. "Apocalypse" is in this view not a distant destruction of the world, but a liberating transformation of this one "triggered through the love of things for each other" (21). Rossetti's ecotheology emerges in her practice, through a poetics that celebrates the vitality of all creation and eschews waste, and through devotional prose rich in empirical detail. As a whole, Mason argues, Rossetti's work challenges ecocriticism's residual tendency to "reduce Christianity to a one-dimensional simplification of fundamentalist Evangelicalism" that justifies the conquest of nature and disregards real life by focusing on the world's end (22). Mason seeks to elucidate Rossetti's personal ecotheology as well as its intricate participation in her contexts and the "history of radical Christian ecology" (22). The four body chapters pursue these aims through stages of Rossetti's career. The first reveals the greenness of Rossetti's well-known Tractarian roots, demonstrating the ways in which her ecotheology grew out of Tractarianism's vision of the created world as a "network in which every being was connected with the divine" (35). Immensely important to Rossetti's sense of creation as a community was Edward Bouverie Pusey, leading Tractarian and visiting preacher at Rossetti's Christ Church in London. Pusey affirmed an "intercommunion" of creation with Christ that is especially revealed and encountered through the Eucharist (34). Chapter 2 freshly connects Rossetti's ecological Christology to her mid-century involvement with Pre-Raphaelitism, which reinforced her Tractarian-formed belief in the non-binary integration of the material with the divine. Assimilating Pre-Raphaelitism, Platonism, patristic and Franciscan Trinitarian theology, and William Blake's sense of creation as the divine body of the Savior, Rossetti comes to see creation as networks of humans, other animals, plants, and inanimate things that "are connected through a kinship with God" based on the intercommunion of the Trinity (93). Such kinship is celebrated and threatened in Rossetti's best-known poem, "Goblin Market" (composed 1859, published 1862). Its famous lists (for example, of fruits), Mason claims, act like genealogies in the Old Testament, testifying to an interwoven kinship of creation. Mason could have done more to account for the ways in which the poem also links its profusive lists and similes to sensual self-absorption and objectification of others; that said, Mason illuminates the poem's critique of commercialism for commodifying and selling creation, which God gave to all things for their home. Chapter 3 uncovers in Rossetti's mid-career poetry and prose a view of creation as a sacred commons of companion species evolving over time as part of the divine. This drove Rossetti's passionate opposition to vivisection as "dismember[ment]" of "the divine [End Page 514] body" (112). Mason ranges from Rossetti's children's poems in Sing-Song (1872), to prose studies such as Seek and Find (1879) and Called to Be Saints (1881), to poems less often studied, such as "'All thy works praise thee, O Lord': A Processional of Creation" (1881). Rossetti's own sense of creation as a sacred commons was informed, Mason reveals, by the "urbanature" of London, from Regent's Park to the Zoological Gardens and other green spaces (43). Mason highlights the range of ecotheological botanical works that "affirmed" for Rossetti an "evolutionary and green reading of creation compatible with Christianity...