Feminine Renunciation and Power in the Epiphanies of Christina Rossetti: Fat Jewel-Fruit-Orbs, Thin Aery Flame-Sails

Abstract

Abstract In order to identify the recurrent structure pattern that distinguishes the visual epiphanies of Christina Rossetti in her poetry and prose fiction, Bidney's Bachelardian phenomenological method is employed to analyze the pattern's components: physical elements, movement patterns, and shapes. In a theoretical-cultural context provided by Bordo, Butler, Leighton, Merlin, Orbach, and others, the epiphanies' implications for the social psychology of anorexia in Victorian culture and in the broader scope of feminist thought are explored. Though in general the constrast is emphasized between what are felt to be epiphanies of destructive masculinity and those of redemptive femininity, one also finds a covert or ambivalent merging of the two in rebellious scenarios of feminine power assertion, though heavily qualified by the traditional negative weight of renunciation as the needed or lauded means to attain that power. Tendencies toward a subsurface androgyny, though often doomed, are fascinating to trace and to analyze, with minute attention to the blatant or subtle tensions. Theorists have generally sidestepped the food problems in Rossetti, vastly ramified though they are, in favor of more generalized or more spiritual unease. But anorexia-centered epiphanies are the places where traditional piety and Victorian moral strictures most problematically converge for her.