Metaphor and Maternity: Dante Gabriel Rossetti 's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter

Abstract

In Gabriel Rossetti and Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence, John Holmes recently discussed shaping influence of The House of Life (1870, 1881) on a wide range of authors, Christina Rossetti and Rupert Brooke to scarcely known Theo Marzials, George Barlow, and Rosa Newmarch. Augusta Webster, to whose posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895) Holmes devotes a brief section, sticks out as neither a familiar face nor a complete stranger. (1) When Webster's oeuvre was rediscovered in 1990s, critical interest initially focused on controversial female speakers of her dramatic monologues (Portraits, 1870): an infanticidal mother in Medea in Athens, a genteel prostitute in A Castaway, a bewitching temptress in Circe. The thematically much more conventional Mother and Daughter, by contrast, has been slow to make its way into scholarly publications. Dorothy Mermin was probably first to note that it extends emotional range of sonnet sequence beyond its traditional amatory concerns. (2) Angela Leighton and Alison Chapman also addressed sequence briefly in their surveys of Victorian poetry, and Florence Boos discussed it in more detail in her contribution to a study of Rossettis' literary legacy. (3) Despite pioneering insights she offers into works of several virtually unstudied late nineteenth-century female sonnet writers, Boos persistently refers to Webster's sequence as Mother and Child, thus inadvertently betraying just how unfamiliar most critics still are with work. To figure Rossetti's influence on Webster, Holmes and Boos both adopt metaphor of literary kinship. Boos quite conspicuously presents Webster, Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Olive Custance, Rosa Newmarch, and Michael Field in title of her essay as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetic daughters. Holmes's discussion of late Victorian women poets follows a chapter devoted to the sons of Gabriel, suggesting that women he goes on to consider belong to female lineage of Rossetti's poetic offspring. The adoption of genealogical vocabulary seems most apposite in this context since, as Harold Bloom has pointed out, from sons of Homer to sons of Ben Jonson, poetic influence [has] been described as a filial relationship. (4) Yet, by taking Rossetti's literary parentage for granted, Boos and Holmes create major critical blind spots. While they meticulously scan Mother and Daughter for Rossettian approaches to life, and death, profusion of references to birth, childhood, and maternity in The House of Life, which, in case of Webster, constitutes such an obvious point of comparison, remains largely undisclosed. In addition, although figuring of literary influence in terms of son- or daughter-ship may accord with distinct predilection that Rossetti, like so many of his predecessors and colleagues, had for trope, it does not necessarily do justice to Webster and her sequence. Most crucially, it obscures possibility of reading Mother and Daughter as a cogent critique of alienation of fundamentally female experiences, such as birth and motherhood, and of female body in general for use as metaphors of male creativity. Gabriel Rossetti's plan to compose The House of Life sprang Willowwood, a series of four sonnets that boldly rewrite Ovid's myth of Narcissus. The group heads all early drafts and manuscript versions of sequence, and was first published in 1869 in Fortnightly Review as sonnets 1 through 4 out of sixteen sonnets On Life, Love, and Death before taking its final position at heart of 1870 and 1881 printed editions. Critics have variously described it as addressing problem about love and hope of its fulfilment, recording the obsessive nature of desire for unity and fact that desire becomes even more obsessive after separation, and most recently, exploring homoerotic potential of Rossetti's vision of love, but it was probably William Michael Rossetti who best captured scope of Willowwood when he claimed that it is all about the pangs of severance. …