Regarding Christina Rossetti's "Reflection"

Abstract

The Woman at Window RECENT WORK BY ALISON CHAPMAN ON BIOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS of Christina Rossetti has demonstrated an intriguing proclivity on part of virtually every Rossetti biographer to visually frame poet at a window, in a manner highly suggestive of... a portrait, as if Rossetti was herself a living 'framed' picture, for she both looks out and is seen. (1) While such aestheticizations of Rossetti may be linked, as Chapman suggests, to specific biographical incidents, they also signal absorption and reinscription of a more generalized trope in Romantic and Victorian poetry and art: recurrence of at window. (2) this regard, of course, biographical construction of Rossetti herself as a model of woman poet-cum-painterly object is also inevitably informed by key texts within Rossetti's own oeuvre, texts which focus precisely on such framed moments of fetishistic aestheticization. In An Artist's Studio springs to mind immediately in this context, as perhaps Rossetti's mo st famous, and most famously trenchant, reflection on obstacles posed for nineteenth-century woman artist by her overdetermined role as object and muse in field of artistic and cultural production. I want to suggest, however, that it is to one of Rossetti's much widely known poems, simple-sounding but intricately structured lyric, 'Reflection,' that we should look, not only for a challenging opportunity to re-think interrelated questions of subjectivity, gender ideology, and epistemology raised by of framed woman, but also for an opportunity to re-think Lacan's concept of the gaze itself, in terms of its potential historical significance for a devout Victorian poet. Written in 1857 but unpublished during Rossetti's lifetime, 'Reflection' has in recent years attracted new critical interest on part of feminist readers such as Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, who include it in their important anthology Victorian Woman Poets. (3) (modest) attention it has received to date, poem has, more often than not, been read as a subtle send-up of courtly-love tradition, in which a cloistered woman at her chamber window is addressed as my soul's dear soul (1. 2) by a male speaker gazing upon his beloved. Anna Maria Stuby thus argues that readers and listeners of poem are ... forced to take roles of spectators in a drama whose main action--that of watching and being watched--is divided between a male and a female protagonist, and where gender-specific attribution of roles of subject and object of is staged as invariable. (p. 23) Stuby seems to base her assumption about gender-specificity of speaker and object of his on cues from established critics such as Dolores Rosenblum, whose work on Rossetti's devotional poetry notes that the metaphor of sight, particularly as it involves gazing upon a face, belongs ... to secular tradition, where it has acquired specific and fixed gender assignments. (4) Similarly, though, Angela Leighton also reads demand for recognition and answer in 'Reflection'--most evident in speaker's urgent exhortation, Answer me, O self-forgetful! (1. 31)--as evidence of progressive disillusionment of a male suitor, whose unrequited love sours into boredom and petulance as indifferent and secretive woman whom he addresses sits cold thro' [his] kindling / Deaf to all he prays and says (11. 36-37): Now if I could guess her secret / Were it worth guess? Time is lessening, hope is lessening, / Love grows and less (11. 41-44). (5) Curiously, while Stuby, for one, recognizes ambiguity and doubleness of poem's very title, noting that semantically, 'reflection' oscillates between 'meditation' and 'mirror image' (p. 23), neither she nor Leighton pursues ambiguous potential of self-reflexive cues announced by title--and, incidentally, reinforced by poem's original title of Day Dream, as well. …