The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti 9780367514402, 9780367514419, 9781003053859

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The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti

In an unprecedented comparison of two of the most important female authors of the nineteenth century, Azelina Flint foregrounds the influence of the religious communities that shaped Louisa May Alcott’s and Christina Rossetti’s visions of female creativity. In the early stages of the authors’ careers, their artistic developments were associated with their patrilineal connections to two artistic movements that shaped the course of American and British history: the Transcendentalists and PreRaphaelites. Flint uncovers the authors’ rejections of the individualistic outlooks of these movements, demonstrating that Alcott and Rossetti affiliated themselves with their mothers and sisters’ religious faith. Applying the methodological framework of women’s mysticism, Flint reveals that Alcott’s and Rossetti’s religious beliefs were shaped by the devotional practices and life-writing texts of their matrilineal communities. Here, the authors’ iconic portrayals of female artists are examined in light of the examples of their mothers and sisters for the first time. Flint recovers a number of unpublished life-writings, including commonplace albums and juvenile newspapers, introducing readers to early versions of the authors’ iconic works. These recovered texts indicate that Alcott and Rossetti portrayed the female artist as a mouthpiece for a wider community of women committed to social justice and divine communion. By drawing attention to the parallels in the authors’ familial affiliations and religious beliefs, Flint recuperates a tradition of nineteenth-century women’s mysticism that departs from the individualistic models of male literary traditions to locate female empowerment in gynocentric relationships dedicated to achieving a shared revelation of God.

Azelina Flint is a Teaching Fellow of American Literature and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s American Studies PhD program where she was awarded an AHRC “CHASE” fellowship to support her research on Alcott and Rossetti. Azelina’s research on the Alcott family has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, and she holds MA degrees in Victorian Studies and English Literature from Royal Holloway and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, respectively. Flint has published articles on Alcott and Rossetti in Comparative American Studies and the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, while further research in American and Victorian Studies has appeared in a range of peer-reviewed publications.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

Titles include: The Bohemian Republic Transnational Literary Networks in the Nineteenth Century James Gatheral The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed The New Historical Fiction Ina Bergmann Jane Austen and Literary Theory Shawn Normandin Robert Seymour and Nineteenth Century Print Culture Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration Brian Maidment Victorian Pets and Poetry Kevin A. Morrison The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction Samuel Saunders Doctrine and Difference Readings in Classic American Literature Michael J. Colacurcio The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti Azelina Flint Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901 Kimberly Cox For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Nineteenth-Century-Literature/book-series/RSNCL

The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti

Azelina Flint

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Azelina Flint to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-51440-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-51441-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05385-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Dedicated to the memories of my late father, Bertram William Flint, and Great Uncle, Frederick Keen. Men who embodied ‘theologies of renunciation.’

Contents

1

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xi

Introduction

1

“I am Even I”: Rossetti and Alcott Resisting Male Authority

28

PART I

“Left-Handed Societies”: Women’s Life-Writing 2

3

57

“Renunciation Is the Law, Devotion to God’s Will the Gospel”: The Empowerment of Others in the Alcott Women’s Life-Writing

61

“For Every Human Creature May Claim to Strength”: The Rossetti Women’s Elevation of the Left Hand

92

PART II

“A Loving League of Sisters”: Alcott and Rossetti’s Promotion of Christian Values through the Ties of Sisterhood 4 5

125

We Are All Relative Creatures: The Transformative Power of Sisterhood in Rossetti’s Maude

129

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia

150

viii

Contents

Conclusion CODA Nineteenth-Century Women’s Matrilineal Theologies of Renunciation Works Cited Appendices Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix Appendix Appendix Appendix

3 4 5 6

Appendix 7

Index

174

179 197 211

“Rolf Walden Emmerboy” Transcription 211 “Two Scenes in a Family” Transcription 211 “Wealth” Transcription 213 “Our Madonna” Transcription 215 “Story of An Apple” Transcription 217 “Extracts From Bradley’s Sermons” Transcription 217 “The Maid of Sorrow” Transcription 219

221

Acknowledgments

This study is indebted to the guidance of many generous mentors, friends, spiritual guides, and relatives. It may seem strange that a work of scholarship devoted to recovering the matrilineal heritage of two women is dedicated to the memory of my late father, Bertram William Flint. In his parenting, my Dad was the embodiment of a ‘theology of renunciation’: a brilliant mentor, exhaustive scholar, insightful writer, and self-giving religious leader. Likewise, my late Great Uncle, Frederick Keen, made many sacrifices to support my family over the years, and this book could not have completed without him. My mother, Debra Flint, has been an unwavering emotional support and remains my biggest ally. My ideas have been strengthened, enriched, and supported by the collegial environment of the Department of American Studies, University of East Anglia. Hilary Emmett, Thomas Ruys Smith, and Malcolm McLaughlin have been generous with their time, wise with their guidance, patient with their advice, and unwavering in their enthusiasm when my own has been at a low ebb. Thanks are also due to the AHRC ‘CHASE’ consortium and the Fulbright Commission, especially to Steve Colburn, Rob Witts, Clare Hunt, Daphne Rayment, and Brittany Lehr, all of whom helped to make my archival research possible. Beyond the UEA, there are many academics who have enhanced my ideas with their scholarship and learning. Dinah Roe of Oxford Brookes is a formidable authority on the Rossetti family who has gone above and beyond in her criticism. Wendy Parkins, Kent University guided my early research on Rossetti, while my study at Harvard was informed by the enlightening conversation of John Stauffer. Foundational Alcott scholar, John Matteson, has been kind enough to review my work. The trajectory of this study has also been shaped by a number of independent scholars. The conversation of Parish Catechist, Michael King, of Sacred Heart and St Margaret Mary R.C. Church, Dereham, informed my thinking on the Trinity and the imitatio Christi. Equally, the enthusiastic correspondence of Eddie Simpson enlightened my ideas on Christian communities. Family friend, Luca Loreto, allowed me to discover more about his vocation as an iconographer. The assistance of

x

Acknowledgments

teacher, David Glenn of the Brilliant Club, has been instrumental in motivating me to promote my research to a wider audience. Lauren Hehmeyer’s criticism and collaboration has assisted in the development of both this book and the next: I look forward to a future dedicated to the recovery of May Alcott Nieriker! As a woman of faith, I have been touched by the spiritual care of many religious communities while completing this study. The support of my Parish Priest, Fr Brendan Moffatt, and my brothers and sisters at the Parish of Sacred Heart, Dereham has been invaluable. My research at the Delaware Art Museum was enabled by the kind hospitality of the sisters of the Caterina Benincasa Dominican Monastery, Wilmington. The spiritual havens of Blackfriars, Oxford and Ampleforth Abbey have provided sanctuaries for my work, and I am grateful to Fr Matthew Jarvis OP and Alan Jones for opening their doors. My former parish priest, Fr Nicodemus Lobu Ratu SVD, and the parish of St Mary-on-the-Quay, Bristol remain formative influences in my life. Likewise, I cannot forget the slightly wacky spiritual guidance proffered by the Reverend Dr Alexander Lucie-Smith, a character straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel! The former Chaplain of the Fisher House Cambridge Catholic Chaplaincy, Fr Alban McCoy OFM, should also not be forgotten. Last, but not least, I cannot overlook the support of many longstanding friends who infuse my life with joy, providing me with the motivation to continue in my research. Outstanding among these are my elected sisters: Clarissa Chenovick and Rosary Abot; childhood friends, Becky O’Hara and Emma Scott; fellow Dante and Rossetti enthusiast, Francesco Amatulli; my “college brother” and director extraordinaire, Josh Seymour; musical prodigy, Aeron Glyn Preston; expat traveller-poets and associate Christmas convalescents, David and LeAnna Porter; man of steel, Alex Ronaldson; fellow Catholic and feminist academic, Raphael Cadenhead; choir director, autodidact and proof-reader, the late great Helen Jacobs; my sister in Christ and sometime art restorer, Kathleen Malkin; my adopted brother and sister, Andrew and Pippa Simpson, and their son, Peter (my Godson). Finally, my students of the Brilliant Club, the UEA, and Royal Holloway have challenged and inspired me to look for ways to make my research more relevant to everyday life. The list is too long to name in full, but to all my friends, thank you for confirming the words of Hilaire Belloc, first taught to me by my father: From quiet home and first beginning, Out to the undiscovered ends, There’s nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends. (85–88)

Abbreviations

AFAP LMAAP

Alcott Family Additional Papers Louisa May Alcott Additional Papers

Introduction

This book recovers the matrilineal heritage of Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) and Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) through considering the ways these authors experienced and expressed their Christian faith in relation to their mothers and sisters.1 Alcott’s and Rossetti’s artistic development embodies a striking parallel: each writer grew up in a culturally prominent artistic movement that, after the Romantics, sought to attain transcendent experience through expressing the individual’s sublime engagement with nature. Each of these movements (Transcendentalism and Pre-Raphaelitism) attempted to invest art with a spiritual significance that superseded religious faith during a period when American Protestantism grappled with the destructive implications of the Calvinist Doctrine of the Total Depravity of Man and British art promoted the medieval ‘age of faith’ in the face of the growing prominence of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Neither Alcott, nor Rossetti embraced the elevation of art as a secular form of religious practice and, as such, their artistic identities departed from the models of their male relatives. Instead, they followed the examples of their mothers, who located women’s empowerment in sisterly relationships dedicated to achieving a shared revelation of God, encouraging their daughters to identify with one another and thereby create a model of authorship based on service to one’s sisters that could be extended to the wider world. That said, discussions of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s contributions to nineteenth-century women’s writing and its wider feminist contexts have disproportionately focused on the authors’ Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite connections. The theological discourses and life-writings of their mothers and sisters have only recently been accorded serious attention, and feminist criticism remains resistant to the communities’ theologies of renunciation. Renunciation, the act of forgoing material pleasures to achieve spiritual enlightenment, remains a controversial concept for feminists because it eschews seizing the individualistic aspiration towards self-fulfillment and self-expression historically assigned to the male author. Approaching this subject as a woman of faith, my intention is to evaluate the capacity of renunciation to empower and unite female communities through the framework of mystical experience.

2

Introduction

Mysticism is the term given to the myriad ways the supplicant attempts to achieve union with God and the wider Christian community: through prayer, sacramental and/or liturgical practice, ritual, community life, study, and the contemplation of creation. It strives to achieve an intense consciousness of the divine that, in its most refined form, will manifest itself in such supernatural phenomena as dreams and visions, but more commonly refers to everyday experiences that express the individual’s relationship with God. In essence, mysticism refers to the way the supplicant subjectively experiences their faith outside the institutional framework of their peculiar denomination. Specifically, in this context, it has relevance because the Alcott and Rossetti women partook in shared mystical experiences. Their renunciatory acts and practices were dedicated to ensuring every member of the community could express their revelatory encounters with the divine. More particularly, and significantly, in describing their experiences and writings, they held the weakest and smallest members of their mystical community in most esteem, inverting the assumed hierarchy of wider society. Producing collaborative devotional life-writing and engaging in shared religious practices allowed each community to conceive itself as a single body, with priority and most respect accorded to the otherwise most lowly members. The Alcott women envisaged their community, this body, as the foundation of a universal Christian sisterhood extending into the outside world to dedicate itself to wider feminist social reform, while the Rossetti women visualized their mystical body as ascending upwards to unification with the communion of saints through prayerful contemplation. Alcott’s and Rossetti’s mystical experiences of renunciation in their matrilineal communities shaped the portrayal of motherhood, sisterhood, and female kinship across their canonical, lesser-known, and unpublished works. In two distinct cultural locations and from two diverging religious denominations, each author wrote out of their experience of mystical unification with their mothers and sisters. Through examining the parallels in their experiences, I hope to demonstrate that mystical experience is at the heart of nineteenth-century women’s devotional writing and supplants the vestige of male authority implicit in the patriarchal hierarchies of institutionalized Christianity. By doing so, I endeavor to uncover the value of women’s mysticism for feminist studies of nineteenth-century women of faith, prioritizing women’s religious experience above their commitment to Church tradition, dogma, and doctrine. For Alcott and Rossetti, the spiritual authority of maternal love superseded all forms of Church authority and underpinned the authors’ devotional visions of female creativity. In an 1878 letter to British poet, Augusta Webster (1837–1894), on the topic of women’s suffrage, Christina Rossetti argued that maternal love expressed the divine and thereby possessed the power to overcome gender inequality:

Introduction

3

if anything ever does sweep away the barrier of sex, and make the female not a giantess or a heroine but at once a hero and a giant, it is that mighty maternal love which makes little birds and little beasts as well as little women matches for very big adversaries. (Letters 2 158) There are two interesting things about this passage. Firstly, when the female reaches epic proportions, she transcends her gender: she is not a giantess or a heroine but a hero and a giant. Not only that, she is “at once” both a hero and giant; the transcendent female does not simply become the male—she encapsulates all of the dominant qualities language would assign to the male (ibid.). Secondly, this epic might and power does not generate more heroes and giants, but rather begets “little” things: “little birds,” “little beasts,” and, most importantly, “little women” (ibid.). Where the Romantic tradition affiliates divine creation with the supposedly more active role of the male in heterosexual sexual relations, Rossetti claims it is maternal love that comes closest to emulating the deity. Why? The very fact that the female creates ‘little’ things renders her an emulation of God because creation, for the omnipotent, is an act of humility. Even the universe, in its totality, must pale in the face of an all-encompassing being—nothing can be created as its equal. And yet, as the reflection of this prime mover, the universe, in a curious way, also mirrors the Creator. In this way, the most diminutive things are “matches for very big adversaries,” for no adversary is capable of obliterating the primeval origin of every created being (ibid.). Of course, Rossetti is not alone in upholding littleness as the supreme reflection of God’s “mighty maternal love,” for she did not coin the term “little women” (ibid.). It was made famous by her American contemporary, Louisa May Alcott, who created an iconic fictional community of sisters who, following the model of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), strive to attain redemption by orienting their daily lives towards the teachings of Christ. Alcott’s text departs from Bunyan’s, however, in its portrayal of maternal love as the guiding force on the sisters’ journey to salvation. I foreground this passage because it provides an uncanny resonance between these contemporaries who never met or corresponded. One cannot imagine that when Rossetti staked her claim ten years after the publication of Little Women (1869), she did not have Alcott’s phenomenally successful novel in mind.2 Yet, Rossetti’s decision to evoke the term is significant for reasons that transcend the vestige of a material connection between these women. The authors’ independent expressions of faith reveal they engaged in a shared set of preoccupations, and even personal experiences, across time and space—despite their immediate cultural and denominational differences, as well as the vastly different genres in which they worked. In the proceeding scholarship, I will show that both women elevated the mother as the proper intermediary

4

Introduction

between earth and heaven because mothering emulates the self-emptying of the incarnate God, who dispensed with his divinity to share in the littleness of humanity. As Christ conforms himself to the will of the Father, so does the mother encourage her daughters to treat the circumstances of their lives as reflections of divine providence, embracing the obstacles they confront as gateways to salvation. Both the Alcott and Rossetti matriarchs encouraged their daughters to observe the force of God’s will in their lives through mutually interpreting their shared daily events and experiences. These acts of interpretation were forged in collective life-writing projects: collaborative journals, commonplace books, and juvenile newspapers. Fostering a shared consciousness through creating a mutual record of their lives within their respective matrilineal communities allowed the Alcott and Rossetti sisters to conceive themselves as a single body of distinct persons that resembled the communion of the Trinity. The Trinity expresses the unique personhood of each of its members through identifying and integrating each member with and into the personhood of the others. Following the example of their mothers, each member of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s sisterhoods identify themselves with the weakest members of the group, championing littleness as the foundation of a reformed society based on the matrilineal model, as well as the heavenly communion of saints. In their public works, both Alcott and Rossetti upheld littleness as an expression of the renunciatory practices that bind the female community together. Serving the littlest members of the community allows each sister to expand the matrilineal model and imitate Christ, who served the weak and disenfranchised. By imitating Christ’s humility, the women of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s fictional communities take on spiritually empowered roles that place women at the center of both family and public life. The “little women” of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s work are the replication of “that mighty maternal love” as it multiplies itself through sympathetic identification with others (ibid.). When I first encountered Alcott and Rossetti in adolescence, I saw myself as part of the extended community of Christian women they sought to establish through their writing. I understood these communities were not merely fictional; they were patterns of sisterhood the authors hoped would be taken up by their readers in either private devotional communities of the family and/or religious life, or in public feminist advocacy groups that sought to reform the outside world through philanthropic projects based on Christian principles. I hoped that uncovering the historical roots of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s visions of female community would foreground the mystical experiences that underpinned their devotional writing. Through encountering these mystical experiences, I strive to reconnect with my own matrilineal, mystical heritage. For Alcott and Rossetti, motherhood and sisterhood transcend the immediate familial circle to be embraced by women who share in the authors’ Christian worldviews. In this respect, their mystical experiences are comparable with one another, and with my

Introduction

5

own. It is on these grounds I undertake a comparative study of these women: contemporaneous Christian sisters who never met. Since both Alcott and Rossetti believed that motherhood and sisterhood transcended time and space and extended into eternal life, it does not seem inappropriate to regard them as spiritual mothers and sisters who continue to speak to Christian women through the expressions of faith embodied in their work. As a Christian writer and researcher whose personal experiences of faith shape my interpretations of devotional writing, I regard Alcott and Rossetti as part of a wider spiritual matrilineal heritage into which I incorporate myself, as the sections of this introduction that follow will show.

Devotion and Mysticism: Subject and Method This book is in part an act of devotion, and through that act of devotion, I endeavor to reach a deeper understanding of the wider matrilineal heritage of mystical spirituality of the authors and myself. In approaching the work in this way, I place emphasis on the authors’ attempts to encounter the divine and create a vision of universal Christian sisterhood. Mystical theologies of renunciation are my subject-matter and provide a way into a method of scholarship: I interpret the matrilineal communities’ mystical experiences through the practice of mysticism. I believe there are distinct advantages to interpreting the mystical and renunciatory practices of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s matrilineal communities in this way, from the perspective of my own religious faith. To illustrate, I will draw an analogy with iconography, between the way a Christian critic interprets a devotional literary work and the way a pilgrim interacts with an icon. Iconography can be understood as a type of pilgrimage, achieved through artistic practice, to a holy person. According to Luca Loreto, the iconographer attempts to “make a place where the saint will be ‘present’ in an image,” striving to be “inhabited by the subject” (1). Depicting the revealed image of the saint allows the iconographer to achieve communion with the wider communion of saints. Thereafter, the pilgrim who contemplates the icon is also incorporated into the communion of saints by virtue of the iconographer’s prior communion. In this sense, for the pilgrim, the iconographer remains present in the icon. Both are united in devotion across time and place because the process in which they have engaged is timeless: shared by all iconographers across history (purportedly stretching back to St Luke) and crossing the boundaries of material and divine by means of timeless contemplation. Like the iconographer, I suggest the devotional writer endeavors to achieve a revelation of the divine through the act of composition. In the case of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s matrilineal communities, the practices of literary collaboration, shared reading and annotation establish a

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Introduction

spiritual communion among the communities’ members. When the Christian critic reads the writing of these women, they witness and partake in this spiritual communion and, in doing so, encounter the living (not simply enduring) presences of these authors. By these means, this book offers a way into the lived experiences of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s faith. In taking this approach, I seek to decipher the spiritual languages these communities shared, which might not be apparent to secular readers. After all, when a pilgrim stands before a devotional work of art they are empowered to “read” its devotional, sacramental, and scriptural symbols in a manner accessible only to a person of faith; secular eyes strive to observe aesthetic beauty only (Loreto 7 5). Let me provide a personal example of this: at the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata in Florence, there is a painting of the Annunciation allegedly completed by an angel. According to legend, the fourteenthcentury painter, Fra Bartolommeo, labored over the painting for weeks but was unable to capture the beauty of the Virgin’s face. One night, he fell asleep in despair and awoke to discover the painting had been completed by an angelic hand. Since then, a cult surrounding Santissima Annunziata has emerged and pilgrims travel across the world to see it. It is preserved behind a screen, which is raised every day at 6 pm. This became very real to me one evening in Florence at dinner with a friend. Talking art over gelato, my friend remarked she was unfamiliar with the painting and I proposed on a whim we sprint across the city to look. I vividly remember the moment we entered the church: we barely made it through the door in time and stood panting in the shadows as the screen was lifted. As the painting emerged before our eyes, a bevy of elderly women dropped to their knees. We stood in silent contemplation before this sacred image, uncovered for only an hour a day. After a short period of silence, my friend said to me, “The painting is a testament to the power of inspiration.” “No,” I replied, “it’s a testament to the presence of angels.” For her, the painting was a metaphor; for me it was a living truth. Our differing responses to the painting at Santissima Annunziata were emblematic of the differing ways religious and secular thinkers engage with devotional works of art across all media. The secular thinker dwells in the world of ideas: spiritual experiences are symbols of concepts and emotions not easy to express. Conversely, Léonide Ouspensky explains that the iconographer—or indeed any devotional artist or writer— “transmits not their own ‘idea’, but ‘a description of what is contemplated’, that is a factual knowledge, something seen if not by himself, by a trustworthy witness” (42). As such, individualistic expressions of originality are not highly prized by devotional artists. It is crucial we understand Alcott’s and Rossetti’s work as “a record of what has been contemplated rather than an idea” (41). If we look at the authors’ work in this way, their respective decisions to reject the Transcendentalists’ and Pre-Raphaelites’ emphasis on creating (as opposed to ‘describing’)

Introduction

7

transcendent and sublime experience through art (which is transformed into a divine object, rather than a vehicle for the divine) can be read as a decision to conceive themselves as devotional artists. To judge the aesthetic value of their work by the standard of individualistic self-expression is to ignore the authors’ intentions. Their intentions were formed within the matrilineal community, which is recovered here for the purpose of appreciating both Alcott’s and Rossetti’s work as expressions of their Christian faith. In the rest of this introduction, I outline how I set about recovering the matrilineal heritages of Alcott and Rossetti through the framework of mystical practice. To illustrate how my interpretations of the authors’ works are shaped by the devotional act of pilgrimage, I will connect each aspect of this scholarship to a stage in the icon-painting process. Thus, like the pilgrim’s meditation before the icon, my study is the devotional witness of these matrilineal communities, my own matrilineal inheritance. I endeavour to uncover what Vladimir Lossky describes as the “revealed reality” the authors “describe” in their work (22). As I survey the authors’ rejections of the Transcendentalists’ and PreRaphaelites’ individualism in favor of the renunciatory theologies of their mothers and sisters, I will show that—like the icon—“the degree to which the gift of expression is subordinated to the revelation it has to express, determine[s] the spiritual level and the purity” of the devotional literary work (Ouspensky 44). Departing from the more familiar, established methods of literary criticism in this way inevitably brings risks, but I argue here there is very much to be gained. Instead of striving to unearth the myriad possibilities for interpretation within a text, I instead attempt to foreground the authors’ mystical experiences through the lens of my own. This approach is, in part, a response to the skepticism concerning the aesthetic, social and intellectual value of Christian women’s experience prevalent in feminist criticism. This work advocates approaching the writing of Christian women with an attitude of metaphysical openness similar to that of ontological anthropologists, who, in Eduardo Kohn’s words, take seriously “styles or forms of thought that change our ideas about the nature of reality” (312). Ontological anthropologists respond to the common criticism, described by Paolo Heywood, that “insisting on the ‘reality’ of multiple worlds commits [one] to a meta-ontology where such worlds exist” (146) by reminding their detractors that all scholars possess, to use Morten Axel Pedersen’s term, a “meta-ontology”—but those who aspire to objectivity merely obscure their own meta-ontological position (para. 10). I seek to recover, participate in, and write from the ontological reality of my subjects to enrich my interpretive insights. As Lorencova et al have argued, sharing in the ontological framework of one’s subjects may enable the scholar to “actualize” the “transcendent reality” to which their subjects defer (3). My attempt to recover Alcott’s and Rossetti’s theologies of renunciation

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Introduction

seeks to transform my perception of their faith, so I may actualize the mystical experiences their work “describes” (Lossky 22). In developing this argument, the introduction will now outline the four aspects of this scholarly work: my recovery of the matrilineal communities’ mystical theologies of renunciation, the development of my methodology, the ideological basis for this transatlantic comparison, and the ontological framework through which these authors are viewed. It will be impossible for me to attain a complete vision of Alcott and Rossetti through this pilgrimage, but I hope to encounter their living presences and reflect the voices of their mothers and sisters on this journey.

Preparing the Wood: Matrilineal Theologies of Renunciation and Women’s Mysticism In the first stage of the icon-painting process, the iconographer chooses the wood. The wood represents the suffering the pilgrim encounters on their journey to salvation; it is emblematic of the tree of life and the cross. As the iconographer prepares and sands the wood, they partake in purifying practices that allow them to receive the presence of the saint. The saint is invoked continually in prayer, while the iconographer fasts for a sustained period so they can transform themselves into a place where the saint can “be present” (Loreto 1). As they become a pure receptacle, ready to receive the divine presence, they begin to “live” the icon and are “inhabited by the subject” (ibid.). Renunciation is essential to this process. By attempting to cleanse themselves of the vestige of their sinfulness, the iconographer seeks to return to their prelapsarian state as one who reflects the image of God. The word “icon” in fact derives from the ancient Greek word, ‘εικwν,’ which means ‘image’—referring to the description of mankind as created in God’s image in Genesis 1:27. Orthodox believers regard the icon as a sacramental object that contains God’s presence. By reflecting the image of Christ, the iconographer is remade in God’s image, as is the pilgrim who contemplates the record of their transfiguration. This transfiguration can only take place if the iconographer recognizes they are an “unworthy instrument” who has undertaken a “responsibility” that is “frightening” (Loreto 2 6). Renunciation is also essential to the mystical practice of Alcott and Rossetti, and their female relatives. The theologies of renunciation espoused and practiced by the authors’ matrilineal communities mirror the ascetic practices of the iconographer, for they allow each member of the community to live through and inhabit one other. All members of the community sacrifice their needs for the needs of their ‘littler’ sistren and purify themselves in the process. Seeking to rid themselves of all vestiges of inward-facing solipsism, the Alcott and Rossetti

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women transform themselves into pure receptacles of Christian sanctification, ready to receive their mothers’ and sisters’ presences. Thus, the expression of selfhood becomes an expression of love for the matrilineal community; each member of the community reflects the other in a transfigurative process that transforms all members into a single, mystical body. Just as the iconographer is “inhabited by the subject” (Loreto 1), the Alcott and Rossetti women are inhabited by each other. Their mystical union is expressed in their collaborative life-writing, a record of the presence of their mothers and sisters as it lives within them, (just as the icon is a record of the presence of the saint as it lives within the iconographer). More typically disparaged by feminists as a form of repression imposed from above within a patriarchal hierarchy, renunciation can be better understood as a form of spirituality that attempts to unite the individual with the divine through contemplative, communal practices. As a practice of mysticism, it seeks, in Beverly J. Lanzetta’s words, to foster “the awareness of the oneness that underlies duality and difference” (29) through “the experience of consciously striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of selftranscendence towards the ultimate value one perceives” (Schnediers qtd in Lanzetta ibid.). The final aspiration of the mystic is to access what Ewert H. Cousins terms as the “ultimate reality” of the divine (xiii) in “a moment of ‘pure,’ ‘content-less,’ or ‘empty’ consciousness” (Lanzetta 29–30). Such experience relies on “the central absence of egoidentity in living a spiritually focused life” (Lanzetta 29). When the self is emptied of its ego, it is able to achieve communion with others and the divine. Because mysticism has thrived in communal structures that exist outside the hierarchies of the church, it has been peculiarly open to women throughout Christian history.3 Yet, Amy Hollywood argues that despite the fact female mystics frequently “struggled to maintain interpretive control over [their] experience against the encroachment of male ecclesiastical elites,” feminist scholars have consistently failed to take mysticism seriously (6). Jantzen locates the origin for such pejorative attitudes in the fact that “the preoccupations of most modern philosophical interpreters of mysticism were not the preoccupations of mystics themselves”; namely, philosophical studies of mysticism often founder when seeking to examine experiences of divine revelation within secular intellectual frameworks (10). They fail to recognize that “the mystics of the Western Christian tradition lived in a thought world where the existence of God was taken for granted” (9). My examination of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s theologies of renunciation traces the formation of these theologies to authentic spiritual experiences and worldviews shared within their matrilineal communities and recorded in their life-writing. I regard the provability

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of such outlooks and experiences, as assessed against a standard of ‘objective truth,’ to be fundamentally irrelevant. The Alcott and Rossetti women interpreted their daily experiences and familial relationships through the lens of their Christian beliefs. As such, the most ordinary events and occurrences acquired a mystical significance that would not be observed by individuals who defer to secular frameworks of thought. For example, Maria Rossetti (1827–1876) “shrank from entering the Mummy Room at the British Museum under a vivid realization of how the general resurrection might occur even as one stood among those solemn corpses turned into a sight for sightseers” (C. Rossetti, Time Flies 316). I am primarily interested in how the ordinary experiences and ideas recorded in life-writing become mystical when viewed through the framework of women’s theologies of renunciation. That said, both matrilineal communities also experienced moments of immanent revelation. Louisa May Alcott described one such a moment in her journal after the death of her sister, Elizabeth (1835–1858): A few minutes after the last breath came … I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air. Mother’s eyes followed mine, and when I said ‘What did you see?’ she described the same light mist. Dr G. said it was the life departing visibly. (89) Christina Rossetti combines the mystical with the ordinary when, in Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets (1881), she describes how her lived experience is underpinned by her faith,4 which leads her to interpret the song of the Nightingale as a part of the celestial music of the spheres: “all things, then, waxed musical; each star/ Sang on its course, each breeze sang on its car” (355 Sonnet 21 6–7). Of course, the authors’ diverging denominational frameworks of Tractarianism and Unitarianism lead them to interpret their mystical experiences differently. Rossetti writes from an Anglo-Catholic tradition that views mystical experience as primarily accessed through scripture and the sacraments, the reception of which leads the individual to achieve divine unification with God alongside her matrilineal community; Alcott writes from a nonconformist Protestant background that views the individual as guided by the Holy Spirit to an immanent awareness of God shared in common with the matrilineal community and propagated to the wider world to support a vision for social justice. Nonetheless, both women view mystical experience as supporting a shared outlook across the community enabled by renunciatory identification with others. This shared outlook empowers the community’s members to promote marginalized voices and resist the ideological domination of the male individualist. It is significant that mystical theologies of renunciation elevate the divine vision of the matrilineal community

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because feminist discourse frequently assumes that women writers aspire to individualistic models of authorship and fall back on renunciation when these models prove unattainable. For example, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) reads mysticism as a form of narcissism that enables women to transfer their desire to achieve omnipotence onto an illusory (male) other.5 The following work therefore recovers the mystical theologies of Alcott and Rossetti as expressive of the authors’ desire to achieve unification with God in opposition to an (androcentric) vision of authorial individualism. This is important because Alcott’s and Rossetti’s portrayals of female communities have received extensive scholarly attention, but critics are yet to consider the feminist implications of the authors’ theologies of renunciation, as well as the relevance of women’s mysticism to their work. Currently, there is a dearth of scholarship on Alcott’s religious faith deriving from her private religious practice as a Unitarian woman who did not participate in public worship. Unitarianism in mid-nineteenth-century New England promoted charismatic forms of devotion and its congregations were ecumenical and diverse, open to Christians of all denominations. In this particular historical and cultural context, Unitarian practice centered on the rejection of the Doctrines of the Total Depravity of Man, Original Sin, and Predestination, emphasizing the integrity of the individual’s relationship with God. As such, it did not demand regular public worship. The Alcott women therefore rarely attended church, although they enjoyed a close relationship with Unitarian reformer and minister, Theodore Parker (1810–1860), while Alcott’s maternal uncle, Samuel May (1797–1871), was a prominent Unitarian pastor, educationalist, women’s rights activist, and abolitionist. My perusal of the collaborative diary of Alcott’s mother, Abigail (1800–1877), has revealed that the Alcott matriarch developed a theology of renunciation (quite opposed to her husband’s Transcendentalist ideology of individualism) that informed both the devotional vision of her daughters, and Louisa’s iconic work, Little Women. Nevertheless, the only available selected edition of Abigail’s life-writing, My Heart is Boundless (LaPlante 2012), expunges her religious faith from the record.6 As a denomination that prioritizes the everyday conduct of the Christian in their relationships with others above devotional discourse, public worship, and private prayer, Unitarianism is not overly ‘pious.’ Its literary expressions are prone be misinterpreted, by those unfamiliar with its tenets, as lacking in zeal. The nonconformist nature of Unitarianism and its emphasis on practical devotion, unique among Christian denominations, may account for the lack of attention accorded to Alcott’s religious faith. Susan Bailey’s 2013 edited collection of Alcott’s devotional writing, Louisa May Alcott Illuminated By The Message, proves that the author’s theology of renunciation can be observed across the canon of her private and public work but, to my

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knowledge, the only work of academic scholarship available on Alcott’s devotional vision is Robin Cadwallader’s 2018 book chapter on the Christian concept of caritas in Alcott’s portrayals of Christian women’s social reform. In that context, the present study is the first extended work to examine the devotional influence of Alcott’s matrilineal heritage at length. As yet, there are no full-length studies of Alcott’s sisters and my cursory examination of their life-writing touches the tip of the iceberg. There is more work of recovery to be done in this area, some of which is already in progress.7 Contrastingly, studies of Rossetti’s devotional output as a theologian and religious poet have proliferated over the last 20 years. Nevertheless, this prior scholarship does not examine Rossetti’s theology of renunciation in depth. This is true of Diane D’Amico’s germinal work, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time (1999), for example, which adopts a straightforward historicist approach and calls for Rossetti scholars to “accept … that Rossetti’s faith [is] central to both her life and poetry” but to “incorporate that view into the current interest in gender” (16). Mary Arseneau took up D’Amico’s baton in her foundational Recovering Christina Rossetti (2004), the first work to centralize the influence of the “familial, literary, intellectual and religious community” of the Rossetti women on Rossetti’s legacy (1).8 I diverge from Arseneau’s emphasis on Rossetti’s Tractarian “incarnational poetics” by foregrounding Rossetti’s concern with the feminist potential of the Trinity: a theological model for the renunciatory identification with others championed by all three Rossetti women. More recently, Dinah Roe (2006), Elizabeth Ludlow (2016) and Emma Mason (2018) have produced sensitive theological studies of, variously, Rosetti’s faith and scriptural scholarship, poetic imagination, and environmental awareness. Yet, while these works have greatly enriched critical appreciation of Rossetti’s devotional verse and theological writing, scant attention has been paid to her theology of renunciation. And while renunciatory practice is examined in the work of Lynda Palazzo (2002), the only thinker to address the feminist connotations of Rossetti’s theological vision, she dismissively argues that: “A stumbling block in the appreciation of Rossetti’s devotional texts has long been the critical preference … for the negative values of renunciation, of mental anguish, and of frustrated women” (140). Palazzo regards renunciation as inhibitive to artistic expression, resulting in “mental anguish” and (presumably sexual) “frustration” (ibid.). In contrast, I argue that, for the Alcott and Rossetti women, the recognition of unworthiness implicit in their theologies of renunciation underpins their capacity to reflect both their communion with one another and the image of the divine. Like the iconographer, the Rossetti women renounce individualistic selfhood in their devotional practice, to attain an immanent revelation of the communion of the saints. They seek

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to reflect one another as images of God and, in doing so, ascend upwards to the kingdom of heaven. Christina Rossetti’s devotional writing champions the imitatio Christi: a practice whereby the supplicant imitates Christ to achieve unification with him and be restored to their prelapsarian state as one who is created in God’s image. Similarly, the Alcott women endeavour to identify with and serve the weakest members of the community in recognition of the fact that all are equally unworthy before God. Therefore, the ‘littlest’ and most marginalized members of the community are placed at the top of the hierarchy because they reflect Christ’s humility. In complementarity with Christina Rossetti, Louisa May Alcott also advocates imitating Christ but in a practical and altruistic manner: by serving the ‘little’ and weak. Simply put, the matrilineal communities’ theologies of renunciation allow Alcott and Rossetti to be remade in God’s image, just as the iconographer’s recognition of their unworthiness allows them to become an icon of Christ. Contrary to Palazzo’s claim, renunciation does not inhibit artistic expression; it allows nineteenth-century women of faith to fulfil their devotional purpose of reflecting God’s image in their work.

Preparing the Gesso: Archival Relics, Negotiation with the Dead, and the Methodology of Pilgrimage During the second stage of the icon-painting process, the iconographer prepares the gesso. Consisting of whiting of plaster of Paris and rabbit skin glue, gesso takes many days to create, for each coat must be allowed to dry before a new one is laid down. Out of these messy and rudimentary materials, the iconographer creates a pure and smooth white surface, a “home” for the saint (Loreto 1). Throughout this process, they contemplate the enormity of their vocation, described by one practitioner as “playing with holy fire” (6). At this moment, the iconographer becomes conscious of their intention to embed the presence of divine onto the most elementary materials of their craft. The gesso, for me, consists of the ground I have prepared for this study, by reconstructing the context of the lives of Alcott and Rosetti from the material of the extant archive, the relics as it were. It is crucial that I examine an expanded range of texts from those typically discussed. Analyzing the authors’ conceptual debates with their male relatives and their rejections of the individualistic models of artistry championed by the Transcendentalists and Pre-Raphaelites requires me to recover Alcott’s and Rossetti’s commentaries on these movements in journals and correspondence, as well as the lesser-known autobiographical works in which Alcott and Rossetti satirized the art and writing of their male peers. These texts are available in print but are infrequently referenced in scholarship on Alcott’s and Rossetti’s engagement with Transcendentalism and Pre-Raphaelitism. By centralizing

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lesser-known autobiographical texts in my preliminary discussion of the authors’ patrilineal heritages, I demonstrate that Alcott and Rossetti participated in fully formed debates with their male peers concerning the nature and function of artistic identity, and thereafter made conscious choices to affiliate themselves with the Alcott and Rossetti women. Alcott’s and Rossetti’s matrilineal affiliations are mapped in early juvenilia forged collaboratively with their mothers and sisters. It will be shown that much of this unpublished juvenilia provides the basis for the mystical theologies of renunciation promoted in the authors’ mature works and informs their most iconic portrayals of matrilineal communities and sisterhoods. The theological and literary influence of the wider matrilineal community is made visible in my extended analyses of their life-writing. Life-writing is integral to the recovery of female literary traditions because, as Linda H. Peterson argues, many women “composed their lives without a sense that they were appropreriating a masculine tradition or that their experiences were radically different from men’s” (6). Life-writing allows scholars to depart from the androcentric preoccupation with male canons to consider the “self-representational modes available to, acknowledged, or created by women writers” (3). The life-writing of these matrilineal communities is largely unpublished and remains underdiscussed because, unlike their male peers in the Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite movements, the authors’ mothers and sisters were not acclaimed professional writers. It should be noted, however, that both the Alcott and Rossetti matriarchs harbored serious literary ambitions that were curtailed by personal and familial circumstance,9 but they nonetheless encouraged their daughters to reflect on their sisterly relationships and religious faith in collaborative literary projects. These early literary productions exerted a far greater influence on the authors than the public outputs of the Transcendentalists and Pre-Raphaelites. My reclamation of Alcott’s matrilineal heritage traces the influence of matriarch, Abigail Alcott’s, collaborative journal on the Alcott sisters’ newspapers, The Portfolio and The Pickwick, as well as their mature letters, diaries, and poetry. These papers are housed at the most significant archive of the Alcott family at the Houghton Library, Harvard. Likewise, I foreground the devotional literary influence of Rossetti’s mother, Frances (1800–1886), on the theological work of the Rossetti sisters by examining the visibility of Frances’s Commonplace Book and newspaper, Hodge-Podge, in Christina Rossetti’s posthumously published Valentine’s Day Verses (dedicated to her mother) and Maria Rossetti’s early theological work, The Rivulets. Both the Commonplace Book and Hodge-Podge are housed in the Angeli-Dennis Collection of the University of British Columbia, while a copy of The Rivulets can be found at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. With the exception of Hodge-Podge, which has been transcribed for Jerome McGann’s online

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Rossetti Archive, none of these works have been previously published. A selection of important passages from Frances Rossetti’s Commonplace Book are included here for the first time, alongside a range of submissions to the Alcott sisters’ newspapers, including an early sketch for Little Women, in the appendices. My method of interpretation largely focuses on shared devotional themes, including the practice of lived religion, the experience of sympathy, the supplicant’s conformity to divine providence and the practice of imitating Christ, which are established in the matrilineal communities’ life-writing and elaborated in Alcott’s and Rossetti’s public works. Generic innovation is also paramount since life-writing and juvenilia—by virtue of its form—challenges established literary conventions of the (male-dominated) canon. Both communities create unique principles of composition and collaboration, which reflect their modes of communication and discourse, as well as the patterns of devotion that shape their daily lives. Of central importance is the study of intertextual referencing, which allows us to track the influence of the matrilineal communities across Alcott’s and Rossetti’s careers, and consider the authors’ personal engagement with their religious beliefs recorded in scriptural allusions that elucidate their mystical experiences. My intertextual practice further strives to expand the authors’ corpuses by foregrounding the matrilineal influence in lesser-known, as well as more well-established, public works. By presenting these lesser-known texts as integral to the authors’ artistic developments, I do not, as Jane Tompkins suggests, regard them as valuable only as records of “religious beliefs, social practices, and economic and political circumstances” (xii–xiii). Instead, I shift the emphasis away from iconic works, which narrows down critical discussion to a limited set of preoccupations that do not reflect the multifaceted and interdisciplinary outputs of these women. It is important to remember that no landmark text comes to us fully realized; texts that dominate the critical discussion reflect the moral, political and sociological contexts of a particular moment in history, while texts that consistently dominate the scholarly debate reflect the history of authorial reception, which comes down fraught with assumptions and value judgements that stretch back to the public images constructed for authors by editors, publishers and literary executors, as well as critics. Examining the widest range of texts allows us to recover the authors’ visions of female creativity through collating the experiences, causes, themes and preoccupations that interested them throughout their lives. The gesso of my research, then, is the widest possible range of texts I can access and discuss within the limited scope of this work, all of which embody the authors’ spiritual lives and mystical experiences. At the heart of my devotional pilgrimage is an attempt to converse with the dead to discover how their lived religious practices shaped their visions

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as writers. This is not as eccentric an objective as it might initially appear. In her 2002 memoir on writing, Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood claims that “all writing, is motivated, deep down … by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something, or someone back from the dead” (140). As the only art form that survives as voice, writing uniquely captures the author’s presence on the material substance of the page (much as the gesso captures the presence of the saint). According to Atwood, writing “survives its own performance” and leaves a trace of the author behind as “fossilised footprints” on the manuscript, which is subsequently transformed into a kind of score for the reader to ventriloquize the writer’s voice (141–142). Atwood brings a wide range of ancient and classical texts to bear on this thesis, from the legends of Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice, to Virgil’s Aenied, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She convincingly argues that the desire to communicate with the dead transcends all cultures and can be observed in the ancestor worship practiced among indigenous cultures of Africa and Eastern Asia, the Day of the Dead celebrated in Central and South America, and the Western secular feast of Halloween that finds its roots in Paganism and Christianity. If my recovery of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s religious experience is defined as a pilgrimage to the communion of saints, then my engagement with archival material can equally be understood as a veneration of relics. Following Derrida’s premise that the act of archiving imbues an object with the trace of the event or person it seeks to commemorate, I contend that the matrilineal communities’ collaborative record of their devotional practices is composed with the view of allowing Christian readers to re-enact their mystical experiences. It is worth noting that both communities burnt of and disposed manuscripts they did not wish to preserve and that their life-writing was targeted to an exclusive audience that excluded the Alcott and Rossetti men. The archival papers discussed here are imbued with the presence (or Derridean ‘trace’) of the matrilineal communities’ experiences of their faith. These presences can only be activated by those who share in this faith and who are able to decipher the experiences and events recorded. My archival transcriptions therefore serve as devotional aids for reactivating the presences of the Alcott and Rossetti women in archival objects, understood here as relics. The introductory chapter, “I am even I,” considers how Alcott and Rossetti resisted their male relatives’ models of artistic individualism in familial correspondence, autobiographical fiction, and collaborative literary projects. Part I, “Left-handed Societies,” examines how the matrilineal communities’ theologies of renunciation, as recorded in their life-writing, are incorporated into the authors’ iconic works, Little Women and “Goblin Market.” Part II, “A Loving League of Sisters,” uncovers the influence of the matrilineal communities’ theologies of

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renunciation on Rossetti’s and Alcott’s portrayals of utopian sisterhood in their lesser-known public works, Maude (1850) and Work (1873). The conclusion compares Alcott’s and Rossetti’s rejections of individualistic models of creativity and their promotion of matrilineal theologies of renunciation in fictional sisterhoods. A final Coda applies four strands of my interpretive lens: resistance to individualism, the elevation of maternal authority, the transfigurative power of Christian sisterhood, and the metaphysical propagation of transatlantic theologies of renunciation to five nineteenth-century women: Emily Dickinson, Sojourner Truth, Michael Field (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper), and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to consider how this research might be fruitfully applied to future scholarship across the field of nineteenth-century women’s writing.

Painting the Matrilineal Image of God: The Theological Statements of the Alcott and Rossetti Women The third stage of iconography is dedicated to the act of painting. As the iconographer attempts to “channel” the presence of the saint onto the wooden panel, they make a “theological statement” (Loreto 1). Icons are written, as much as they are painted, incorporating sacred texts from holy scripture (ibid.). Because icons are based on biblical truths, they possess the capacity to transcend denominations, for they pay witness to the “concrete events of Sacred History” (Ouspensky 49). The painting of an icon draws the iconographer out of their mystical contemplation of the saint into the life of the church community as they begin to deploy symbols, patterns and texts that can be deciphered by pilgrims across history. By interpreting Alcott’s and Rossetti’s theological statements, I seek to recover the matrilineal heritage through which they are connected, and so incorporate this present work into that same lineage. In their devotional writings, Alcott and Rossetti express the theologies of renunciation of their matrilineal communities. I characterize Rossetti’s and Alcott’s spiritual outlooks as ‘theologies of renunciation’ in opposition to the term “doctrine of renunciation” used by Judith Fetterley (“Civil War” 38). In line with Fetterley’s own views on renunciation, “doctrine” bears connotations of an imposed hierarchical framework enforced from above in a patriarchal superstructure. By contrast, ‘theology’ suggests a fully conceptualized belief-system developed in a mutually supportive community actively engaged with Christian traditions, mores, and discourses. Alcott’s and Rossetti’s theologies of renunciation enable them to express the beliefs of the matrilineal community, just as the act of painting allows the iconographer to articulate the biblical foundations of Christian belief. Once the matrilineal communities’ theologies of renunciation are recorded in life-writing

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texts, they are passed down to subsequent generations in much the same manner the icon is passed down to future pilgrims. Alcott’s and Rossetti’s theological statements are formulated against the individualistic discourses of their male relatives in the Pre-Raphaelite and Transcendentalist movements. Scholarship concerning Alcott and Rossetti often defines their theologies of renunciation as expressions of deference to the dominant individualism of the male artists of their families. Yet, if the paradigm of artistic identity offered by the male artist is one of individualistic genius, then to embrace a theology of renunciation is an act of resistance. I deploy the term ‘ideology of individualism,’ when discussing the Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite movements in reference to Mary Poovey’s definition of “ideology” as a system that “governs not just political and economic relations but social relations and even psychological stresses as well” (xiv). The ideology of individualism adopted by the Rossetti and Alcott men went far beyond the realm of art, shaping the economic destinies, gender dynamics and psychological pressures experienced by the two families. Nor were these ideologies mere constructs or speculative philosophies: they were established systems of principles that governed the relations between the gendered communities of the two families, for “simply by living together, men and women establish priorities among their needs and desires” (ibid.). Christian women on both sides of the Atlantic (and, indeed, across the world) regard their attempts to embody and express the self-emptying love of God as radically opposed to individualistic modes of selfexpression. The Christian artist acts as both witness and medium to the creative power of the divine. In the Orthodox tradition, the iconographer is instructed to resist individualistic expression and is threatened with “divine retribution” if they “adopt Western and humanistic elements” (Loreto 7). This resistance to artistic individualism is grounded in the understanding that the devotional artist is an “instrument” of the Creator (2), rather than, in Christine Battersby’s words, an “individual and arrogant ego, so swollen with pride as to suppose that its own self encompasses the whole universe” (45). This has particular relevance because much of the early criticism of Alcott and Rossetti aligned their rejection of artistic genius, commonly associated with their male relatives in the Transcendentalist and PreRaphaelite movements, with their inhibited agency as nineteenth-century women. For instance, a 1930 review in the Times Literary Supplement by Basil de Sélincourt characterizes Rossetti’s poetry as expressing “an imprisoned genius” because artistic originality is fostered by a “latitude and amplitude of circumstance” that is “harder for a woman” to attain (1022). De Sélincourt associates Rossetti’s qualities of “introversion and self-effacement” with her status as a “satellite” of the Pre-Raphaelites (ibid.). For de Sélincourt, Rossetti’s existence in a society where “the centre of gravity was incorrigibly male” imbues her renunciation with “a

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certain hollowness” because “she [is] renouncing what she had never had” (ibid.).10 The presence of the Romantic concept of male genius as an ultimate point of authorial aspiration has left its trace in twentieth-century feminist criticism. Gilbert and Gubar’s 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic,11 adapts Harold Bloom’s 1973 theory of an “anxiety of influence” by arguing that female writers experience an “anxiety of authorship” that is the product of the male author’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a feminine voice (Gilbert & Gubar 49). Yet, as Nina Auerbach succinctly puts it, the theorists’ work “grants patriarchal structures … a power they do not seem to have earned” (Madwoman 506). And where Angela Leighton (1992) offers a more nuanced account of the nineteenth-century female author’s struggle to distinguish herself against the social mores that surrounded her, she still situates this tradition within a conflict between the prescriptive values of “sincerity and purity” and “the individualistic model of artistic identity … inherited from the Romantics” (3 5).12 Repression is one of the central preoccupations of scholarship concerning nineteenth-century women’s writing. A notable exception to this trend is Marianne Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989), which upholds the importance of recovering the figure of the mother as a pivotal precursor to the female author. And yet, this important work of psychoanalytic recovery is still invested in a vision of autonomy that finds its model in the Romantic conception of a male literary genius who seeks to distinguish himself against the tradition that precedes him.13 Hirsch does not stop to consider that a female literary tradition might follow a fantasy of integration, rather than individuation, especially if the female community is perceived as existing on a continuum that stems from the divinely ordained love of the mother. In the work that follows, I demonstrate that Louisa May Alcott upholds a model of renunciatory cooperation within the matrilineal community as an alternative to the ideology of individualism promoted in her father’s 1843 utopian commune, Fruitlands. The Transcendentalist conception of genius is centered on the marginalization of the nuclear family, typified by Emerson (1803–1882) or Thoreau (1817–1862), for example.14 The rarefied status of the male artist in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood15 is also contingent upon the diminishment of the female other. According to Elisabeth Bronfen, the female muse in Pre-Raphaelite painting represents the threat of true feminine otherness and its potential to obliterate the hidden individualism of the male artistic creator (11). It will be seen that Christina Rossetti’s contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, The Germ, portray the idealized Pre-Raphaelite model as a female corpse, thereby exposing the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s desire for communion with a lifeless female object recreated in his own image. The parallels between the Pre-Raphaelite and Transcendentalist movements go beyond the subordination of the female muse to the

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transcendent vision of the male individualist.16 Yet, there remains no comparative study of these two seminal movements of nineteenthcentury British and American cultural life. The scholarly obliviousness to resonances in Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite styles of thought at least in part derives from the inclination in transatlantic scholarship to focus on models of authorial influence or epistolary exchange within literary or intellectual networks. In light of these methodological models, there are few transatlantic studies concerning either Alcott or Rossetti, or the two prominent artistic movements with whom they are associated.17 This study can, then, at the same time help to complicate our understanding of the relationship between British and American literary traditions. It answers a resistance to examining the comparative development of British and American literature, evident from Bloom (1973) down to Gilbert and Gubar (1979), and traced in Robert Weisbuch’s Atlantic Double Cross (1989). In essence, the development of a rarefied national literature in the US is an outgrowth of Emerson’s ideology of individualism, which insists on the exceptionalism of the American literary tradition as an outpouring of remarkable individuals who distinguish themselves against their predecessors and eschew models of literary collaboration.18 Typically, when the connection between the two traditions is acknowledged, it is through a framework of cause and effect that presents American literature as the child of the British tradition.19 Yet, in tandem with their American counterparts, mid- to late- nineteenth-century British cultural movements, including the Pre-Raphaelites, also attempted to reconcile the Romantic aspiration to reconceive the imagination as the source of all transcendent experience with the rise of empirical frameworks of thought as the accepted modes for comprehending reality. It is, as Susan Manning (2013) has observed, difficult to unravel the entwined networks of influence that join the literary North Atlantic, somewhat confounding Paul Giles’s (2010) characterization of these as “parallel” (i.e. neatly separate) traditions. I agree with Richard Gravil (2000) that the emergence, institutionally, of English and American Studies was a “bizarrely separate development,” obscuring the presence of inextricably linked styles of thought on both sides of the Atlantic (17–18). Alcott and Rossetti based their styles of thought on the spiritual authority of their mothers, in much the same way the iconographer forms their vocation in relation to the example of the Virgin Mary. To return to iconography, then, to illustrate this point. Iconographers believe that Christ is only able to take on the form of the first icon because he is incarnate in the flesh and womb of a woman—Mary. Mary is therefore regarded as the patron of iconographers: she is venerated as “the indisputable condition of the Incarnation, the cause of the fact that God became representable” (Ouspensky 31). The role of the iconographer, and all devotional artists, is paradoxical: they assume a position of humility to take on the ultimate privilege of transmitting the image of God to the world. The prototype for

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the vocation of transmitting God’s image and adopting an attitude of humility is the Mother of God who acts as mediatrix and intermediary between human and divine. Alcott and Rossetti may not have venerated the Virgin Mary, but they regarded their mothers as intercessors between earth and heaven who embodied exemplary theologies of renunciation for their daughters to imitate. Reverence for the mother therefore underpins the theological statements of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s devotional works of art; the mother provides a model for rejecting individualistic ideologies in favor of projecting the image of God.

Gilding the “Doors of Perception”: Mystical Communion across Time and Space In the final stage of the icon-painting process, the iconographer gilds the icon. The gold leaf represents the presence of heaven: it invests saints and holy figures with halos and crowns to symbolize their sanctity. The overlaying of gold leaf “lifts the icon out of the world into the realm of Heaven” (Loreto 2). It is at this moment that the icon becomes a divine object: it has been embellished with the most refined material substances available that indicate its sacredness. The application of gold leaf enables the pilgrim to “read” the icon because it denotes the holiness of its figures (7). Embedding the icon with precious substances that transport it into the divine allows subject, iconographer, and pilgrim to, as John Baggley puts it, transcend the “precise historical moment of time and space” and enter the “world of the spirit … a world of human consciousness that is richer and more mysterious than the ordinary everyday world of rational decisions and logical actions” (82). At the beginning of this introduction, I presented my reclamation of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s matrilineal heritages as a pilgrimage to my own matrilineal, mystical heritage as a Christian feminist scholar. The object of pilgrimage is to affect a revolution in the pilgrim’s consciousness comparable to the transfiguration of perception that takes place when icon is gilded. Turner and Turner claim that during the course of a pilgrimage, the structures of thought that dictate the pilgrim’s experience in the secular world are replaced by “symbolic structures: religious buildings, pictorial images [including icons], statuary, and sacralised features of the topography” (10). These sacramental objects enable the pilgrim to vividly sympathise with “the culturally defined experiences of the founder and those persons depicted as standing in some close relationship to him” (11). The pilgrim’s immersion in the symbolic language of their religion restores “the innocence of the eye” and facilitates the “cleansing of the doors of perception” (ibid.); they are purified of the sinfulness that marks their existence in a fallen world and mystically cross the boundaries between earth and heaven.

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My encounter with Alcott’s and Rossetti’s matrilineal heritage (through archival relics) is designed to immerse me in the structures of thought of a Christian community of women that stretches across geographical, metaphysical, and temporal boundaries into the communion of saints. An icon is often figured as a door that allows the pilgrim to cross between earthly and divine spheres to petition (or converse) with the figures they venerate. The distorted perspective “represent[s] the dematerialized, spiritual form of the [icon’s] subject transfigured by divine grace” (Baggley 83). To read the icon as a sacred text, the pilgrim must refine their understanding of perspective and radically alter the way they see the world. The wider symbolic significance of an icon must be worked out in the soul of those who behold [it]; what the icon represents may have been manifested at a precise point in time and space, but its fuller significance is found in the inner world where the true work of purification, illumination, and union have to be accomplished. (Baggley 82) Likewise, the critic also attempts to achieve a transformed understanding of the literary text through engaging in the act of close reading. Criticism can be understood as a dialogue between scholar and writer that enables the scholar to understand the significance of the author’s experience of their belief-system, their vision of artistry, and their understanding of the social function and purpose of literary art. Through rigorously analyzing the text, the critic attempts to communicate with the author across time and space. Similarly, the last act a pilgrim makes when they arrive at the object of their veneration is that of petition. This may take the form of a prayer before an icon where they ask the religious figure to advocate for their requests and protect them in their daily lives. At the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a stone’s throw away from where this book was composed, you write your petition on a scrap of paper and drop it in a box to be burnt before the altar. The trace of your living presence, impressed upon the manuscript, is consumed by fire, the smoke of which rises up to meet with the figures you have invoked. The final act of this pilgrimage, then, is a petition to the Alcott and Rossetti women: may their voices come alive in the relics of their manuscripts and convey the lived experiences of their faith as expressions of their mystical communion with one other. To illustrate the type of communion I endeavour to achieve, I will close with an anecdote concerning a literary pilgrimage I made to Louisa May Alcott in 2016. While surveying the Alcott archive at the Houghton Library, Harvard, I was made aware of a temporary exhibit, “Louisa May Alcott’s Walpole,” in the Historical Society of a charming New Hampshire town. Louisa resided in Walpole for just two years and is

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better known for her residence in Concord but, as a true Alcott enthusiast, I hired a car and set off on a hair-raising journey that saw me attempting to enter the highway from the wrong side of the road and narrowly avoid hitting a lamppost when I observed an effigy of the Democratic nominee for president hanging from a noose outside a New Hampshire mansion. On reaching Walpole, I was feeling slightly worse for wear and was determined to exit the vehicle as quickly as possible. I abruptly turned from Main Street onto a quiet suburban road, vaguely processing a quaint clapboard duplex on my left, and stopped in front of a steep path that curved up a woodside hill. Leaving the monstrously huge car in the middle of the road, I got out and ran up the path. As I reached its peak, I was struck anew by the beauty of the New England autumn and the fine mellowness of the light as it trickles through the leaves. At the moment the light burst through an aperture in the branches above, I was compelled to contemplate my blessings, one of which is the privilege of studying literature. The exhibit was everything I expected it be: a charming celebration of local history that contained only one object belonging to Louisa May Alcott—a petticoat, the provenance of which was uncertain. I was briefly torn between the British tendency to disparage objects of unknown provenance and the Catholic tendency to venerate objects precisely because their provenance is unknown. Of course, I settled on the latter. Just as I was leaving, the local historian accosted me, “Before you go, make sure you turn off Main Street and take a look at the duplex where Louisa lived. You’ll find the path she used to run up every day at the end of the road—you know, the one that looks out on her ‘splendid ravine’”. Then, I remembered that the woods held a special significance for Louisa May Alcott, for a journal entry of 1845 memorializes a spiritual revelation she received while running in the woods: I had an early run in the woods before the dew was off the grass … It seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond. A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life. (57) 40 years later, Louisa annotated this passage: “I have, for I most sincerely think the little girl ‘got religion’ that day in the wood when dear mother Nature led her to God” (ibid.). One might read Louisa’s entire output in the context of this passage: here she describes her remaining lived experience as transformed by the mystical moment of revelation she received in the woods. During the moment of

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revelation Louisa’s work becomes an act of witness to the “happy sense of nearness” that thereafter pervaded her life: she was made aware of the immanent presence of the divine (ibid.). The very last thing an iconographer does before they donate their work to the devotional community (giving over a piece of themselves in the process) is to “sign” the image (Loreto 2 5). The image is not signed with their name, however, for they have become a divine “instrument” (2). Instead, the icon is signed with the name of the mystical event or holy figure it commemorates. At this moment in the woods, where Louisa and I meet across time and space, she signs her future work with the record of the moment of her conversion. Louisa’s entire canon is imbued with the trace of this moment, just as Christina Rossetti’s verse is imprinted with her aphorism: “All things we see lie far within our scope / And still we peer beyond with craving face” (Later Life 356 Sonnet 23 14).

Notes 1 I will refer to Alcott and Rossetti by their surnames, unless I am discussing them in the wider context of their families, in which case I will refer to all family members by forename, or forename and middle name, depending on how the figure in question is best known. 2 Little Women was well received in Britain. The British Quarterly Review claimed that, “We are not so sure that our American cousins do not, in this department of literature, far excel any writer that we can boast,” 53.[1] Jan. 1871: 157 (Clark 84). Likewise, The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, raved: “We consider Miss Alcott’s stories to be far better in every way than the generality of English tales,” 103.203 1st January, 1875: 271 (87). Due to unprecedented demand, Little Women precipitated a blockade at the warehouse of Alcott’s publisher, Roberts Brothers, upon its initial printing in 1868 (Matteson 344). Roberts Brothers were also Christina Rossetti’s American publishers (Kooistra 96). 3 As Grace M. Jantzen argues, “It was crucial to the ecclesiastical establishment that those who claimed knowledge of the mysteries of God should be contained within the structures of the church, since the power of the church would be threatened if it should be acknowledged that access to divine authority was possible outside its confines” (2). Therefore, the “delimiting of mysticism through the centuries was crucial to maintaining hierarchical control in church and society” (3). 4 “A host of things I take on trust: I take/The nightingales on trust” (R.W. Crump, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 2001 355 Sonnet 21 1–2). Crump’s edition of Christina Rossetti’s poems is cited throughout, with the exception of poems appearing in Rossetti’s 1896 novella, Maude. 5 Hollywood argues that Beauvoir’s The Second Sex regards female mystics as projecting their “desire to be everything” onto love of “self, man or God” (22). 6 Eve LaPlante’s, extensive recovery of Abigail, which also includes her landmark double biography, Marmee and Louisa (2013), is nevertheless an invaluable resource for showcasing Abigail’s literary gifts; her close bond with her daughters and the stylistic influence of her work on Louisa’s output.

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7 An academic monograph on Alcott’s youngest sister, May, The Forgotten Alcott: Essays on the Artistic Legacy and Literary Life of May Alcott Nieriker (Flint & Hehmeyer) is forthcoming with Routledge’s The Nineteenth Century Series (2022). I know of four biographies concerning the Alcott sisters that are currently in progress. 8 Arseneau’s work draws attention to the intertextual presence of Rossetti’s mother, Frances, in Christina’s writing, but does not offer an extended analysis of Frances’s Commonplace Book, which is discussed here at length alongside the theological writings of Rossetti’s sister, Maria, formerly recovered by Arseneau. 9 According to LaPlante, Abigail Alcott “longed for the experience of her brother Sam… She wished to read history and literature, to learn Latin and Greek, and to use her mind to improve the world, as he was encouraged to do. Her society did not value these goals in a girl, but her brother and mother honored her ambition and encouraged her to educate herself” (Marmee 19). Abigail married philosopher, Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), with the view of expanding her intellectual horizons. Her private writings and journals contain a fluency that surpasses that of Louisa May Alcott’s life-writing. Frances Rossetti née Polidori (a prolific life-writer and governess) was likewise attracted to the older Professor of Italian at King’s College, London, Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), on account of his learning. She hoped they might produce a family of accomplished scholars and writers. Like Abigail Alcott, Frances had a literary brother: the writer J.W. Polidori (1795–1821), who composed the first British work of vampire fiction. 10 De Sélincourt’s portrayal of renunciation as the by-product of female submissiveness is also embraced, albeit positively, by Alcott’s contemporaries. Alcott’s funeral eulogy describes her death, two days after her father’s, as evidence of her identification with him: “As the young mother in the classic story gave her breast to her famished sire in prison, so this daughter, such a support to her father on earth, was needed by him even in heaven” (“Louisa May Alcott.” AFAP 1707–1904. MS 1130.16. Folder 7. Houghton Lib., Harvard). Early assessments of Alcott’s work underscore the fact that her writing financially supported her father in his literary and artistic endeavors, thereby presenting her authorial vocation as a response to his needs. 11 The important cultural work attained by Gilbert and Gubar should not be underestimated. As Janet Gezari argues, “Gilbert and Gubar’s account of how nineteenth-century women’s writing had been shaped by ‘gender strife’ brought the emergence of gender as a category of analysis to full consciousness” (266). 12 Isobel Armstrong (2002) makes a similar contention, arguing that Victorian women’s poetry reveals the lack of an expressive outlet for the spontaneous “overflow of feeling” Coleridge claimed was integral to poetic expression (340–341). As a consequence of the inability to “bring forth an excess of feeling,” repression becomes an integral aspect of the female poet’s condition (341). 13 Hirsch argues that “in conventional nineteenth-century plots of the European and American tradition the fantasy that controls the female family romance is the desire for the heroine’s singularity based on a disidentification from the fate of other women, especially the mother” (10). 14 Joyce W. Warren argues that, for Emerson, “Other people have no existence, no substance, except as they are absorbed into or made use of by the self” (29). Likewise, Kathryn Schultz writes of Thoreau: “The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about

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16

17

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Introduction self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to survive and thrive in the world” (para. 6). Wendy Graham contends that the Pre-Raphaelites capitalized on the public’s initial “neglect, incomprehension and censure” to cultivate an avant-garde mystique as misunderstood geniuses whose only compensation for their inadequate recognition was their very “status as geniuses” (57). Both movements positioned themselves against what they deemed to be the stagnant and restrictive models of creativity upheld in the canon and academy, championing instead a return to nature as expressive of an artistic authenticity that could paradoxically enable both the creation of a new mode of realism and the simulation of a pantheistic transcendence; both reacted against the organized religions of their cultural milieux by presenting alternative visions for social reform in their stead; each predominantly male group was founded on historical prototypes of cooperative fraternity that drew inspiration from the European Romantics and Coleridge in particular, and each circle, in its own idiosyncratic way, experimented with philosophies of free love derived from either the work of prominent thinkers, such as Charles Fourier and Ezra Heywood, or the immediate desire to gratify their own sexual appetites—usually with disastrous results. There are only two extended works of transatlantic scholarship that examine the work of Louisa May Alcott, both of which center on her literary influences. Christine Doyle’s Transatlantic Transactions (2000) considers the interchange between Alcott and Charlotte Bronte’s ideas concerning women’s work, while Barton and Huston’s Transatlantic Sensations (2016) examines the transatlantic exchange of ideas in sensation writing, paying careful attention to the influence of British writers like Elizabeth Braddon on Alcott’s horror writing. Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women contains a fascinating comparison of the matriarchal structure of the Bennet and March families in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Little Women, respectively, but Auerbach does not link her observations concerning fictional female communities to the authors’ matrilineal heritages. The only monograph to touch on Christina Rossetti’s transatlantic connections is Lorraine Jantzen Kooistra’s Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (2002). Yet, the Rossetti household paid considerable attention to American literary culture. Dinah Roe’s 2015 Pre-Raphaelite Society Founders’ Day Lecture, “A Special Relationship: The Rossetti Family and the United States of America,” has highlighted the need for more research in this area. It is no coincidence that authorial identity replaces the selection of individual works as the expression of wider aesthetic and formalistic trends in the nineteenth-century. Leon Chai (2019) has made the prescient point that the privileging of individual figures “sacrifices the canon’s essential purpose, since, if there is nothing transcending the authors … neither can there be any principle of selection or exclusion to express the idea behind the canon—exemplariness” (4). In short, exemplariness—whether British or American—is a mythic point of aspiration that functions merely to distinguish one tradition against the other, using identical modes of formulation. In his study of the literary influence of Romanticism in both traditions, Richard Gravil (2000) writes: “the situation of idealistic Americans in 1823–1862 … involved preoccupations and expectations strangely parallel to those of England in the period 1790–1819” (14). Patrick J. Keane’s Emerson, Romanticism and Intuitive Reason (2002) recovers Emerson’s development of the concept of “intuitive reason” with reference to work

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of Kant and his wider milieu, as well as British Romantic thinkers including Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle. Samantha C. Harvey’s Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature (2013) presents Coleridge as the catalyst for the transformation in Emerson’s thinking and the subsequent birth of American Transcendentalism between the years 1826–36. In her “Transcendentalism, Romanticism, Transatlanticism” (Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies 2016), Diane Piccitto offers a more nuanced account of the Romantic influence on Transcendentalism by arguing that the Transcendentalist appraisal of British Romanticism reflects the tensions in the American understanding of the Old World as both its forebear and antagonist.

1

“I am Even I”: Rossetti and Alcott Resisting Male Authority

In his 1904 memoir of Christina Rossetti, Some Reminiscences, William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919) described his sister’s transition from childhood to adolescence as a period in which she increasingly forced herself to subdue her passionate emotions: “Her temperament and character, naturally warm and free, became ‘a fountain sealed’” (lxviii). This interpretation of Christina’s early life was echoed by her other brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), in his 1877 chalk portrait of Christina and their mother, Frances: Christina Georgina Rossetti; Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti (nee Polidori). The portrait shows both women in side-profile and emphasizes their austerity and inscrutability. Each gaze inclines away from the viewer in a frown, while the lips of both women are set severely and appear to eschew the expression of emotion—something that is also emphasized by the muted blue and grey palette. When discussing this portrait in his memoir, William Michael again linked it to his sister’s enforced self-repression: “Whenever I set my eyes upon it, the lines from her poem, ‘From House to Home’ come into my mind—‘Therefore in patience I possess my soul; / Yea, therefore as a flint I set my face’” (lxv). William Michael’s interpretation of Dante Gabriel’s portrait as a straightforward representation of their sister’s inner life encapsulates the ways in which Christina’s theology of renunciation has been interpreted by succeeding generations of critics. Christina’s religious faith has historically been read as stifling and repressive, a symptom of the period in which she lived. Likewise, Louisa May Alcott is remembered as ‘Duty’s Faithful Child,’ a nickname given to her by her father commemorating the sacrifice of her ambitions for his own. The authors’ theologies of renunciation have historically been read as coercive outlooks that deny their agency and ability to engage in informed discourses with their male relatives. Yet as this chapter shows, by exploring the authors’ engagements with their male relatives and the wider PreRaphaelite and Transcendentalist movements, both women champion the importance of spiritual accountability: each person must strive to attain eternal salvation through acknowledging their responsibility to

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others. In correspondence and life-writing, collaborative literary projects and autobiographical fiction, Christina and Louisa reject ideologies of individualism contingent upon the female subject’s subservience to the male artist. William Michael’s biographical reading of his sister’s verse has influenced subsequent interpretations of her poetry,1 while Dante Gabriel’s portrait, as a surviving visual representation, is often circulated as a reliable depiction of her character.2 Barbara Garlick interprets Christina’s identification with the image of “the frozen fountain” as a reference to her virginity and “the loss of selfhood involved in repressed sensuality” (105), while Dolores Rosenblum conflates Christina’s impenetrable demeanor with her role as a Pre-Raphaelite model, claiming her severe facial expression “becomes a … mode of aggression, as this seemingly stoical declaration reveals: ‘Yea, therefore, as a flint I set my face’” (85). Twentieth-century critical readings of Christina’s verse often portray her as suppressing her sensual nature, fostered by the Pre-Raphaelites, to meet the requirements of the religious beliefs she shared with her mother and sister. Donald Sturge uses William Michael’s description of Christina as a “fountain sealed” to support his claim that she experienced an “inner conflict” reflecting diverging familial influences, which can be “divided into two categories, ‘religious’ and ‘intellectual’ corresponding to the predominate interests of mother and father respectively” (193). R.A. Bellas likewise argues Christina withdrew into herself because of her religious belief-system, which he describes as an “imposition of a code of life—a way of thinking, feeling, and acting—that did not satisfy the needs of Christina’s personality or adequately explain her experiences” (43).3 Yet, Christina’s stoical demeanor, perceptible in the flint-like facial expression of Dante Gabriel’s portrait, belies a hidden depth—as can be observed in her poem “Flint” (251): “An opal holds a fiery spark; / But a flint holds fire” (7–8). Louisa May Alcott’s early reception was likewise overshadowed by her father’s published evaluation of her character. Specifically, in his 1882 Sonnets and Canzonets, Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) included a tribute to his daughter, which described her as “Duty’s faithful child” who had “vexed a sprightly brain” to “cherish kindred dear” (qtd. in Matteson 404 9–14). As William Michael’s assessment of his sister’s character has influenced subsequent readings of her poetry, so has Bronson’s description of his daughter shaped successive critical responses to her life and writing. Early reviewers praised Louisa’s submission to her father’s will with an 1888 obituary claiming she would be remembered as “the devoted daughter, on whose arm leaned for support that white-haired sage from whom her separation in life has been so pathetically brief.”4 This tradition of interpretation continued into the 1970s with Carol Gay claiming that Louisa was unable to mature as a thinker because her relationship with her father infantilized her.5

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“I am Even I”: Resisting Male Authority

Leona Rostenberg’s 1943 discovery of Alcott’s pseudonymous horror fiction and Madeline B. Stern’s subsequent 1975 landmark edition of Alcott’s forgotten thrillers, Behind a Mask, strengthened the conflation of Alcott’s literary output with her dutiful relationship with her father. Much has been made of Alcott’s jesting admission in an 1886 interview that she obscured her “lurid style” for fear that her subversive characters might go “cavorting at their own sweet will” in front of “dear Mr. Emerson” and her “own good father” (qtd. in Paola Giordano 146).6 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant argue that Louisa’s pseudonymous work embraces the Transcendentalist ideals of “selfexpression, self-reliance and self-exploration” (99) and is veiled under a pseudonym because Alcott anticipated her father and Emerson disapproving of a woman embracing these principles (100).7 As recently as 2012, Meg Jensen has similarly contended that Alcott’s work implicitly expresses her sense of repression under her father’s “intrusive surveillance” (10). While Jensen acknowledges that Alcott “critiqued” Bronson’s philosophy in her writing, she claims Alcott nonetheless “avoided … explicit public critiques” of her father, which is “in a Bloomian reading” evidence of “weakness” (5 10). And yet, something of vital imporance is missed in these readings because they defer to prominent biographical fallacies about the authors inherited from their early critical receptions, shaped by their male relatives. For example, they place considerable emphasis on the change in temperament both women experienced during adolescence when they relinquished the passionate demeanors that characterized their early lives.8 In childhood, Christina was allied with Dante Gabriel as one of the ‘two storms’ of the family, as opposed to the ‘two calms’ of her other siblings: Maria and William Michael. Christina’s preoccupation with religious obedience and devotional practice followed her adolescent breakdown in 1845 when she was 15 years old. There has been much speculation about the possible medical causes of Christina’s reported breakdown, but now as in her own lifetime, these tend merely to deny her agency by viewing her religious faith as a symptom of her mental illness.9 As a consequence, it is suggested here, we have come to know her through, essentially, misreadings of her life experiences. Alcott’s childhood was subject to comparable fits of anger and frustration. Like Rossetti, who admitted to mutilating her arm with a pair of scissors in childhood after being reprimanded by her mother, Alcott’s journal expresses resentment of parental authority and surveillance.10 In adult life, Alcott relinquished this resentment to take on the role of family breadwinner, often assuming literary projects that were distasteful to her, such as the Little Women trilogy. Alcott’s sense of familial obligation is sometimes connected to her father’s disapproval of her fiery temperament; her theology of renunciation has been read as an attempt to win his approval.11 In reality Alcott’s decision to become the family

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breadwinner reflects her lifelong dedication to and affiliation with her mother and the wider matrilineal community: Alcott provided the economic support her father was unable to offer in his career as a philosopher.12 It will be seen that Alcott and Rossetti rejected the individualistic outlooks modelled by their male relatives to assert their conceptual independence as artists; they believed the individual should prioritize eternal salvation and service to others above public acclaim. Their correspondence with their male relatives partakes in lively debates concerning the role of the artist, demonstrating their wit, satirical skill and, at times, playfully independent thinking. Currently, there are no studies comparing the influence of the male and female communities of the Rossetti and Alcott families, with the exception of Madelon Bedell’s The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (1980) and Dinah Roe’s The Rossettis in Wonderland (2011), exhaustive biographical studies that, by virtue of their genre, do not extensively examine familial debates concerning artistic identity. My recovery of the authors’ affiliation with their matrilineal communities demonstrates that Alcott and Rossetti advanced alternative models of female creativity to the figure of the poet as prophet championed by the Romantics and later taken up enthusiastically by second wave feminist critics. By placing Rossetti’s and Alcott’s theologies of renunciation alongside their male relatives’ ideologies of individualism, the work that follows illustrates that renunciation is practiced with the view of empowering women to safeguard and promote one another’s human dignity in the face of the male individualist’s solipsistic self-interest. Alcott and Rossetti imagine a world where artists and philosophers collaborate with providence through adapting their visions to the changing circumstances of their lives. They interrogate the real-world implications of Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite values, and predict the future lives of their male relatives. Ironically, the authors’ summations of the fruits of an individualistic outlook prove to be more accurate than the male artists’ inspired visions: both women demonstrate that the incorporation of the female subject into the male artist’s ego is detrimental to both parties, as well as the wider community. As Alcott and Rossetti turn away from the artistic examples of their male relatives, we see them championing women’s spiritual authority, religious faith and renunciatory practice—qualities at the forefront of their collaborative writing within the matrilineal community, which I explore in later chapters of this book. I begin here, however, by surveying the authors’ correspondence with their male relatives: drawing attention to their declarations of conceptual independence and the promotion of idiosyncratic literary styles that foreground the merits of women’s renunciatory theologies. In autobiographical fiction and literary collaboration, Alcott, and Rossetti skillfully mimic and ventriloquize the style, voice and tenets of Transcendentalism and

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Pre-Raphaelitism to expose the movements’ ideological dependence on the subjugation of women and the subordination of the wider community to the aspirations of the individualistic self. In work that explicitly evaluates the movements’ spirituality, Alcott and Rossetti stress the importance of abiding by an ethical code of conduct that tempers the moral excesses accompanying the pursuit of sublime experience. Ultimately, both women reorient our attention to the practice of renunciation espoused by female figures of spiritual authority. In concert with their wider matrilineal communities, both Alcott and Rossetti argue that artists should prioritize the redemption that is the fruit of service to others above personal fulfilment centered on the all-consuming gratification of self.

“I am Even I”: Christina Rossetti’s Assertion of the Female Poet’s Independence in Her Correspondence with Dante Gabriel Rossetti Christina Rossetti’s correspondence with Dante Gabriel Rossetti reveals her intellectual engagement with the values of the Brotherhood and her development of a unique poetic voice that contests the individualistic vision of the Pre-Raphaelites. She resists her brother’s criticism of her work and reasserts her poetic identity, while endorsing the achievements of other female poets, who were subject to her brother’s disapproval. This can be observed in her critical commentary of the poetry of Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862), Dante Gabriel’s late wife. Christina considered a selection of Siddal’s poems, furnished by her brother, for inclusion in her upcoming 1865 volume of verse (C. Rossetti Letters 1 224) and favored the works that were most critical of her brother. Christina regarded Siddal’s poems as autobiographical,13 and claimed that her favorite was “Number III,” “Dead Love” (Letters 1 225 fn. 3), a poem that condemns the inconstancy of the narrator’s beloved: Oh never weep for love that’s dead Since love is seldom true But changes his fashion from blue to red, From brightest red to blue, And love was born to an early death And is so seldom true. (1–6) In speaking of her especial admiration for “Dead Love,” Christina implicitly affiliates herself with Siddal’s critique of her brother. Dante Gabriel’s poetry and painting commonly features dead women who redeem their unworthy beloveds through prayerful intercession in the afterlife. Here, Siddal presents love, rather than the beloved, as dead and transforms the masterful personified figure of “Love,” conceived by

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Dante, and developed by her husband, into a foppish character who changes his color with the fashion of the moment. When evaluating “Dead Love,” Christina daringly informs Dante Gabriel that she admires the poem because it is “piquant … with cool bitter sarcasm.” This is an audacious admission, given the fact she associates Siddal’s poetry with “Lizzie herself” (225). Unsurprisingly, Christina’s next letter indicates her brother does not agree with her positive evaluation of the poem.14 Christina implies that Dante Gabriel’s reaction belies his desire to control Siddal’s image after her death.15 Emily J. Orlando argues that Siddal’s poetry has been continually associated with that of Dante Gabriel as “products of the great artist’s influence” that are “decidedly secondary to his canon” (628). Orlando claims that this was because Dante Gabriel “continually put his stamp on how history would remember [Siddal],” suppressing the publication of her poetry, and even destroying her photographs, so she would be remembered solely through his paintings (628–629). Christina Rossetti’s letter simultaneously acknowledges her brother’s desire to control Siddal’s reputation, while implicitly supporting Siddal’s criticisms of his inconstancy. Christina’s responses to her brother’s criticisms of her own poetry assert her independence and stress the uniqueness of her poetic identity. Anthony H. Harrison has argued that Christina refutes her brother’s criticisms through an illicit “strategy of depreciation” where she refers to alleged technical weaknesses to justify her rejection of her brother’s advice (95). However, a careful examination of Christina’s correspondence reveals that what may appear to be an affirmation of poetic weakness is a statement of poetic independence. When responding to her brother’s request that she allow him to provide a list of recommended revisions for her upcoming volume of verse, Christina replies: “Please make your emendations, and I can call them over the coals in proofs:— only don’t make vast changes as ‘I am I’” (Letters 1 232). While at first glance this may appear to be an acknowledgement of her artistic limitations, Christina is, in fact, quoting her triptych of poems, “The Thread of Life” (330–331). In these poems, the narrator initially expresses a desire to join in the activities of those surrounding her,16 only to repudiate the desire by asserting the immanence of her personal identity: “But soon I put the foolish fancy by: / I am not what I have nor what I do; / But what I was I am, I am even I” (II 12–14). Masked in deference, Christina’s statement to her brother is an implicit assertion of her right to a separate voice from his own, as well as a rejection of any collaborative or shared literary style. When outlining Christina’s “strategy of depreciation,” Harrison cites a letter where Christina responds to Dante Gabriel’s request for new material (96). She refuses, claiming she is unable to produce poetry on demand because she is “a person of one idea” who sings from a

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“one-stringed lyre” and is unable to “turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning” (Letters 1 348). Harrison observes a denigrating tone in her statement that “Women are not Men” and Dante Gabriel “must not expect [her] to possess a tithe of [his] capacities” (ibid.). Although this statement is outwardly depreciative, it contains an underlying criticism of Dante Gabriel, of which he would have been aware. In claiming that the only way to increase her output would be to broaden her subject-range to the breadth of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1806–1861), Christina references a poet whom she knew her brother disliked. He later criticized Christina’s poem, “The Lowest Room,” as “echoish of the Barrett-Browning style,” which he defined as a type of “falsetto masculinity” (Letters 1 323). By claiming she cannot be Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina implicitly draws attention to the double standard of her brother’s demands. On the one hand, he demands a greater volume and variety of material, but on the other he excludes women from writing on certain topics. In response, Christina asserts her independence and distinctive character as a female poet by claiming she is only able to write within a certain style and, if her brother does want her to follow Barrett Browning’s example, neither should he expect her to follow his own. In other letters, Christina asserts her special suitability to write on certain topics as a woman. Responding to her brother’s claim that the subject of her poem, “Under the Rose,” is inappropriate for a woman poet because it is about an illegitimate child, Christina writes: “whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be-desired unreality of women’s work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within the female range such an (work) attempt as this” (234). Christina’s letters also implicitly challenge her brother’s moral approach to certain poetic topics. For instance, when criticizing his sonnet on Chatterton, she writes: You are right as to my thoro’ ignorance not being able to say anything about Chatterton’s literary position: but the dreadful poverty which goaded him to so dreadful a deed I do know something of; & hard must be the heart which feels not for him, however far from feeling with him. You bring the poor boy & his gifts & his career vividly before one: I, if I could write thus upon him, I should say something more & something less (238) In this passage, Christina states that, while she does not share her brother’s knowledge of Chatterton’s work, she is able to understand the situation that drove him to suicide. She sympathizes with Chatterton, but cannot empathize with him, and it is implied that the “something more” she would say would be a condemnation of his suicide, while the

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“something less” would be a limiting of her brother’s unfettered praise (ibid,). Christina implies there are moral obligations to the poet’s role, which her brother has failed to fulfil, and which she would be better qualified to achieve. Consequently, there are occasions where she indicates Dante Gabriel’s limited approach reveals an inherent moral weakness, where her “female range” (234) can render her more suited to the topic in question. Christina’s correspondence with Dante Gabriel asserts the value of the female poet’s vision. She promotes Elizabeth Siddal’s verse concerning Dante Gabriel’s inconstancy, thereby undercutting the latter’s attempts to control his wife’s image after her death. When discussing her own poetry, Christina emphasizes the uniqueness of her voice and the peculiar aptitude of women to write about moral issues like the plight of illegitimate children and the despair that accompanies poverty and suicide. Christina develops the assertion of her poetic identity implicit in her correspondence in her poetic contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, The Germ. Christina’s entries to The Germ, examined in the following section of this chapter, subtly satirize Pre-Raphaelite portrayals of dead women. In place of the dead beloved, Christina presents an isolated female figure who separates herself from the material world to strive towards a divine union with Christ in the afterlife, rather than a heavenly reunion with the male lover.

“The Death of a Beautiful Woman Is Unquestionably the Most Poetical Topic in the World”? Christina Rossetti’s Portrayal of the Pre-Raphaelite Corpse in Her Contributions to The Germ Christina Rossetti’s poetic entries to The Germ reflect her unique status as a cultural outsider, who was simultaneously granted ‘inside access’ to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. As such, she develops a feminist representation of the Pre-Raphaelite dead woman, who is objectified and idealized in Pre-Raphaelite art, functioning as a receptacle for the male artist’s desires. The Germ was established by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1849 as an artistic manifesto for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as well as an attempt to contribute to the sphere of literature, as well as art. All members of the Brotherhood were invited to contribute, but the magazine only went through four issues before it went out of print in 1850 due to poor sales. Scholars and biographers have disagreed over the nature of Christina’s involvement in the publication. Garlick argues Christina was marginalized because she was denied membership to the Brotherhood but was nevertheless exploited as an “acolyte and central icon of virginity” (105), while the Belseys draw attention to an 1848 letter from Dante Gabriel to William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), which states it was “impossible” to

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persuade Christina to attend the Brotherhood’s meetings because she was “under the impression that it would seem like display… a sort of thing she abhors” (qtd. in Doughty 45). Christina’s poems were largely used as a ‘filler’ when the magazine was short of material and were privately selected by herself and her brothers from her notebooks. Alexis Easley asserts that Christina’s poetic contributions are “meditation[s] on her choice to suppress her name and desire for artistic fame” (7 emphasis added). These poems reflect Christina’s rejection of the vanity of The Germ as a project. Her submissions to the magazine are concerned with virginal female figures who are icons of self-containment. I will examine these poems in light of their intertextual references to the works of the Brotherhood, drawing attention to Christina’s critical commentaries on the portrayal of dead and dying women prominent in Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry. Pre-Raphaelite art and literature is excessively preoccupied with the image of the dead female beloved. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” (1850) was inspired by Poe’s “The Raven,” a poem doubtlessly motivated by the latter’s assertion that “the death … of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (1621). Bronfen argues that for artists like Poe and Rossetti, the dead female body: “appears as a perfect, immaculate aesthetic form … solidified into an object of art” (5) and that the male artist ultimately aspires towards a necrophiliac union with this statuesque dead body (70). The desire for an erotic union with the beloved’s corpse can be observed throughout the Brotherhood’s contributions to The Germ. For example, Thomas Woolner’s (1825–1892) double-set of poems for the first issue, “Of my Lady in Life” (The Germ 1–5) and “Of my Lady in Death” (5–10) portrays the narrator as excessively preoccupied with his lady’s corpse.17 The beloved’s death is presented as the consequence of her sexual relationship with the narrator.18 Woolner writes from a Victorian tradition that fetishizes the erotic promise of female virginity and dictates that if a woman experiences sexual relations outside of marriage she is permanently ‘fallen.’ The lady’s death is the inevitable consequence of her probable sexual act, functioning as a means of preserving her purity, while simultaneously allowing the narrator to violate the virginity he finds so alluring outside the confines of marriage. Christina’s poem, “Dreamland” (The Germ 20), included in the first issue of The Germ, subverts the image of the dead woman by implying that the female subject aspires towards death because death allows her to achieve a type of fulfilment that does not defer to romantic or erotic unions with men. Instead, the poem’s subject redirects her attention towards the fulfilment found in eternal life as she awaits her redemption. The title may refer to the Tractarian Doctrine of ‘Soul Sleep,’ which contends that humanity will remain asleep until the Last Judgment. The poem’s subject inhabits a liminal space between mortal and eternal life;

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she experiences “a charmed sleep” (3), “a perfect rest” (17) and a “perfect peace” (32). Death seems to be an integral aspect of her personal development, for she leaves “the fields of corn, / For twilight cold and lorn” (10–11) as a completion of her journey towards “the west / The purple land” (20) where she can experience a “Sleep that no pain shall wake” (29) until “joy shall overtake / Her perfect peace” (31–32). Elaine Shefer has observed that many of Christina’s poems refer to Mariana from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: a figure who, in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) poem, “Mariana” (1830), laments the desertion of her lover. As opposed to the Mariana of Tennyson or John Everett Millais (1829–1896),19 who endures painful selfimprisonment derived from her abandonment and possible shame, Christina’s figure has escaped the restrictions of the outside world to exist in an enclosed state of being no one can disturb. Her heroine’s isolation is not a response to male rejection20 but is rather borne of a desire to achieve self-fulfillment independently. In her contribution to the third issue of The Germ, “Repining” (The Germ 111–117), Christina invests the inanimate beloved with a voice and indicates the only way she can find fulfilment is through union with Christ, since the role assigned to her by the male artist is reductive and unrewarding. The poem opens with a description of how Christina’s heroine sits “always thro’ the long day / Spinning the weary thread away” (1–2), a reference to Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1832)—a poem that also featured as the subject of many Pre-Raphaelite paintings.21 As with the sudden appearance of Lancelot in Tennyson’s poem, Christina’s heroine is suddenly joined by a mysterious stranger. The stranger is revealed to be Christ, who in direct reference to Matthew 4:19 commands the narrator to, “Rise, and follow me” (49). The narrator is then led into the world to witness a number of horrific sites: an avalanche, a storm at sea, and a fire, all of which cause mass destruction and death. At the close of the poem the narrator kneels “in her agony” (247) before Christ, exclaiming: “O Lord, it is enough…. / My heart’s prayer putteth me to shame / Let me return to whence I came” (258-249). The Belseys have argued that the message of “Repining” reinforces Tennyson’s earlier work where the female subject is condemned for stepping outside the confines of her allotted task, but in opposition to the figure portrayed by Tennyson and Holman Hunt,22 Christina’s narrator achieves understanding and acceptance of her situation at the poem’s close; she learns to rely on the love of God.23 Christina indicates that the female subject should reject her role as silent beloved and find fulfilment in her religious faith. She condemns the fate of the Pre-Raphaelite muse and presents an alternative path for her readers. Christina’s contributions to The Germ subvert the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with dead women to expose the Brotherhood’s objectification of the female muse, who is depicted as a receptacle of the male

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artist’s desires. Christina transforms the image of the dead muse by rendering her unobtainable and creating a space where she is selfcontained and free of men’s interference. Although Christina emphasizes the frustration experienced by the muse, she also indicates that women can find fulfilment in their relationships with God. In the world of Christina’s poems, her theology of renunciation protects women from exploitative and one-sided relationships with male artists. Christina develops this resistance to the male artist’s ideological domination in her private, posthumously published writing, which is completed alongside her entries to The Germ.

“Cannot You Fancy She May Be Leaning Down to Me from Her Rest”? Christina Rossetti’s Subversion of the Female Intercessor in Her Prophetic Poem, “A Year Afterwards” In 1850, while Christina was still contributing to The Germ, she further developed her critique of the Pre-Raphaelite portrayal of dead women in a dramatic monologue, “A Year Afterwards,” posthumously published by Rebecca Crump (2001 713–715). This poem refutes the PreRaphaelite artist’s belief that he can create the female muse in his own image while relying on her to intercede for his redemption in the afterlife. The individualism of Pre-Raphaelitism, which functions under the assumption that the male artist can compel the female subject to conform to his ideal of beauty, is undercut by the muse’s insistence that the artist cannot wield any control over her spiritual life, and he is responsible for his own salvation. “A Year Afterwards” stresses the importance of providence in the exercise of free will. While the male artist is free to pursue his individualistic aspirations, he must be mindful of the implications of his conduct for his spiritual welfare. The monologue describes the speaker’s pilgrimage to his beloved’s tomb and explores his fantasies surrounding an imagined reunion in the afterlife. It unwittingly prefigures Dante Gabriel’s 1869 exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal to retrieve a set of manuscripts he had buried with her in a fit of grief. The exhumation took on a life of its own, inspiring an apocryphal myth that Siddal’s hair had grown until it filled the coffin. Much of Dante Gabriel’s poetry imagines a heavenly reunion with the beloved that depends on her unconflicted identification with the poetpainter. Indeed, Dante Gabriel wrote of his wife’s exhumation: “The truth is, no one so much as herself would have approved of my doing this” (qtd. in Marsh Dante Gabriel Rossetti 376). By prefiguring Siddal’s exhumation, “A Year Afterwards” unwittingly complements Dante Gabriel’s belief that poetry could foretell the future. Jerome McGann argues that, following the model of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Dante Gabriel believed poetry could prophesy impending

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events and that he viewed some of the verses composed before meeting his wife as “prophetic poems about [her]” following her death (64). The prophetic power of the poem becomes dangerous when placed in the hands of a female poet: Christina’s engagement with her brother’s verse enacts Dante Gabriel’s conception of the prophetic power of poetry to his detriment. In “A Year Afterwards,” Christina chillingly prefigures Siddal’s death and her brother’s subsequent obsession with his wife’s corpse—all the while making intertextual references to Dante Gabriel’s poetry. “A Year Afterwards” implies that the female artist is better equipped to forecast future events than her male counterpart, perhaps because she understands the individual must work in concert with the divine to achieve salvation, instead of expecting the outside world to conform to their individualistic will. William Michael’s posthumously published edition of Christina’s work, New Poems by Christina Rossetti (1896), did not include this poem—perhaps because William Michael was uncomfortable with the accurateness of Christina’s prophecy and its implications for their brother’s subsequent conduct. “A Year Afterwards” extensively references “The Blessed Damozel,” a poem that describes the predicament of a deceased beloved who pines for her earthly lover. “The Blessed Damozel” is narrated by a male lover, who imagines he can hear his beloved yearning for him while he dreams of her in a forest. “A Year Afterwards” portrays an almost identical scenario, but, in this case, it is presented as a fantasy created by the narrator: The dusk branches meet Above, making green fretted work, The screen between my saint and me. There, where the softest sunbeams lurk, Cannot you fancy she may be Leaning down to me from her rest; And shaking her long golden hair Thro the thick branches to my face, That I may feel she still is mine? — (18–26) The narrator invites the reader to join in his fantasy, so we may become complicit in his desires. His motivations are unambiguous: he wants to imagine the beloved is leaning down to him from heaven, so he can maintain the delusion “she still is [his]” (26). The visionary, ecstatic experience of “The Blessed Damozel’s” narrator is expunged, so the protagonist’s intentions are made clear; he constructs an alternative reality where the beloved eternally belongs to him. By consciously defining the dead beloved as a ‘saint,’ rather than a “Blessed Damozel,”

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Christina’s narrator acknowledges that his relationship with the dead beloved has superseded his religious devotion. Christina expands on her critique of Dante Gabriel’s vision of a heavenly reunion by questioning whether the unworthy male lover can ever attain redemption. In two unpublished stanzas of “A Year Afterwards,” struck out of the manuscript of the Weston Library, Oxford University,24 the narrator recalls how the beloved commanded him to pluck no more flowers for her until she was able to wear “Such flowers as Dorothea wore/When first her footsteps trod the sky” (Crump 1999 429 fn.37 48–49). This is a reference to stanza 17 of “The Blessed Damozel” where the Damozel describes how she will introduce her beloved to “the five handmaidens” (105) of the Virgin Mary when they are reunited in heaven. However, Christina’s beloved questions the narrator as to whether they will ever be reunited in the afterlife, expressing doubts as to whether she shares in St Dorothea’s power to redeem souls.25 When Christina endows the female beloved with a voice in the first draft of the poem, she stresses the narrator’s moral culpability and lack of worthiness for heavenly redemption. The beloved’s insistence that the narrator is fully responsible for his questionable moral conduct refutes the faith of Dante Gabriel’s beloved in “The Blessed Damozel,” who is certain that her prayers will provide sufficient grace to reunite her with her lover in the afterlife. It is notable that the two stanzas containing the most critical intertextual references to “The Blessed Damozel” are struck out of the original manuscript of “A Year Afterwards.” In the footnotes of his posthumously published edition of Christina’s verse. William Michael acknowledged that his brother sometimes destroyed uncomplimentary descriptions of himself in their sister’s manuscripts.26 It is therefore possible that the strike-out was not made by Christina, although this would be impossible to ascertain conclusively. It is unsurprising that William Michael, the gatekeeper of the Rossetti legacy, expunged “A Year Afterwards” from his posthumous edition of Christina’s works.27 It is likely the poem was simply too close to the bone in its eerie foreshadowing of Siddal’s disinterment. Imagining her brother’s response to his beloved’s death, Christina creates a scenario where the unnamed narrator visits his beloved’s grave, fantasizes about the near-perfect state of her corpse and imagines her hair falling about his face—almost 20 years before Siddal’s exhumation. Underpinning this imagined scenario is Christina’s critique of a male lover who depends upon his beloved’s prayers for salvation. This dependency is portrayed as a type of spiritual apathy, which allows the male lover to deflect responsibility for his redemption onto the female beloved who, as an unresponsive corpse, can be conveniently molded into the perfect ‘saint’ who ensures his entry into heaven. The narrator’s dehumanization of his beloved preserves his individualism, allowing him to maintain his solipsistic attitude towards the outside world, while exploiting the beloved as a gateway to spiritual salvation.

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Christina’s literary interactions with her brother and his work, allow the inanimate female muse, often conflated with the dead woman, to speak back to the individualistic male artist, who endeavors to transform her into the silent receptacle of his erotic desires. In speaking back, the deceased beloved of “A Year Afterwards” forces the autobiographical poet-painter to accept his personal responsibility for his salvation. This emphasis on spiritual autonomy complements the stance of the female figures in Christina’s Germ entries, who strive to attain fulfilment through heavenly redemption, rather than romantic or erotic unions with the male artist. Christina’s portrayals of dead women champion spiritual submission. Her protagonists achieve fulfilment through accepting that their destinies are tied to the authority of a higher power. This elevation of female spirituality prefigures Christina’s explicit references to the matrilineal community’s religious authority in her later private devotional verse, discussed in Chapter 3. The deceased female muse, who is given the authority to speak back to the individualistic male artist, is modeled on sisterly intercessor, Maria Rossetti, and maternal spiritual leader, Frances Rossetti: this muse advocates submission to divine authority and the renunciation of sexual desire, in favor of achieving eternal life.

“Leave All to God—and Me”: Louisa May Alcott’s Rejection of Bronson Alcott’s Ideology of Individualism Louisa May Alcott’s artistic identity was formulated in opposition to the individualistic ideology of her father, Bronson, in much the same way Christina Rossetti affiliated herself with the religious vision of the deceased female muse against her brother, Dante Gabriel’s, objectification of that muse in their correspondence. Alcott’s letters challenge her father’s ideology of individualism through subtly satirizing his philosophical beliefs. Her autobiographical fiction, based on her father’s life, critiques his philosophical practices more openly than Rossetti’s subtle commentary on Pre-Raphaelitism. Raised to follow her father’s philosophical tenets, where Rossetti was free to decline membership to the Brotherhood, Alcott’s critique is far more reactionary. Alcott stresses that Transcendentalist individualism depends on women’s domestic labor, just as Rossetti presents the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s ideal of beauty as based on the dead woman’s silence and immobility. Alcott’s rejection of Transcendentalism runs parallel with her affiliation with her mother’s theology of renunciation, presented as an alternative to her father’s individualistic outlook. Alcott’s letters to her father interrogate his negative assessments of her character and appearance, grounded in his philosophical beliefs. She challenges his faith in complexion theory, an unpleasant pseudoscience that claimed that the moral natures of human beings could be deduced

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by their physical coloring. Bronson was blue-eyed with a fair complexion, while Louisa and her mother, Abigail, had olive complexions and dark hair and eyes. Bronson allied the volatile temperaments of his wife and daughter with their coloring, claiming the two women exhibited demonic tendencies.28 Bronson wasn’t temperamental by nature and believed his behavior was an exemplar for the rest of his family. Matteson claims Bronson’s narrowness “long prevented him from setting [Louisa’s] talents at their proper value. For him, genius was to see the world as a seamless and transcendent unity” (192). Bronson’s early letters to Louisa reprove her for her fiery temperament and encourage her to follow his example. In a letter on their shared birthday of November 29th in 1842 when Louisa was ten, Bronson begs his daughter to allow him to influence her behavior for the better. He claims the human person is controlled by “good” and “bad” spirits (B. Alcott Letters 93). In his description of the bad spirit, Bronson provides a catalogue of faults, which he doubtlessly wishes to curb. These include “anger, discontent, impatience, evil appetites, greedy wants, complainings, ill-speakings, idleness, heedlessness, rude behavior” (ibid.). It is unsurprising the ten-year-old Louisa resisted her father’s influence, especially when one considers the letter was conveyed as a birthday gift. Years later, Louisa recalled such letters ironically in her own birthday correspondence with her father. In a letter of 1855, written on her 23rd birthday, Louisa satirizes Bronson’s complexion theory, claiming her faults were present from the moment of her birth because she has dark skin, while her father was born pale-skinned and morally irreproachable: I know you were a serene & placid baby when you began your wide meditations in the quiet little Spindle hill farmhouse (I believe that’s where you descended from on high) looking philosophically out of your cradle at the big world about you.… I was a crass crying brown baby, bawling at the disagreeable old world. (L. Alcott Letters 13–14) Louisa parodies her father’s belief in complexion theory, as well as his judgements of herself to reveal their ludicrousness. If temperament is determined by complexion, which is inherently good or bad, then people are predestined to be good or evil, born fair, “serene and placid” or “crass brown” and temperamental (ibid.). Louisa questioned her father’s philosophical views from an early age. As with Christina’s correspondence concerning her brother’s criticisms of her verse, Louisa was also able to adopt her father’s style of discourse to expose its flaws, whilst nevertheless appearing to support his theories. Indeed, she ironically signs off one letter, “Ever your loving demon” (32).

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Bronson frequently policed Louisa’s language, often condemning her for expressing herself passionately. An 1845 entry in Louisa’s journal recounts how her father forced her to look up the word “mean” in her dictionary following an argument with her sister, Anna. Louisa writes: “it means ‘base’, ‘contemptible’. I was so ashamed to have called my dear sister that, and I cried over my bad tongue and temper” (Journals54). Bronson ostensibly encouraged self-reflection in his children’s lifewriting, but this was purely on his own terms: anyone who wished to question him had to do so from the realm of his own philosophical theories. Over the years, Louisa developed an ability to do this skillfully. A journal entry of 1845 includes an ironic account of the lessons of her father’s associate, Charles Lane (1800–1870). Lane requested that his young pupils list their faults in class. Louisa’s did so religiously, but ended the list with “love of cats”—probably referring to her father and Lane’s objection to any display of passionate feeling (Journals 55). In her private letters with her mother, Louisa was more explicit in her assessment of her father’s Transcendentalist views. Writing of her attendance at a meeting of the Transcendental club in 1872, she describes the event as a “funny mixture of rabbis and weedy old ladies, the ‘oversoul’ and oysters” where Bronson and his colleague “flew clean out of sight like a pair of Platonic balloons” (Letters 165). She concludes the account by describing how a member of the audience ended the meeting by admitting it all seemed “very fine,” but he could not “understand a word of it,” signing off her letter with the declamation: “We are a foolish set!” (ibid.). Louisa’s autobiographical fiction publicly dissects her father’s philosophical beliefs, stressing the negative implications of the male philosopher’s ideology of individualism for women. Louisa examines her childhood in the Transcendentalist movement to uncover the wider socio-cultural implications of her father’s ideology of individualism. Her autobiographical fiction assesses the negative consequences of her Transcendentalist upbringing and exposes the double standard of the Transcendentalists’ attitudes towards women. The movement’s emphasis on freedom of expression is revealed to be dependent on women’s domestic labor, shouldered at the expense of personal fulfilment and intellectual ambition. Louisa’s most famous autobiographical work, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” is an 1873 short story based on her time at the Fruitlands commune established by her father in 1843 when she was 11 years old. The Fruitlands community was founded on vegan and fruitarian principles. Bronson and his associate, Charles Lane, believed humanity could return to its original state of innocence if it ceased exploiting the environment and using animal labor. Bronson and Lane claimed that the individual’s diet reflected their moral condition and should be restricted and monitored to purify body and spirit. Endeavoring to respect the communion

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between human beings and the natural world, Bronson excluded all meat, salt, cane sugar, spices, coffee, and tea from daily meals. He also forbade the use of oxen for ploughing, as well as oil-lamps because they depended on the exploitation of whales. All members of the community were banned from wearing wool because it was considered theft from sheep, as well as cotton because of its association with slavery. Many members wore linen and went barefoot in the harsh winter months, while living in a house that had open windows, thereby increasing the stifling heat in the summer months. Bronson even went so far as to attempt to prevent his wife, Abigail, from feeding milk to their youngest daughter, May, while she was still a baby to prevent the exploitation of cows. The Fruitlanders strove to return to a prelapsarian state of innocence and thereby attracted some questionable characters. These included a resident nudist and compulsive swearer who believed language “was of little consequence if the spirit was only right” (“Transcendental Wild Oats” 371). The increasingly strict demands of the Fruitlanders’ lifestyle, coupled with the fact that its leaders expected the women to oversee all domestic labor, eventually brought Bronson into conflict with his wife who was concerned for the health and well-being of their four daughters, all of whom were under 13 at the time. The experiment collapsed after six months when Lane announced his intention to reconceive the community as a segregated-gender organization. Lane envisioned a commune where people would put aside their ‘selfish devotion’ to their families and form, instead, a single, ‘consociate family,’ even going so far as to propose dissolving the marital union, in favor of practicing sexual abstinence. Abigail Alcott suspected Lane’s obsession with marital celibacy stemmed from his attraction to her husband,29 and subsequently convinced her brother, Samuel May, to withdraw his financial support for Fruitlands, thereby ensuring the community’s eviction from the freeholding. She then issued her husband an ultimatum: he would have to choose between his family and the reestablishment of the community. “Transcendentalist Wild Oats” exposes Bronson’s values of living “simply and spiritually” as a “pretense” that allows the male Fruitlanders “to escape from all responsibility, both domestic and otherwise” (Sandra Harbart Petrulionis 3). The story promotes the theology of family matriarch, Hope Lamb, based on Abigail Alcott. Hope’s emphasis on the practical fulfilment of duty allows the commune to survive for a short period and she later becomes the head of the household, supporting her husband and family. Hope’s practical theology of renunciation is contrasted with the solipsism of her male contemporaries. Louisa portrays the men of the commune as so preoccupied with their conceptual worlds that their engagement with reality becomes warped. Their lack of empathy with the female community causes them to transgress their philosophical

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principles. When asked by a visitor if there are any “beasts of burden” on the commune, Hope ironically replies: “Only one woman!” (373). Whilst the female members of the commune are confined to a “domestic drudgery” (ibid.), the men respond to “some call of the Oversoul” (375) during harvest season, leaving Hope and her infant daughters to reap the harvest by hand during a thunderstorm, an incident that happened to the Alcott women while at Fruitlands. Following their so-called “inner light” (370), the Fruitlands’ men cultivate their ideologies of individualism through forcing their female counterparts to shoulder all practical responsibilities. Their aspiration to achieve transcendental divinity is dependent on female subjugation. Louisa’s condemnation of the individualism of the Fruitlands’ men has much in common with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804–1864) negative portrayal of the individualistic behavior of the leader of the fictional commune, Blithedale, in The Blithedale Romance (1852), which is based on his experiences in the Transcendentalist commune of Brook Farm. Hawthorne portrays the philanthropy of the commune’s leader, Hollingsworth, as essentially selfish and tyrannical. He is motivated by a need to affirm his ego at the expense of the wider community. It is in a similar vein to Louisa’s portrayal of Charles Lane, renamed “Timon Lion” in her story. Referring to him as “Dictator Lion,” Louisa condemns Timon as a hypocrite who justifies delegating his manual work to the women of the commune with the claim that “each member is to perform the work for which experience, strength and taste best fit him” (368). Hawthorne came to despise such attitudes after his disastrous experience at Brook Farm, and he dissolved his friendship with Bronson Alcott following the Fruitlands episode. He went on to satirize Bronson in his short story “The Celestial Railroad,” a parodic retelling of John Bunyan’s, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Bronson’s favorite book, to which he often referred in lectures and personal writings. Yet, Louisa did not see the women in Transcendentalist communes as sharing the male leader’s tragic fate, as is the case in The Blithedale Romance. Thus, she recast the appropriately named Hope Lamb as her heroine in “Transcendental Wild Oats.” When the Fruitlands community collapses, Hope takes on a spiritually symbolic function in the story. When the other members of the commune abandon the Lambs, Alcott describes how “Hope” became “the watchword” for the family—implying she is transformed into the personification of the values she represents, indicated by her name (378). And in contrast to Hawthorne, Alcott subverts the emphasis on the male individual as the Godlike center of the familial community. When Abel Lamb suffers a physical and mental breakdown, Hope responds by reassuring her husband: “Leave all to God—and me. He has done his part; now I will do mine” (ibid.). Hope replaces Abel as the center of the family and identifies her maternal values with an external, omnipotent

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God, rather than with a self-centered ‘oversoul.’ Abel’s individualistic vision is replaced by a mutually supportive familial community. “Transcendental Wild Oats” presents Hope Lamb’s theology of renunciation as an alternative framework to the ideology of individualism espoused by Abel Lamb, Bronson Alcott’s counterpart. Hope secures the family’s survival through shouldering its burdens and sacrificing her interests for the greater good of others. Hope’s renunciatory theology allows her to reclaim her agency, in much the same way the renunciation of Christina Rossetti’s muse enables her to resist male control and forge a divine union with God. Hope reasserts the value of the familial community and the importance of working alongside God’s providence to determine the outcome of the individual’s life, rather than forcibly subjecting the wider community to their sublime vision. The weight “Transcendental Wild Oats” accords to individual accountability is in harmony with Rossetti’s emphasis on the individual’s responsibility for their salvation, but Alcott provides an intersubjective model for the attainment of redemption by affiliating herself with her mother. Alcott’s artistic vision is formulated in opposition to her father’s attempts to coerce her to conform to his ideal of ‘true womanhood,’ just as Rossetti resists Dante Gabriel’s recommendations concerning the proper style and scope of women’s writing. But, where Alcott openly mocks and satirizes her father’s beliefs, Rossetti implicitly undermines her brother’s objectification of women. Both women decline to affiliate themselves with the individualistic visions of their male peers because they understand these visions are forged at the expense of women’s autonomy. Instead, they submit themselves to a higher power and underscore the importance of working in concert with the divine.

“Love and Duty Go Hand in Hand”: Louisa May Alcott’s Reformation of Her Transcendentalist Heroes Alcott’s foremost criticism of Transcendentalism is that it subsumes the familial and wider community into the male philosopher, while claiming to offer a pathway to empowerment for all members of society. Her public and private writing explores the ramifications of a Transcendentalist ideology of individualism for the immediate community and offers a model of reform for the self-involved individualist. Alcott’s early work satirizes the writing and lifestyle of leading Transcendentalist figures, Emerson, and Thoreau, and imagines the possible outcomes of their lives if they were to faithfully apply their philosophical tenets to their relationships with women. Like Christina Rossetti, Alcott forecasts the future of her male peers and advocates collaborating with providence and the wider community, rather than blindly pursuing one’s destiny, to safeguard the innate dignity of the community’s members. An unpublished fragment, “Rolf

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Walden Emmerboy,” foregrounds the implicit elitism of the Transcendentalist position, which claims to empower others while holding up the male individualist as a blameless example for others to emulate. Alcott’s early novel, Moods (1864), turns to the matrilineal community in its imagined resolution to the strained relationship between the male philosopher and the nuclear family. Alcott satirized the writing and lifestyle of her Transcendentalist peers, both in her private life and public writing. A fragment, “Rolf Walden Emmerboy” (Appendix 1), housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard, records a spontaneous theatrical performance where, according to Edward W. Emerson (1844–1930), Louisa performed “travesties on her father’s writing,” as well as the writing of his own father (325–236). The fragmented monologue is voiced by a “snowy and meditative crow,” Rolf Walden Emmerboy, who labors under the delusion he is a Phoenix (Appendix 1). Emmerboy believes he can offer a model of sublime transfiguration for his audience, but he belittles them by addressing them as “fellow worms” (ibid.). His self-image is at odds with his achievement: he is described as sweeping “the blue fundament like the fowl of Job watching the stars” (ibid.). Alcott subverts the Romantic aspiration towards the sublime, commonly denoted by the word “firmament,” by portraying Emmerboy as unwittingly aspiring towards the “fundament,” referring to “a person’s buttocks or anus.”30 Alcott’s deliberate semantic error underscores the pretension of her protagonist. Although he is described as the “flower of American literature” (ibid.), the monologue is a paragraph-long stream-of-conscious sentence finishing mid-ellipsis, mimicking Emerson’s discursive style. Phrases like “mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity” (ibid.) are subject to myriad interpretations and eschew fixed meaning—literally becoming lost in linguistic slippage, inadvertently creating the very vortex Emmerboy describes. Emmerboy may offer himself as an intellectual and spiritual model for his audience, but his philosophy is obscure, and he makes no attempt to render it intelligible. Alcott mocks the ‘democratic’ position of Transcendentalism: it may claim to render sublime experience accessible to all, but, in reality, it does little to ensure its audience can participate in the sublime. The implicit solipsism of Transcendentalism is a central concern of Alcott’s first published novel, Moods, which examines the disastrous implications of becoming romantically entangled with not only one but two Transcendentalists. The novel is concerned with the early life of Sylvia Yule, a 17-year-old heroine who is mentally unstable and subject to a ‘moody’ nature. Sylvia strives to mature through forging friendships with two older, Transcendentalists, contemporaries of her brother, Mark. Geoffrey Moor is a 30-year-old poet, based on Emerson, while Adam Warwick is a nomadic Thoreauvian figure, who leaves college after a year to pursue various undefined social reform projects. Both men

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fall in love with Sylvia on a boating trip, but Warwick does not declare his feelings. Sylvia is compelled to marry Moor after he threatens to end their friendship but later discovers Warwick reciprocates her romantic feelings and thereafter returns home to the Yule family. In the first edition of the novel, Sylvia’s psychological strain leads to her death of an unspecified illness, while the revised 1882 edition sees Sylvia reconcile with Moor after Alcott discovered “love and duty [could] go hand in hand”—a statement made in the 1882 “Preface” (Moods 225). Sylvia’s mental instability exposes the pitfalls of adopting a Transcendentalist ideology of individualism. Alcott claimed the novel was intended to “show the mistakes of a moody nature, guided by impulse, not principle” (ibid.). This self-gratifying ‘moody’ nature is affiliated with an Emersonian aphorism, the epigraph of Moods, taken from Emerson’s 1884 essay, “Experience”: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world in their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus” (Moods xlix). “Experience” argues that that the individual encounters the world through the lens of their subjectivity: all are subject to a “system of illusions” and shut in a “prison glass” of self, which they “cannot see” (Emerson “Experience” 219). Alcott does not endorse Emerson’s self-involved vision. Sylvia’s unstable temperament rather reflects the “two natures that had given her life,” who war “against each other, making … her life a train of moods” (Moods 84). The ill-fated partnership between Sylvia’s parents is the result of their ‘marriage of alliance’: Sylvia’s father, John, married her mother for her fortune and is punished for his “self-inflicted wrong” by the various instabilities of his children (83). John follows the Emersonian dictum, also set out in “Experience,” that: “Marriage … is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object” (230).31 Moods presents the dangerous implications of such a philosophy: in seeking to create his wife in his own image, John Yule unwittingly precipitates her death and their daughter’s mental instability. The novel demonstrates that prioritizing subjective experience at the expense of human relationships is disastrous for women: the only possible solution to Sylvia’s instability is “mother-love,” which is circumvented by Mrs. Yule’s premature death (84). In opposition to the conventional trajectory of the nineteenth-century novel, the heroine’s experience of romantic love only exacerbates her psychological problems: Alcott makes it clear that women’s alliances with Transcendentalist men do not provide a salve for the loss of the matrilineal community. Indeed, Sylvia regards herself as ill-equipped for romance at the novel’s opening and instead pursues friendship with the two heroes to counter the loss of her mother. The novel’s elevation of friendship strikingly echoes Thoreau’s meditation on friendship in the

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“Wednesday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Where Thoreau claims “Friendship is first, friendship is last” (269), Alcott similarly describes friendship as “cooler than passion, warmer than respect, more just and generous than either” (Moods 85). Unfortunately, Sylvia is barred from the benefits of friendship by her gender. Her interactions with other women are characterized by the restrictive gender roles assigned to them and she questions whether there can be “real and simple friendships between men and women without falling into this everlasting sea of love” (24–26). Certainly, Thoreau would have answered in the negative. A Week endorses friendship between the genders only on the grounds that “it is [easy] for man to secure the attention of a woman to what interests himself” and he even goes so far as to disparage the proffered friendship of a woman whose acquaintance does not inspire that “confidence and sentiment which women, which all, in fact, covet” (273–281). In other words, the only viable relationships between men and women are romantic ones. Such an attitude proves detrimental to Sylvia: she pursues a friendship with Moor in response to his claim that “Friendship is the best college character can graduate from,” but when she declines his proposal, he ends their relationship (92). She later reneges and marries him, explaining her feelings haven’t changed, but she will accept “anything, if [he] will only stay” (106). The ill-fated union ends with Moor’s concession that “it was too soon for [Sylvia] to play the perilous game of hearts” and he should have left her to “the safe and simple joys of girlhood” (170). Alcott endorses the Transcendentalist elevation of friendship but underscores the importance of making such intellectually enriching relationships available to women. Moor’s attitude to his friendship with Sylvia coincides with Thoreau’s admission that he can “find [himself] turning [his] back on [his] actual Friends, that [he] may go and meet their ideal” (270). Sylvia’s relationship with Moor is dictated by the former’s ideal of ‘true womanhood’: he overlooks her need for self-development. Sylvia’s preferred suitor, Warwick, presents an alternative drawback to falling in love with a Transcendentalist: he sets out to subsume Sylvia’s identity into his own. Described as “a masterful soul, bent on living out his beliefs and aspirations at any cost” (37), Warwick is aptly characterized by Henry James in his 1865 review as a “dissolute adventurer” whose attitude can be summarized by the following dictum: “I may be a sneak, a coward, a brute; but at all events, I am untamed by law, etc.” (Moods 221). Warwick’s effect on Sylvia is most aptly distilled in the “Sermons” chapter of the 1882 edition of Moods. During a boating excursion closely modelled on A Week, Warwick furnishes his companions with a Sunday sermon that performs an “audacious onslaught upon established customs, creeds, and constitutions” (255) in a thinly veiled allusion to Thoreau’s tirade against organized religion in his

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“Sunday” chapter. Leaving Sylvia feeling as though “the foundations of the earth were giving way” (ibid.), the sermon perversely strengthens her desire to find a “simple sustaining faith” (257). In essence, Warwick’s philosophy is “too large” for her (256); he is described as “unconsciously absorb[ing] into himself the personality of others” (180). Whereas Moor’s attitude to courtship is one of coercion, Warwick’s is one of tyranny. Forming the conceited hypothesis that Sylvia loves him, but “[has] not learned to know it” (125), Warwick concedes the field to Moor: in the 1860 edition because he is engaged to another woman, and in the 1882 edition because he arrogantly assumes “[Moor] was fitter than I to have you” (125). If such self-involved behavior were not exasperating enough, he then attempts to bully Sylvia into leaving her husband against her wishes. Warwick’s attitude seems to be a parody of the Thoreau brothers’ courtship of the 17-year-old Ellen Sewall (1822–1892),32 who joined them for a number of boating and woodland excursions during her 1839 summer holiday in Concord. Thoreau stepped aside under the mistaken belief Ellen preferred his brother, John, but when John’s proposal was rejected Thoreau immediately wrote Ellen and proposed himself. Ellen rejected both brothers with little hesitation. One wonders if Sylvia would have been best advised to do the same with Moor and Warwick. At any rate, each lover, in his own way, attempts to force Sylvia to submit herself to his will. Alcott indicates Sylvia’s involvement with both men, and her inability to recognize their faults, derives from the absence of a mother-figure to guide and advise her. In fact, Sylvia only identifies the shortcomings of her suitors when she finds a surrogate mother in Moor’s older cousin, Faith Dane. Closely modelled on Alcott, Faith is subject to an “unhappy girlhood” and her “early cares and losses” lead her reflect on the causes of ill-fated marriages (181). Faith reveals Moor’s and Warwick’s faults to Sylvia: the possessive Moor “clings to persons” (180), while Warwick regards persons as “but animated facts or ideas” (180). Faith advises Sylvia she should have married “neither,” allowing herself the time to mature and become “a law unto herself” (178 182). Alcott offers a model of maternal love in place of Transcendentalism: when Sylvia questions what she should do next, she is “gathered close” against the “proper resting-place” of Faith’s heart (183). It seems Sylvia would have found happiness and fulfilment had she been able to ground herself in a matrilineal community and avoid romance altogether. Despite Alcott’s implied elevation of the matrilineal community, Sylvia is unable to resurrect this community after her unsuccessful marriage. When she returns to the Yule family, she is subject to gossip and treated like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne (190). Unlike the heroine of Louisa’s later novel, Work (1872), discussed in Chapter 5, Sylvia isn’t given the opportunity to conceive a life for herself independently of her husband. Alcott was doubtless aware of the scandal a novel championing divorce

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would inspire; she was no George Sand but rather a bestselling novelist who wrote for the marketplace. In both versions of the text, Sylvia is informed by Faith that “for every affliction there are two helpers … Time and Death” (184), and each version of Moods explores one of these outcomes. In the 1860 edition, Sylvia is transformed into the image of the idealized dead beloved, inspiring “genius” from her husband through the “grief” precipitated by her death (215). Yet, there is some indication that Sylvia’s passing will usher in a more promising future: her brother, Mark, is instructed to keep his daughter, “little Sylvia,” from “making mistakes like [hers]” and the heroine is cared for by her surrogate mother, Faith (215). If the first edition disappoints in its capitulation to the dead woman motif, it is to be credited for providing a visceral portrayal of women’s contact with male Transcendentalists: a nervous breakdown is the only outcome the young author can imagine for her heroine. Alcott makes it clear the idealized dead woman exists because she is killed off by the individualistic male genius. The 1882 edition shifts the emphasis away from the suffering of its heroine to the reform of its heroes. Alcott’s later work shares Rossetti’s emphasis on the male artist’s spiritual submission: he must accept the shifting circumstances of his life and his responsibility to others, instead of attempting to make the outside world conform to his desires. Moor acknowledges he “see[s] [his] mistakes, will amend such as [he] can … and make no new ones” (184), while Warwick enacts the highest form of renunciation: sacrificing his life for his friends’ happiness. Where the first edition implies Warwick’s untimely death in a shipwreck will enable his heavenly reunion with Sylvia, the second edition makes it clear that Warwick saves Moor’s life to facilitate Sylvia and Moor’s reconciliation. Sylvia experiences a visionary dream where she almost meets her death while standing on the seashore. As letter after letter of “the great word Amen” is spelt out in the sky, her husband prevents her from being assumed into a tidal wave (278). Above them, Warwick’s “beautiful, benignant face, regard[s] [them] with something brighter than a smile” (ibid.). All three protagonists learn to collaborate with providence, accepting the unexpected events of their lives, and relinquishing personal fulfilment to facilitate one another’s happiness. Warwick learns to respect Sylvia’s marriage, Moor acknowledges Sylvia’s autonomy, and Sylvia learns that “Love and God’s help can work … miracles” (280). She reembarks on her marriage as a mature woman destined to live “a long and happy life, unmarred by the moods that nearly wrecked her youth” (ibid.). Alcott provides a fitting moral tale for her Transcendentalist readers: the novel’s happy ending depends on learning “to live by principle, not impulse,” and making “love and duty … go hand in hand” (280). Alcott’s Transcendentalist fiction shares Christina Rossetti’s aim of

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imagining the eventual outcome of the male artist’s ideology of individualism. Moods coincides with Rossetti’s emphasis on assuming responsibility for one’s moral conduct and prioritizing eternal salvation above self-gratification. Alcott’s message to her Transcendentalist peers is that it is impossible to relentlessly pursue one’s genius in a familial or romantic context: at its worst, such behavior destroys the women who affiliate themselves with Transcendentalist communities. Initially, Alcott’s heroine shares the fate of the dead female muse who, in Rossetti’s verse, escapes the male artist’s ideological control to find fulfilment in the afterlife. The later edition of Moods imagines an alternative destiny for the self-involved male genius, who accepts his duty and endeavors to rebuild the family. Like Rossetti, Alcott forecasts the future lives of her male peers in her writing: “Transcendental Wild Oats” sees Abel Lamb rededicate himself to the family,33 while a later short story, “Eli’s Education” (1888), imagines a fictionalized Bronson Alcott becoming a minister to support his impoverished mother and sister. Alcott’s Transcendentalist fiction presents the matrilineal community as an alternative to the failed Transcendentalist utopia: in all these autobiographical texts a mother-figure facilitates selfdevelopment and eventual salvation for the author’s female protagonists. This mother-figure counteracts the male Transcendentalist’s attempts to subsume others into his ego, as is observed in such texts as “Rolf Walden Emmerboy.” The matrilineal community is not accorded the status it is in Alcott’s iconic works, but it nevertheless lays the foundation for her theology of renunciation. Just as Rossetti’s portrayal of the female muse’s spiritual authority prefigures the promotion of matrilineal religious practice and devotion in her later work, so does Alcott’s elevation of ‘love and duty’ anticipate her creation of an intersubjective female community in her mature fiction. Rossetti and Alcott not only provide more accurate predictions of their male peers’ destinies than the men in question; they prefigure the emphasis on religious faith, renunciatory practice, and women’s spiritual authority that characterizes their later work, written out of the matrilineal community.

Notes 1 William Michael’s legacy as an editor has also left its mark on the organization of Christina’s verse until the present day. David A Kent has compellingly argued that William Michael’s decision to organize Christina’s poetry into the “arbitrary” categories of “devotional” and “general” verse has obscured the fact that she saw her secular and religious poetry as deeply intertwined (19). The false separation that has been made between Rossetti’s secular and religious verse has enabled critics to interpret her work through a ‘double life’ myth that sees the secular verse as an expression of the repressed desires that are expunged from the religious poetry. For example, Germain Greer divides Rossetti’s secular poems of “rebellion and self-assertion” from

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her devotional verse of “resignation and self-denial” (Slip-Shod Sibyls 359), while Kathleen Jones claims that Rossetti turned to religious poetry following the break-up of her engagement with James Collinson as a means of encouraging herself to embrace a renunciatory outlook (55). See, for example, the dust cover and frontispiece of The Letters of Christina Rossetti, Vol. 2 1874–1881, ed. Anthony H. Harrison. At the close of Some Reminiscences, William Michael provides a list of portraits of his sister “which can be appealed to settle the question of her good looks” (lx). The vast majority of the portraits referred to are by Dante Gabriel. Both Some Reminiscences and the 1895 New Poems of Christina Rossetti (edited by William Michael), use reproductions of Dante Gabriel’s portraits as frontispieces. Andrew and Catherine Belsey have noted that many modern biographies have followed William Michael’s tradition of using Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portraits for the frontispiece or front cover (31). See also C.M. Bowra’s The Romantic Imagination (245–270) and Donald Gray’s Victorian Literature, the latter of which claims that Christina’s poems “are often personal in the sense that they express her feelings about herself and her connections with others, with the possibilities of life outside her narrow bound, and with God” (543). “Louisa May Alcott.” (Obituary.) 1888. MS 800.23. LMAP, 1849–1931. Houghton Lib., Harvard. “Driven by a blind desire to please him and by her own intellectual and psychological limitations, [Louisa] succeeded only in giving [Bronson] what he neither desired nor needed… ‘Duty’s Faithful Child’, as her father called her, never grew up” (Gay 189). Both Stern (Behind a Mask xxvi) and Octavia Davis (vi) interpret the interview as an indication that Alcott’s domestic fiction was written out of economic necessity, whereas the experimentations with horror writing were in some sense liberating. Veronica Bassil (191), Christine Doyle (51) and Judith Fetterley (“Impersonating” 369) believe that Alcott affiliated her literary identity with the horror writing but was forced to hide it from her reading public because it was deemed unacceptable for a sentimental authoress to write within this genre. The assumption that Alcott’s pseudonymous fiction expresses a repressed ‘true’ self has been transferred to Little Women’s Jo March, an autobiographical heroine who relinquishes her pseudonymous horror writing to become a sentimental novelist. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser claims that Jo’s adoption of a sentimental style “throws a damper on [her] creative powers” (72), while Fetterley regards Jo’s sentimental writing as promoting the elevation of “a more submissive spirit,” which upholds “the wisdom of the doctrines of renunciation and adaptation” (“Civil War” 38). Elaine Showalter claims that Bronson’s attempts to “tame stubborn Louisa ‘down to docility,’” determined the proceeding trajectory of her life (Alternative xi-xiii), while Rosenblum argues that Rossetti’s transformation from a “beautiful and wrathful little girl” to a “reserved middle-aged woman” was a symptom of her deference to Dante Gabriel who, as the head of the family, was regarded as the superior artist (85). Frances Thomas links Rossetti’s symptoms to her religious beliefs: “She was now firmly locked into a system that taught her that human beings were miserable tainted creatures doomed to perdition. With her vivid imagination, the Horrors of hell were tangible and present” (50). Lona Mosk Packer claims that Rossetti’s illness was self-induced and functioned as a means of avoiding the restrictions that were imposed upon her as a Victorian woman:

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“I am Even I”: Resisting Male Authority “She early found semi-invalidism, with its freedom from economic and social responsibilities congenial to a life in which the production of poetry was paramount” (123). Jan Marsh has speculated that Christina’s behavior is consistent with that of a sex-abuse victim, hazarding that the abuser in question was her father, Gabriele: something for which there is no direct evidence in Christina’s private writings; the accounts of her doctors; or the memoirs of any member of the Rossetti family (Christina 48). After suggesting that Rossetti’s “invalidism” was a conscious choice, Greer hypothesizes that it stemmed from her “religious mania” (Slip-Shod Sibyls 364). For a complete summary of the psychoanalytic interpretations of Rossetti’s breakdown see Petra Bianchi (18). An 1845 entry in Louisa’s journal, written when she was thirteen, reads: “I am so cross I wish I had never been born” (Journals 55). Louisa’s early journals also express a sense of guilt concerning her temperamental outbursts: “I’ve made so many resolutions, and written sad notes, and cried over my sins, and it doesn’t seem to do any good!” (59); “I try to keep down vanity… My quick tongue is always getting me into trouble, and my moodiness makes it hard to be cheerful” (61). This view is espoused by Matteson (191-95) and Elizabeth Lennox Keyser. Keyser argues that Louisa continued to “express her angry feelings while supplying herself with the moral commentary that would regulate them” (xvii). Louisa’s journals claim her greatest priority is her mother’s care. A July 1850 entry, written at the age of 18, reads: “[Mother] always encourages me, and I wish some one [sic] would write as helpfully to her … I think she is a very brave, good woman, and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her” (63). Louisa’s journal celebrates the fulfilment of this “dream” in an entry on her mother’s death, written in November 1877: “My only comfort is that I could make her last years comfortable” (206). “How they bring poor Lizzie herself before one, with her voice, face and manner” (C. Rossetti Letters 1 225). “How odd it seems to me that just III my admiration is rejected by you as ineligible” (C. Rossetti Letters 1 226). “I think with you that, between your volume and mine, their due post of honour is in yours. But do you not think that (at any rate in your volume) (that) beautiful as they are they are almost too hopelessly sad for publication en masse?” (C. Rossetti Letters 1 225). Here, Christina indicates it would be more appropriate for Siddal’s poems to be included in one of Dante Gabriel’s anthologies. She implies it is unlikely Dante Gabriel will take her advice, given the poems’ potentially negative impact on his reputation. The concerns Christina expresses are at odds with her former praise for Siddal’s poetry; she seems to be insinuating the publication of these verses will damage the posthumous image Dante Gabriel created for his late wife. “Then gaze I at the merrymaking crew, / And smile a moment and a moment sigh / Thinking: Why can I not rejoice with you?” (C. Rossetti Poems “The Thread of Life” 330–331 II 9–11). The narrator describes how his “day-dreams hover … round her brow / Now o’er its perfect forms / Go real worms” (31–33) and visualizes his lady’s corpse directly: “Her eyelids by the earth are pressed; / Damp earth weighs on her eyes” (17–18). “Of my Lady in Life” closes with a description of how “Each breast swelled

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with its pleasures” (141) and “new sensations dimmed her eyes, / Half closing them in ecstasies” (143–144). At the opening of the following poem the narrator’s lady is already dead in what is probably the indirect consequence of her sexual experience. In Millais’s 1851 oil painting, Mariana, the heroine is portrayed at the close of the day, stretching her arms in apparent fatigue by the desk where she has been embroidering. Her posture is tense, and her head is thrown back in exhaustion. This uncomfortable position may be indicative of an illicit pregnancy. The painting’s backdrop is covered with scattered fallen leaves, which represent the loss of Mariana’s youth during her time of self-enforced imprisonment. Shefer argues that Christina’s references to Mariana stress “renunciation, frustration and sexual repression;” experiences that Christina herself allegedly experienced (18). See, for example, Elizabeth Siddal, The Lady of Shalott At Her Loom 1853; Arthur Hughes, The Lady of Shalott 1873; John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott 1888 and The Lady of Shalott [looking at Lancelot] 1894. Tennyson’s implicit condemnation of the Lady of Shalott for her act of leaving the tower is dramatically conveyed in Holman Hunt’s 1886 oilpainting of the same name. Hunt portrays the Lady of Shalott at the moment the loom is torn. The scene is apocalyptic: the stray threads of the loom wrap around the Lady of Shalott to entrap her as she attempts to leave the tower, and her long hair flies loosened into the air, a common symbol of sexual promiscuity. Hunt’s interpretation of the poem is clear: it represents the protagonist’s rejection of the confines of respectable womanhood, and the erotic appeal of her subsequent abjection. “Thou who for love’s sake didst reprove, / Forgive me for the sake of love” (250–251). Notebooks of Christina Rossetti Poems. 1845-56. Cat. 504. Item 1305. Weston Library, Bodleian Collections, University of Oxford; Crump (1990 181–184 429–430). “Her courage won a soul from earth; / Is love sufficient for such things? / Can simple love profess such worth?” (Crump 1999 430 fn. 37 51–53). In his note on the poem, “Portraits,” collected in New Poems of Christina Rossetti, William Michael writes: “This warm-hearted though light effusion is meant for myself … and for Dante Gabriel … There used to be an intermediate stanza, characterising him; it is torn out (by his arbitrary hand, beyond a doubt)” (380). Roger Peattie argues that a “fierce family loyalty … characterised the Rossettis” (72) and that William Michael was just as selective when preparing and editing his brother’s work for publication (86). Peattie contends that those who judge William Michael harshly should bear in mind that, as an editor “he was not much better but certainly no worse than the general run of Victorian … editors” (ibid.), and that the collation and publication of works by the Rossetti family is, in large measure, indebted to his work as a memorialist (86). It is inevitable that William Michael’s attempts to protect both of his siblings has, in some measure, obscured Christina’s more radical written responses to Dante Gabriel’s life and writings. Bronson’s journal describes Louisa and her mother as “Two devils … I am not quite divine enough to vanquish—the mother fiend and her daughter” (qtd. in Matteson 189).

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29 Harriet Reisen writes, “In talks Abby was not permitted to join (but which were held in her presence), [Lane] pounded away at Bronson to impose sexual abstinence on Fruitlands” (98). Upon announcing her decision to leave the commune, Abigail told Bronson he could go “with the rest of the family or stay with Lane” (101). Richard Francis more explicitly claims: “It seems likely that the intense and in many ways destructive relationship between the two men had some degree of homoerotic underpinning. That would explain Abigail’s anguish and resentment at being overlooked. Certainly Lane himself was fully aware that he was involved in a triangle” (266). 30 According to the OED, the figurative use of the word “fundament” came into being in the sixteenth-century, and was in common usage until the 1950s. Fundament, n2. Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2017. Web. 23rd October, 2018. 31 Predictably, Emerson assigns the role of subject to the male: “The subject is the receiver of the Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might” (ibid., emphasis added). 32 Alcott acknowledged the autobiographical basis for Moods in her journal: “I seem to have been playing with edge tools without knowing it. The relations between Warwick Moor & Sylvia are pronounced impossible, yet a case of that sort exists in Concord” (147). Keyser speculates that the novel may be inspired by the attraction between Thoreau and Emerson’s second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson (1802–1892). 33 Louisa transforms Abel Lamb’s breakdown into a religious conversion and thereby radically edits the collapse of the Fruitlands episode. Bronson did suffer a nervous breakdown and exhibited symptoms of persecution mania: claiming that his refusal to eat or participate in communal activities was a response to the lack of support he received for the community from both family and friends. This breakdown occurred midway through the experiment, not at its close. In fact, Bronson did not undergo any dramatic transformation.

Part I

“Left-Handed Societies”: Women’s Life-Writing In Christina Rossetti’s 1892 devotional commentary on the apocalypse, The Face of the Deep, she wrote: Society may be personified as a human figure whose right hand is man, whose left hand is woman; in one sense equal, in another sense unequal. The right hand is the labourer, achiever: the left hand helps, but has little independence, and is more apt at carrying than at executing. The right hand runs the risks, fights the battles: the left hand abides in comparative quiet and safety; except (a material exception) that in the mutual relations of the twain it is in some ways far more liable to undergo than to inflict hurt, to be cut (for instance) than to cut. Rules admit of and are proved by exceptions. There are left-handed people, and there may arise a left-handed society! (410) Readers of Rossetti’s theological work may wonder where this conception of a ‘left-handed society’ originates. Scholars of nineteenth-century American and British culture would doubtless situate it in the ‘doctrine of separate spheres.’ As Ellen Jordan has argued, where “linked distinctions such as mind/body, public/private, reason/desire had long been part of western thinking,” the nineteenth-century Western world created the doctrine of separate spheres to gender these distinctions: conceiving the public sphere as the realm of men and the private sphere as the sanctuary of women (43). Confined to the domestic household, women were regarded as “relative creatures” whose role was to “guide and uplift their more worldly and intellectual mates” (Houghton 349 352). Rossetti’s conception of a left-handed society can be interpreted as a theological justification for women’s role in the domestic sphere, largely embodied in the cultural figure of the ‘angel in the house.’ The angel in the house was known for her qualities of charm, unselfishness, self-sacrifice, and purity (Woolf 2), and was mirrored by her American counterpart, the ‘true woman’, who possessed qualities of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (Welter 152).

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It would be easy to interpret Rossetti’s ‘left-handed society’ as a mere collection of domestic angels who “help [men], but [have] little independence” (C. Rossetti Face of the Deep 410). However, Rossetti’s left-handed society does not describe the nineteenth-century domestic sphere that privileged the public above the private. Instead, it provides a vision of a world where the left hand is invested with authority. Carole Pateman argues that the public and private spheres are intertwined because men’s assumption of authority in public life derives from the patriarchal authority they exert in the home (3-4). Brigid Lowe expands this discourse to argue that the Victorian British novel exposes the fact that “men are produced … by female labour, continue helpless and beholden to others for life” and the formation of their identities is shaped by women (143). A left-handed society is built on the premise that the matrilineal community is at the heart of both private and public life. Sharon Marcus’s pivotal work, Between Women (2007), has highlighted the fact that the preoccupation with women’s status as relative creatures limits our understanding of women’s “kinship and equality” with one another (1). Marcus uncovers the multiplicity of kinship networks between Victorian women, foregrounding the ways friendship licenses “forms of agency women were discouraged from exercising with men” (2). Marcus’s methodological focus on life-writing places women at the “centre of histories of the nineteenth-century family,” thereby resisting the critical tendency to focus on how women “accepted and contested belief systems that defined [them] in terms of male standards, desires and power” (9). In the life-writing of both the Rossetti and Alcott women, the central quality of the matrilineal left-handed society is sympathy. Like Kristin Boudreau, I define sympathy as the ability to identify with marginalized others achieved through “imaginary leaps across spaces of difference” (x). Glenn Hendler has contended that the feminine model of sympathy is focused on a voyeuristic dynamic where the subject is expected to “submerge his or her experience in the emotions of the [object] in order to transform partial sameness into identity” (Public Sentiments 5). However, in the framework of women’s mysticism, sympathy for others is the product of divine union. Female mystics become intermediaries between heaven and earth through recognizing and fulfilling their sisters’ needs. Women mystics conceive female empowerment as achieved through attaining a shared “enlightened consciousness” that overthrows everything that “stands in the way of the original freedom between God and the person” (Lanzetta 82). By sympathizing with one another, women’s devotional communities create an alternative mystical reality based on “a sustained and infused feeling of divinity” that brings “dignity and empowerment” to each of the communities’ members (82–3).

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The female communities of the Alcott and Rossetti families develop what I refer to as a ‘shared consciousness’ that allows each member of the community to conceive her selfhood as formed through identifying with others, prioritizing the little and weak. This model of shared consciousness is modeled by the Alcott and Rossetti matriarchs whose vision of the divine is the foundation of their theologies of renunciation and service to others. The matrilineal communities’ attitude of sympathetic submission towards one another and the divine embodies what Jordan defines as the “religious heterodoxy” of the women’s movement: a position that enabled women of faith to outwardly accept their subordinate status through theologies of renunciation, while nevertheless exploiting their moral and devotional authority to critique the workings of male privilege that underpin the doctrine of separate spheres (90). Abigail Alcott’s female literary community, consisting of herself and her four daughters, opposed the ideals of individualism and self-reliance championed by her husband, Bronson. The left-handed society of the Alcott women was centered on the values of sympathy, religious devotion, and renunciation. Equally, the Rossetti women’s participation in the daily devotional practices of the Tractarian Movement contributed to the fostering of a shared set of ethical and artistic principles from which the Rossetti men were side-lined. These devotional practices led to the development of a lesser-known body of theological work that focused on the value of matrilineal relationships, spiritual submission, and the renunciation of earthly desires. These concepts were inspired by the theology of family matriarch, Frances, and were deployed in the religious writings of her two daughters, Maria and Christina. Where Chapter 1, “I am Even I,” focused on how Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti resisted the ideologies of individualism disseminated by their male peers, Part I, “Left-handed Societies” will analyze the understudied life-writing of the matrilineal communities of the Alcott and Rossetti families, as well as its wider influence on the canonical works of Alcott and Rossetti. A notable exception made by Hendler in his discourse on sympathy is the function of epistolary writing as a “primary site for affective exchange” that facilitates an “emotional transaction” between individuals (Public Sentiments 23). The network of life-writing generated between the Alcott women, and the collaborative theological discourse of the Rossetti women, develops an intersubjective account of female experience that privileges submission to one’s sisters. These acts of submission create a community that champions the co-existence of multiple perspectives and identities through a shared emphasis on “real, personal human engagement—intellectual give and take” (Lowe 11). Beverly J. Lanzetta, whose germinal work on feminist mystical theology is foundational to my methodology, argues that self-negation allows female mystics to experience reality in relation to others (91). The Alcott and Rossetti women resemble the medieval mystics in their discovery that

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spiritual empowerment is not rooted in an “independent, autonomous, individualistic self,’” but rather “a particular kind of spiritual nothingness” that enables the erosion of boundaries integral to mystical communion (Lanzetta 96). My examination of the life-writing and literary discourse of the Alcott and Rossetti women reveals they understand the relationship between sisterly communion and divine union as symbiotic in nature: divine union makes sympathetic identification possible, while sisterly communion deepens and enriches the individual’s capacity to perceive the divine. I will now turn to the network of life-writing and domestic discourse generated by the Alcott and Rossetti women to outline the models of sympathetic identification developed by Abigail Alcott and Frances Rossetti, tracing the propagation of these sympathetic frameworks in the Alcott and Rossetti sisters’ visions of left-handed societies.

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“Renunciation Is the Law, Devotion to God’s Will the Gospel”: The Empowerment of Others in the Alcott Women’s Life-Writing

In his double biography of Louisa May and Bronson Alcott, Eden’s Outcasts, John Matteson claims the grief-stricken Louisa, unable to write a memoir of her mother, burnt the majority of Abigail Alcott’s writings—a decision “that has cost historians priceless insights into the mind of an extraordinary woman” (388-9). Matteson’s account is confirmed by Louisa’s journal entry for April of 1882, which claims that she followed her mother’s wishes and burnt the majority of Abigail’s writings following her death (Journals 233). However, in her 2012 double biography of Abigail and Louisa, in some measure a response to Matteson’s prior work, Eve LaPlante contested his claim that the loss of the majority of Abigail’s life-writings has cost scholars the opportunity to assess her significance as a figure within the Alcott family: The biographer John Matteson concluded that “instead of weaving her mother’s writings into published work, [Louisa] chose to commit the great majority of them to the flames” … [This] conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong. Louisa did weave her mother’s writings into published works … [The] archives also contain hundreds of pages of Abigail’s diaries … Unknown papers of the Alcotts continue to be discovered. (Marmee 5) La Plante’s selected collection of Abigail’s private writings, My Heart is Boundless, revealed that while the volume of Abigail’s surviving lifewriting pales in comparison to the thousands of pages bequeathed by Bronson, they nevertheless constitute a considerable body of work. LaPlante transformed the scholarly narrative by revealing that, while Louisa could not bring herself to burn all of her mother’s writings, the editorial hand of Bronson, who rewrote, edited, excised, and burnt much of his late wife’s work, has shaped our vision of Abigail since her death (Boundless xi–xii). LaPlante claims that the destroyed material was critical of Bronson’s conduct as a husband and father, and that this is something that both Abigail and the wider family wished to obscure.

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Antoinette Burton’s 2005 collection of essays, Archive Stories, argues that archival research is often structured around a “liberal, triumphalist narrative” that emphasizes “fact-retrieval” (6–7) (5).1 However, Burton claims that the archive itself is also an artefact, subject to “specific historical and cultural contexts” and the embodied experience of the researcher at work (9). It is imperative that archival scholars scrutinize the narrative contained within the archive—considering such questions as how it has been compiled, selected, and edited, and what this can tell us about the material we access. It was implicitly accepted in the Alcott family that the writings and scholastic reputation of Bronson, the public philosopher, would be protected at the expense of the private writings of Abigail, and this decision has shaped the archival approach of succeeding generations of scholars, who have, by and large, focused on the prolific writings left by Bronson, at the expense of Abigail’s scattered fragments. LaPlante’s anthology marked the beginning of a rehabilitation of Abigail’s archival material, but her selected collection of Abigail’s work is by no means exhaustive. Focusing on Abigail’s talent as an unpublished writer, as well as her forgotten significance as a historical figure, LaPlante’s work does not include the collaborative writings of Abigail’s daughters, which intersected directly with Abigail’s journals. William Merrill Decker has argued that the publication of epistolary writing transforms the original form of the genre, which was conceived as addressing a “multiple interface” or “community of utterance” by reschematizing it into a linear progression of life-writing, authored by a single individual (33). The same can be said for the nineteenth-century diary, and this is certainly the case for the Alcott family, who followed the practice of reading and annotating each other’s journals and private writings. Collaborative journaling was not uncommon in nineteenth-century New England for, as Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray have argued, the “broad distribution of literacy in a … rural society undergoing rapid urbanization” (101), coupled with the explosion of a market for “special-purpose blank books” (104) led to “a widespread writing impulse propelled by the dual need to keep track of one’s life in a time of social upheaval and to maintain ties to distant loved ones” (102). The collaborative contents of Abigail’s journals are significant in that they offer an insight into what the Zborays have termed “the structural relationship between writing as a practice and lived experience” (103). These moments of literary interaction are inextricably linked to moments of historical interaction within the Alcott family, exposing the authorial identity of the diarist as not simply an “isolated self standing out in high relief from its social environment but the self embedded within its environment,” utilizing the diary as the record of a type of “socioliterary experience” (ibid.).

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“Socioliterary experience” comes hand in hand with generic hybridity, for the forms adopted within a collaborative work must reflect the developing events and experiences of its co-authors. Thus, “long, commonplace book-like passages of poetry … routinely interrupt the flow of a diary usually enhanc[ing] the account of daily experience” (105); “clippings sometimes document … the events recorded by hand” (107), the diary can become a friendship album containing messages of sympathy during times of bereavement (109). Within this nexus, the use of poetry is particularly significant because the authorial identity adopted by the poet is at once personal and impersonal. Adapting the events experienced over the course of the day into a prescribed literary form, the diarist-as-poet invites readers and collaborators to examine their reflections, not only as types of narrative record but as works of literature. This enables the journal’s co-authors to develop an analytical discourse surrounding their inter-personal relationships with the view of achieving a greater mutual understanding. In opposition to her husband, Abigail views the diary, not as a site for parental discipline but a space for developing sympathy between family members. Lisa M. Stepanski claims that while Bronson used personal writing to enquire about his “daughters’ faults,” Abigail used her journals and those of her children to provide the “safe psychic space her daughters needed to pursue their individual talents” (103–108). Stepanski emphasizes that Abigail’s use of literature was “communal, dialogic, uplifting,” drawing attention to Abigail’s interest in educating her “daughters’ moral sensibilities,” thereby connecting them “to the greater community—in this case the immediate family” (100–101). Poetry, in this context, provides a space where the Alcott women exchange ideas and feelings concerning their artistic accomplishments, the inter-workings of family relationships and the formation of a shared set of religious beliefs. The Alcott sisters expanded on the collaborative practice instigated by their mother in their juvenile newspapers, which paid tribute to Abigail as the inspiration for their mutual literary endeavors. These collaborative projects form what Elizabeth Hewitt has termed as a “networked community” of writers and readers (15). Focusing on epistolary practice, Hewitt contends that literary collaboration is orientated “not merely toward the writing subject, but also toward the myriad networks and communities” forged through literary exchange (6). Citing the work of Mary Favret, Celeste-Marie Bernier et al. expand upon this vision of literary exchange to argue that female communities “pulled the letter out of its fiction of individualism” and transformed epistolary practice into “a site for social negotiation and political empowerment” (14). It is my contention that this vision of a ‘networked community’ is not only limited to epistolary practice but was utilized by the Alcott women as a means of negotiating personal empowerment within the family, as they

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formulated a set of literary, relational, and devotional discourses that consciously opposed the philosophical outlook of family patriarch, Bronson.

“Let Us Perpetuate in the Remembrances of Our Children […] What of Love and Good-Will We Have Lived for Them”: Abigail Alcott’s Model of Relational Sympathy Abigail Alcott’s literary influence over her daughters is rooted in the mode of sympathetic discourse she champions in her life-writing, which resists the framework of sympathy espoused by her husband. Bronson Alcott embraced a vision of sympathy, but his vision embodied what Gordon Hutner defines as the Hawthornian model of the infallible author who depends upon the sympathy of his readers, stipulating “how others must come into his sphere… through sympathetic penetration … For others to know him, they must extend their own capacities, and not rely on any guidance from the author” (8). In other words, the sympathy of the reader must be directed towards the author without any expectation of emotional return. This framework of authorial privilege relies upon what Janet Todd has termed “the communication of common feeling from sufferer or watcher to reader or audience” (4), developing a “politics of sympathy [that] is fatally flawed by its drive to turn all differences into equivalences, all analogies into coincidences” (Hendler Public Sentiments 8). Ironically, Hendler affiliates this particular politics of sympathy with a “protofeminist subject position” that attempts to forge “emotional solidarity between … predominantly white women” as a means of advocating for the rights of “their racial, class and national others” within the sentimental novel (7). Elizabeth Barnes imposes this interpretation of a female politics of sympathy onto the fiction of Louisa May Alcott, claiming that: “Sadistic impulses are ultimately converted into masochistic ones in Alcott’s novels, a transformation that affords its own form of pleasure by the children’s understanding that the one who is ‘beaten’ is the one who is loved” (21). Abigail Alcott’s life-writings, which provided much of the inspiration for Little Women, oppose this masochistic approach to child-rearing. Abigail did not share in her husband’s disciplinary practices but instead perceived parental discourse to be a dialogue that privileged the experiences of others and fostered mutual understanding and growth. Abigail’s conception of sympathy encourages the development of what I term as ‘shared consciousness’ where the needs and behaviors of the individual are shaped by the experiences of others, as much as they are the experiences of the self. This shared consciousness mirrors the “enlightened consciousness” attained by female mystics like Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila who argued that the contemplative and

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prayerful Christian transformed the self into an “inner monastery” capable of shutting out the distractions of the outside world to achieve union with the divine and one’s sisters (Lanzetta 82 91). Abigail’s journals are the site of her development of shared consciousness, for they form a reciprocal discourse with her children by means of self-analysis and reflexivity. She defines the purpose of the diary as allowing the moral good of the individual to live on and nourish the growth of their children: “let us perpetuate in the remembrances of our children at least, what of love and good-will we have lived for them” (LaPlante Boundless 200). It is also through the exchange of personal record, something that Abigail encouraged her daughters to actively partake in, that family ties and relationships are cemented. For instance, in a private letter, sent to 14-year-old Louisa through the “domestic post office,” established by Abigail to heal “all differences and discontents” within the family,2 Abigail describes the diaries of herself and her daughter as intertextual works that evidence the intertwined nature of their lives: “My Diary! Your Diary! only to think that we neither of us snatch a moment to notch our days! Can they be profitably spent if not a moment can be spared to record the fact that we lived?” (LaPlante Boundless 155–156). Abigail used her journal as a site for maintaining her relationships with her girls, fostering affectionate communication between them. She would sometimes record notes sent through the domestic post office for posterity. For instance, she transcribed a note sent to Louisa on her 11th birthday into her journal, which encouraged her daughter to use her diary as a tool for reflection that would aid her personal growth: “Remember, dear girl, that a diary should be an epitome of your life. May it be a record of pure thought and good actions, then you will indeed be the precious child of your loving mother” (128). Abigail understood the purpose of life-writing as a tool for self-composition: recording one’s life enabled the individual to analyze and reconstruct their behavior, so refining and strengthening their conscience in the process. Abigail’s journals frequently express frustration at her husband’s inability to relate to her need for empathetic relationships and sympathy from others. After observing Abigail’s happiness at receiving a sympathetic note from her brother Charles, which addressed their difficulties during the Fruitlands experiment, Bronson apparently criticized her for showing signs of weakness, something that provoked the following entry in her journal: Cousin Sam leaves us this morning a truly kind and fraternal note from our dear friend … This is what I much need, what my husband seems to regard as puerile and false sympathy. I do not … It may be weakness- well! I am weak and I do not find that he that is wise is “always strong.” I am but human, and with many infirmities lurking about me. (A. Alcott Diary 6th February, 1844)

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Noting that Bronson’s aspiration to fashion an independent identity overrode the human desire for mutual understanding, Abigail observed that his denigration of emotional experience ignored a fundamental aspect of the human condition: the desire for sympathy from others. In failing to aspire after the same level of self-sufficiency, Abigail concedes that she might appear weak, but that in acknowledging and accepting the reality of her supposed weakness, she is wiser than her husband, for her desires are rooted in the inevitable human need for companionship. At the heart of the divergence between husband and wife are opposing visions of fate and providence. Where Bronson sees his Transcendentalist vision as forming part of a manifest destiny, where all becomes unified in the oversoul, Abigail emphasizes the importance of working with the uncertain and shifting circumstances of the individual’s environment, trusting that, through cooperation with the divine, they will be directed towards the best possible outcome for their lives. A quotation by Bronson, written in Abigail’s hand in her journal, suggests he believed human will could dictate the course of the individual’s future—to the extent of achieving a vision at odds with that of the external world: “that which such souls desire, shall assuredly come to pass. His desire is the promise of its accomplishments, and his Faith prophetic. Time shall unfold his Ideal into its full and fair image in the actual” (ibid. 22nd August, 1842). For Bronson, the mere existence of human faith was evidence of its inevitable fulfilment—it was only a matter of time before such faith came to fruition. In contrast to her husband, Abigail’s vision of transcendent experience is achieved through total submission to divine will and complete forgetfulness of self. An entry on 1st April, 1843, claims that a soul attached to earthly desires, or “creaturely entanglements,” paradoxically has greater difficulty in achieving true freedom (A. Alcott Diary). Stating that “conversion to God is aversion from sin,” Abigail argues that “turning away from the latter is going into the former, a continuous sinking into the Deity” (ibid.). While a relinquishment of self-interested desire might, on the surface, appear to necessitate a renunciation of individual identity, within Abigail’s theology, such an act of spiritual renunciation redirects the individual away from the perversions and distortions conditional to the fallen world. Instead, the individual achieves their preordained purpose, unification with God, through a letting go of an individualized selfhood aligned to the desires and conditions of the external world. Abigail’s vision of submission to divine will closely resembles the attitude of mystical surrender championed by the medieval female mystics. Surrender of will enables the female mystic to immerse herself in the deity and access a transformed plane of experience especially attuned to the divine. By aligning her identity with that of the Creator, the female mystic attains an increased sensitivity to both suffering and ecstasy:

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unification with the divine exceeds any pleasure attainable in the material world, but also heightens the disparity between the material world and the world to come. Thus, Abigail writes: “Love is the weight which sinks us as into an infinite sea, wherein they descend with inconceivable rapidity from one profound depth to another” (ibid.). Immersion into such transcendent experience requires a learnt acceptance of suffering; the submission of the individual necessitates a rejection of the outside world. In Abigail’s conception, the ability to embrace suffering is achieved through detaching the self from the immanence of conscious experience, so that it is diminished by the presence of the deity: “A sensibility of suffering constitutes a principle [sic] part of the sufferings themselves. They often bear the Cross in weakness, at other times Strength. All should be equal to us in the will of God” (A. Alcott Diary 22nd August, 1842). In another diary entry, dated 2nd July, 1848, Abigail even goes so far as to claim that, as a vehicle to unification with God, human suffering can be transformed into an uplifting experience: “Renunciation is the law, devotion to God’s will the Gospel, the latter makes the former easy—sometimes delightful” (ibid.). It is possible to interpret such a theology as, on some level, masochistic. Marianne Nobel has compellingly argued that: “The masochism in sentimentality—neither subversive nor purely reactive—makes available the ‘bliss’ of reveling in fantasized submission to power” (5). Likewise, Claire Jarvis stakes the claim that the repression of female sexuality can function as a means of activating that sexuality: “Withholding sex, in the Victorian novel, is a perverse way of having it” (viii). However, Abigail’s theology of renunciation is a framework for transcending pain, not ‘reveling’ in it: “A sensibility of suffering constitutes a principle [sic] part of the sufferings themselves” (A. Alcott Diary 22nd August, 1842). Through identifying herself with the will of God, Abigail enters an alternative plane of existence that reconfigures the human emphasis on individual fulfilment. Female mystics experience renunciation not as pain but as a type of ecstatic bliss where the subject lets go of the limitations of the self to share in the pleasure given over to others. This mystical theology alters sense perception, so that the sensations one experiences in the world, which are conditional to the solipsistic outlook of that world, are turned upside-down. Pain, in this context, would be to turn inwards into the self because such selfinterestedness would facilitate the victimization of the other, with whom the individual identifies. Kenyon Gradert raises the interesting possibility that Abigail Alcott’s theology of renunciation might be viewed as part of a wider female response against the “individualistic spiritual antinomianism” of midnineteenth-century New England (1). Gradert contends that Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), in particular, sought to counter “a Puritan legacy of excessive iconoclasm, individualism and antinomianism”

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through “reclaiming [Puritanism’s] communal facets in … a folk theology grounded in the lived reality and communal relations of Puritan New England” (2). This folk theology is mystical in nature: it focuses on the lived experience of the church community as it interprets everyday life through the framework of its faith. The life of the community is built out of what Gradert refers to as a “hermeneutic of empathy in which readers imaginatively cast themselves back into the world of sacred history,” in order to come to a realization that “God spoke not only through individuals, but to communal peoples that developed and matured through the arc of sacred history” (4). In the conception of these emerging Puritan communities, inspired by the Halfway Covenant,3 the teleology of sacred history is based on mystical experience, as opposed to institutionalized doctrine. The events of sacred history are embedded “within a texture of vernacular speech and quotidian folk life” that formulates a vision of Christian theology as growing out of “communal lived [and mystical] experience” (6–7). Abigail might reasonably be seen as falling into this tradition, for she counters her husband’s belief in divine revelation with an understanding of individual destiny as generated through an outward-facing predisposition towards the growing needs of the surrounding community. While the Transcendentalist emphasis on a return to prelapsarian innocence opposes the Calvinist Doctrine of the Total Depravity of Man, the movement’s faith in individual revelation and the divinely ordained vocation of the individual, is nevertheless indebted to the concept of predestination. If all is united within the oversoul, then the oversoul, as a precondition of one’s existence, facilitates the individual’s personal fulfilment. The difficulty with this self-affirming philosophy is that it interprets the conditions of life as supporting the individual’s chosen identity and does not allow for the possibility that an individual’s circumstances may affect his or her desires. Contrastingly, mystical theology is centered on the understanding that the individual must adapt to the unexpected events of daily life—reading these events as signs of an evolving relationship with God shaped by both the individual’s identity and their affiliation with the wider Christian community. Of course, what we might term as Abigail’s ‘matrilineal mystical theology’ differs from Stowe’s ‘folk theology’ in that it is contained within the unit of the nuclear family and does not consciously situate itself within a Puritan discourse, but Abigail’s development of a sympathetic shared consciousness is fascinatingly close to Stowe’s “hermeneutic of empathy” (Gradert 4). Both frameworks are centered on lived religion, communal relationships, and mystical experience. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Stowe viewed Louisa May Alcott as her sentimental heir, writing to her in a letter that “in these days where so much seductive and dangerous literature is put forward, the success of your domestic works has been to me most comforting” (qtd. in Saxton 305–306).

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In Louisa’s public works we see her ground her mother’s matrilineal theology in “the vernacular speech and quotidian folklife” of New England (Gradert 7), developing a sentimental backdrop that is indebted to Stowe’s earlier work. It is my contention that Alcott’s portrayal of female relationships as “a key means of grace” that facilitates the integration of the self-reliant individual into a “social body” (ibid.) is indebted to the prototype of the matrilineal community of the Alcott women. Like the medieval female mystics, the Alcott women “turn[ed] their attention to the spiritual life, often co-opted by [male] authority and submerged in academic [discourse], and to the daily trials by which a soul ascends in grace” (Lanzetta 82). In the work of the Alcott sisters, we witness an application of Abigail Alcott’s vision of shared consciousness where the needs of the community are prioritized above those of the individual, as well as a mutual championing of her theology of renunciation and practice of lived religion, which conceives mystical experience as the foundation of the community’s vision of the divine.

“Piety of the Right Kind”: Abigail Alcott’s Lived Religion in Anna Alcott’s Literary Criticism and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women The Alcott sisters conceive religious practice as a practical way of life that eschews the hierarchical and ritualistic frameworks of organized religion, instead focusing on the power of communal bonds to redeem the individual and bring them closer to God. The emphasis on the redemptive power of matrilineal relationships fosters a providential outlook because the individual’s salvation is facilitated through the femalecentered relationships of the family. This matrilineal vision of redemption can be observed throughout the life-writing of the Alcott sisters and is the foundation for the portrayal of the March women in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Anna Alcott’s journal records the sympathetic vision of the Alcott women and its influence on their public writing. Her critique of Susan Warner’s (1819–1885) The Wide, Wide World is germane to our understanding of Little Women because it illuminates Louisa May Alcott’s innovations within the sentimental genre, and indicates how these innovations embody the providential outlook championed by Abigail Alcott. Kristina West has sensitively documented the pitfalls of approaching Little Women and Alcott’s wider canon through an autobiographical framework as I do here. West reminds scholars that any claim to “the real” is “only based on texts themselves” and archival papers have no access to “something prior or extra to” textual production (p. 27 and 45). My introduction has outlined my conception of archival ephemera as devotional relics, but I agree with Rosemarie Bodenheimer that an intertextual approach allows scholars to “discover plausible ways of

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negotiating between ‘the life’ and ‘the work,’” thereby countering critical myths that emerge through various schools of interpretation, be they theoretical, psychoanalytic, or autobiographical (16). I foreground the empowering aspects of the Alcott women’s theologies of renunciation to trouble the assumption that they share the repressive ramifications of renunciatory theologies in contemporaneous works like Warner’s. Viewing the theological vision of Little Women through the lens of the Alcott women’s archive allows us to understand why the novel, in Anne Boyd Rioux’s words, “points backward to a simpler time of family cohesion and looks forward to a complicated time when women would find work away from home and family” (136): the Alcott women’s theologies of renunciation lay the foundation for sororal cooperation and participation in the public sphere. Anna’s journal contains short pithy reviews of works of fiction and religious tracts, a practice she inherited from her mother. Her observations on The Wide, Wide World reflect her wider sentiments concerning lived religion and spiritual submission. The entry for Tuesday 9th February, 1861 argues that Warner’s novel would be a “real good story if it were not quite so pious.”4 Clarifying she does not “dislike piety of the right kind, that which shows itself in loving words and unselfish deed” (Anna Alcott Diary 9th February, 1861), Anna explains that she finds the formal religious practice of the novel’s heroine, Ellen Montgomery, affected: ….when a child of 10 yrs. talks constantly of being “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” ‘having a new heart’ and seeking Grace, it seems rather unnatural. Then to pray on every occasion, read the Bible in preference to all other books, and weep bitterly if anyone asks her if she is a “Christian“ or “expects to be saved” seems to me hardly childlike and simple enough. (ibid.) Anna’s objection to Ellen Montgomery’s particularly self-conscious brand of “piety” can be linked to what Jane Tompkins has termed as the “ethic of submission” that pervades the sentimental genre (167). Within this framework, female heroines “could not assume a stance of open rebellion against the conditions of their lives” and instead appropriated the “culture’s value system” of female submission to gain a position of authority (168). Tompkins interprets The Wide, Wide World as “paradoxically an assertion of autonomy” because submission, as the highest act of Christian faith, enables “the dutiful woman [to] merge her own authority with God’s” (169). Thus, every single act of submission within the text is consciously linked back to the heroine’s piety and is developed within a religious discourse that is, as Anna points out, somewhat affected for a child of ten years old. One might ask how Warner’s “ethic of submission” (Tomkins 167) differs from Abigail’s theology of renunciation. The answer lies in

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Warner’s theology of predestination, which views the subordinate status of women as part of God’s preordained salvific plan. Warner’s ethic of submission defines the sufferings of women at the hands of patriarchal authority as divinely willed, thereby championing an eschatological vision of female destiny that perceives salvation as facilitated through gynocentric suffering. This can be seen as a devotional version of Bronson Alcott’s vision of “Fate” and radically opposes women mystics’ emphasis on the attainment of selfhood through ecstatic immersion in the divine. Ellen Montgomery’s submission does not lead to the other-orientated shared consciousness upheld in the devotional writings of the Alcott women because it is dependent upon the heroine’s sacrifice of her mother, and, with her, the possibility of a redemptive matrilineal community. In Warner’s narrative, Ellen Montgomery’s mother must die, so that Ellen can form a closer relationship with God. No logical reason is given for Ellen’s separation from her mother (other than the weak preferences of a perpetually absent father whose intermittent appearances in the novel seem only to coincide with the circumvention of his daughter’s happiness), but Ellen’s fallibility is explicitly associated with her motherlove: “Ellen had plenty of faults, but amidst them all, love to her mother was the strongest feeling her heart knew” (11). Warner’s theology embodies what Ira L. Mandelker defines as “Puritan mysticism” (39). The Puritan mystic strenuously subordinates themselves to “Divine Law” at the cost of great suffering, focusing on the doctrines of “resist no evil” and “turn the other cheek” to form a “positive ascetic ideology” (ibid.). This mode of mysticism opposes mysticism practiced exclusively within the female community. Female revelation is placed above the interpretation of divine law promulgated by church authorities in the work of the medieval mystics, for example. Anne Douglas has astutely observed that sentimental texts like The Wide, Wide World invariably disappoint feminist scholars because such “sentimentalism provides a way to protest a power to which one has already capitulated” (12) by becoming complicit within a power structure that “forces its objects to be oppressive in turn, to do the dirty work of their society in several senses” (11). Douglas disregards the value of the sentimental genre in its entirety, arguing that “America lost its maledominated theological tradition without gaining a comprehensive feminism or adequately modernized religious sensibility” (13). Yet, Anna’s critical response to the brand of piety presented in The Wide, Wide World suggests otherwise. Anna objects to the rigidly formal elements of organized religion because they are a replacement for the mother as mediatrix to the divine. While Nina Baym asserts that “an expression of existential doubt and absurdity” is preferable to Warner’s beneficent portrayal of an autocratic deity (145), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women stands out for representing a family matriarch, based on

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Abigail Alcott, who acts as a spiritual guide for the novel’s four heroines. Abigail was influenced by the emphasis on free will and spiritual aspiration promoted by the Arminian revival but nevertheless remained true to the Unitarian precept of wresting “religion from the clergy, congregation, and ritual, and substitut[ing] an intense personal relationship with God” (Mandelker 44). This aspect of Unitarian religious practice is surprisingly close to women’s mysticism, which prioritizes “the subversive value of experiential knowledge” above the authority of the Church (Lanzetta 145). Abigail’s emphasis on her personal relationship with God is forged in concert with the left-handed matrilineal society of the family and we observe her vision of mystical shared consciousness in Little Women. Consider, for instance, the difference between the function of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women and The Wide, Wide World. Where Ellen Montgomery is encouraged to apply Bunyan’s text to her own life as a means of accepting the peculiarly misogynistic brand of injustice she is continually forced to confront, Marmee encourages her four daughters to use the text as an aspirational vehicle towards self-fulfillment: “Do you remember how you used to play Pilgrim’s Progress when you were little things? … Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get” (17–18). Bunyan’s text allows the March sisters to look upon the trials and tribulations of their lives as obstacles to be overcome, rather than the inevitable workings of blind destiny. The sisters are encouraged to read the text through the unfolding events of their lives, instead of interpreting their lives through the framework of the text. Their engagement with Bunyan’s narrative is active and evolving because it is a guide for conquering “their bosom enemies” and achieving salvation through supporting all members of the matrilineal community in its mutual quest towards spiritual fulfilment (14). By contrast, Ellen Montgomery applies the text to her life in hindsight when its events cannot be altered: she does not create her own unique interpretive language but rather submits herself to the instruction of her male superiors. Marmee’s conflation of her daughters’ struggles with what is presented as a favorite childhood story also associates self-improvement with ‘play’: “We are never too old for this, my dear, because it is a play we are playing all the time in one way or another” (18). The use of literature and theatricality, as well as the emphasis on heavenly reward, allows the girls’ attempts to conquer their faults to bring joy and laughter, as well as suffering. This association of self-improvement with ‘play’ counteracts Richard Brodhead’s claim that sentimental works like Little Women foster a practice of “disciplinary intimacy” (70) where the protagonist is punished through the voyeuristic experience of the victim’s suffering (68). The very notion of ‘play’ suggests that one’s moral development is formed through a process of trial and error and rejects any suggestion

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that the parent should encourage the development of excessive guilt for what are essentially childish misdemeanors. ‘Play’ is not a form of emotional manipulation; it is rather an act of creative collaboration and self-discovery. Louisa’s emphasis on self-reflection through ‘play’ also encourages the reader to reject the notion that the experiences of her heroines are predetermined. The narrative structure of the novel, which examines the struggles of each sister in the context of Bunyan’s narrative, opens up the text to myriad interpretive possibilities. The sisters’ understanding of the text is transformed by each circumstance they meet and their failure to overcome their bosom enemies is neither lamented as an indicator of their eternal damnation, nor is it celebrated as an inevitable obstacle in the divine trajectory of their lives. Instead, it is presented as an integral aspect of the individual’s self-development, and each sister is encouraged to regard her shortcomings as the foundation for psychological and spiritual growth. Alcott’s portrayal of lived religion is in some respects radical for the period and was even scorned by contemporary reviewers. For example, an anonymous reviewer in the Zion’s Herald condemned Alcott’s secular appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress and her refusal to link Bunyan’s narrative to the affected display of pious sentiment that can be observed in The Wide, Wide World: We dislike the spiritualizing in it of Bunyan’s great Allegory … The fight with Apollyon is reduced to a conflict with an evil temper, and the Palace Beautiful and Vanity Fair are made to be only ordinary virtues or temptations. We cannot recommend the book as its quality merits. It is without Christ, and hence perilous in proportion to its assimilation to Christian forms. Don’t put it in the Sunday School library.5 When read alongside this review, Anna’s critique of The Wide, Wide World takes on another dimension, for she is pushing against the restrictive models of religious formation assigned to women in the sentimental literature of the period, and thereby prefiguring her sister’s intervention in the canon. One might wonder what the reviewer finds to be so dangerous in Louisa’s text. (S)he is apparently affronted that a novel that affirms Christian values, makes extended reference to the popular theological writing of the period, and features a paterfamilias who is an Army Chaplain, never references Christ directly. His or her outrage perhaps makes more sense when we consider the possibility that the deeper source of offence lies in Louisa’s alleged trivialization of Bunyan’s text, for the reviewer regards Louisa’s association of a theological tract with “ordinary virtues and temptations” as sacrilegious (ibid.). This is

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astounding, given Bunyan’s narrative was an allegorical rendering of his own life and conversion experience. In short, his was a mystical text. However, the reviewer’s attitude becomes comprehensible when we consider the possibility they are offended Louisa has the audacity to locate Bunyan’s spiritual insights in the left-handed society of the domestic sphere. The anonymous reviewer implies Louisa should relinquish her authority over Bunyan’s text, here utilized as an aid for women’s spiritual development. Susan Cheever has argued that the most rebellious feature of Little Women is that it allows the “domestic details” of daily life to become the “subject of art,” thereby implying that the “small things in a woman’s life—cooking, the trimming of a dress or hat, quiet talk—can be just as important a subject as a great whale or a scarlet letter” (192). The same claim can and has been made for The Wide, Wide World6—but the fact remains that the struggles of Ellen Montgomery are rooted in her continual expulsion from the domestic sphere and her forcible immersion into the wide, wide world. She is cast out of the prelapsarian space of the matrilineal community and forced to make her way in a shockingly misogynistic society without any sign of protest, or rebellion. When Anna objects to Ellen Montgomery’s inability to appear “hardly childlike or simple enough,” advocating “piety of the right kind” (Anna Alcott Diary 9th February, 1861), she is really championing the practice of lived religion modeled by her mother and promoted in Little Women.

“We Enjoyed Our Little Pleasures with Gratitude When We Had Care and Sorrow”: Bronson Alcott’s Vision of Predestination in Two Early Sketches for Little Women The incorporation of Abigail Alcott’s practice of ‘lived religion’ into the providential framework of Little Women is rendered even more explicit when it is examined in the context of a double set of early sketches for the novel, “Two Scenes in a Family” (Appendices 2–3), which were written for the Alcott sisters’ juvenile newspaper, The Portfolio. Like the opening of Little Women, these sketches portray four sisters in front of a fireside complaining about their poverty. However, this earlier version of the scene also features the figure of a father, an “old philosopher” seated by a “well-stocked bookcase,” clearly based on Bronson Alcott (Appendix 2). Rather than opening with the dialogue between the sisters that commences Little Women, “Two Scenes in a Family” allows the paterfamilias to commence the discussion on poverty. He is anxious to justify the family’s straightened circumstances in light of his philosophy of predestination, which interprets earthly sufferings as preordained tribulations that establish the individual’s purity of character. The four daughters remain unconvinced by the patriarch’s arguments, claiming

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they would be more able to help those less fortunate than themselves if they were financially comfortable and more able to engage in providential acts of goodness. The opening debate subtly places the sisters’ theology of free will and good works in opposition to their father’s emphasis on human weakness and the necessity of hardship. The girls defer the question of the abstract value of poverty to their mother who argues that the struggles of the poor are the product of a self-serving capitalist society that does not encourage values of renunciation and generosity. She echoes Abigail Alcott’s sentiments, arguing that the foundation of any successful society lies in its capacity for sympathy and love for others. Emulating Abigail’s example, the nameless mother disregards the philosopher’s claim that punishment alone can refine a person’s character, instead advocating the universal development of a sympathetic shared consciousness fostered within the matrilineal community. The girls’ father, however, dismisses his wife’s dreams of a future society where “wealth may be a source of true happiness to high and low” with the abrupt assertion that such a time “will never come” (Appendix 2). His wife’s insights are disregarded without cause, and he restates his prior belief that poverty is in the best interests of the family. In light of this earlier blueprint for the opening scene of the novel, it is fascinating Louisa chose to erase the figure of the father from the first part of Little Women. The absence of this self-righteous philosopher, who undercuts the insights of his wife, allows the March sisters to follow the advice and instruction of their mother without opposition. Indeed, the second sketch of “Two Scenes in a Family,” “Wealth” (Appendix 3), suggests the father’s mere presence undermines the promotion of sympathetic values, for his philosophy of predestination is upheld, while his wife’s faith in the development of universal sympathy is presented as untenable. Although the family has attained wealth, its good fortune has corrupted each of its members with the exception of the old philosopher and Lizzie, an early version of Beth March. Annie, the counterpart for Anna Alcott and Meg March in Little Women, appears lazy, listless, and bored; the “brown girl,” an early model of Jo March and the fictional counterpart of Louisa May Alcott, is pictured “filling a costly album with nonsensical poetry,” while the youngest sister, an unnamed version of Amy March based on her real-life counterpart, May Alcott, sits “idle” in a recess (ibid.). Most damning of all, however, is the portrayal of the unnamed mother who throws off her “rich furs,” exclaiming in a “discontented voice”: The beggars are a public nuisance. I cannot stir out, I am surrounded with vagabonds and poor wretches who torment one’s life out for this thing and that. Ah me, what a trouble it is to be rich if they would but let me alone, I should be satisfied. (sic ibid.)

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The mother’s failure to realize the altruistic attitude she has previously championed confirms the ‘old philosopher’s’ avocation of the necessity of cathartic suffering. The aspiration towards a mutually supportive left-handed society is exposed as fallacy and this early version of Marmee is portrayed as the worst of hypocrites because she is unable to practice her philosophy of altruism when she becomes the recipient of good fortune. Consequently, a belief in the providential power of good works is rejected in favor of upholding a vision of predestination where one submits to the righteous vengeance of a wrathful God to achieve eternal salvation. The family’s moral peril is explicitly underlined by the “brown girl” who claims that “we were happier in our old home at C.” because “we enjoyed our little pleasures with gratitude when we had care and sorrow … of our own. We felt for those who suffered like us and in that pity found comfort for our own griefs” (ibid.). The sketch abruptly ends on this note of discord, implying that the family’s unexpected windfall is to have disastrous ramifications for the spiritual welfare of its female members for the foreseeable future. “Two Scenes in a Family” presents a depressing alternative to Little Women because, like The Wide, Wide World, it insists that women must be subjected to perpetual suffering if they are to obtain salvation. Within these texts, the matrilineal community is shown to be entirely incapable of self-control and unable to achieve virtue through the cultivation of sympathy, the entire premise of Little Women. Louisa’s iconic work embodies a conscious rejection of Bronson’s theology of predestination in favor of Abigail’s vision of a left-handed society centered on the cultivation of sympathy and good works. Louisa expunges the figure of her father from the text because his mere presence traps the matrilineal community in a sense of guilt and unworthiness, as they perpetually enact what Brodhead terms as the pedagogical practice of “disciplinary intimacy” (70). Furthermore, LaPlante has argued that the minor character of Mr. March, who does share in Mrs. March’s moral authority following his return from the Civil War in Part II of the novel, is actually based on Abigail’s father, Colonel Joseph May (Marmee 228). Unlike Bronson, whose poverty followed his failed philosophical, educational, and social experiments, Colonel May, like Mr. March, lost his fortune after clearing the debts of a business partner who participated in a fraudulent Ponzi Scheme without his prior knowledge or consent (ibid.). By replacing the figure of her father with her maternal grandfather, Louisa enables her mother’s moral wisdom to be reaffirmed and supported by the patriarchal figurehead of the novel. The moral message of Little Women also becomes affiliated with the maternal line of the Mays (tellingly, the surname “March” is also a month of the year), rather than the patriarchal line of the Alcotts (227).

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When read in this context, Little Women can be seen as a depiction of Abigail’s sympathetic vision of a matrilineal community that facilitates female redemption through championing mutually supportive and reciprocal relationships between women. The providential structure of the novel, which examines the unfolding events of the sisters’ lives in the context of their evolving interpretations of The Pilgrim’s Progress, mirrors the shared code of conduct modeled by Abigail through her collaborative journaling, the installation of a family post-office and her fostering of juvenile literary projects like the Alcott sisters’ newspapers. This exchange of life-writing encouraged the development of a sympathetic shared consciousness within the matrilineal community. The network of the Alcott sisters’ life-writing demonstrates how each sister applied Abigail’s vision of a sympathetic shared consciousness and her theology of renunciation to their daily lives and mystical experiences.

“We Must Live for Each Other”: The Maternal Bond as Origin and Apotheosis of the Alcott Sisters’ Artistry Abigail Alcott is presented as the inspiration for her daughters’ collaborative life-writings throughout their lives, and her presence continues to linger after her death. The Alcott sisters’ journals are commonly dedicated to Abigail and assign her the role of intended reader. The sisters place the maternal bond at the center of their life-writing and artistic projects, interpreting the circumstances of their lives through the framework of their relationships with their mother. Examining Louisa May Alcott’s participation in this literary community helps us to understand how her identity as an author was shaped by her sympathetic relationships with her mother and sisters, so that her published works became a public expression of the devotional values of the matrilineal community. As with the preeminent role of Marmee in Little Women, Abigail is presented as the central influence on Anna’s life in her journal. On her first wedding anniversary on 22nd May, 1861, Anna inserted a note from Abigail into the text, instead of including something from her husband. Anna links the event of her marriage back to her mother, implying the maternal relationship remains the central influence of her life and that all other relationships are built out of this preeminent bond. Abigail’s note informs Anna that she has been preparing her diary for Anna’s perusal, and it is to be passed on through Louisa. It is clear Abigail still understands her life as intertwined with those of her daughters, even after their marriages, and that she looks upon lifewriting as a means of continuing her relationships with them. She re-establishes herself as a constant presence in her daughter’s life, acknowledging the continuation of their bond, despite Anna’s marriage: “Oh my darling it is hard to believe that you belong to anyone else than

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God or me—all happy you are happy—all try to be” (Anna Alcott Diary 22nd May, 1861). Abigail’s description of the relationship between mother and daughter as a continuing state of “belonging” presents the maternal bond as symbiotic in nature, for the identity of each individual is formed through identification with others (ibid.). Indeed, Abigail’s journals define the maternal bond as centered on an outward-facing disposition towards the other: “I wish [my daughters] to feel that we must live for each other. My life thus far has been devoted to them and I know they will find happiness hereafter in living for their Mother” (LaPlante Boundless 106). While Abigail acknowledges the importance of Anna’s marriage, she nevertheless champions the maternal bond as transcending all other relationships. The role of the mother is associated with that of the Creator, while the bond between mother and child is portrayed as emulating the human relationship with the divine parent. Throughout her life, Abigail interpreted the maternal role as a sacred duty, claiming the mother was “the most interesting, as well as important member in the community.”7 Anna’s act of pasting her mother’s note into her journal suggests she shared this view and regarded her maternal bond with Abigail as preceding her conjugal union. Anna also shared her mother’s aspiration to achieve a sympathetic shared consciousness between family members. She describes her union with her husband as based on mutual identification, inadvertently mirroring Abigail’s description of the mother–daughter relationship: “We are most blessed together, our habits, tastes and inclinations being much alike … Each has grown to be a need to the other” (Anna Alcott Diary 1st January, 1861). The maturation of the conjugal bond is defined as a process whereby each person reconciles themselves to the personal and temperamental dispositions of the other, so that they become, in effect, indispensable to the other person. This description of the marital relationship is accompanied by an excerpt of devotional verse that stresses the importance of the individual’s responsibilities to others in daily life. This excerpt is taken from Isaac Watts’ poem, “Self-Inquiry”: a versified examination of conscience that instructs the individual to reflect on the impact of their actions upon others at the close of each day. Unlike the Transcendentalist model, Watts’s definition of self-knowledge is relational, seeking to understand the self through others, rather than through contemplating an internal divine calling. The ultimate end of Watts’ analysis is to place the actions and behaviors of the self in relation to the individual’s relationship with God and their hope for eternal salvation: “These self inquiries are the road / That leads to virtue and to God” (ibid. 12–13). Watts perceives the self as part of a wider familial community that directs its shared experiences towards the divine will of its Creator. This theological outlook necessitates a relinquishment of the individual’s ego,

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so that they are able to identify the workings of God in the external world. Anna shares her mother’s belief that human relationships should be tied to a vision of divine providence where the individual consciously relates the events of their daily lives towards the image of the Creator through a self-sacrificing dedication to others. Her reference to “SelfInquiry” also evidences her continuing allegiance to the literary community of the Alcott sisters, for this poem is transcribed in an 1852 journal entry of Anna’s youngest sister, May Alcott Nieriker (1840–1879).8 The fact that the sisters cited the same literary excerpt when composing reflections on the importance of family relationships indicates that they collaborated in the creation of a canon of influential aphorisms that informed their private life-writings throughout their lives. The life-writing of the youngest of the Alcott sisters, May, shares in the providential vision of human relationships promoted in the diary of Anna, while likewise figuring the mother–daughter bond as an instrument that shapes the divine trajectory of the lives of both individuals. May was a painter who, from 1870, undertook a number of European excursions to cities like Paris, London, and Rome, to study art. Her letters home, largely addressed to her mother, portray Abigail as the inspiration for her artistic career. May’s art classes are narrated in minute detail and inform her mother of the continuing development of her artistic accomplishments, including the praise received from a drawing master for her “strikingly strong” work, in contrast to his distaste for the poorly executed drawings of a colleague.9 May’s letters also included small pen and ink drawings of her paintings, so that her mother might be able to better visualize her progress.10 The use of illustration in May’s correspondence is a vehicle for enabling her mother to enter into her everyday experiences. For instance, she proposed creating an album of places she had visited abroad, so that her mother could feel she was traveling with her.11 For her part, Abigail dedicated her final journal to May, and the vast majority of its entries concern her youngest daughter. Abigail was a remarkable mother for the period, in that she was determined all of her daughters pursue careers.12 She supported May’s studies abroad and her final journal expresses a “hope” May will “mature and develop the best traits of her character … and confirm still further her conviction that her talent for painting needs these farther instructions to establish her claim as an artist of no mean degree.”13 Following Abigail’s death, May continued to situate her mother’s influence at the center of her life, interpreting her lived experiences in light of her mother’s example and the providential framework of her beliefs. Shortly after her mother’s passing, May informed her family she experienced a psychic intuition of the event: “On the 25th I was sitting in the dressing room writing my home letter beginning ‘Dear Marmee’ I

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think and at night had a good cry in my room” (M. Alcott Letters). This experience can be interpreted as a mystical premonition of Abigail’s death, a manifestation of the matrilineal community’s union across the barriers of time and space that divide the transatlantic world. After this mystical revelation, May modeled her life on Abigail’s values and example. When she married Swiss businessman, Ernest Nieriker, the following year, she justified her happiness during her period of grief on the grounds that Abigail’s “example” would “always be [her] guide,” arguing that her own unconventional double vocation as artist and wife was inspired by her mother’s decision to embark on an unconventional marriage with a philosopher “for love.”14 May also made it clear that Ernest would never supersede Abigail as the most important person in her life: “No matter how dear the husband he can never be so precious as Marmee” (Paris Letters Meudon September 1878). Like Anna, she interpreted the mother–daughter relationship as a bond that supplanted all other unions, including the covenant of marriage. She even went so far as to create a shrine to her mother in her home in Paris, writing: “It is so beautiful, and Marmee seem[s] to have come … in spirit so that even amid my happiness I … weep a little weep” (ibid.). May’s devotion to her maternal shrine resembles the pilgrim’s mystical interaction with an icon: she aspires to achieve divine communion with her mother who remains present in the devotional image after the latter’s death. Louisa shared her sisters’ celebration of the maternal relationship as the preeminent bond in a woman’s life, combining Anna’s championing of the mother as the divine source of love with the connections May makes between the identity of the woman artist and the motherdaughter relationship. In an elegy, “Our Madonna” (Appendix 4) dedicated to May after her premature death in 1879 at the age of 39, Louisa describes her sister’s transformation from an artistic Madonna associated with “the goddesses she traced/Upon her chamber wall” (11–12) to “A mother, folding in her arms/The sweet supreme success” (29–30). May’s transformation embodies a shift in female spirituality from the goddess figure who represents the “feminine divine,” a procreative force observed throughout creation, to the figure of the divine mother who is “generative and sacrificial in her generation through giving physical birth; and … is nurturing, feeding the child with her own bodily fluid” (Lanzetta 46 51). The feminine divine represents the power of women throughout the world, where the divine mother symbolizes women’s self-sacrificial renunciation for their children—an act that is seen as procreative in itself. Louisa’s preoccupation with the devotional image of the Madonna not only references her sister’s profession as a painter but also alludes to the shrine May created for Abigail after Abigail’s death. Indeed, this shrine inspired a later scene in Jo’s Boys (1886), the final text of the Little Women trilogy, where the March sisters commission a portrait of their mother:

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In the place of honor, with the sunshine warm upon it, and a green garland always round it, was Marmee’s beloved face, painted with grateful skill by a great artist whom she had befriended when poor and unknown. So beautifully lifelike was it that it seemed to smile down upon her daughters, saying cheerfully: “Be happy; I am with you still” (825) Louisa shares her sister’s belief that the devotional image is “inhabited by the subject” (Loreto 1) and generates a continuing mystical union after that subject’s death. The sisters’ faith in the enduring presence of the subject resembles the pilgrim’s faith in the living presence of both the subject of the icon and the iconographer within the image for as long as its earthly duration. Louisa’s depiction of May as a transfigured Madonna implies that May has both emulated the example set by their mother and achieved her vocation as an artist. May’s “picture of a baby face” is described as “her loveliest and last” work of art (Appendix 4 3930). Motherhood is presented as the fulfilment of the female artist’s creative vocation; Louisa depicts May as “sainted” (53) by her selfsacrificial death for her daughter (35). Just as May based her identity as an artist on the example of her mother, so does Louisa present May as fulfilling their mother’s example in her death—bequeathing her child to the family as her final, and greatest, work of art. While Louisa’s elegy to her sister may seem to place undue emphasis on the procreative capacity of the female body at the expense of women’s professional achievements, it nevertheless commemorates the enduring power of the matrilineal community as the source and apotheosis of women’s inspiration, spirituality, and art. Although Louisa never had children, she regarded her subsequent adoption of May’s daughter, Lulu, as a sacred obligation that fulfilled her artistic vocation. On learning of her sister’s death, Louisa wrote: “I see now why I lived. To care for May’s child & not leave Annie all alone” (Journals 219). Louisa’s affirmation that her purpose as an artist was to provide support for her adopted child echoes her earlier claim that her pursuit of artistic success centered on her desire to care for her mother. Throughout her life, Louisa envisaged the purpose of her artistry as sustaining the matrilineal community. She interpreted May’s self-sacrificing death for Lulu as an expression of her sister’s shared devotion to that community and the fulfilment of May’s vocation as an artist whose practice upheld the mother–daughter bond. Louisa regards May’s artistic vision as embodied in the birth of Lulu, who is the culmination of her mother’s art. Indeed, Louisa’s description of May’s final bequest associates May’s motherhood with her achievements as a painter: “She wished me to have her baby & her pictures. A very precious legacy!” (Journals 219). Among the pictures bequeathed to Louisa was Rosa Peckham’s portrait of May, which remains in the Alcotts’ Orchard House to this day.

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Imitating May’s earlier shrine to Abigail, Louisa displayed this portrait in Orchard House for the use of Lulu and the wider family. On Lulu’s first birthday on 8th November, 1880, Louisa recorded her adopted daughter’s spontaneous interaction with this portrait: She sat smiling at her treasures under her mother’s picture. Suddenly attracted by the sunshine on the face of the portrait which she knows is “Marmar” she held up a white rose to it calling “Mum! Mum!” & smiling at it in a way that made us all cry. (Journals 228) Here, Lulu incorporates herself into the matrilineal community’s tradition of mystical spirituality and follows the examples of both her natural and adoptive mothers by viewing the work of art as embodying its subject after the latter’s death. Her unaffected reaction to her mother’s portrait can be interpreted as a mystical epiphany where Lulu reads the sunshine’s illumination of her mother’s image as an outward sign of May’s continuing spiritual presence. May’s earlier premonition of Abigail’s death and subsequent creation of a shrine seems to have inspired a wider matrilineal faith in the ability of the community to achieve mystical communion through art, as well as a form of transcendent communication that penetrated the barriers of time and space. In response to May’s continuing devotion to their late mother’s memory, Louisa initially connected Lulu’s birth with May’s spiritual relationship with Abigail: “How [Marmee] would have enjoyed the little grand-daughter and May’s romance. Perhaps she does?” (Journals 217). Louisa seems to have based her interpretation of the events concerning the matrilineal community on her sister’s earlier mystical experiences. On being informed of May’s terminal illness, Louisa confided in her journal that she had been forewarned of May’s passing in much the same way May prophesied their mother’s death: “The weight on my heart is not all imagination” (218). Clearly, the matrilineal community regarded its mystical communion as transcending the spatial borders of the transatlantic world. The Alcott sisters regarded their mother as the source of their mystical communion with one another and the inspiration for their art and lifewriting. Both Anna and May present the maternal bond as the source of all human relationships, including that of husband and wife. Their preeminent relationship with their mother shapes their future relationships with their husbands and directs the course of their daily lives following their marriages. May also regarded her artistic vocation as the expression and record of her mother’s continuing presence as her muse. Abigail’s death precipitated a transformation in May’s approach to art: painting became not only a medium for self-expression but also a means of communicating with the matrilineal community after its members had passed into the world to come.

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In the aftermath of her sister’s death, Louisa took up May’s identification with their mother to present May as the embodiment of Abigail’s prior example. Just as Abigail’s theology of renunciation served as the foundation for her daughters’ artistry and sympathetic communication with one another, so did May’s death enable her daughter, Lulu, to become incorporated into the matrilineal community’s tradition of mystical experience. In “Our Madonna,” May is presented as an intermediary between earth and heaven who bridges the human and divine. May’s role as intermediary allows her to create the ultimate work of art: the continuation of the matrilineal community, and its mystical practice, for generations to come. In the final stanza of this moving elegy, Lulu is described as May’s “truest art” (Appendix 4 64), while May is transformed into the embodiment of the image of the feminine divine she pursued throughout her life.

“A Little Kingdom I Possess”: Abigail Alcott’s Theology of Renunciation in the Life-Writing of the Alcott Sisters The Alcott sisters’ juvenile newspapers, The Portfolio and The Pickwick, are collaborative attempts to form a manifesto centered on their mother’s theology of renunciation. The dedicatory poem of the first edition of The Pickwick, “To Mother,”15 written by Louisa, presents the project as an embodiment of the sisters’ determination to sacrifice their needs for the continuing preservation of their mother and the survival of their family. Within this poem, the constraints of poverty are superseded by an “economy of love”16 that situates the fulfilment of the individual in the context of her relationship with others. Poverty of self and feelings of unworthiness are transformed through the elevation of the weakest member of the family-unit: the fragile and aging mother who invests her children with the self-sacrificial purpose that motivates their writing: To Mother Accept our little offerings, Few and simple though they be. For we are poor, dear mother, In all save love to thee. Yet the poverty is all unfelt. For the wealth our hearts can hold Of fadeless love is better far Than costly gifts of gold. Like wayside flowers that humbly bloom And ask no fairer home May we be to thee, dear mother, Through the years that yet may come.

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Abigail’s understanding of composition as a tool for strengthening matrilineal bonds is presented as the source of the newspaper’s creation and circulation. Aesthetic quality is dismissed from the outset: these “little offerings” are “few and simple” (1–2), but their purpose is to function as mutually supportive models for family relationships. An analogy is drawn between the matrilineal community and the order of the natural world: as the girls “bloom” into adulthood, so will their mother grow in fragility (9). The purpose of collaborative composition is to foster a symbiotic model of interchange where the natural development of the mother towards death and decay is counteracted by the growth of her daughters into adult strength. Thus, the Alcott sisters are presented as a single tree with shared roots (16), collectively sheltering Abigail from the impending storm (one might even read Abigail herself as the roots of this tree, protected by the interconnected framework of its branches). As a literary project, the newspaper is transformative, uniting the sisters in a shared moral purpose, and setting out the providential framework for their future relationships with one another and their mother. By publicly articulating the sisters’ continuing dedication to the mother–daughter bond, the paper acts as a guarantee for the fulfilment of their promise to maintain this bond and can be seen as a type of contract. The Pickwick does not aspire towards originality of execution or virtuosity of craftsmanship; it is rather a collaborative expression of the matrilineal values fostered by Abigail, as well as an attempt to propagate these values within the family at large. As such, it prefigures Louisa’s later attempt to transmit her mother’s sympathetic vision to the public sphere through extending the network of sisterly relationships in Little Women. The newspapers’ preoccupation with the renunciation of individualistic desires for the benefit and preservation of the wider world is especially apparent in the juvenile work of Elizabeth Alcott. Elizabeth’s compositions, written under the Dickensian pseudonym of “Tracey Tupman,” are allegorical fables that champion Abigail Alcott’s code of conduct, usually within the context of a redemptive female figure. One such composition is the undated “Story of an Apple” (Appendix 5), an allegorical narrative that emphasizes the transformative potential of a theology of renunciation when it is dispersed throughout society at large. In this story, a young girl, happening upon a “fine, rosy apple” in a “beautiful garden,” longs to take the “fair and beautiful” fruit home as a gift for her mother (ibid.). Once she has picked the apple she meets “a little ragged boy” who asks permission to take the apple home to his “poor sick mother” dying in a “miserable hut” (ibid.). The little girl unthinkingly gives the apple to the

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boy and runs “laughing away (to think how generous she had been)” (ibid.). The apple becomes the boy’s last gift to his mother, “refresh[ing]” her, before she dies (ibid.). Following his mother’s death, the boy plants the seeds of the apple by the door of the hut and returns with his family years later to see what becomes a “beautiful tree full of ripe and rosy fruit” (ibid.). The story closes with the nameless protagonist gathering apples with his children, while telling them the story of “the little sunny haired child who had given him the apple for his sick mother years ago” (ibid.). Elizabeth’s story can be read as a revision of the Eden myth, for here a blameless female protagonist saves a dependent male victim by deferring to a matrilineal code of conduct. In Elizabeth’s revised version of the fall, a female child, who is protected from temptation by her virtue of her innocence, unthinkingly plucks the apple because it is a sign of the abundance and beauty of the natural world. However, as soon as she realizes her male counterpart has a greater need of the fruit, she immediately relinquishes it in an unthinking act of self-sacrifice. The apple no longer symbolizes a selfish desire for knowledge and disobedience towards God but instead comes to embody the procreative power of nature, freely shared by women for the benefit of others. Strikingly, the apple’s symbolic capacity to regenerate the individual is conflated with the mother who witnesses the little girl’s generous act from an upper window and is subtly conflated with the providential God who influences the actions of humanity for the greater good. Likewise, the apple is also associated with the boy’s mother whose family is regenerated by the fruit that has been consumed by their deceased matriarch. No longer conflated with the fall, the tree of knowledge is re-presented as a symbol of reciprocal self-giving that brings new life to future generations. Crucially, the male protagonist passes the story on to his descendants, so they also will associate the apple with new life and the preservation of humankind through the self-sacrificial acts of women, rather than female disobedience and the fall. The Eden myth was significant in the Alcott household. In an attempt to check selfish desires and bodily appetites, Bronson would re-enact the fall of mankind with his infant daughters. When Louisa was three and Anna was four years old, he placed an apple on top of the girls’ wardrobe—informing them it belonged to him, and they were forbidden to eat it. Upon his return, he discovered the girls’ actions had mirrored those of Adam and Eve, for Louisa had initially eaten the fruit against Anna’s instruction but later convinced her sister to share the apple with her. As a form of punishment, Bronson left Louisa alone with a second forbidden apple the following day. To her credit, the sorely tried toddler tried to resist temptation, picking up the object of her desire several times, and returning it, saying “No. No, father’s. Me not take father’s apple. Naughty! Naughty!” (Matteson 72). However, Louisa eventually

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lost her internal struggle, helplessly explaining to her father that, “Me could not help it! Me must have it!” (ibid.). Casting himself as the judgmental and patriarchal God, Bronson more closely resembled the serpent in his persistent temptation of his baby daughter. The experiment was designed to fail when directed at an infant who was of an insufficient age to understand the abstract benefit of experiencing deliberate temptation to learn the value of renunciation. By contrast, Abigail encouraged her daughters to practice renunciation in everyday situations, so they might observe how it could positively impact the lives of others. On Louisa’s fourth birthday party at the Temple School, the flower-strewn child, who was distributing her cake, discovered she was a piece too short for all the guests. Letting her daughter make the decision for herself, Abigail nevertheless informed Louisa that, “It is always better to give away rather than to keep nice things. I know my Louy will not let the little friend go without” (Matteson 73). Louisa received a kiss from her mother as a consolation for her generous act. While both events probably appear extreme to a modern sensibility, Abigail’s mode of teaching was nevertheless relational, focusing on how one’s actions could affect the lives of others. The young Louisa was able to understand the practical value of bringing pleasure to a friend where she could not grasp why her father would make her stare at an object she was forbidden to take. Bronson’s mode of instruction focused on female temptation, disobedience, and weakness, where Abigail’s emphasized loving relationships and generosity. Elizabeth’s story follows the tradition of her mother, for the narrative is centered on a generous feminine desire to help and serve others. Elizabeth affiliates herself with her mother’s vision of a redemptive and regenerative matriarchal community, rejecting her father’s patriarchal authority, which casts women as weak beings who need to be protected from their own selfish desires. “Story of an Apple” is noteworthy for portraying the practice of renunciation as a key facet of female identity. However, there is a remarkable absence of any sense of deprivation, loss, or punishment, because the child, by virtue of her innocence, conceives her personal desire as bound up with the needs of the wider community. The legacy of Abigail Alcott’s theology of renunciation, which can be identified here, is the foundation of the Alcott sisters’ identities as writers. The Alcott sisters’ literary identities are formed through their collaborative literary practice, which, in turn, shapes Louisa’s public portrayal of sisterly communities that embody a sympathetic shared consciousness between women. Abigail’s transformative theology of renunciation, founded on a return to a state of prelapsarian innocence and the pursuit of eternal salvation, remains a constant presence in Louisa’s life-writing. Following Abigail’s death in 1877, Louisa composed an elegy, “Transfiguration” (LaPlante Boundless 223–225), which presents her mother’s suffering and

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renunciatory acts as the source of her eventual union with the divine, in much the same manner that Louisa portrayed Abigail’s self-sacrificial example as the source of her sister, May’s, divine transfiguration two years later: Bending beneath the weight of eighty years, Spent with the noble strife Of a victorious life, We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears. (223 5–8) The evocative image of Abigail as “Bending beneath the weight of eighty years” (5) uncannily resonates with the earlier symbol of the Alcott sisters as a bent tree, shielding their mother’s aged roots from the oncoming storm, in the dedicatory poem, “To Mother.” Here again, the weight of age, decay, and fragility is the foundation of the aspiration of the matrilineal community towards salvation because Abigail quite literally dissolves into celestial purification through her aged weakness, “fading heavenward” (8). This divine transfiguration is brought about through human suffering, for Abigail enters heaven “through our tears” (ibid.), a phrase that references the Christian concept of the “vale of tears,” taken from Psalm 84:6, which describes earthly life as a continual state of trial and tribulation. Viewing the world as a ‘vale of tears’ allows the Christian to understand earthly life as a temporary state, redirecting their suffering and affliction towards an eternal union with the divine. Thus, Abigail ascends through the overwhelming weight of 80 years’ mortality, thereby facilitating the grief and tears that will also pave the way for her daughters’ eventual salvation. Abigail’s theology of renunciation is also portrayed as the foundation of her salvific destiny in “Transfiguration.” Her “great deep heart” is metaphorically described as a “home for all” (224, 29), subtly affiliating her charitable achievements as one of the first poverty workers in Boston (an early form of social work) within the domestic sphere. Louisa presents the ethical foundations Abigail lays within the home as possessing a transformative power to reshape the outside world. Abigail’s vision of a just society, built out of the values of the domestic sphere, allows her own heart to become the spiritual “home” that the poor and afflicted seek (ibid.). This outward-facing position of caritas facilitates her return to a prelapsarian state of innocence, so that she is able to overcome her fallen nature through a self-sacrificial orientation towards others: “Wide charity, that knew no sin, no fall” (224, 32). This vision of a perfected state of being achieved through relinquishing the individual’s solipsistic desires subtly opposes Bronson Alcott’s faith in ‘fate’ as guaranteeing the individual’s fulfilment through assimilating the conditions of the world into the divine destiny of the self. Contrastingly, Louisa describes Abigail as “wresting happiness from Fate’s hard hand” (224 36).

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Unlike the Fruitlands experiment, which aspired towards a return to innocence through rejecting the injustices of the outside world, Abigail achieves purification through engaging with social injustice “in protest against wrong” (224 31), rendering herself the vessel of divine intervention. Indeed, the term “transfiguration” refers to Jesus’s revelation of his perfected body, as a means of evidencing his divinity to the Apostles on Mount Sinai, shortly before his sacrificial death. This transformed body prefigures Jesus’s appearance following the resurrection and, within Christian theology, is understood as a revelation of the appearance that all redeemed bodies will take following the Judgement Day. By describing Abigail’s acts of charity as facilitating her own transfiguration on earth, Louisa implies Abigail achieved a communion with God through uniting herself with the self-sacrificing Christ as a vehicle for salvation. As such, Abigail is redeemer of both the family-unit and the wider community of the public sphere, “Mating poor daily needs/With high, heroic deeds” (224 34). Louisa’s elegy can also be read as a commemoration of the collaborative literary network of the Alcott women initiated by her mother, for it refers to previous exchanges between herself and Abigail that occurred within the domestic sphere. Her description of Abigail’s renunciation “Of Scepter and of crown/To win a greater kingdom, yet unseen” (43–44) is a reference to an earlier juvenile poem, “A Little Kingdom I possess,” also known as “The Kingdom of God is Within You.” This poem was one of the literary works that Abigail prized most highly in Louisa’s canon. Abigail submitted it to the Transcendentalist educator, F.B. Sanborn, for publication in a Sunday School chapbook (LaPlante Boundless 217), and later transcribed it, alongside excerpts of Keble’s Christian Year, as an aid for prayer, writing “I have copied these lines, for … I find them superior in judgment and beauty—encouraging as well as inspiring.”17 Like “Transfiguration,” the final stanza of “A Little Kingdom I possess” describes the individual’s relinquishment of an earthly crown to obtain salvation: I do not ask for any crown But that which all may win; Nor try to conquer any world Except the one within. (My Kingdom 25–28) When read in the light of her later elegy to her mother, Louisa’s juvenile poem can be interpreted as an attempt to emulate Abigail’s self-sacrificing orientation towards the heavenly kingdom facilitated through a theology of renunciation. However, the earlier poem focuses on conquering the kingdom of the postlapsarian self, where the later work describes the kingdom attained when this self is conquered. As such, Abigail’s life can

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be properly viewed as the exemplar for Louisa’s earthly pilgrimage. Indeed, the devotional framework of self-control presented in “A Little Kingdom I Possess” also prefigures the March sisters’ attempts to conquer their ‘bosom enemies’ at their mother’s behest in Little Women. “Transfiguration” is a microcosm of the values upheld across the network of life-writing authored by the Alcott women. It celebrates Abigail Alcott’s self-effacing dedication to others, affirming her vision of providence as shaped through the individual’s commitment to serving the wider community. Bronson Alcott’s understanding of fate as compelling the circumstances of the individual’s daily life to conform to their personal desires is rejected in favor of a vision of redemption achieved through cultivating shared consciousness with the weakest members of society. The literary network of the matrilineal community is also alluded to through referencing previous exchanges between Louisa and her mother, thereby figuring Abigail as the exemplary model for her daughters’ literary and spiritual identities, while presenting the mother–daughter bond as at the heart of the individual’s conception of self. Written after Abigail’s death, “Transfiguration” evidences her continuing influence on Louisa’s writing, something that was eventually articulated in her iconic public work, Little Women. This novel not only pays tribute to Abigail but also celebrates the shared vision of the matrilineal community Abigail initiated. The voices of Meg, Beth, and Amy March can be identified in the private works of Anna and Elizabeth Alcott, and May Alcott Nieriker, respectively. The Alcott sisters shared in Louisa May Alcott’s conception of the mother–daughter bond as preceding all other familial relationships, as well as laying the foundation for their interactions with the outside world and the development of their identities as artists. Louisa May Alcott’s identity as an author is inextricably linked to the mystical theology of renunciation espoused by her mother, and shared between her sisters, and her canonical works should be reassessed in light of the life-writing produced by the matrilineal community her mother instigated. The final stanza of “Transfiguration” sums up the spiritual aims of this literary community, which are closely aligned with the vision of the March women in Little Women: Teach us how to seek the highest goal, To earn the true success, To live, to love, to bless, And make death proud to take a royal soul. (225 45–48)

Notes 1 An abbreviated version of this overview of the Alcott archive can be found in my article, “‘Her lovely presence ever near me lives’: A Brief Encounter from

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“Left-Handed Societies”: Women’s Life-Writing the Archives with May Alcott Nieriker.” Brief Encounters 2.1 (January 2018): 53–68. Web 1st May, 2019. Diary for the years 1841–1844; at Concord, Fruitlands, Still River, and again at Concord. Monday 23rd January, 1843. AFAP, 1707–1904. MS Am 1130.14 (1), Houghton Lib., Harvard. Subsequent citations to this work will be made in parenthesis, using the format: “A. Alcott Diary,” accompanied by the date of entry. The Halfway Covenant, written by Richard Mather in 1662, allowed secondgeneration Puritans to be baptized without first undergoing a conversion experience. See Campbell, “The Halfway Covenant” in “Puritanism in New England.” American Authors: Literary Movements. Web. 9th October, 2018. 1860–1861 Diary of Anna Alcott Pratt. Tuesday 9th February, 1861. AFAP, 1707–1904. MS AM 1130.14 (6), Houghton Lib., Harvard. Subsequent citations to this work will be made in parenthesis, using the format: “Anna Alcott Diary,” accompanied by the date of entry. Zion’s Herald 45.43. 22nd October, 1868. 509:3 (Clark 63–64). Catharine O’Connell has argued that The Wide, Wide World “privileges female subjectivity” within the domestic sphere because the portrayal of “female suffering” in the seemingly trivial events of daily life subtly undermines the authority figures of the public sphere, to whom Ellen Montgomery submits (22). Tompkins contends that Warner’s largely female readership would have identified with “the psychological dynamics of living in a condition of servitude” and that the novel demonstrates how women cope with this servitude “hour by hour and minute by minute” (178). By contrast, Noble’s reading of The Wide, Wide World endorses my own in its emphasis on how the loss of the mother is presented as a facet of God’s providence: “If Ellen can learn to interpret suffering as a sign of God’s love, then her suffering will not only be meaningful, but rewarding” (94). Extracts from the journals of Abigail Alcott in the hand of Louisa May Alcott, 1828–1829. 9th June. AFAP, 1707–1904. MS AM 1130.14 (5). Houghton Lib., Harvard. 1840–1879. AM.S. Diary 1 Sep 1852-25 Jul 1863. Thursday 1st December, 1852. LMAAP, 1845–1944, AM 1817 (56). Houghton Lib., Harvard. Mirador. Web. 4th September, 2018. May Alcott Letters Sent From Abroad. Undated. AFAP, 1724–1927. AM 2745, Series II, Houghton Lib., Harvard. Subsequent citations to this work will be made in parenthesis, using the format: “M. Alcott Letters,” followed by the date or number. “Here dear Marmee is the still life group, which I have been busy on the last week, and which everyone praises so much and in which I feel I have improved so greatly” (M. Alcott Letters Undated No. 69). “I send this letter to you because it is a pictorial one, I know you like to see first where your big baby is and enjoy all the fine old things with her as far as possible” (ibid., 20th September, 1876 No. 39). “My girls shall have trades, and their Mother with the sweat of her brow shall earn an honest subsistence for herself and them” (LaPlante Boundless 88). Abigail’s use of the term ‘trade,’ commonly associated with the working classes, displays her belief in the importance of engaging with divine providence through industrious activity. Instead of desiring her daughters to cultivate the benign ‘accomplishments’ deemed to be the proper pastimes of young ladies, Abigail instead encourages them to shape the course of their lives through the “sweat of the brow” (ibid.). This work ethic is formulated in opposition to Bronson’s aristocratic approach to work: “[I] should like to see

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my husband a little more interested in this matter of support. I love his faith and quiet reliance on Divine Providence, but a little more activity and industry would place us beyond most of these disagreeable dependencies on friends” (A. Alcott Diary 18th January, 1844). While Bronson’s refusal to engage in industrious activity is couched as a “quiet reliance on Divine Providence” (ibid.), Abigail portrays him, as once more, expecting the outcome of his life to conform to his will, rather than working with the circumstances he encounters. His interpretation of providence diverges from her vision of a sympathetic shared consciousness and is more closely affiliated with a framework of fate or predestination. Diary September 1876 - 8th October, 1877. 14th April, 1877. AFAP, 1820–1886, AM 1817.2 (15). Houghton Lib., Harvard. “She struggled with poverty and all possible difficulties and came out gloriously at last.” Extracts from May’s letters in Paris, 1878–1879. London, 15th March, 1878. AFAP, 1724–1927. AM 1130.17. Subsequent citations to this work will be made in parenthesis, using the format: “M. Alcott Paris Letters,” followed by the date or number. A reproduction of the first edition of The Pickwick containing this poem can be found in the inside pocket of the back cover of Lilliputian Newspapers (Henderson 1936). I am indebted to independent researcher, Susan Bailey, who has provided me with photographic images of this poem, as it appears in Henderson’s work. This phrase, coined by Tara Fitzpatrick, refers to Alcott’s desire “to imagine a public world in which women’s private virtues might be employed to reconstruct social and public exchange” (30). In Fitzpatrick’s words, “Alcott refigured self-sacrifice as work for love—a reward as tangible as money in this fictive order” (31). An MS copy of “My Kingdom” with a commentary upon it with “Extracts from Keble”: an MS commentary of a poem, AFAP, 1820–1886. MS AM 1817.2 (17). Houghton lib., Harvard. Subsequent citations to this work will be made in parenthesis, using the format “My Kingdom.”

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“For Every Human Creature May Lay Claim to Strength”: The Rossetti Women’s Elevation of the Left Hand

Christina Rossetti’s devotional reading diary, Time Flies (1885), establishes the left-handed society as mirroring the right. In fact, she presents the left and right hands as two sides of the same coin, acknowledging the right hand commonly predominates, but the left at times usurps this dominant role. In Emma Mason’s estimation, Rossetti’s elevation of weakness promotes “an openness to a plurality of subjectivities and kinships” that reorients the human tendency to assume a deferential attitude towards power and authority (19). In Rossetti’s lexicon, ‘left hand’ is part of a wider vocabulary for alternative and other. She does not refute that to be other is, in some sense, to be marginalized, but to be marginalized in the material world is to assume a spiritually elevated status in the world to come. Christians should aspire to be left handed, other, little, and weak. In short, the Christian supplicant should strive for the diminutive position commonly assigned to the female: In common parlance Strong and Weak are merely relative terms: thus the “strong” of one sentence will be the “weak” of another. We behold the strong appointed to help the weak: Angels who “excel in strength,” men. And equally the weak the strong: woman “the weaker vessel,” man. This, though it should not inflate any, may fairly buoy us all up. For every human creature may lay claim to strength, or else to weakness: in either case to helpfulness. “We that are strong,” writes St. Paul, proceeding to state a duty of the strong. We who are weak may study the resources of the weak. (57) The radical connotations of this left-handed theology are noted by Lynda Palazzo, who claims that Rossetti rejects the androcentric conception of God as all-powerful, prefiguring a “post-Christian” feminist position as promulgated by such contemporary theologians as Mary Daly (xi). Daly proposes rejecting the patriarchal hierarchy of the

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Christian Church in favor of an inward-facing sisterly community that positions male domination over women as “original sin” (ibid.). Palazzo aptly foregrounds Rossetti’s rejection of female inferiority but ignores the reality that, as Dinah Roe has claimed, “Christina’s theories about women, however forward-thinking they may seem, are always subordinate to and answerable to God’s higher authority” (Faithful Imagination 107). As Mason has pointed out, Rossetti strives to emulate Christ’s kenosis (19), a theological term for his self-emptying described in Philippians 2: 5–8: “Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though his was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” According to Sarah Coakley, kenosis is a useful paradigm for women of faith because it conceives “true divine ‘empowerment’” in the context of “a special form of human ‘vulnerability’” equally applicable to men (32). Such vulnerability, achieved in devotional practices like contemplation and prayer, and upheld in Rossetti’s poetry, exposes her readers to “unexpected and perplexing mysteries” (Mason 186). In other words, a kenostic attitude of submission facilitates mystical union with the divine. Rossetti’s conception of the privileged position of the weak allows her to reverse the hierarchy of values within an individualistic culture that conceives the weak as inferior to the strong. As such, she adopts a position favored by female mystics, who refer to themselves as weak “to highlight their special status before God” (Lanzetta 52). Nevertheless, Rossetti accepted that the weak were denied positions of institutional authority; she rejected women’s suffrage on the grounds that “the Priesthood being exclusively man’s leaves me in no doubt that the highest functions in this world are not open to both sexes” (Letters 2 158). That said, she saw women as possessing an innate spiritual authority that transcended their inferior temporal roles. On the suffrage question, she made an important exception for mothers on the grounds that their nurturing role was sacred.1 In her 1879 theological work, Seek and Find, Rossetti presents motherhood as the apex of all human relationships: “And well may [woman] glory, in as much as one of the tenderest of divine promises takes … the feminine form: ‘As one whom the mother comforteth, so will I comfort you’” (31). While Palazzo claims that such assertions are only viable from a postChristian perspective, the discourse of the Trinitarian God as motherlike in its relation to humankind is longstanding. Elizabeth Ludlow claims that Christina’s concept of “divine maternity” is indebted to a “patristic conception of personhood” that likened the relationship between God and humankind to that of a “nursing mother” and her offspring (174). In the tradition of women’s mysticism, Julian of Norwich, claimed that: “Jhesu Crist, that doth good against evil, is oure very moder: we have

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oure being of him, where the ground of moderhed beginneth … As verily as God is oure fader, as verily is God oure moder” (309). Julian’s location of ‘divine maternity’ in the childlike status of the human person bears a striking affinity to Abigail Alcott’s contention that the child primarily belongs to God and its mother. Within the Rossetti household, Christina perceived her own mother, Frances, as possessing a preeminent role as spiritual instructor and vehicle for her children’s salvation. Frances’s influence is imperative to any study of Christina’s devotional writing. Mary Arseneau’s germinal monograph, Recovering Christina Rossetti, is foundational to my own work because it provides an account of the critical “tendency to consign to the margins the very conceptual framework and lived perspective most intimate to Rossetti herself”: that of the “familial, literary, intellectual, and religious community” of the Rossetti women (1). Her work is the first to discuss the influence of Frances’s Commonplace Book on Christina’s poetry, demonstrating that Frances’s immersion in the dramatic monologues of such nineteenth-century female poets as Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) and Laetitia Landon (1802–1838) shaped Christina’s future style and subject matter—providing her with a female literary tradition from which to write (50). Arseneau likewise refers to Hodge-Podge, the newspaper Frances authored for the Rossetti siblings, as an example of Frances’s early influence on her children’s literary projects (ibid.). Indeed, Dante Gabriel Rossetti later erroneously claimed “The Blessed Damozel” was written for Hodge-Podge. I enhance Arseneau’s recovery by surveying the presence of Frances’s theological precepts in Christina’s devotional writing. Frances’s Commonplace Book contains a selection of excerpts from a range of theological tracts, while Hodge-Podge includes a small number of original hymns. The theological tenets embedded in both these texts are upheld and referenced in Christina’s sequence of poems for her mother, the Valentine’s Day verses. Frances’s life-writing establishes her role as spiritual guide for her children and encourages the Rossetti siblings to defer to her spiritual authority. Frances counsels her children to imitate the relations between the saints in the Kingdom of Heaven and to prioritize their eventual redemption as the ultimate point of aspiration. Christina extends Frances’s instructive role in the Valentine’s Day verses by presenting her mother as mediatrix between earthly and divine. Frances is portrayed as the vessel for divine revelation who enables her children to imitate the relations between both the communion of saints and the three persons of the Trinity. The educative role that Frances adopts in her Commonplace Book is typical of the genre. David Allan’s foundational history of commonplacing in the Georgian England of Frances’s generation has demonstrated that the commonplace book was established to allow the domestic reader to take on the position of critic, cultivating their aesthetic tastes through exchange with other family members, deference to acclaimed scholars, and

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structured note-taking (102). The selection, editing, excerpting, insertion, and ordering of texts in commonplace books possessed both interpretive and creative functions (129). Commonplace books recorded readers’ responses to texts and provided them with the means to “challenge … prevailing modes of authorship” (Price qtd in Allan 129). Frances’s album contains a catalogue of religious reading and provides a model of Christian authorship taken up by Christina in her Valentine’s Day verses, which position her mother as the central voice of religious authority within the household. Frances’s album creates a comparable mode of ‘socioliterary experience’ to that of Abigail Alcott’s collaborative journal: it encourages the Rossetti siblings to construct their identities through collective reading and writing practices that contribute to the formation of a shared religious worldview. Frances’s Commonplace Book stands out among women’s commonplace albums for retaining a high proportion of theological excerpts. Deborah Lynn Pfunter has catalogued the differences between men’s and women’s albums in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century in both Britain and the US. Men’s albums usually consisted of a series of exclusively religious short passages, while women’s albums incorporated literary, economic, and socio-political content (6). Commenced in 1818 before her marriage, Frances’s album was originally composed for her pupils and was later expanded to include her children. It is clear that religious devotion was at the center of Frances’s moral instruction. My analysis of her commonplace book focuses on the theological precepts taken up in Christina’s later work. The vast majority of entries in the album are undated, although entries from all of Frances’s children are visible in its final third. Regardless of whether the excerpts analyzed were inserted after the birth of the Rossetti siblings, it is clear they had access to the book in its entirety. It is likely Frances expanded the album to include her children, in order to acquaint them with the religious beliefs and practices she developed over her life. Christina’s continuing deferral to her mother’s Commonplace Book (it was found among her personal effects after her death), as well as her emulation of its exclusivity (the Valentine’s Day verses were authored for familial circulation only) indicate she identified with the inter-generational network of the domestic household, of which Frances was positioned as spiritual head. Just as Christina prioritizes the maternal bond, so do networks of commonplace albums cement the bonds between family members in the wake of loss, communicating “a sense of familial identity and history” (Amanda Watson 122) through a shared frame of literary reference. The Valentine’s Day verses are an extension of the earlier familial, literary projects commenced by Frances. In these verses, Christina realizes the aspiration towards mystical communion established in Frances’s earlier life-writing. The Valentine’s Day verses portray the mystical communion of the matrilineal community

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as imitating the relations between the three persons of the Trinity. Coakley conceives the Trinity as founded on the feminine principle of reciprocity (111) because the “communion” among the three persons is contingent upon the “fluidity in their boundaries” (121). Each Trinitarian person defines its personhood in relation to its two counterparts, as well as their shifting communion with one another and humanity as a whole. The persons of the Trinity are constantly “reconfigured and reconstructed as the soul advances to more dizzying intimacy with the divine” (129). The Valentine’s Day verses portray the identities of the Rossetti sisters as defined through their relationships with one another and their mother, while Frances is conflated with the person of the Father—the procreative source from whom the other two persons proceed. As divine mother, Frances enables her daughters to ascend upwards into heavenly communion. The Trinitarian poetics of communion, upheld in the Valentine’s Day verses, mirrors the shared consciousness of the Alcott women’s life-writing. Where Frances is presented as the divine source of her daughters’ spiritual communion with one another, Maria Rossetti is portrayed as the living example who puts their mother’s theological tenets into practice in her daily life. My analysis of Maria’s influence centers on her theological work, The Rivulets: A Dream not all a Dream (1846). I am indebted to Arseneau for alerting me to the presence of this text, but where Arseneau tracks its influence on Christina’s references to Dante and Bunyan, I examine its presence in her theological writing, especially her avocation of a practice of lived religion. As Palazzo has claimed, Christina’s theology offers the possibility “for spiritual development outside the Church and a revaluation of women’s daily activities” (107). I identify these activities with her shared life with Frances and Maria, scrutinizing her discourse of ‘lived religion’ through the lens of her intertextual references to the theological writing and wisdom of Maria. Exposing Maria’s influence on Christina’s work allows us to connect Christina’s references to what Roe refers to as “a matrilineal religious history” of scripture (Faithful Imagination 127) with the immediate matrilineal community of the Rossetti women. Christina’s devotional work bridges the link between what Gradert defines as “folk theology” (2), which embeds the individual within an overarching teleology of sacred history, and the private ‘matrilineal theology’ practiced within the enclosed community of the Rossetti women. Let us turn, then, to the influence of Frances on Christina’s Valentine’s Day verses.

“Companion, Friend, & Mother mine”: Rossetti’s Trinitarian Poetics as Accessed through Her Mother In 1876, Christina started composing yearly Valentine’s Day verses for her mother, which lasted until Frances’s death ten years later. The project was inspired by the then 75-year-old Frances’s casual comment she had never

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received a Valentine. Boldly taking on the role of her mother’s Valentine following her father’s death, Christina composed a set of poems that emphasized the priority of the mother-daughter relationship as exceeding all others in its capacity for love. The private collection of poems, posthumously published by Crump, mirrored an earlier project established by Frances: the creation of a newspaper for her children, Hodge-Podge, in 1843. The newspaper was launched as a means of maintaining contact with the Rossetti siblings while Frances took her husband, Gabriele (1783–1854), to convalesce in Paris. It was a short-lived experiment, going through just seven issues during Frances and Gabriele’s absence. These issues consist of travel correspondence, a selection of original hymns, one narrative poem and a spiritually instructive letter to Christina. Christina’s later poems share the exclusive nature of Frances’s earlier project: both literary collections were written for familial circulation only. However, Christina’s poems expand on the incarnational and Christological emphasis of her mother’s earlier hymns to champion the mother–daughter relationship as imitative of the relations between the three persons of the Trinity. Christina portrays Frances as modeling the spiritual transfiguration she champions for her children in her life-writing. In the Valentine’s Day verses, Frances facilitates immediate contact with the Godhead and prefigures Christina’s absorption into that Godhead in the world to come. Frances is presented as mediatrix between heaven and earth who enables Christina’s eventual integration into the communion of saints. Frances assumes a morally instructive role in Hodge-Podge, but she does not centralize this role in her devotional compositions, instead encouraging her children to focus on the incarnate person of Christ. Her “Hymn for Ascension Day”2 combines the historical concreteness of Christ’s life on earth as the “humble son of Joseph” with the immanence of his innate divinity as the Messiah who “From [?] abodes of Paradise came down;/Laying aside His bright eternal crown” (ibid. 4–6). The hymn encourages the Rossetti children to conceive the liturgical calendar as a reflection of eschatological history. Frances emphasizes the veracity of scripture and portrays every event in the narrative of Christ’s life as typologically connected: foreshadowing and resonating with other fixed historical moments in past and future. Redemption is only attained through accepting the historical authenticity of Christ’s life, death and resurrection: “They who in life with joy embrac’d his cross; / Shall triumph then; the rest shall suffer loss” (25–26). This final couplet closes off the possibility of justification through anything but direct acknowledgment of what is presented as historical truth. Frances’s role as theologian and spiritual guide is not acknowledged in the text; instead, the hymn’s reference to the liturgical year and its role as a devotional aid encourages Frances’s children to interpret her words as one particular manifestation of the total outpouring of the Christian Church, which constitutes the physical Body of Christ on earth.

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Christina’s Valentine’s Day verses affirm Frances’s religious tenets, but Frances is instead placed at the center of the collection as the point of revelation from which her daughter’s relationship with the Trinitarian God derives. Rather than referring to theological discourse, Christina privileges her mother’s spiritual insights. The verses foreground Frances and Christina’s shared interpretation of reality derived from common devotional practices. In the Valentine for 1878 (847), Christina presents her relationship with her mother as a vehicle to heaven that will continue into the afterlife: “Companion, Friend, & Mother mine / … / With whom I hope to stand & sing / Where angels form the outer ring” (2–5). Christina’s portrayal of her shared transfiguration with her mother departs from Frances’s characterization of the elect in “Hymn for Ascension Day.” In this poem, the elect are variously described in generic and multitudinous imagery as: “mankind,” an “unborn race,” “the dead” and “all the human race” (16 17 20 24). In Frances’s verse, the individualized identities of the elect, and the particular relationship between poet and child, is subsumed into the Christian body. Contrastingly, the Valentine for 1878 upholds the maternal relationship as uniting poet and recipient with the Trinity, thereby facilitating the poet’s redemption in the afterlife. The image of the ring, or circle, is a common symbol of the Trinity in Christian typology—denoting both the immortality of God, and the united nature of the three distinct persons. Significantly, the Trinity is defined primarily by means of the relationships between the three persons, rather than through gender identification. In the words of St Augustine, “He is not called Father with reference to himself but only in relation to the Son; seen by himself he is simply God” (qtd in Joseph Ratzinger 182). The fifteenth-century mystic, Christine de Pizan, extended Augustine’s theory of relationality to argue the Trinity could reveal itself in a feminine form (Lanzetta 56). In the Valentine for 1878 Frances emulates the role of the Father by directing her daughter towards spiritual redemption and heavenly reunion: “Bid me to that tryst above, / Bless your valentine” (C. Rossetti Poems 847 11–12). Christina also implies that her mother’s association with the Trinity extends beyond the Father to all three persons by casting Frances in three roles, “Companion, Friend & Mother” (2). These roles correspond to the three persons of the Trinity. The Father is often characterized as spiritual parent, the incarnate Son as ‘friend or ‘brother,’ while the Holy Spirit is presented as the ‘companion’ or ‘comforter’ of humankind. Christina’s theological emphasis moves away from the incarnation, as upheld Frances’s earlier poem, to Trinitarian relations, accessed through the maternal bond. The form of the poem also positions Frances as the center-point of Christina’s religious faith to whom she must return in the afterlife. The poem is structured in groups of three lines connected by the poet’s use of enjambment. The poem’s shape resembles a returning circle made up of

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interconnecting parts. Christina makes use of the indented line to give a sense of a whole within a whole, subtly portraying the relationship with the mother as a microcosm of the heavenly communion: Blessed Dear & heart’s Delight, Companion, Friend, & Mother mine Round whom my fears & love entwine,— With whom I hope to stand & sing Where angels form the outer ring Round singing Saints, who clad in white Know no more of day or night.… (1–7) The poem is structured around a train of reflections and images associated with the mother’s role as mediatrix. Each group of three lines is centered on a particular theme, but these themes converge into a continuously-evolving whole. The first three lines address the figure of Frances, while the proceeding three look towards the celestial realm. However, Frances has already been projected into the celestial realm within the poet’s imagination, so the two groups run into one another. The second group is indented because the vision of heaven is initially contained within Frances, but this contraction abruptly expands into a generalized vision of the afterlife. The afterlife is not merely a realm where Christina and Frances “hope to stand & sing” (4): it is also the residence of the heavenly communion. From here the scansion of the poem accelerates, as the number of syllables is contracted and the description of heaven becomes more rapid and insistent. Thus, the seventh line that begins the second half of the poem is a continuation of the heavenly vision instigated by the sixth. This model of poetic form is unique and emulates the tripartite nature of the Trinitarian God whose identity is in perpetual transition as each person reconfigures itself towards the other two, as well as humanity at large. The three-line divisions mutate into one another in an act of continuous transformation. The length, scansion, and placement of each line in the poem are determined by their relation to the previous lines, thereby emulating the perpetually transformative relationships between both mother and daughter and the three Trinitarian persons. Joseph Ratzinger claims that Trinitarian ‘Personhood’: “is the pure relation of being related, nothing else. Relationship is not something extra added to the person, as it is with us, it only exists at all as relatedness” (182). Christina’s innovations in form depart from the precedent set out by Frances. “Hymn for Ascension Day” is conventional in design as a series of rhyming couplets in iambic tetrameter. Frances only deploys formalistic license when referring to divine authority: the iambic foot is briefly disrupted by continuous spondee when Frances affirms “God the Father’s grace” (12). Where Frances looks to liturgical precedents in her deployment

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of poetic form, Christina positions her relationship with her mother as both the source of her faith and center-point of her creative expression. This unconventional approach to form is prevented from becoming blasphemous by its reference to the fluidity of being, inherent in the Trinity. Since the Trinity possesses a form humanity can neither conceive, nor define, it is necessary to equate it to its nearest approximation in the maternal bond. Unlike Frances, Christina does not defer to divine authority but grounds her poetic practice in her relationship with her mother as the starting-point for her contemplation of theologically impenetrable doctrinal mysteries. The Valentine for 1878 portrays the maternal relationship as engendering a transformation of experience and sense perception. The transfiguration that both mother and daughter hope to achieve is portrayed in absolute terms; Christina disrupts the iambic foot of at the moment of mother and daughter’s imagined transformation. She describes the saints, with whom she and her mother will join in communion, as those who “Know no more of day or night” (C. Rossetti Poems 847 6). The monosyllabism of this line disrupts the consistent iambic scansion with continuous spondee—providing the aural effect of a relentless continuing stress that accumulates towards a dramatic climax. The abrupt disturbance of the metrical foot underlines the tangible nature of the described transformation as a reality that both poet and recipient witness and aspire toward. The poem constructs a shared lexicon between mother and daughter that encourages a mutual interpretation centered on their shared hope for future redemption, and a common set of religious beliefs. Christina’s revelation of the world to come allows her to enter a space where the conditions of human consciousness are radically altered, and external stimuli is experienced only as an embodiment of divine immortality. The saints are described as dwelling in a place where they “know no more” of “death or any changeful thing, / Or anything that is not love / Human love & love divine” (7; 10–12). The very conditions of the person’s existence are turned upside down, so that the experience of death, upon which the human condition is predicated, is eradicated. Human and divine love are fused into a single entity, so divine love is no longer reached by means of the imagination or the conscious outpouring of prayer. The maternal bond enables Christina to infuse the transcendent with the immanent: she reconfigures her experience of reality, so her aspiration towards heavenly redemption does not pose an existential challenge. It is through shared mystical experience with her mother that Christina realizes her spiritual vision. Like the Alcott women, Christina perceives the maternal bond as altering the way the individual experiences the world, facilitating their eventual salvation. The transformation of existential experience facilitated by the mother–daughter bond does not subvert the divine authority deferred to in Hodge-Podge but rather allows Christina to conceptualize the heavenly

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realm more clearly as an immanent and tangible place. Christina’s visualization of the communion of saints as an extension of the relational and reciprocal bond she shares with her mother extends a description of heaven transcribed into Frances’s Commonplace Book.3 An undated excerpt from a sermon by the Revnd. Charles Bradley, included in The Methodist Episcopal Pulpit (1856), reminds devotees that although Christians are taught “to consider heaven as a state, rather than as a place,” scripture makes it clear that “there is some portion of the universe set apart to be the special residence of the King Immortal” from where he will “eventually, assemble all the happy intelligences of the whole universe” (Appendix 6). Christina integrates the two perspectives put forward in the sermon by depicting the physical space of heaven as accessed through the state of grace facilitated by the maternal bond. Where Frances uses scriptural typology to provide empirical evidence for the physical reality of Christ’s judgement, Christina presents a shift in perspective enabled by the emerging perception of an underlying reality of which the poet had been previously unaware. The physical space of heaven is achieved through the spiritual revelations contained within the mother as vessel of divine grace. The Valentine’s Day verses confirm the theological precepts Frances establishes in Hodge-Podge, but present these precepts as revealed only through Frances’s spiritual example and the grace she exudes through her relationship with her daughter. Frances is the intermediary between the corporeal and spiritual realms, a point of revelation that allows Christina to witness the reality of the heavenly sphere. As a precedent for Christina’s subsequent collection of poems, Hodge-Podge places the immanent manifestation of God in the incarnation at the center of the individual’s devotion, deferring to both scriptural and liturgical authority as the foundation for the individual’s faith. Christina does not deny the preeminence of these ecclesiastical foundations but reminds her mother that Frances herself functions as point of access within the matrilineal community. Consequently, it is fitting that Frances’s poetry requests the Trinity to reveal itself to her directly. Her “Morning Hymn for the tune of ‘Glory to Thee my God this night’” contains this supplication: Shine in my soul throughout this day, And keep me in the narrow way, Oh Thou of Righteousness the Sun With Father, Spirit, God in One!4 Frances’s intercession requires the Trinitarian God to imbue its essence into her soul. Christina takes such invocations literally, for her verses portray the relations between the three persons of the Trinity as revealed through her relationship with her mother. Frances is the catalyst for the spiritual metamorphosis that transforms the heavenly sphere from a state

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of being into a physical place manifested through the mother’s divine grace. The Valentine’s Day verses present the maternal relationship as transforming both poet’s and recipient’s perceptions of reality. Thus, it can be argued that a distinct idiom of expression is borne out of the shared faith between mother and daughter. I will now explore how Christina deploys this distinct idiom to uphold the private world she shares with her mother, accessed only by those who participate in their religious faith, as well the redemption that is facilitated by the maternal bond and revealed through analogical language.

“Love Is Love”: Transforming Conscious Experience through Matrilineal Religious Faith On the surface, the Valentine’s Day verses appear highly literal, deploying a narrow vocabulary and uncomplicated syntax embedded in largely derivative and didactic statements. However, these statements are imbued with scriptural and doctrinal allusions visible only to readers initiated into the ontological world of faith. Faith shapes immanent experience and creates its own language for describing the external world. The female mystics who preceded Frances and Christina “drew new metaphors and symbols for the divine life” that counteracted the patriarchal “symbolic order” upheld in “language, text, scripture and imagination” (Lanzetta 57). Deciphering the analogical content of Christina’s verse reveals that Christina and Frances’s mystical faith modified their experience of the environment in which they lived and separated them from the diverging experiences of those who rejected their religious framework. In the Valentine for 1881 (848), Christina makes a conscious link between the external world and her vision of the heavenly sphere. The awareness of the difference between the material and spiritual realms transforms poet’s and recipient’s interpretations of reality, so they no longer experience the material world as something immanent, instead viewing it as a shadow of the world to come, thereby reversing the trajectory of conscious experience privileged in a secular culture, which conceives religious faith as an analogical manifestation of physically immanent experience. For female mystics, physically immanent experience is valuable only insofar as it can be infused by the divine. The poem begins with a straightforward description of the natural world before the Spring: “Too cold almost for hope of Spring/Or firstfruits from the realm of flowers” (1–2). Although this seasonal backdrop may appear to be universally relatable to all readers, these opening lines already contain Christian references that illuminate the rest of the poem. The compound noun “firstfruits” is an idiosyncratic Pauline term, taken from Corinthians 15:20: “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.” The winter landscape

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symbolizes the soul before death, which is to be redeemed by Christ in the resurrection. This theological precept is explicated in the second and final stanza of the poem, which makes an explicit connection between the wintry nature of the unredeemed world and the ecstatic experience of the soul in paradise: If even in this wintry world love is love (This wintry world which felt the fall), What must it be in Heaven above Where love to great and small Is all in all? (6–10) This second stanza provides a hermeneutic key for the symbolism of the first where the wintry experience of poet and recipient is revealed to be symptomatic of their exile from heaven. The wordplay on “fall,” referring to falling leaves, the autumn season, and the fall of mankind indicates that the world is overshadowed by the postlapsarian condition of humanity. Christina creates a typological language that can only be deciphered by readers who share her Christian faith. While a secular reader might initially feel included in the scene described in the first stanza, this is actively disrupted in the second, which abruptly exposes the descriptive imagery of the first as symbolic foreshadowing of the transformation of the Christian soul in paradise. The juxtaposition between the two stanzas reveals poet and recipient’s experience as shaped by their mystical interpretations of reality. This rhetorical strategy reveals Christina’s adherence to the Tractarian Doctrine of Analogy, which contends that God reveals his presence analogically through type and symbol because humanity is unable to cope with encountering him directly. The religious tenets upheld in Christina’s analogical discourse find their instructive origins in her mother’s Commonplace Book. Frances’s selection of excerpts from the sermons of Charles Bradley also include a claim that the supplicant’s initiation into the elect is dependent on their cultivation of a shared outlook with their Christian brethren. Bradley postulates that his congregation’s “hope to join the peaceful company in heaven” is dependent on being of “one mind here on earth” (Appendix 6). If the congregation were to achieve a unified totality of being, they would attain a mystical revelation that would transform the Church into an extension of the heavenly congregation. At the heart of mystical theology is a desire to “bring souls to God” through “spiritual discipleship” (Lanzetta 149). Christina transfers the championing of parochial community recorded in her mother’s Commonplace Book into a celebration of matrilineal community rendered exclusive by the deployment of analogical language. The use of analogical language requires the reader to have

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already attained a specialized level of theological knowledge and mystical experience before they can be admitted into the internal world of the poem. Accordingly, the act of reading becomes an act of faith in the spiritual efficacy of the maternal bond and the Christian redemption it enables. Christina eschews the instructive role taken on in texts such as Bradley’s, which reflect Frances’s early denominational affiliation with Evangelicalism before she converted to Tractarianism in 1843. Tractarianism placed less emphasis on individual conversion and the preaching of the Word, instead championing sacramental grace. Sacramental faith is mystical in nature: it hinges on the individual’s ability to decipher the hidden grace that infuses physical objects and thereby access a transcendent reality shared across the church community. Christina’s 1881 Valentine expresses the shared interpretation of reality championed in Bradley’s work but requires the reader to access this interpretative framework through a recognition of the sacramental grace conveyed through the maternal bond. Where Bradley conceives the continuity between earthly and heavenly experience as achievable only through the creation of a Christian community, Christina presents the transcendent love projected through the maternal bond as a bridge between heaven and earth. In the first stanza, the poet uses her love for her mother as a way of combatting the wintry nature of the fallen world that surrounds them: “Your dauntless Valentine I bring / One sprig of love, and sing / Love has no winter hours” (Poems 848 3–5). When “Love“ is capitalized in verse, it refers either to a personified figure who controls the romantic lover, as can be observed in the poetry of the Italian stilnovisti, emulated in the verse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or the figure of the incarnate Christ, who is portrayed as the realization of human love on earth. The identity of the transcendent figure of Love in the 1881 Valentine is ambivalent in the first stanza but is explicated in the second, where Christina rejects both poetic precedents to claim that maternal love is the only human experience that will remain unaffected by the fall: “even in this world love is love / (This wintry world that felt the fall)” (6–7). Christina implies that the maternal bond is uncorrupted by the fall because it is divinely ordained. As such, Christina invests Frances with a comparable status to that of a Christian priest. The priest is the vessel that acts as intermediary between the congregation and Christ, facilitating the sacramental transformation of the physical object or human subject. By placing her mother in a spiritually elevated position as medium to the divine, Christina expands on the aspiration to achieve heavenly redemption presented in Frances’s Commonplace Book. Frances’s excerpts from Bradley’s sermons include the latter’s proclamation of the indissoluble nature of sin but do not incorporate asubsequent excerpt that makes an exception for the Christian priest (Bradley 10). Christina

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upholds her mother’s Christian precepts but positions Frances as the origin of those precepts within the matrilineal community. Written after Frances and Christina’s mutual conversion to Tractarianism, the Valentine for 1881 transforms the mother into a divine key who deciphers the analogical Word of God in the world. Christina not only bypasses the male literary tradition but creates a female-centered version of the Church located in the divine revelation that grows out of the mother–daughter bond and is contained within the matrilineal household.

“A World of Change & Loss, a World of Death”: Rossetti’s Theology of Renunciation and the Deferral of Redemption The mother–daughter bond facilitates a direct revelation of the divine, but this revelation is a type of prophecy that prefigures the world to come. Frances’s role as mediatrix is limited: she cannot recreate the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, even as she directs her daughter towards a vision of it. The limitations of Frances’s transfigurative role confirm Bradley’s claim, as recorded in Frances’s Commonplace Book, that the internal divisions of the Christian community prevent the purification of the world at large (Appendix 6). Bradley makes it clear that human divisions obstruct the propagation of the divine in the material world: the individual may achieve an internal peace that enables them to bear witness to the presence of God, but they cannot counteract the discord imbued in the world around them (ibid.). Christina upholds the maternal bond as containing the power to achieve the spiritualized union upheld in Bradley’s theological discourse, but she does not attempt to diffuse this union into the world beyond the home. In fact, the irreparably fallen nature of the outside world is the source of the Rossetti women’s spiritual renunciation. The Valentine’s Day verses invest Frances with the power to transform the domestic sphere into a reflection of the heavenly sphere in a manner that resembles a religious community, but it is beyond Frances’s capacity to transform the world beyond the household. As such, both poet and recipient must suffer in a fallen world where heavenly redemption is deferred indefinitely. Like Abigail Alcott, both Frances and Christina refuse to regard human suffering as all-encompassing, but they diverge from the Alcott women in their deferral of human fulfilment to the afterlife. Frances and Christina do not share the Alcott women’s faith in the matrilineal community’s ability to extend its outward-facing dedication to others to the world beyond the home. Nevertheless, the Valentine’s Day verses do promote the mother–daughter bond as partially alleviating earthly suffering, for it enables both women to develop the necessary stoicism for attaining the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Christina makes this explicitly clear in the short, stanza-long Valentine for 1883 (C. Rossetti Poems 849): A world of change & loss, a world of death, Of heart & eyes that fail, of labouring breath, Of pains to bear & painful deeds to do:— Nevertheless a world of life to come And love; where you’re at home, while in our home Your Valentine rejoices having you. (1–6) In this poem, earthly experience is defined through human mortality and the gradual disintegration of the physical body. The image of Christina’s mother is constituted solely by her ailments: the failing heart, eyes, and shortness of breath. Christina acknowledges human decline as the fulfilment and embodiment of all earthly experience, for human life is a progression towards death. This is heightened by her elision of the midline caesura in the third line, which gives a sense of the relentless accumulation of pain: “Of pains to bear & painful deeds to do” (3). The casual, almost flippant tone of solace in the following line, “Nevertheless a world of life to come” (4), dismisses the recipient’s experience of pain, while acknowledging that it is more immediate than the projected eternity (more descriptive space is accorded to the recipient’s suffering within the poem than the Kingdom of Heaven). Christina implies that, while the world to come is a certainty she and her mother share in, this does not alleviate the immanent reality of earthly suffering and division Bradley laments in his earlier sermon. This reality of suffering can only be borne through consciously redirecting human experience towards hope for future redemption. Christina concurs with Abigail Alcott’s assertion that redemption is only achieved through an acceptance of the conditions of the surrounding world, but this acceptance is contingent upon privileging divine revelation. Christina’s emphasis on salvific deferral diverges from the Alcott women’s theology of renunciation, which regards the Kingdom of Heaven as built out of sacrifices experienced on earth. If we think back to Elizabeth Alcott’s “Story of an Apple” (Appendix 5), we recall that renunciation is not painful because the prelapsarian individual does not struggle to sacrifice their needs for others. Likewise, in Louisa May Alcott’s “Transfiguration,” her mother’s decline and old-age are described as the means by which she attains salvation. For the Alcotts, the fallen world is in some sense mediated by the reciprocal bonds of the matrilineal community. By contrast, Christina and Frances share in the same divine vision, but they must defer this vision to the afterlife. The self-contained world between mother and daughter is one of mystical revelation and insight; it is not an outward-oriented community of charity.

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The poet’s and recipient’s relationship is once more defined as a point of continuity between earthly and heavenly experience, for it is the “love” (C. Rossetti Poems 849 5) shared between them that makes the world bearable. The poet portrays the loving relationship between herself and her mother as an exclusive one, superseding all others within the earthly sphere. While Frances dwells “at home … in our home” (5), it is only “[her] Valentine” who “rejoices” (6). The transition from the plural space of the household (“our home”), which at this time was also shared with William Michael Rossetti, to the singular pronoun of “your Valentine” defines the loving relationship that protects Frances from her experience of pain as existing solely between mother and daughter. The reciprocal nature of these verses focused on the shared goal of eternal salvation, as well as the private lexicon shared between mother and daughter, upholds the precedence of matrilineal relations within the Rossetti family. The religious beliefs of the Rossetti family were divided along lines of gender, forming two distinct communities. Frances’s conversion to Tractarianism was followed by that of her two daughters, Maria, and Christina. William Michael adhered to his father’s nonconformist example by rejecting Christianity and all forms of organized religion at age 14. Dante Gabriel also abstained from joining his mother and sisters in their conversion, although his beliefs were more agnostic in nature. As the Rossetti men all rejected the symbolic Christian framework on which these verses are predicated, the poems create a conceptual linguistic world accessed only by the Rossetti women. As occasional poems not intended for publication, but rather for exchange within the household, the verses uphold the religious faith that underpins the matrilineal community. The exclusivity of perspective fostered in these verses is comparable to the shared consciousness cultivated within the network of life-writing authored by the Alcott women, which also focuses on their shared Christian and family values. The shared consciousness of the Rossetti women is likewise proliferated across the matrilineal community, for the divine maternal bond is accessed by Maria Rossetti, as well as Christina and Frances. Maria died the year Christina commenced the sequence and it is likely that Christina conceived the project as an affirmation of the continuing union between the Rossetti women following her sister’s death. Despite Maria’s physical absence, Christina acknowledges her spiritual presence in the second poem of the sequence, written from Maria’s perspective. I will now examine Maria’s inclusion in the Valentine’s Day verses as an expression of the matrilineal community’s desire for the conversion of the Rossetti brothers. The matrilineal community perceived justification as occurring through the faith modeled by Frances for her children.

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“Transfigured by Love’s Flame”: The Redemptive Power of Frances’s Spiritual Authority According to Arseneau, the Valentine for 1877 is signed: “C.G. for M.F.R” (Christina Georgina for Maria Francesca Rossetti) and is an attempt to “ventriloquize the recently deceased Maria’s voice,” thereby expressing the poet’s “longing for a reunion” between her mother and sister (Recovering 50). However, the poem does not focus exclusively on a reunion between Frances and Maria but incorporates all the Rossetti siblings—thereby embodying the female Rossettis’ collective desire to bring about the conversion of the Rossetti men. Maria admitted on her deathbed she had become an Anglican nun in the hope of converting both her brothers through prayer, while Christina expressed fear for Dante Gabriel’s soul following his death. Nonetheless, the poem expresses a continuity between the domestic and heavenly spheres that incorporates all members of the Rossetti household. Articulating a motif that will appear throughout the Valentine’s Day verses, the voice of Maria indicates Frances can redeem all her children in her role as intermediary between earthly and divine. Within the world of the poem, each of the Rossetti siblings desires a familial reunion that transcends death, in spite of their diverging religious views. The voice of Maria indicates that the source of the siblings’ eventual transfigurations will be their mutual recognition of the precedence of Frances’s love, which emits the divine: Own Mother dear, We all rejoicing here Wait for each other, Daughter for Mother, Sister for Brother, Till each dear face appear Transfigured by love’s flame Yet still the same,— The same yet new,— My face to you, Your face to me, Made lovelier by Love’s flame But still the same; Most dear to see In halo of Love’s flame Because the same. (C. Rossetti Poems 846–847) The structure of the poem resembles a liturgical ‘sequence’: a hymn or chant that celebrates the transfigurative power of the light of Christ that proceeds from the resurrection. The sequence is sung before the proclamation of the gospel on Easter Sunday. Early medieval sequences

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consisted of short sections of chant, resembling verses, that overlapped with one another through use of a recurring refrain that could be placed anywhere in the chant as a transitional bridge. In the 1877 Valentine, the two sequential refrains are “Love’s flame” and “the same.” As the personified “Love’s flame,” Frances herself is the refrain that bridges the sections of the sequence. The variations of this refrain trace the stages of her children’s spiritual transfigurations: the Rossetti siblings are “transfigured” (7), “made lovelier” (12) and finally revealed “In halo” (15). Frances’s “flame” therefore takes the place of Christ in the liturgical sequence, for she is recast as the point of access to heavenly redemption. Her flame provides continuity between heaven and earth. Although she precipitates the spiritual transfiguration of her children, she simultaneously enables them to retain their “sameness” or innate identity. In this poem, Frances’s role is incarnational, but she renders the incarnation accessible on a personal, familial level. This theological innovation is unconventional because the incarnation is deemed sufficient as a source of unification between humanity and God. In the Rossetti family, it is Frances who conveys the presence of the incarnate Son to her earthly children. Nevertheless, the Rossetti children must receive Frances’s incarnate flame to complete the process of their transfigurations. Each of the “faces” in the poem resembles one another as it is illuminated by Frances’s all-encompassing flame of love. The shifting sequence of these faces, “Daughter for Mother, / Sister for Brother” (4–5), heightens the reciprocity in the familial community. In the same manner as the three persons of the Trinity, the faces are constituted by their relationships to one another. The shifting placement of the phrase “the same” in the syntax of each refrain belies the evanescent transformation of each face as it reflects that of its counterparts. The presence of Frances’s flame allows her children to ascend upwards in much the same manner as the persons of the Trinity reconfigure themselves in relation to one another and mankind as the course of salvation history unfolds. Thus, the transfiguration of the Rossetti children occurs because Frances remains “the same”: she is the source of the siblings’ Trinitarian relations with one another. Unlike that of the Alcotts, the shared consciousness of the Rossetti family is contingent upon a conscious affirmation of the religious faith espoused by the mother. The Valentine for 1877 stands out in the sequence for its articulation of the matrilineal community’s desire for the Rossetti men to be reconciled to its divine vision. The sequence of faces who“Wait for each other” (3) include “Daughter for Mother” (4) and “Sister for Brother” (5) but significantly do not include “Brother for Sister.” Christina implies that the Rossetti women (including the deceased Maria) continue to hope for the incorporation of their brothers into their spiritual community, but this desire has not yet been reciprocated. In divergence to the

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Valentine for 1881, the 1877 Valentine displays a persistent hope that Dante Gabriel and William Michael will eventually radiate the divine flame of their mother’s spiritual love. Christina extends solace to Frances in the wake of Maria’s death by attempting to realize Frances’s spiritual aspirations for her children. Frances’s Commonplace Book makes it clear she viewed the redemption of her children as her primary maternal responsibility and it expresses a particular concern for the spiritual welfare of her sons. The Commonplace Book contains a selection of excerpts from devotional texts directed at young boys in need of spiritual instruction from their elders, indicating that Frances felt that her sons, who regularly reviewed the album, were in need of especial spiritual guidance. A poem titled, “Address to the moon by Mrs. Dorset,” champions the primacy of the bond between mother and son and is headed with the inscription: The following lines were suggested by the story of a lady, who having had her son removed from her protection, at a [sic] early age, adopted the same expedient of carrying on an imaginary interaction with him as was desired by the two lovers mentioned in one of the old French romances, viz that of looking at the moon at stated periods, agreed on between them. (F. Rossetti Commonplace Book 37–38) The inscription places the mother in an equivalent role to that of lover, but the subsequent poem makes it clear the mother conflates herself with the moon to encourage her son to refer to her as a point of spiritual aspiration throughout his life. Separated from her son by death, the unnamed mother pleads with “aerial forms” to convey her prayers for his redemption to him in the world below (ibid. 39 35). From her place in the moon, she “pleads for [her] absent son” before the “heav’nly throne” and expresses trepidation that “no tender mother’s anxious care/Shall teach him to raise his little hands in prayer” (ibid. 39 39–42). The poet conceives the mother’s spiritually instructive role as extending into the afterlife where she acts as intermediary for her son’s redemption. The excerpt anticipates Christina’s later portrayal of her mother as a transcendent flame of love whom her children must figuratively pass through to ascend upwards into the heavenly sphere. The intercessory role of Maria, whose hope for a heavenly reunion is voiced in the 1877 Valentine, also resembles that of the mother in “Address to the moon,” who dwells within the moon purely “To watch the object of [her] earthly love” and “guard [her] infant” (ibid. 40 64–66). The Christian symbolism of the moon is significant here: in the Divine Comedy the moon is first of the heavenly spheres and residence of redeemed souls who are unable to witness a direct revelation of God in the upper spheres because they did not prioritize their religious faith

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above familial ties while on earth. The mother therefore deliberately chooses the lowest abode in heaven so she can continue to watch over her son, “Sure [that] pitying Heav’n will grant the boon [she] ask[s]” (40 65). Her function also resonates with that of Frances in the Valentine’s verses whose flame of love enables divine transfiguration and unification between her children. Frances seems to have anticipated her sons’ burgeoning nonconformism in her Commonplace Book, for it also contains a prayer authored by William Michael Rossetti at her direction and an accompanying excerpt from a devotional tract instructing young men on how to retain their faith in the face of doubt. The prayer is a highly unusual text in the Rossetti family corpus, which contains no other affirmation of faith from William Michael who later became vocal concerning his atheism. The prayer, composed when William Michael was nine, is a formal invocation for God’s protection upon King’s College where he was a student and expresses a conventional vision of scholarly obedience to one’s elders as reflecting the divine hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being: Grant that the young who are now assembled within these walls may remember thee their Creator, in the days of their youth, may be diligent in their studies, obedient to their parents and superiors, and kindly affectioned one to another. More particularly we pray that the seeds of learning, virtue and religion may bring forth fruit abundantly to thy glory and the benefit of our fellow creatures. (F. Rossetti Commonplace Book 1st April, 1838 244) It seems unlikely a child of nine would independently compose a prayer requesting unswerving obedience to his elders across the entire school community conveyed in diction reminiscent of the King James Bible, especially when the child in question subsequently rejected the principle of unquestioning obedience to ecclesiastical authority. The prayer is recorded with flawless cursive penmanship that is not visible in William Michael’s subsequent manuscripts and is most likely the product of an instructive exercise set by Frances. Indeed, the subsequent excerpt in Frances’s hand indicates that she had likely already detected schismatic tendencies in her son and was doing her best to counteract them. Frances’s accompanying excerpt similarly encourages a young male pupil to refer to scripture, religious education and church tradition when confronting doubt. It is taken from Jacob Phillips’ 1818 A Letter from a Grandfather to his Grandson, pointing out the right course of his studies and conduct during his clerkship, etc, and refers to the passage of the text regarding Phillips’ grandson’s ongoing spiritual life during the course of his studies. The young man is commanded to “Devote Sundays to the consideration of religion” and is provided with a list of recommended theological texts to assist him in his private devotions

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(F. Rossetti Commonplace Book 245). As well as encouraging his grandson to make structured notes on scripture using a method resembling transcription into a commonplace album, Philips counsels him to attribute any religious “doubt” to personal “weakness,” rather than “to any defect in the proof or evidence of religion” (ibid.). The excerpt is notable for championing sacred tradition over independent reasoning. Contrary to the principles of the Enlightenment, apostolic Christianity defines tradition as the gradual revelation of divine truth through scripture, liturgy, and sacrament as they unfold over the course of salvation history. As with the Doctrine of Analogy, tradition is seen to provide an accessible medium for the gradual comprehension of the Creator. Religious faith dictates there is no equivalent being to the prime mover in the material world. It is therefore tenable that human doubt stems from a tendency “to argue on false premises, or reconcile inconsistencies” (ibid.). Frances’s scholarly instruction to her youngest son is designed to circumvent the emphasis on intellectual deduction he was to embrace in later life. William Michael’s prayer and Frances’s accompanying devotional aid promotes the importance of received wisdom and deference to one’s elders. In other words, Frances instructs William Michael to accept the religious beliefs passed on through the mother as an affirmation of her inter-generational authority. In this context, it is telling that Christina positions Frances as the source of divine revelation to whom all the Rossetti children must defer in the Valentine’s Day verses. In the Valentine for 1877, Christina adopts her sister’s voice to advocate for the conversion of her brothers based on the acceptance of their mother’s spiritual authority. The verses are designed to fulfil a project commenced in Frances’s Commonplace Book, namely, the total acceptance of ecclesiastical authority among the Rossetti siblings through the medium of the mother’s flame of love. Tellingly, Frances’s husband, Gabriele, is excluded from the Valentine’s Day verses: his influence led to the nonconformism of the Rossetti brothers and Frances ordered that all remaining copies of his most heretical work, the Amor Platonico (1840), be burned immediately upon his death. It would seem that a heavenly reunion is impossible for the already deceased Gabriele, source of the family’s religious divisions. Christina guides her still living brothers toward the example of their deceased sister, Maria, to encourage them to embrace the spiritual authority of their mother upheld throughout the matrilineal community. Maria features minimally in the Valentine’s Day verses because she predeceased their composition, but Christina’s acknowledgement of her sister in the 1877 Valentine suggests Maria shared in the theological vision instigated by Frances. Maria’s influence pervades Christina’s work as a theologian, and in this work we see Maria upheld as the exemplar of Frances’s love. Maria is championed as embodying a type of lived

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religion because she takes the precepts set out by Frances and applies them to her daily life. Even if another person’s redemption cannot be effected by one’s good works, these good works have the power to transform the bleakness of a fallen world.

“In Harmony with Her Holy Hope and Joy”: Maria’s Influence on Christina’s Discourse of Lived Religion Maria figures as a spiritual role-model and literary precursor in Christina’s 1885 theological work, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, which defers to Maria’s authority as an exemplar for Christina’s Christian practice. Time Flies makes reference to Maria’s early theological writings, written before her entry into religious life in 1872 and her premature death from ovarian cancer in 1876 at the age of 49. The text is structured as a devotional diary, containing spiritual meditations for each day of the year. Christina’s personal experiences are related back to her religious beliefs and presented in short reflective pieces that consider how she might refine her devotional practice and deepen her relationship with God. These reflections uphold Maria’s spiritual example as providing the basis for Christina’s devotional aim of becoming a better Christian through her writing practice. Todd O. Williams has compellingly expanded on Roe’s claim that “In Time Flies, Christianity is as much about the writing of the self as it is the writing of God” (Faithful Imagination 148), by arguing the text creates an “extended consciousness” through constructing the self “in relation to the environment, which, for Rossetti, is experienced through her Christian beliefs” (322). Christina transforms her daily experiences by placing them within a Christian framework, allowing her “sense of self as physical and spiritual being” to be developed “in relation to God” (ibid.). Time Flies is a mystical text: it conceives everyday events as expressing God’s presence in the world, placing the author’s life in a redemptive Christian narrative that references scripture and the lives of saints. Christina’s application of a religious framework to her daily life bears a striking affinity to Louisa May Alcott’s use of The Pilgrim’s Progress as a narrative template for Little Women. Alcott follows her mother’s example of placing her daily struggles in the context of the tribulations experienced by Bunyan’s Christian, while Christina also uses theological writing as a means of reinterpreting her life within a Christian framework. However, where Alcott refers to the spiritual authority of her mother, Christina draws on the theological wisdom of Maria. Christina transforms her sister’s use of Christian allegory into an autobiographical narrative. Christina’s diary is a devotional aid for the practice of lived religion, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own salvific journey through tracking the progress of the author’s spiritual life. The text encourages

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the reader to develop a type of devotional self-awareness. Unlike the Alcott sisters, Christina cannot instigate a matrilineal community in the outside world, but she can encourage her readers to emulate the community she shares with her sister through embracing lived religion. The opaqueness of the typological symbolism in Maria’s theological writing is transformed into an anecdotal autobiographical narrative. Where Maria’s theological writing provides the tenets that are the foundation of Christina’s devotional practice, Christina’s ‘reading diary’ demonstrates how these tenets should be applied to one’s daily life. As such, Christina opens up the matrilineal community to the wider world, but the reader’s participation in this community is contingent upon an act of free will. Christina cannot build the theological discourse of the matrilineal community into the public sphere in the same manner as the Alcott sisters; she must ask the reader to propagate this discourse alongside her as they meet within the space of the text. Maria’s theological work, The Rivulets, was written when she was 19 and privately published by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori (1764–1853). It provides the analogical framework that is applied to Christina’s daily experiences and salvific journey in Time Flies. The Rivulets describes a vision experienced by the author, which is thereafter analogically elucidated through an imagined dialogue between author and reader. At the beginning of the narrative, the author finds herself in “a wideextended plain” scattered over with “a number of little cottages,” all of which contain a rivulet (5). Each cottage is placed in the care of one of four children, all of whom bear symbolic German names: Liebe, meaning love; Selbsucht, who is associated with selfishness; Eigendunkel, who stands for presumption; and Faule, who represents sloth. The four children are directed by a mysterious man, who is an Ambassador for “the King,” to purify their rivulets, which are being polluted by venomous serpents (6–8). The Ambassador sprinkles each rivulet with pure water and gives the children a crystal mirror that reflects words of instruction and advice, alongside bunches of myrrh and hyssop and a vase of sweet perfumes. Liebe persists in cleansing her rivulet, although she is consistently thwarted by the serpent and often falls into fits of despair. Nevertheless, she eventually succeeds in her task and her crystal mirror instructs her to: “Let us consider one another to … promote love and good works” (24). She interprets this message as a command to assist Faule, who has fallen asleep by her rivulet in exhaustion. At first, Liebe does most of Faule’s work, but she is eventually assumed into heaven and leaves Faule’s mirror behind with the command to “put not your trust in any child of man” (34). Faule’s grief rouses her from her lethargic state and she subsequently completes her task, although her finished stream does not possess as “clear and unbroken a surface” as Liebe’s (38). Nevertheless, it is sufficient to win her redemption and she also is assumed into heaven by an angel.

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In contrast, Selbsucht takes pleasure in further polluting his rivulet, and makes no effort to cleanse it. While his behavior leads to his eventual degradation, he exhibits only a self-interested sorrow, rather than “the sorrow that works repentance unto salvation” (31). The roof of his cottage subsequently collapses and he is consumed by a “darkness visible” (ibid.). Selbsucht’s damnation leads the prideful Eigendunkel, who has previously expressed a belief he is “already perfect” (19), to reject his inclination to “triumph over others” and redress the incipient pollution in his own rivulet (33). Eigendunkel is also assumed into heaven, shortly after which the narrator awakes. In the concluding dialogue of the text, the author explicates the symbolism of her analogical narrative. The rivulets are revealed to be the hearts of each individual, while the serpents represent the devil and his attempts to corrupt them (41). The King’s Ambassador is a Christian priest, whose sprinkling of holy water represents the sacrament of baptism and the gift of grace that enables each individual to reject the temptations of the devil (41–42). The priest’s gifts of the mirror, spices, and perfumes symbolize Holy Scripture and “repentance, and the selfdenying duties of religion” (42). It is notable that religious devotion alone is insufficient to secure the redemption of Maria’s protagonists. All four figures must combine religious practice with acts of faith. Maria’s representation of the priesthood and sacraments as gaining efficacy through free will complements the theology of one of the excerpts of Bradley’s sermons, copied into Frances’s Commonplace Book (Appendix 6). Bradley contends that there is “no inseparable connection between the outward visible sign of and the inwards spiritual grace in any sacrament” because a sacrament can become “polluted” by human sin (ibid.). In other words, a sacrament must be received in a state of grace for it to prove efficacious. The individual’s redemption, while assisted by the sacraments, is ultimately secured through faith. Religious observance can strengthen faith, but “no outward ordinances can cleanse the soul from its pollution” (ibid.). Bradley’s metaphorical imagery of pollution and his later description of faith as a “fountain which has the power to wash away sin and uncleanness” (ibid.) resembles Maria’s representation of the hearts of Christians as rivulets who are vulnerable to the pollution of sin. Maria’s portrayal of sacramental grace as reliant on free will displays the influence of Frances’s theological reading and instruction, as well as the matrilineal community’s vision of redemption as justified by faith alone. Bradley reminds readers that the “heavenly priests” who retained spiritual purity were “washed,” “sanctified,” and “justified” in “the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (Bradley 10). The resonances between Bradley’s and Maria’s work indicate that while the Rossetti women’s faith was sacramental in practice, it was still

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built on an Augustinian framework that positions faith as the only means of attaining redemption. The Tractarianism of the Rossetti women combined the fundamentalist vision of Frances’s early Evangelicalism, which stressed the importance of the individual’s conversion and affirmation of faith, with the Anglo-Catholic movement’s emphasis on a return to apostolic authority and ecclesiastical tradition. In the conception of the Rossetti women, salvation is open to a narrow group of people who are able to affirm their faith through deference to apostolic authority. Unlike the Alcotts, who propagated their model of sympathetic shared consciousness to the outside world through outward-facing acts of charity, the matrilineal community of the Rossetti family is only able to share its divine grace through assisting in the conversion and repentance of others. The Rivulets functions as a type of analogical instruction manual on how to achieve salvation. Christina’s ‘reading diary,’ Time Flies, follows the earlier model of The Rivulets by providing an account of how the choices, behaviors, and temptations of the author’s daily life affect her journey towards salvation, but where Maria provides a generalized analogical narrative designed to relate to a variety of experiences, Christina individualizes her theological work by presenting it in diary format. Structuring her work as a diary allows Christina to reduce the impression she is preaching to or judging the reader. Christina associates her behaviors and choices with each of the deadly sins Maria condemns in The Rivulets and shares her struggles in addressing these faults with her readers, allowing them to identify with her. By applying Maria’s analogical key to her lived experiences, Christina advocates for Maria’s authority as a woman of faith and encourages her readers to join her by following Maria’s example. Christina’s entry on Maria’s death provides an account of how Maria’s practical theology transformed Christina’s experience of grief. Christina applies her sister’s beliefs concerning earthly separation to her own grieving process, thereby allowing the reader to witness the transformative effects of Maria’s theology. Christina’s observations regarding her grief are also closely aligned with the experiences of Faule in The Rivulets. In her entry for 22nd April, 1885, Christina describes how Maria, “one of the most genuine Christians I ever knew,” never regarded earthly separation as an obstacle to human relationships because she believed that “such congenial intercourse on earth” was destined to reach full “development” in heaven (77). This anecdote is supplemented by a poetic reflection by Christina, who contemplates how submission to God’s will promotes the greater good: Lord, I had chosen another lot, But then I had not chosen well; Thy choice and only Thine is good: No different lot, search heaven and hell,

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Had blessed me, fully understood; None other, which Thou orderest not. (ibid.) Christina’s disruption of the AB rhyme scheme, so the first and last lines of the poem rhyme unexpectedly, jars the reader aurally, providing a sense of vocal disturbance that mirrors the sudden shift of direction at the poem’s close. This complements the poem’s internal trajectory, where the author’s wishes are initially at odds with God’s will but undergo radical transition once she realizes the pursuit of her own desires cannot bring her fulfilment because her human identity derives from God. Christina’s use of macro imagery, spanning the spiritual cosmos from heaven to hell, underlines that the full spectrum of human desire across a variety of spiritual planes fails to supersede God’s will. As an accompanying piece to Maria’s reflections on earthly separation, Christina’s poem portrays her sister’s theology as a type of Christian submission. Separation is figured as part of God’s providential plan, which brings about the individual’s redemption. Christina’s assertion that she might have “chosen another lot” (ibid. 1) perhaps alludes to a former desire not to be separated from her sister by death. However, her life-experiences allow her to realize that God’s “choice” is “good” when it is “fully understood” against the possible outcomes of the poet’s desires (ibid. 3 5). Maria’s prior reflections on the afterlife prefigure the complete understanding of God’s will achieved by Christina at the denouement of this poem. Consequently, Maria’s death allows Christina to fully appreciate the truth in her sister’s theological meditations. While Maria has predeceased her, their spiritual partnership is nevertheless maintained, for the insights that are facilitated by Maria’s death allow Christina to continue on her spiritual pathway towards redemption. Christina’s portrayal of the impact of her sister’s death on her spiritual development is comparable to the insights achieved by the character of Faule following Liebe’s death in The Rivulets. Like Faule, Christina was characterized as “indolent.”5 Faule’s grief for Liebe arouses her from her spiritual torpor, encouraging her to follow Liebe’s example in redirecting her efforts towards the purification of her rivulet. Time Flies uses the precedent of Maria’s theological writing to argue the experiences of daily life can be transformed through applying a Christian framework of interpretation that focuses on the individual’s preparation for the afterlife. This framework of interpretation is more relatable: the reader is more likely to sympathize with the author’s acknowledgement of fallibility than with Maria’s proselytizing tract. Christina’s portrayal of her sister’s wisdom as directly applicable to her own life therefore provides greater credence to her sister’s theological authority. Time Flies is also peppered with references to Maria’s spiritual wisdom, which show how her theological beliefs transformed the lives of others. For example, the entry for 7th November, 1885, contains a

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reflection on Maria’s funeral, which is portrayed as emblematic of her blameless life and assurance of Christian redemption. Maria’s faith in her salvation inspires others to reorient themselves towards the solace provided by their own faith. Maria is described as “one of the dearest and most saintly persons I ever knew,” whose positive example leads mourners to act “in harmony with her holy hope and joy,” instead of allowing themselves to be overcome by grief (213). Christina fondly describes how her sister requested not to have the stereotypical “hood and hatband” style of Victorian funeral, towards which the author “evinced some old-fashioned leaning” (ibid.). She recalls Maria’s claim that funerals should not appear “hopeless” because they are symbolic of the individual’s union with God (ibid.). Christina’s recollections of Maria’s funeral are shaped by her belief that her sister’s presence transformed the day’s events; she creates a mystical interpretation of her experiences as a mourner in hindsight. The text describes how the sun made “a miniature rainbow in [Christina’s] eyelashes” during the first hymn (ibid.). It would appear Maria is able to intervene in God’s divine language of analogy from above, for Christina interprets the presence of the rainbow as corroborating her sister’s belief that funerals should be joyful celebrations of the individual’s union with God. In Genesis 9: 13–17 the rainbow is presented as a sign of God’s salvific covenant with his people following his protection of Noah from the flood. The rainbow is an emblem of Maria’s salvation, but it also symbolizes her assimilation into the divine language of analogy. Maria’s death is not only perceived through an analogical framework; she is incorporated into that framework by virtue of her unification with God. The rainbow is a private medium of symbolic communication between the sisters, who share in the same eschatological interpretation of the world. Christina shares the sisters’ typological communication between heaven and earth with her readers, so they will be encouraged to discern the same divine symbolism in the events of their own lives: “May all who love enjoy cheerful little rainbows at the funerals of their beloved ones” (ibid.). While the bond between the sisters is exclusive, it is utilized as a means of inspiring others to reorient their lives towards a perception of the divine. Christina reveals how Maria’s model of lived religion can be applied to the daily experiences of the reader, sustaining them on their pathway towards redemption. Applying a mystical framework of belief to everyday events and experiences allows the divine language of analogy to become a living reality between sisters. Mutual religious practice creates a shared worldview that shapes the sisters’ respective experiences. Christina’s devotional diary is a bridge between her faith and her readers, enabling them to bear witness to the power of the religious beliefs and practices she shares with Maria. Maria is upheld as the living model who achieved the standard of lived religion to which Christina aspires and to which her readers should also aspire.

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“Her Sister Stood in Deadly Peril to Do Her Good”: The Priestly Role of the Sister in “Goblin Market” Among the references to Maria as a spiritual partner in Christina’s journey towards redemption in Time Flies is an account of an event that perhaps inspired Christina’s iconic poem, “Goblin Market” (1862). In the meditation for 17th July, 1885, Christina describes a childhood experience where “a little girl and … my yet younger self” agreed to halve “a certain wild strawberry growing on a hedgerow bank” (C. Rossetti Time Flies 136). The elder of the two girls instructs the author “not to pluck [the strawberry] prematurely,” so as to allow it to ripen, but “one fatal day” they find it “half-eaten, and good for nothing” (136–137). In hindsight, Christina interprets the event as teaching both herself and Maria the importance of prudence and self-restraint, while enabling both of them to learn how to bear with disappointment as an inevitable part of life. Renunciation is again associated with deferring one’s happiness to the afterlife, for Christina claims that their “counsel of prudence” left them disappointed in regard to the strawberry, but the “baulked watches of the afterlife” will not “prove in vain” (137). The minor trials and tribulations of daily life cannot be overcome in this world, but they nevertheless allow the individual to achieve spiritual fulfilment in the world to come. By referring to such shared life experiences, Christina demonstrates that both she and her sister have endeavored to apply the same religious framework to their lives and that they both experience disappointment as a temporary obstacle on the path to redemption. “Goblin Market” (C. Rossetti Poems 5–20) expands on the anecdote of the wild strawberry by portraying the responsible sister’s example of renunciation and prudence as redeeming her fallen counterpart, enabling the latter to be reintegrated into the sisters’ shared religious framework, from which she has been temporarily separated. In his notes to the 1904 edition of the poem, William Michael claimed Christina dedicated “Goblin Market” to Maria because “C. considered herself charged with some sort of spiritual backsliding, against which Maria’s influence had been exercised beneficially” (qtd. in Thomas 176). The sisters’ encounter with a potentially dangerous fruit in childhood is re-appropriated into an analogical narrative that pays tribute to Maria’s spiritual guidance. In this poem the responsible sister, Lizzie, resembles Maria, for she advises her sister, Laura, not to partake of the Goblin men’s fruit: We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots. (42–45)

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When Laura refuses to heed her advice and begins to waste away after sampling the fruits, Lizzie saves her sister by usurping the role of the Christian priest. She obtains the fruit in a violent encounter with the Goblins who attempt to assault her with their wares, unwittingly smearing her with the fruits’ juices in the process. These juices enable her to provide the antidote for her sister, who is instructed to: “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices” (17 468) and “Eat me, drink me, love me” (17 470). Critics are divided over whether Laura’s sacrificial offering to her sister is indicative of a lesbian encounter6 or an experience of the Eucharistic body.7 However, the most remarkable aspect of Lizzie’s encounter with Laura is that she the medium of access to the Eucharistic body. Lizzie’s potential as a female Christ has been well documented,8 but it should be noted that it is not Lizzie’s body that cures Laura, but rather the fruit-asantidote upon her body. Rather than standing in for Christ, Lizzie replaces the Christian priest who takes on the personae Christi (or person of Christ) to effect the transubstantiation of the Eucharist at the moment of consecration. Christina situates the grace of the Eucharistic sacrament in the female community, relocating it from the patriarchal hierarchy of the apostolic Church. Maria’s role in Time Flies is closely aligned with that of “Goblin Market’s” Lizzie because her council of “prudence and self-restraint” (C. Rossetti Time Flies 137) allows her sister to redirect her attention towards her future salvation, just as Lizzie’s example of self-denial allows Laura to be transfigured and redeemed. Likewise, Liebe’s renunciation in The Rivulets inspires Faule to rededicate herself to her heavenly salvation, and it is possible that this text also served as a precursor to “Goblin Market.” In all of these texts, the individual’s primary point of access to the divine is the female community. The redemptive power of the matrilineal community is stressed at the close of “Goblin Market” when Laura brings the children of the two sisters together to “tell them how her sister stood / In deadly peril to do her good” (C. Rossetti Poems 20 557–558). Although Christina claims “the highest functions of the world are not open to both sexes” (Letters 2 158), she portrays the figures of both mother and sister as equivalent to the apostolic priest. Christina’s portrayal of the matrilineal community as a type of female priesthood that transmits grace between women within the household is her most significant intervention in the devotional writing of her mother and sister. A precursor to “Goblin Market,” “The Maid of Sorrow,” is in Frances’s Commonplace Book (34). This story diverges from Christina’s later work by portraying the loss of female virtue as irreparable, even in the face of sisterly intervention. The excerpt is designed to discourage women from engaging in extra-marital sexual relations. Frances explains her inclusion of the story in the album: “The following simple narration speaks much instruction, and may be of use to parents and youth” (Appendix 7). It seems likely that the excerpt was transcribed for the

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benefit of Frances’s female pupils and provided a moral lesson on the imperative of female sexual propriety. The story is told from the perspective of a “Gentleman in the medical line” who is called to visit a female patient (ibid.). Upon arriving, he finds “two young females,” one of whom is in “the agonies of death” (ibid.). The healthy young woman attempts to convince her dying counterpart to “take a bit of bread dipped in spirits,” an allusion to the Passover meal, which symbolizes the redemption of the Jewish people and prefigures the Eucharist (ibid.). The “maid of sorrow” declines, explaining that such sustenance “could but contribute to prolong her misery” and abruptly “expires” (ibid.). The story upholds the notion that the supplicant who receives the Eucharist in a state of sin commits a grave act of sacrilege that further damns their soul. It offers no redemption for the penitent ‘fallen woman,’ denying her the ability to be justified either by her faith or her reception of the sacraments. The inactivity of her female companion indicates that sexual sins cause irreversible spiritual damage that cannot be remediated by any member of the female community. Christina stakes a significant intervention in writing concerning ‘fallen women’ by portraying Lizzie as a female priest whose transmission of sacramental grace reverses the damaging effects of the goblins’ assault upon her sister. Prostitution, known as ‘the great social evil,’ reached its crisis point in the 1850s when the Contagious Diseases Acts were enforced. During this period, sexologists like William Lecky maintained that “pure” women did not experience sexual desire, while ‘fallen women,’ as “eternal priestess[es] of humanity” exorcised “the degradation and sinfulness of man” from the domestic sphere (J.B. Bullen 56–57). In “Goblin Market,” Christina brings the pure and fallen woman together as sisters who possess the ability to convey sacramental grace to one another. The portrayal of the matrilineal community as a receptacle of sacramental grace transcends the theological model provided by Frances in “The Maid of Sorrow.” Frances takes on the role of spiritual guide for her students and children by including morally instructive writing in her Commonplace Book, but such entries indicate that salvation cannot be accessed through the female community. Its members must follow the example of their mothers and sisters by maintaining blameless lives. Although Christina upholds the precept of justification by faith alone, she indicates there is no sin beyond the redemptive power of penitence. “Goblin Market” portrays the sister as a type of female priest who enables her penitent counterpart to become the recipient of sacramental grace. If we recall that Maria upholds sacramental faith as the vehicle for purifying the heart in The Rivulets, her appearance as a Christian priest in “Goblin Market” underlines her importance as Christina’s spiritual role model. Christina’s portrayal of the matrilineal community as a gateway to salvation mirrors Louisa May Alcott’s depiction of the female community

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as facilitating the spiritual and moral growth of each of its members in Little Women. However, the March women attempt to expand their sympathetic community into the outside world, while Christina upholds the exclusivity of the matrilineal community in “Goblin Market.” Helena Michie argues: “the temptation of the fruit is ... the temptation of difference” between sisters (34). I agree with Michie’s contention but do not concur with her negative evaluation of Christina’s portrayal of sororal identification in this poem, especially her claim that Christina’s “discourse of sameness” undermines individuation between women (33–34). What Michie defines as the “temptation of difference” is not the threat of possessing a separate identity, it is the threat of cutting oneself off from the sacramental communion facilitated by the matrilineal community (ibid.). Lizzie and Laura are not the same person: their diverging responses to the Goblins make this clear, but they are united in the sacramental redemption facilitated by Lizzie’s act of self-sacrifice. Just as the three persons of the Trinity remain distinct but are yet united as one divine entity, so the two sisters possess separate identities that nevertheless come together as one body when they partake in sacramental union. Time and again, Christina portrays the sacramental vessel as female in nature, whatever her claims about the higher function of an apostolic male priesthood. Yet, the matrilineal community can only come into communion with God through unification with the Christian ‘Body of Christ.’ Rossetti’s Trinitarian poetics upholds a model of matrilineal identification that is very close to the Alcott women’s model of a shared consciousness but diverges in one crucial respect: the community’s assimilation with the divine must be accessed through a priest-like medium. Frances Rossetti, like the Creative Father, embodies a continuum of love that extends from this world to the next, allowing her daughter to access a vision of heavenly salvation, while Maria Rossetti becomes the analogical vehicle that enables her sister to witness the presence of the divine on earth. To access the divine, one must willingly acknowledge the precedence of the matrilineal community and enter into communion with it. Salvation is enabled by recognizing the sacredness of the maternal bond as the primary means by which each individual accesses the love of God. The maternal bond can be expanded outwards into a matrilineal network, but this is an elected network: it cannot be built into the public sphere in the same manner as the Alcott women’s shared consciousness. Where the Alcott women believe an outward-facing disposition towards the other can transform the structures of human relationships in society, the Rossetti women insist upon the individual’s direct assimilation into the left-handed community before they can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At the heart of these diverging conceptions of matrilineal communion is the communities’ differing perceptions of divine grace. The Rossetti women follow the Augustinian model of grace as the free and unmerited favor of God evidenced by religious faith alone. Thus, if the mother is the primary

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medium of grace, she must be acknowledged as such: there is no room for entering into a communion with the divine without first recognizing her sacramental authority. In contrast, the Alcott women defer to a providential model of grace that relies on the implementation of good works; a self-sacrificing disposition towards the other has the power to transform the wider community’s experience of the divine. Unlike the Alcott sisters, the Rossetti women cannot promote a maternal theology of lived religion to the world at large; their redemptive community serves as a model that others can choose to accept or reject. If society chooses to reject this model, a theology of renunciation is merely accepting the material world as a shadow of the world to come; it is not a means of restructuring society on the values of the matrilineal community. However, the theology of the Alcott and Rossetti women overlaps in one crucial respect: the relations of the left-handed society are upheld as a vehicle for accessing the divine. Within the left-handed societies of both of these families, the identity of the individual is formulated through unification with the other and it is through becoming one body that the community as a whole is able to access a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the case of the Alcott women this Kingdom is first implemented on earth; for the Rossetti women it is deferred to the afterlife—but in both communities it finds its origins in the figure of the mother. This divine mother is not restricted to the ‘private’ world of the domestic sphere, for her authority can be identified in the private writing of the Alcott and Rossetti sisters, and the public writing of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti. Both Little Women and “Goblin Market” are manifestos of the values of the matrilineal community and its power to redeem each of its daughters, but Alcott’s and Rossetti’s championing of the sympathetic and Trinitarian theologies of their mothers is not limited to these texts. It can be identified throughout their canonical works, which promote the left-handed society of the domestic sphere as the foundation for female empowerment and social reform in the public realm and the elevation of women in the world to come.

Notes 1 “I take exceptions at the exclusion of married women from the suffrage, for who so apt as mothers … to protect the interests of themselves and their offspring?” (Letters 2 158). 2 Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti. Hodge-Podge; or Weekly Efforts. No. 2 RF May 27th, 1843. “Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription”. The Rossetti Archive. Web. 30 Dec 2020. 3 Rossetti, Frances Mary Lavinia. The Literary Diary; or, Complete CommonPlace Book. Box 12–18. Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver. Scanned copy received from archivist. Email. 25th March, 2020. Subsequent citations to this work will be made in parenthesis, using the format: “F. Rossetti Commonplace Book,” accompanied by the date of entry and page number.

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4 Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti. Hodge-Podge; or Weekly Efforts. “Morning Hymn for the tune of ‘Glory to Thee my God this night.’” ll.5-8. July 23rd, 1843 RF Paris. “Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription”. The Rossetti Archive. Web. 30 Dec 2020. 5 See Marsh (Christina), “As William [Michael] wrote, despite a strong sense of duty, she was naturally indolent, ‘often better pleased to be doing nothing than anything’” (173). 6 See for instance, Greer’s “Introduction,” which claims that Christina“used the aspirations of piety as a metaphor for her own frustrated sexuality” (x). Likewise, Cora Kaplan reads the poem as “an exploration … of women’s sexual fantasy that includes suggestions of masochism, homoeroticism, rape or incest” (69), while Mary Wilson Carpenter argues that sisterhood is presented as “a saving female homoerotic bond” (419). 7 In reference to Rossetti’s Eucharistic imagery, Dorothy Mermin writes: “we find it hard to allow a nineteenth-century religious poet the conflation of spiritual and erotic intensity that we accept without question in Crashaw or Donne” (113). Marylu Hill contends that “the poem directly invokes the Eucharist as both sacrifice and as regenerative antidote to the poison of misplaced desire” (462). 8 瀬名波栄潤 refers to Lizzie as a “female Christ figure” (16). Janet Galligani Casey coincides with this characterization: “Rossetti feels that it is suffering for the sake of others (and not sex) that makes one Christ-like” (74). Linda E. Marshall sees both of the sisters as “together imitating mother Eve and motherly Christ” (446).

Part II

“A Loving League of Sisters”: Alcott and Rossetti’s Promotion of Christian Values through the Ties of Sisterhood In her 1883 biblical commentary, Letter and Spirit, Christina Rossetti claimed the wife was incapable of experiencing a direct revelation of God and implied she was spiritually inferior to the single woman: She sees not face to face, but as it were in a glass darkly. Every thing, and more than all every person, and most of all the one best beloved person becomes her mirror wherein she beholds Christ and her shrine wherein she serves Him … Her earthly love and obedience express to her a mystery; she takes heed to reverence her husband, as seeing Him Who is invisible; her children are the children whom God has given her, the children whom she nurses for God. She sits down in the lowest place, and is thankful there. (92–93) Rossetti’s implicit challenge to the elevation of women as ‘relative creatures’ has been well documented, but it is interesting to note the paradox inherent in her demotion of the wife and her absolute elevation of the mother, especially when we consider the wife is discussed in relation to “the children whom she nurses for God” (ibid.). As has been previously observed, the mother attains her spiritual status through her relationship with her children, who must first acknowledge the maternal bond as the primary source of human love, thereby creating a familial Christian community that mirrors the Trinity’s reciprocal relations. The husband, or father, is removed from Rossetti’s portrayal of the mother, with the exception of the heavenly Father whom the mother emulates in her Trinitarian relations with her children. More importantly, the mother’s most sacred maternal relationships are with her daughters.

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If the husband’s removal facilitates the mother’s heavenly union with Christ, then it stands to reason that the relations between sisters transcend those of spouses, for they are the derivation of the life-giving relationship between mother and child that simultaneously mirror the complementarity of spousal relationships, while nonetheless allowing the individual’s relationship with God to take precedence. Leila Silvana May’s integral scholarship on sibling relations in nineteenth-century British literature has traced “the relatively uncharted territory of the horizontal rather than the vertical plane of the family axis, and on the sister as the primary pole of the sibling relationship” to argue the sister is “key to understanding much about the complicated and contradictory conception of the nineteenth-century middle-class family” (13). May claims the sister assumes an elevated role as the “sanctum sanctorum of moral virtue” who draws the brother back into the home (18). I do not contest May’s thesis insofar as it appertains to the heterosexual nuclear family, but in my estimation, she overlooks the presence of exclusively female sisterly communities that separate themselves from heterosexual ties. Such a community can be identified in Christina Rossetti’s 1850 autobiographical novella, Maude, which portrays the psychological, spiritual, and artistic development of its heroine as facilitated by a community of elected sisters inspired by the emergence of the Tractarian sisterhoods in the mid-nineteenth-century. Maude extends religious sisterhood to incorporate secular, as well as religious, women—all of whom inspire an aesthetic and spiritual transformation in the literary heroine. In this text, the sister is no longer a bridge between the public and private spheres. Instead, she identifies with her sisterhood, and the littleness it embodies, to achieve a revelation of Christ. As with the relations of the Rossetti women, whose shared devotional practices facilitated a mystical communion with one another, Maude’s sharing of the sacraments with her sisters enables her to unite herself with Christ through experiencing the imitatio Christi. The imitatio Christi, or imitation of Christ, centers on the belief that the individual who is fully oriented towards Christ engages in a mystical union that reconfigures their perception of the outside world and their relation to others. Rossetti solves the problem of the sister’s enclosure in the domestic sphere by immersing her in a self-contained sisterhood that facilitates integration into the Godhead through the sisters’ mutual identification with one another. Louisa May Alcott shares Rossetti’s vision of attaining communion with the divine through cultivating sisterly bonds but portrays these bonds as outward-facing. Where Rossetti circumvents the sister’s role as redemptive mediatrix by containing her in an exclusive religious community, Alcott creates a philanthropic sisterhood that is the foundation of a utopian matrilineal society. Her 1873 bildungsroman, Work,

“A Loving League of Sisters” 127 explores the psychological struggles of its heroine, Christie Devon, who enters the public sphere in search of a meaningful vocation and is torn between the desire to achieve artistic acclaim and the need to create an intersubjective family. Christie overcomes her internal conflict by instigating a universal sisterhood united in the pursuit of social reform, engaging in a variety of charitable causes that reflect its intersectionality. Through participating in the world of work, Christie’s sisterhood transforms the public sphere: her sisters practice a theology of caritas that alleviates social inequality through prioritizing the needs of the impoverished and marginalized. Christie’s redemptive theology is inspired by the person of Christ, as is indicated by her name, but her imitation is of a practical, rather than a spiritual, kind. Unlike Maude Foster, Christie remains focused on mimicking Christ’s evangelical mission and his self-sacrificial theology of renunciation. Her outward-facing altruism allows her to reconceive her art as the collaborative outpouring of a female community focused on using artistic expression as a tool for combating social injustice. By contributing to the fields of philanthropy, reform and work, Christie’s female community is liberated to re-interpret male literary traditions, re-reading seminal works of the male canon through the framework of its Christian beliefs. Alcott’s vision of a reformed society founded on the bonds of sisterhood is not unique among nineteenth-century American women. In her work on female benevolence in nineteenth-century America, Lori D. Ginzberg claims that charitable associations expanded Protestant women’s social responsibilities “beyond recognition” because women were able to claim “a higher standard of virtue than that … exhibited by men” (17). Ginzberg criticizes Evangelical sisterhoods for attempting to transcend class and racial differences by claiming to act exclusively on “shared sexual status” (21). This criticism can be leveled at Work, but Alcott does not use sisterhood as a smokescreen to obscure difference; difference is rather the foundation for sororal kinship and the pursuit of social justice. Robin Cadwallader’s scholarship on Christian caritas in Harding Davis, Alcott, and Phelps’ work has alerted me to the affinities in Alcott and Rossetti’s vision of sisterhood. Cadwallader explains caritas stems from the Greek verbs for “love” and “charity”; it suggests that human kinship derives from “common relationship[s] [with] God” (114). Caritas is the proper outcome of the imitatio Christi because union with Christ enables Christians to serve one another. The reciprocal relations modelled in Alcott’s Work closely mirror the Trinitarian relationships promoted in Rossetti’s Maude: within each of these fictional communities the individual gains a sense of self through dedicating themselves to the needs of others. Both Alcott’s and Rossetti’s fictional sisterhoods distance themselves from male kinship and influence. Alcott excludes men from her final

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vision of active sisterhood, portraying the female community’s creation of a collaborative work of art, and its formation of a shared school of interpretation, as stemming from its engagement with women in the public sphere. Rossetti takes this depiction of female kinship a step further by creating a self-contained sisterly community that rejects the ideology of individualism promoted by male artists. In both cases, sisterhood achieves transcendence through dedicating itself to others, promoting a theology of renunciation that is the heritage of the matrilineal line. In the canonical works of Alcott and Rossetti, we witness the implementation of the religious beliefs of the authors’ matrilineal communities in their public works. Both Maude and Work present the female artist as the collaborative creation of an outward-facing sisterhood that proceeds from the divine figurehead of the mother.

4

We Are All Relative Creatures: The Transformative Power of Sisterhood in Rossetti’s Maude

When William Michael Rossetti published his sister’s autobiographical novella, Maude, in 1896, two years after her death, he dismissed the work as a “juvenile performance” on the first page of his Preface, assuring the reader he was “not under any misapprehension regarding the degree of merit which it possess[ed]” (C. Rossetti Maude 18). The editor associated the heroine’s spiritual conflict with her affiliation with the Tractarian sisterhoods, which he regarded with suspicion as evidencing her religious extremism: Maude is made the subject of many unfavourable comments, from herself and from her strict-minded authoress. The worst harm she appears to have done is, that when she had written a good poem, she felt it to be good. […] If some readers opine that all this shows Christina Rossetti’s mind to have been at that date overburdened with conscientious scruples of the extreme … I share their opinion. One can trace in this tale that she was already an adherent of the advanced High Church party in the Anglican communion, including conventual sisterhoods. (ibid. 19) Maude is an exploration of the heroine’s internal conflict and her attempts to reconcile her artistic identity with her religious faith. Like Christina Rossetti herself, the teenage protagonist experiences a psychological breakdown that stems from her failure to live up to the high standard of her religious beliefs. She eventually recovers by developing a new mystical style of writing inspired by her friend’s, Magdalen Ellis, decision to become a nun. The text has been the subject of increased critical attention over the last 50 years but has never achieved public acclaim: something that is undoubtedly linked to William Michael’s discouraging Preface, as well as the text’s references to the religious sisterhoods and their continuing association with religious extremism.

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It is easy for contemporary scholars to overlook the radical implications of the Anglican sisterhoods in the mid-nineteenth century. Associated with the long-standing British suspicion of Catholicism, dating back to the Reformation, and fueled, in part, by the furore surrounding the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act providing Catholics with the civil rights to vote and hold office, the sisterhoods were often held in contempt due to the widely perceived “unnaturalness” of sexual abstinence (D’Amico 47). At a time when marriage was perceived to be the only vocation for women because of their status as ‘relative creatures,’ the religious sisterhoods offered a viable solution to the ‘surplus woman problem’ that nevertheless undermined the very fabric of British society, founded on the doctrine of separate spheres. They were met with suspicion because “there was an unsettling lack of male influence over these religious female communities, which had a woman at their helm, provokingly called a ‘Mother Superior’” (Roe Wonderland 258). The radical status of religious sisterhoods in Victorian Britain bears startling parallels with the political impact of religious sisterhoods founded by medieval mystics, such as Teresa of Avila’s Discalced Carmelites. The Tractarian sisterhoods freed Victorian women from their status as ‘relative creatures.’ Medieval sisterhoods likewise offered an alternative to marriage and motherhood: women were granted access to an education ordinarily reserved for men, thereby elevating their social status, and investing them with spiritual authority. Lanzetta writes: “Through church-sanctioned obedience, the transmission of their religious writings, formation of monastic houses … the development of new spiritual lineages were fostered, giving voice to women’s religious, social, and political concerns” (139). Religious sisterhoods have always been radical in their feminist vision and remain so today when the discourse surrounding relations between men and women remains overwhelmingly sexual in nature. As Foucault argues, the conflation of sexual freedom with personal liberation obscures the workings of political power. In this particular case, the perversion associated with celibacy merely reflects the values of a secular culture that conflates human fulfillment exclusively with the body in the absence of a vision of a higher power. Ironically, the thinly veiled disgust with which celibacy is now regarded resembles the discourse of perversity concerning alternative sexualities in Victorian Britain. This discourse “made possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse” where “homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged” (Foucault 101). Similarly, the longstanding British suspicion of religious life has historically compelled women to create their own vision of spiritual power through creating self-contained, celibate sisterhoods. As a unique literary curio, Maude enables us to understand Victorian religious sisterhoods as part of a wider feminist project that endeavors to reject women’s inferior sexual, social, and political status through

We Are All Relative Creatures 131 affirming their spiritual authority. It offers important insights for the study of celibate women’s vocations and religious sisterhoods today: their feminist potential remains underestimated. The prevailing contempt for women’s religious life is visible in Maude’s critical history. Gilbert and Gubar claim: “the moral of this story is that the Maude in Christina Rossetti—the ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed and self-assertivepoet—must die, and be replaced by either the wife, the nun, or the kind and useful spinster” (552). Palazzo goes so far as to argue that Maude subtly undermines Tractarianism because it “expos[es] the extremism of a religious position that denies the beauty of the natural world or of human efforts to reproduce it” (11), while Showalter interprets Christina’s allegiance with religious sisterhoods as a consequence of her exclusion from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the lack of a defined female literary tradition from which to write (Maude xii). D’Amico resists all of these readings, making the important point that they “present [Christina’s] faith more as a device for coping with reality than the reality it was for her” and that focusing on the negative connotations of sexual renunciation ignores the fact that: “for [Christina], controlling bodily and worldly appetites was an important stage in the quest for holiness” (62). The renunciation of bodily and worldly appetites is also an important stage in the mystical practice of the imitatio Christi.1 The imitatio Christi is not centered on a literal emulation of Christ but rather on the restoration of human identity as created in God’s image. Self-interest is relinquished to enable the supplicant to attain a Christlike nature: Christ, as the teacher of perfect humility, shows us that it is in the humbling of self that the height of imitation lies—not as passive recognition or acceptance of oppression—but that self-humbling that leads to truth and the experiential knowledge of one’s own reality. (Ilia Delio Simply Bonaventure 118) The incarnate person of Christ is a radical exemplar in that, even though he is entitled to seek power and authority over humankind, he “enter[s] into suffering humanity … and has loved [humanity] precisely in and through this suffering” (121). In short, the pain of renunciation is the pain one experiences when reorienting oneself towards others to obtain a truly intersubjective outlook. True poverty of spirit radically requires all humanity, both men and women, to recognize their status as “relative creatures’—relative to both one another and to God who has created humankind ex nihilo (out of nothing) (118–119). Consequently, it is only through relinquishing her individualistic conception of the poet’s role, a role that Maude initially places above her religious faith, that she is able to paradoxically access the divine through her verse. By recognizing she is subject to God’s will,

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rather than the will of a husband or brother, Maude achieves the artistic precedence she seeks throughout the text. This chapter is called “We are all relative creatures” because it demonstrates how Maude attains empowerment through embracing a theology of renunciation that places all individuals on an equal footing. Her religious faith enables her to envision a future where artists receive inspiration through dedicating themselves to receiving visions of God. Contrary to predominant critical readings of this text, religious faith is presented as the means by which the female artist achieves preeminence over her male contemporaries, as well as the source of the sisterly community’s elevation over the male-dominated public sphere. Maude’s elected sisterhood is notable for embodying a variety of female vocations, consisting of the religious life personified by Sr Magdalen, the married life represented by Maude’s cousin, Mary Clifton, and the artistic vocation embodied by Maude and her doppelganger, Agnes Clifton, Mary’s sister. Maude is a radical text in that it presents not only one but two alternatives to married life for women, while upholding universal sisterhood as the means by which women are able to form independent identities and discern their callings. Maude’s elected sisterhood is championed as the foundational community for the development of both the heroine and her friends, while their shared religious faith is presented as underpinning sororal bonds. This chapter will examine Maude’s spiritual conflict and her subsequent decision to reject an ideology of individualism. Maude learns to redirect her verses towards the glorification of God, thereby conflating her poetic vocation with her Christian beliefs. The examples provided by her elected sisters, who use their creative gifts to serve the Church, allow Maude to rededicate her poetry to her religious faith. Maude relinquishes her solipsistic preoccupation with self-expression by identifying herself with Christ through experiencing the imitatio Christi. Maude’s conformity with the person of Christ is made manifest through the stigmatic wound in her side. What might initially appear as a symbol of suffering enhances Maude’s transfiguration as a heroine who becomes the image of God through prayerful contemplation. Mirroring the medieval female mystics, Maude becomes united with the crucified Christ through a painful rebirth that is the product of her reorientation towards God. Although the text ends with her death, she is resurrected in the figure of her spiritual sister, Agnes, a truly Christic person who preserves Maude’s devotional verses for succeeding generations of sisters.

“I am Sick of Display and Poetry and Acting”: The Temptation of Originality The conflict Maude experiences between her religious faith and poetic vocation is rooted in her anxiety regarding her lack of humility as an

We Are All Relative Creatures 133 artist. Although William Michael claims “the worst harm Maude appears to have done is that when she had written a good poem, she knew it to be good” (C. Rossetti Maude 19), her error can be more accurately located in the fact that she allows her belief in the quality of her verse to set herself apart from others. As such, she is obstructed from entering into a true union with Christ because she lacks spiritual humility. Indeed, while she feigns modesty by refusing to read her verse aloud because she cannot “think of monopolising everyone’s attention” (33), she nevertheless deliberately suggests a Bouts rimes competition when requested to propose a party-game, despite the fact that her companions are clearly unenthusiastic about her proposal (24). The Bouts rimes competition references a pastime enjoyed by the Rossetti siblings where competitors were given a pre-prepared set of rhymes, which were then used to compose an original sonnet. Maude claims she “has nothing else to propose” for the entertainment but subsequently suggests “game after game” when she has successfully won the competition (24–25). Maude’s anxieties concerning the public recitation of her verses recalls Rossetti’s reservations regarding her brothers’ suggestion she read her poetry aloud during the meetings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which she looked upon as “display … the sort of thing she abhor[red]” (qtd. in Doughty 45). Maude accedes to the temptation to ‘display’ herself under the cover of providing entertainment, but her hypocrisy implies that Rossetti regarded the artistic culture of the Pre-Raphaelites as centered on a competitiveness and self-assertion that was at odds with her religious beliefs. In reference to her love of adulation, Maude later observes: “It is horrible to feel such a hypocrite as I do” (35). Her conflict comes to a head when she decides to abstain from receiving communion on Christmas Day because she knows she is “not trying” to “avoid putting [herself] forward and displaying [her] verses” (35). Using the identical language of ‘display’ that Christina herself used to avoid associating with the Pre-Raphaelites, Maude makes it clear that such self-interestedness compromises her spiritual welfare. Her cousin, Agnes, observes that Maude is torn between the conflicting demands of her religious faith and her desire to indulge in the individualistic aspirations of a celebrated artist: “You cannot mean that for the present you will indulge vanity and display; that you will court admiration and applause, that you will take your fill of pleasure until … death strips you of temptation and sin altogether” (36). Maude’s poetry suggests it is her identity as an artist that obstructs her relationship with God, for it is an expression of her psychomachia—a state of being that traps the subject between two modes of conceiving the world and interpreting reality. Surrounded by an “old chaos of stationary,” Agnes finds Maude looking “pale, languid, almost in pain” (34). One of the poems Maude shares with Agnes articulates her sense of dissociation with religious worship (34–35), for while she listens to

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“the holy antheming” (1) of “white-robed men and boys” (4), she asks herself “with a sad questioning: / What lov’st thou here?” (5–6). It is notable that Maude finds herself unable to relate to the artistic elements of the church service: she does not describe a sense of frustration in prayer, or an inability to achieve a revelation of God. Rather, she cannot access or participate in the beauty of the liturgy. This is significant because liturgy, as a form of ritual directed towards divine communion, requires the suppliant to relinquish individuality, in order to partake in a preordained expression of worship shared in common with the church community. As a crucible of theatrical performance, visual art, and musical expression, liturgy is a type of total art experienced as a reflection of God’s image, not as a vehicle for self-expression. Maude identifies her inability to share in the liturgy with her individualism: “Vanity enters with thee, and thy love/Soars not to heaven, but grovelleth below” (10–11). Maude’s art cannot participate in the divine outpouring of the Church because she uses it to distinguish herself against others. The rejection of originality was central to Tractarian poetics; John Keble (1792–1866) defined the purpose of poetry as “awakening … some moral or religious feeling, not by direct instruction … but by way of association” (qtd. in G.B. Tennyson 25). Eschewing the celebration of individualism, Keble claimed that poetry should forego originality, in order to tap into the wider universality of human experience— redirecting that experience towards the divine (ibid.). Rossetti herself adhered to this sentiment, for in her 1881 theological work, Called to be Saints, she claimed that, “No graver slur could attach to my book than would be a reputation for prevalent originality” (xvii). Maude’s disassociation with church liturgy reflects her resistance to integrating herself into the artistic expression of the church community. At this moment, Maude is torn between the model of “moral and religious feeling” defined by Tractarianism as the object of communal worship, and the paradigm of artistic individualism upheld by the Romantic tradition (G.B. Tennyson 25). She is unable to reject the promise of artistic adulation, but her conscience nevertheless insists that the pursuit of idiosyncrasy is futile. Indeed, the first poem she shares with Agnes makes the radical claim “there is nothing new under the sun” (C. Rossetti Maude 11), but Maude cannot overcome the fallacious belief that she might prove the exception to the rule. When she comes across her cousins embroidering a lectern cover for their church, she is immediately able to read the typological symbolism of the piece: “There is the Cross and the Crown of Thorns; and those must be the keys of S. Peter, with, of course, the sword of S. Paul” but is nevertheless unwilling to participate in the sisters’ collaborative artistic practice: “I should not do it well enough, and have no time to learn” (27). However, the real reason for Maude’s reluctance to participate is that she would receive no recognition for her contribution. The lectern cover

We Are All Relative Creatures 135 fits a utilitarian purpose in serving the church community: no one will enquire as to its creator and no single person will take credit for its invention. Yet, Maude is drawn to the project despite her refusal to help, for she subsequently soliloquizes: “How I envy you … who live in the country, and are exactly what you appear, and never wish for what you do not possess. I am sick of display and poetry and acting” (ibid.). Maude’s inauthenticity and covetousness is aligned with her identity as a poet. Agnes, whose relationship with Maude is founded on their shared religious faith, claims: “You do not act … I never knew a more sincere person” (ibid.). Agnes does not realize Maude is referring to her artistic vanity: the real reason behind her refusal to participate in her cousins’ devotional practice. Ironically, Maude’s pursuit of individualism and originality does not produce verse of aesthetic worth, for her early work is both affected and self-interested. In the opening scene of the novella, the 19-year-old Rossetti presents Maude as something of a teenage poseuse who makes a deliberate show of “slipping out of sight some scrawled paper” when her mother, whom she intentionally ignores, enters the room (20). Mrs. Foster, “accustomed to inattention,” asks her daughter a series of “vain questions” regarding her health and state of mind, only to receive a series of evasive answers from “one who without telling lies was determined not to tell the truth” (ibid.). Regarding her mother as an “interruption” to her weighty poetic occupation, Maude proceeds to compose a poem that begins “Yes, I too could face death and never shrink: / But it is harder to bear hated life,” only to “yawn,” “lean back in her chair,” and “wonder how she should fill up the time until dinner” (ibid.). The attention that Maude draws to herself by ensuring that the secrecy surrounding her compositions is universally known (she makes a performance of hiding them from her mother and refuses to provide her friends with copies of the Bouts rimes verses she previously forced upon them) suggests she enjoys the mystique surrounding her poetic identity in a decidedly immature manner. Maude can only attain maturity as a poet through realizing that her vocation, as a Christian writer, is to reflect God’s image. Therefore, any attempt at self-aggrandizement must appear ludicrous when placed against the collective expression of the Church. Maude is not required to let go of her identity but rather to recognize it as rooted in her creaturely nature as image of God. It is for this reason that the process of the imitatio Christi is integral to her poetic transformation. Christ, as incarnate Son of God, is defined as the “Word of God.” Franciscan theology identifies the “Word of God” as “the sum total of the infinite divine ideas” (Delio Simply Bonaventure 84), referring back to the theory of a proto-Indo-European language that preceded the division of matris lingua along the lines of national boundary. Within this Christian theorization of linguistics, the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9 represents the degeneration of verbal communication

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following the fall. Significantly, this occurs after humanity strives for equality with God through attempting to build a city and tower tall enough to reach heaven. The hubris of humanity in attempting to create an architectural work of art that equals the creative outpouring of God is rectified by Christ as the incarnate “Word” who receives “the self-gift of God into [his] inner depth” as the “exemplary image” of God (64). Thus, the human person who is truly united with Christ is the ultimate realization of the expression of the Word in the world, fulfilling their divine creative potential and thereby enabling “all of material and spiritual reality (which are summed up in the human person) to attain a personal relationship with God” (ibid.). Significantly, unification with the incarnate Christ permanently alters one’s experience of reality, for reality is realigned when one becomes a creative instrument. If Maude is to overcome her sense of artistic superiority, she must first become united with Christ as the Word of God who encapsulates “the congruity between the Word and the world,” revealing all created phenomena as “a little word of God” (ibid.). Consequently, Maude is excluded from liturgical participation until she realigns her verse to become an expression of both the presence of the Word as it lives within her and a link to the intersubjective Christian community that surrounds her. She is only able to achieve this transformation through her participation in Christian sisterhood.

“Let Us Wait the End in Peace”: The Spiritual Transformation of Maude’s Poetry It is the self-denying decision of one of Maude’s friends, Magdalen Ellis, to enter the Sisterhood of Mercy that inspires the transformation of Maude’s poetry. Magdalen’s decision to renounce the expression of her selfhood, in order to aspire to a revelation of God inspires Maude to write out of the religious community in which she finds herself. Following the news of Magdalen’s consecration, Maude chastises her cousin Mary for referring to Magdalen under the disparaging epithet of “poor Magdalen,” sparking a re-enactment of the debate surrounding the religious sisterhoods raging at the time. Mary retorts: Surely you would not want such a life … They have not proper clothes on their beds, and never go without a thick veil, which must half blind them. All day long they are at prayers, or teaching children, or attending the sick, or making poor things, or something. Is that to your taste? (C. Rossetti Maude 29) Mary’s contempt for the religious sisterhoods is rooted in their uniformity and lack of individuation. In her eyes, the outward-facing nature of the community, which requires each individual to reorient their

We Are All Relative Creatures 137 attention toward prayer, teaching, or charitable works, belittles their human dignity by depriving them of an identity. One detects the echo of William Michael’s disparagement of the ‘extremity’ of Anglican religious practice and the underlying assumption that grounding one’s identity in the female community leads to a loss of selfhood. Maude rejects this secular outlook for its rigid partiality and lack of objectivity: “You cannot imagine me either fit or inclined for such a life; still, I can perceive that those are very happy who are” (ibid.). Maude’s critique of Mary is founded on the latter’s tendency to regard the world exclusively through her subjective experience, thereby disregarding the validity of alternate modes of self-creation, especially those generated through participation in shared religious frameworks. Contrastingly, Maude’s psychological struggle is rooted in her need to reconcile two seemingly dichotomous aspects of her character: the religious and community-oriented, and the artistic and self-expressive. She notifies her cousins of her feelings of guilt concerning her rejection of her pastor’s suggestion she engage in charitable work on account of her health. Her appreciation of the value of this ministry leads her to doubt the moral rightness of turning down such work, even though she is not suited to it: “I have regretted it since though: yet I don’t fancy I ever could have talked to the poor people or done the slightest good” (ibid.). Maude’s ministry, however, lies in her verse, which acts as a point of intersection between religious and secular ways of life, uniting the women around her in a common aspiration towards a revelation of God. Magdalen’s decision to enter the convent inspires Maude to not only lift her ban on copying her verses into her friends’ commonplace albums but to attempt a new poetic style through seeking to compose something that is “admissible even within Convent walls” (ibid.). Like Maude’s first composition, the poem for Magdalen’s album (30–31) is centered on a desire for death: a preoccupation that runs throughout the text. Yet, on this occasion Maude does not portray the desire for death as the product of melodramatic and affected world-weariness but instead presents death as the culmination of the natural processes of creation, which gradually evolve towards unification with the risen Christ. She reorients the poet’s affiliation with nature towards a vision of paradise through consciously resisting the generic conventions of her forebears and reconfiguring her textual references towards scripture. Maude disrupts the pastoral genre’s positioning of serenity and tranquility in the natural world by affiliating its tropes with stagnation and cliché, thereby creating a sense of cognitive dissonance in the minds of readers whose generic expectations are undermined. The poem opens: “Sweet sweet sound of distant waters falling / On a parched and thirsty plain” (1–2), a picturesque description whose literal allusions of satiation and abundance are destabilized by the disruptive verbal sibilance and opening spondaic foot, which pushes against the regular

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iambic pentameter of the proceeding line. As the poem unfolds, the poet distances herself from the associations of such imagery with human fulfillment by forming an alternative set of images that resist the pastoral scene she has created. Each stanza is divided into two parts: the first sestet, in iambic pentameter, conforms to the pastoral tradition, while the subsequent sestet deploys iambic tetrameter and reiterates an opposing interpretation of the surrounding world: “Of a much more priceless worth/Is the old, brown, common earth” (11–12). Maude deliberately contrasts the worldly outlook of her previous writing with the Christian framework of interpretation embraced by Sr Magdalen. Maude’s emphasis on the afterlife is made explicit in the second half of the poem when she turns from didactic description to instructive diction, encouraging the reader to share her typological interpretation of nature. The reader is directed to “See the ancient pine that stands the firmer/For the storm-shock that it bore” and “the moon her silver chalice filling/ With light from the great sun’s store” (27–30). Maude’s readership is encouraged to look through the image to the object of its symbolic foreshadowing. Of particular significance is the rendering of the moon as a “chalice” for the sun (ibid.). The chalice is the crucible for the Eucharistic blood of Christ and points the readers towards a figurative reading of the image of the sun as homophonic wordplay (Christ as ‘Son of God’). Just as the moon sources her light from the sun, so is the created world dependent on the incarnate Son for its life. The stereotypical images of the pastoral genre are gradually replaced with Christian symbolism, guiding the reader towards a transition between pastoral and Christian modes of perception, a transition the heroine herself is also currently undergoing. This journey towards Christological centrality is foregrounded in the final stanza when the poet departs from natural imagery to command the reader to “Let us wait the end in peace” and “see our lamps are lighted” because “the judge is at the door” (37–39 43). Maude replaces natural imagery with scriptural references, alluding to the “Parable of Ten Virgins” from Matthew 24, which describes the journey of ten virgins to meet their bridegroom in the middle of night. The five wise virgins bring all the necessary supplies for their lamps, while five foolish virgins forget their oil. The bridegroom arrives at midnight, but the five foolish virgins are unable to go out to meet him and are later barred from the wedding feast. Christ relates the parable to the Kingdom of Heaven, emphasizing the need of his followers to prioritize their relationships with God above the material concerns of daily life. By drawing an analogy between the individual’s redemption and the relationship between the bridegroom and his brides, Christ implies the individual’s relationship with God takes the place of the romantic union as the preeminent relationship in the life of a Christian. Maude’s decision to relate the poem’s denouement

We Are All Relative Creatures 139 to this parable heightens her earlier rejection of the pleasures and beauty of the natural world, in favor of unification with Christ. Through addressing the female audience of a commonplace album, Maude implies that communion with Christ should remain at the heart of her elected sisterhood. The “Parable of Ten Virgins” possesses a special significance in Christina’s understanding of sisterhood because it is referenced in a poem, “Evening Hymn,” by John Samuel Bewley Monsell, which appears in the commonplace album of Christina’s cousin, Isabella Pietrocola-Rossetti.2 This album was shared with all the women of the extended Rossetti family and Monsell’s poem is referenced in Christina’s devotional poem, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh” (C. Rossetti Poems 419). It is significant that Maude’s first poetic entry into one of her friend’s commonplace albums, an act that has previously been renounced, references the wider literary community of the Rossetti women, and its emphasis on devotional life-writing. If Maude’s change of poetic style is precipitated by her affiliation with the conventual sisterhoods, it is also reinforced by Christina’s reference to her allegiance with the literary community of the extended Rossetti sisterhood, as well as her sister, Maria’s, religious vocation as a nun. The original parable’s allegorical machinery is significant in its implication that the ‘wise virgins’ who receive the bridegroom are, in fact, ‘brides of Christ’—a term colloquially used to refer to female religious. By identifying Maude with Sr Magdalen, and herself with the Rossetti sisterhood, Christina implies the elected sisterhoods of both the text and its autobiographical exemplar share a common quest for redemption that is affiliated with the religious sisterhoods of the period. The gradual transition of Maude’s poetic style that begins with Magdalen’s commonplace album outlines her reorientation towards a Christocentric manner of viewing the world. Maude must recognize that creation only achieves its union with the divine through the figure of Christ. The Bonaventurian approach to the imitatio Christi contends that the incarnation “completes creation” because “Christ and the world are not accidentally connected but intrinsically connected” and that the “order of creation” reaches its “highpoint” in the perfection of Christ (Delio Simply Bonaventure 90–91). As the “fulfilment of the potential that lies at the heart of creation,” Christ must be the “goal to which creation is directed” (91). Maude’s emphasis on the futility of a pantheistic approach to nature therefore belies her Christological outlook. This being so, the reader might reasonably ask why Maude’s depiction of nature is bereft of transcendence. Ilio Delio, a leading specialist on the Franciscan spirituality of the imitatio, argues that despite his rarefied view of the incarnation, Bonaventure understood that “the fulfilment of the created world remains incomplete” because “the problem of an incomplete universe lies not in Christ but in the human person” (94).

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If the universe is to be redeemed by the incarnation, it is necessary that the human person becomes united with Christ: “Christ is not only the point of perfection but he is the model and image to which the human person, who is called to spiritual perfection, is to be formed” (ibid.). Paradoxically, it is only through embracing the sacrifice of Christ’s death that humanity can effect a transfiguration of the world around them. Delio argues that “To be the body of Christ is … a flesh and blood reality” (Franciscan Prayer 154), for it is in Christ’s willingness to sacrifice himself for the world that the world is redeemed. The Christian who embraces the imitatio must therefore be willing to sacrifice themselves in imitation of Christ. This does not mean literally dying for others but instead requires the individual to place their needs below those of the surrounding world. St Francis was not a martyr, but he received the stigmata as a sign of his spiritual martyrdom, both for others and for the natural world. Maude’s portrayal of a fallen world that is transfigured by death is a precursor for the transfiguration she herself will later experience through her mystical participation in the imitatio Christi.

“She Had Been Overturned”: Maude’s Experience of the imitatio Christi and Its Impact on Her Verse Maude’s mystical participation in Christ’s passion is the final resolution of her struggle to reform her verse and find a Christian vocation in the elected sisterhood surrounding her. Significantly, the fatal cab accident that precipitates her stigmatic wound is the consequence of the news of her cousin, Mary’s, wedding. Mary’s wedding and Sr Magdalen’s consecration occasion a crisis in Maude’s identity that is only resolved through her mystical unification with Christ. Maude is an unconventional woman who does not fit into any prescribed social role: she is both devoutly religious and a stridently independent artist. It is only through total integration in Christ that Maude reconciles the differing aspects of her identity. Maude departs from home to attend Mary’s wedding immediately after receiving Agnes’s invitation and is instantaneously precipitated into her mystical passion in what feels like a moment of divine intervention: At length … the tardy preparations were completed, and Maude … stepped into a cab…. Half an hour had not elapsed when another cab drove up to the door; and out of it Maude was lifted perfectly insensible. She had been overturned; and, though no limb was broken, had neither stirred nor spoken since the accident. (C. Rossetti Maude 40)

We Are All Relative Creatures 141 Maude’s injuries mirror those of the crucified Christ, for although “no limb [is] broken” she subsequently confides in Agnes: “My side is dreadfully hurt; I looked at it this morning for the first time, but hope never again to see so shocking a sight” (ibid.). The crucified Christ is similarly wounded in the side: a fact that is interpreted in John 19:36 as a fulfillment of the words of Psalm 34:20, “He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken.” Maude’s passion forces her to reorient her identity towards a Christic understanding of the self, for she had previously refused to receive the Eucharist, the sacrament that would enable her to achieve physical union with Christ on earth (35). At the opening of the text, Maude is unable to relinquish the individualistic poetic identity she has crafted for herself and refuses to enter into the mystery of the incarnation “on the eve of the feast celebrating the incarnation of God in human form” (Roden 70), but her mystical passion allows her to receive communion on Easter Sunday. Maude’s final reconciliation with the Eucharistic sacrament implies that her mystical participation in Christ’s death allows her to become a recipient of the redemption effected by his resurrection. Maude’s experience of Christ’s passion inspires a further transformation in her verse, which rejects female vanity in favor of practicing the imitatio Christi. Following her cab accident, Maude sends a triptych of poems, “Three Nuns,” to Agnes, presumably in the hope they will be circulated among the elected sisterhood. In an accompanying letter she explains that the poems’ protagonists are based on herself, Mary, and Sr Magdalen. The triptych consists of three monologues revealing the interior lives of each protagonist. Like Maude, the first nun expresses a world-weariness and inability to find a meaningful purpose in life. Her decision to seclude herself from the world is an attempt to avoid the aimlessness of her existence. Subverting the words of the wicked stepmother from “Snow White,” the first nun endeavors to blot out her vanity by using the monastic cell as an escape from the world: “Shadow, shadow on the wall / Spread thy shelter over me” (ll.1–2 41). However, her request is undercut by her reference to her shadow: a type of reflection that is here deployed for the purpose of self-effacement. The nun shares Maude’s inability to attain the humility to which she aspires. She also partakes in a desire for death, instructing the shadow to: “Be my stainless winding sheet,/Buried before I am dead” (ll.10–11 41). Her entry into the convent signifies spiritual dormancy: she attempts to assume an attitude of death because she is unable to reconcile her spiritual desires to the world. The second nun is a thinly veiled representation of Maude’s cousin, Mary, who disparages the religious sisterhoods and abruptly vanishes from the text shortly after her marriage. She resembles Mary in her obsessive preoccupation with her love for a man. The poem opens with the confrontational address: “I loved him, yes, where was the sin?” (l.1 43).

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Both provocative and defensive, this opening makes it clear that the nun is determined to define herself in opposition to the expectations of the monastic community. She echoes Mary’s cynicism regarding the purpose of religious sisterhoods, fanatically reiterating the centrality of romantic love as the most important facet of a woman’s existence. Susan Casteras has noted that “the theme of religious vows taken as a deliberate and repentant denial of earthly affections” was a common preoccupation of literary and artistic depictions of nuns throughout the nineteenth century (173). Indeed, Rossetti herself frequently deployed this trope in such poems as “A Convent Threshhold” (55), “The Novice” (671) and “Soeur Louise De La Misericorde” (327). In raising and disregarding this trope as an inadequate expression of the religious life, Rossetti underlines Maude’s growth as a writer. Maude now rejects the conventions of popular literature to create a nuanced representation of the monastic community, thereby signaling her departure from the affected conventionality of her earlier verse. Her depiction of the second nun exposes the societal obsession with romantic love as obstructing both the intersubjective relations between women and the suppliant’s vision of Christ. The individual is only able to imitate Christ through regarding him as spiritual beloved. Imitation is attained through prayerful contemplation of the crucified Christ, which enables a “deepening of love in union with God” (Delio Simply Bonaventure 148). Rossetti champions the imitatio Christi as the proper means of attaining a vision of Christ in her final monologue, which synthesizes the theology of renunciation expressed by the first nun with the second nun’s desire to attain personal fulfillment. In contrast to her fellow sisters, the third nun creates a vision of paradise unimpeded by worldly attachments. She transforms the objects of the material world into platonic shadows of the world to come: I will not look upon a rose Though it is fair to see The flowers planted in Paradise Are budding now for me. (43–46 46) Diverging from her fellow sisters, the third nun fashions an identity defined by her heavenly aspirations, rejecting the societal roles of “daughter, sister, wife” (72 46) to take on a new identity of “Spirit and Bride” of Christ (84 47). She is the personification of the sisterhood’s ultimate spiritual goal: total integration with the person of Christ. As such, she embodies a psychic wholeness that evades the other two protagonists who are caught in a conflict between earthly and spiritual desire. Maude’s elevation of the figure of Sr Magdalen, who is associated with the third nun, should not be viewed as an authorial tool for

We Are All Relative Creatures 143 promoting the religious life above a poetic vocation. This, in itself, would be undermined by the fact that the portrayal of Sr Magdalen occurs within a poem. The three protagonists are all ostensibly ‘nuns,’ but the first two are not fitted for the religious life. The third nun’s spiritual superiority is located in her total immersion in the person of Christ. It is possible that the third nun and St Magdalen are fictional renderings of Maria Rossetti, who became a Tractarian sister in 1873. The Pre-Raphaelite painter, Charles Allston Collins, used Maria as his model for the 1851 oil painting, Convent Thoughts, which portrays the subject’s contemplation of the passion as allowing her to transcend her immersion in nature and her romantic attachments. The painting depicts a postulant contemplating a passion flower in an iridescent walled garden that is a trope for her virginal chastity. It is notable for its Pre-Raphaelite realism, which can be identified in its detailed rendering of flora and fauna. However, in a departure from the Pre-Raphaelite ‘truth to nature,’ the subject’s spiritual meditation allows her to transcend the scene, and she is transfixed by the object of her devotion. This is made explicit by the inscription on the frame, taken from Psalm 113:5: “I meditate on all thy work; I contemplate on the work of Thy hands.” In line with the Rossetti women’s mystical Tractarian theology, the postulant views the objects of the natural world as reflections of the glory of God. This painting stands out among depictions of religious sisters for portraying the postulant’s desire to enter into religious life as the fruit of her prayerful contemplation, and not of thwarted love. Collins’ unusually respectful portrayal is notable because he romantically pursued his model but was rejected—perhaps on account of her discernment of the religious life. Collins’ elevation of his subject’s devotional contemplation indicates that, like the third nun, Maria’s religious faith was harmoniously integrated into her identity. Indeed, William Michael commented on this aspect of Maria identity as a woman of faith, writing that Maria become “serenely or even exuberantly happy” after her religious conversion, while Christina developed “an awful sense of unworthiness, shadowed by an awful uncertainty” that can be likened to Maude’s spiritual struggles (qtd. in Marsh Christina 14). Throughout her life, Christina looked upon her sister as a spiritual role model, and Sr Magdalen’s pivotal role in inspiring the reformation of Maude’s verse perhaps reflects the real-life role Maria played as Christina’s spiritual mentor. Maria’s decision to put aside her prospects as a Dante scholar to pursue a religious vocation would explain Sr Magdalen’s consternation concerning Maude’s decision to reject the religious life in favor of a poetic vocation. Maude’s championing of Sr Magdalen’s religious devotion through the medium of her verse suggests that her vocation is to promote the intersubjective values of the sisterhood, and its dedication to Christ, as a female poet.

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“Amen for Us All”: The Trinitarian Relationships of Sisters Ultimately, it is Maude’s contact with her sisterhood that facilitates her immersion in the imitatio Christi, as well as the transformation of her poetry. By representing three varying levels of spiritual insight, “Three Nuns” implies that the object of the sisterhood is to bring individuals together with the view of compensating for each other’s deficiencies. The significance of the number three in the triptych indicates that union between sisters achieves a spiritual wholeness and unity that can be likened to the Trinity. The triptych passes through varying levels of spiritual enlightenment, culminating with the figure of Sr Magdalen; it presents the inter-relational aspects of sisterhood as the prototype for the individual’s gradual integration into the Trinity, and the person of Christ in particular. The imitatio Christi positions Christ as the relational Second Person who transmits the intersubjective relations of the Trinity into creation. The Father is self-diffusive goodness who gives himself entirely to the Son, thereby enabling the Son to radiate the Father’s love throughout creation. Thus, just as Frances Rossetti as mother is conflated with the primeval origin of the Father, so is Sr Magdalen also identified with the Father, for she enables Maude to achieve mystical communion with the Son. The function of the Son in relation to the Father is, of course, as ‘Word’ of the Father. Bonaventure deliberately used “the analogy of language” to help his readers understand the significance of the Son’s title as “Word” (Delio Simply Bonaventure 46). The Father is associated with the “mental word” or originating thought, while the Son is the “causal Word” who brings the thought into being (ibid.). It is imperative that Maude retain her identity as poetess and mouthpiece of her spiritual Mother and mentor, Sr Magdalen, because she transmits the inter-relational values of the sisterhood, as the earthly embodiment of the Trinity, into the outside world. The reformation of Maude’s verse, as witnessed by the reader, enables her to conflate her poet’s vision with the Word of God, manifested in the Son, thereby divesting her poetry of all traces of individualism. Sr Magdalen, proxy of the Father, ensures Maude’s unification with the Son by means of the imitatio Christi, so that she is able to achieve a final purification of her verses. Nevertheless, the problem remains that, following Maude’s spiritual transformation, she requests that Agnes destroy her verses, inspiring Gilbert and Gubar’s claim that “the ambitious, competitive, selfabsorbed and self-assertive-poet must die” (552). Yet, it is important to note that Maude’s poetry remains accessible to the reader within the bildungsroman itself. Agnes also copies a small number of poems for Maude’s mother, once again affiliating the artistic identity of the female

We Are All Relative Creatures 145 poet with her matrilineal heritage. The poems selected by Agnes are emblematic of the transformation of style inspired by Maude’s experience of the imitatio Christi. Indeed, the poem that closes the novella (51) opens with the lines: “What is it Jesus saith unto the soul?— / ‘Take up the Cross and come, and follow Me’” (1–2). It is true that the “self-absorbed and self-assertive poet” does die (Gilbert and Gubar 552), but the reformed Christian poet remains, and it is notable that the selection of poems included in Maude were also published under Rossetti’s name prior to the completion of the text (C. Rossetti Maude “Preface” 18). Arseneau has claimed that Maude is Rossetti’s “poetic manifesto” (Recovering 90), and the novella recounts Rossetti’s own change in style and her later emphasis on devotional writing. Rossetti locates this transformation of style in the figure of Agnes Clifton who, following Maude’s death, becomes the executor of her verse. Agnes is Maude’s doppelganger: the figure who facilitates her return to the Eucharistic table, and who embodies the fulfilled Christian spinsterhood that is Maude’s vocation. Roden has claimed that “As a saving sister, Agnes willingly volunteers to serve as Maude’s double in her relationship with Christ. On praying, Agnes tells Maude, ‘if there is anything you miss and tell me of, I will say it in your stead’” (71). Yet, when questioned by Maude as to whether she would change places with Magdalen, Mary or herself, Agnes responds that Maude must “even put up with me as I am” because she could not “bear [Maude’s] pain” (C. Rossetti Maude 47). Agnes’s rejection of Maude’s identity is founded on the fact that it is Maude’s particular type of pain, experienced through the imitatio Christi, that instead allows Maude to be mystically reincarnated in Agnes. Maude makes Agnes the executor of her surviving verses, while also requesting she “destroy what [Maude] never intended to be seen” (49). This request refers to Maude’s desire to erase any trace of work that embodies the “self-absorbed and self-assertive” poetic identity that has since been rejected (Gilbert and Gubar 552). A new, self-giving poet, dedicated to communion with God, is reborn in Agnes: the figure who is presented to the reader at the close of text, praying “for the hastening of that eternal morning, which shall reunite in God those who in Him, or for His Sake, have parted here” (C. Rossetti Maude 51). Agnes embodies the resolution of the conflict Maude has experienced between the spiritual and artistic elements of her identity. She most closely resembles the mature Rossetti, dedicated to a vision of heavenly salvation and the promotion of devotional writing. Having provided an autobiographical account of her teenage nervous breakdown, Rossetti kills off her younger self, only to have her reborn in a new vision of a single poetess who has dedicated her life to God. Yet, if Agnes is Christina Rossetti, she also embodies elements of Maria Rossetti, especially in her role as the spiritual sister and guide who brings Maude back

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to the Eucharistic table. It would seem that the identities of all the sisters, both within the text and in the real world that inspired it, are conflated. This is made explicitly clear in Agnes’s final act of cutting “one long tress from Maude’s head; and on her return home [laying] it in the same paper with the lock of Magdalen’s hair” (51). Maude’s union with Christ in death unites her with Magdalen who, as a religious sister, has dedicated her life to the devotional practice of imitatio Christi. It would also appear that both sisters are incorporated into the figure of Agnes: the custodian of their memories, writing, and personal effects who awaits the heavenly reunion of the sisterhood, and who integrates the qualities of Maude’s determined independence with Magdalen’s religious devotion. This interchangeability of the sisters’ relationships and spiritual experiences mirrors the intersubjective relations of the Trinity who are at once three distinct persons and one single God. If Magdalen is conflated with the Father, and Maude is identified with the Son, then Agnes is the Holy Spirit who propagates the self-gift of both the Father and Son throughout the world. Total unification with the person of Christ can only be attained through an imitative participation in his passion. Therefore, the Holy Spirit allows those who are not called to participate in this mystical experience to access a communion with God in a different way. Maude’s reformed poetry can be regarded as the Word of the Son, while Agnes is the Holy Spirit who transmits the Word to the next generation. The sisterhood that supports Maude throughout the text is finally integrated into the image of a transformed heroine who promotes a reformed type of devotional verse. It would seem that when spiritual sisters unite through the imitatio Christi, they literally become incorporated into one mystical body that mirrors the maternal archetype of womankind commonly associated with the figure of the mother in Rossetti’s poetry. In their unification as one body, the sisters also mirror the sacramental body of the Eucharist, which unites all members of the Christian church. It is notable that before her death Maude asks Agnes to “come tomorrow and administer the Blessed Sacrament to me” (49) because Maude’s death predeceases this act, presumably leaving Agnes to receive the Blessed Sacrament in her stead. Agnes, then, is a type of female priest. The relationship between Agnes and Maude prefigures that of Lizzie and Laura in “Goblin Market” because these spiritual sisters also reconfigure the gendered dynamics of the Eucharistic sacrament, relocating the physical medium for sacramental redemption in the female body of the sister, rather than the male body of the priest. Thus, Agnes’s final desire to bring forward “that eternal morning, which shall reunite in God those who in Him … have parted here” (51) seeks the divine unification of sisterhood in the body of Christ, something that has been prefigured on earth by the sisters’ mutual participation in the Eucharistic sacrament.

We Are All Relative Creatures 147 It is telling that Mary, the sister who allows her desire for human love to override her desire for divine love, is expurgated from the transfigured sisterhood championed by Agnes. In Rossetti’s text, the exemplar of the religious sisterhoods inspires a reformation of the relationships between all women, as well as the transformation of the artistic identity of its heroine. The religious sisterhoods are models for a reconceived vision of womankind, founded on an intersubjective framework where each individual achieves identification with Christ through unification with the female other. Rossetti does not advocate the religious life as the final object for all women because the trajectory of her own life as a secular poetess runs contrary to such an evangelical mission. Rather, Rossetti promotes the relations between sisters as a medium for divine communion with Christ because they mirror the inter-subjective relations of the Trinity. She creates an elected sisterhood inspired by the religious sisterhoods, but which has the scope to support the divine revelation of all women, including those beyond the convent walls. Still, the spiritual journey facilitated by the elected sisterhood remains finite because the relationships between its members are a temporary substitute for total unification with Christ in the afterlife. It is for this reason that Maude’s poetry must pass away with its heroine, for its consignment to flame represents the spiritual rebirth the heroine has undertaken through her mystical passion and death. Maude’s final act of purgation bears surprising resonances with the end of St Thomas Aquinas’s life, as recorded in Butler’s Lives of the Saints (1756). On the feast of St Nicholas, Aquinas (1225–1274) received a mystical vision so powerful that he determined never to write again, leaving his greatest work, the Summa Theologica (1485), unfinished, as it seemed to pale in comparison to the vision he had received. When questioned over this abrupt decision, he responded: “All I have written appears to me like straw compared with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me” (Butler 196). Maude’s instructions to burn her writings after her death mirrors Aquinas’s dismissal of his work as “like straw” (ibid.) because the transformation of her artistic vision is similarly facilitated by the divine revelation of her mystical passion. It is important to understand that Aquinas’s final act was not a rejection of his identity as a writer, but rather an expression of faith in the mystical revelation he had received as the final embodiment of his authorial vision. Aquinas’s vision was, in some respects, the outcome of the Summa Theologica. His revelation, then, can be viewed as the final fruit of his labor, while Maude’s experience of the imitatio Christi can similarly be interpreted as the ultimate output of her literary career. The practice of mysticism supersedes the work of art because the devotional work of art aspires to facilitate mystical experience. Following the reformation of her verse, which is inspired by her sister in Christ, Magdalen, Maude is transformed into a truly

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Christic individual. For both Aquinas and Maude, their writing has, quite literally, taken flesh and become imbued into their selfhood, rendering the literary text obsolete. Sr Magdalen’s practice of Christian submission may have ensured her final redemption in the world to come, but the transformation of Maude’s poetic vocation has brought about her heavenly transfiguration on earth. The consignment of her verse to flame represents her spiritual rebirth. Just as the Summa Theologica remains the bedrock of Christian theology, so is Maude’s surviving verse, preserved by Agnes and printed in the text, the foundation of the model of universal sisterhood to be taken up by the next generation. As Maude’s doppelganger, Agnes passes on the heroine’s spiritual revelation to the sisterhood to come. Winston Weathers argues that in Christina’s work, sisters often symbolize a crisis of self where two conflicting identities must “struggle with one another” to achieve a final, harmonious resolution (82). This resolution is embodied in Agnes, but it is important to note that the resolution is not only symbolic, as Weathers claims, for the sisters, like the three persons of the Trinity, possess distinct identities that are nevertheless united in the same Christic body. Agnes, like the Holy Spirit, exudes the transfigured identity of Maude, who is proxy for the Son, while simultaneously retaining her own unique selfhood. Agnes will transmit Maude’s ‘Word’ to succeeding generations of sisters, so that the intersubjective relations that have been inspired by the religious sisterhoods will be promulgated to society at large. Rossetti’s text is therefore a manifesto of the divinely transformative power of sisterly relationships and their ability to effect total unification with Christ. Indeed, Maude closes with the voice of the author who, in an unusual moment of self-expression, affirms her support of Agnes’s hope that the sisters will be reunited in heaven. “Amen for us all,” Rossetti writes (51). She may as well have written: “Amen for us all, sisters.”

Notes 1 I read Maude through the Franciscan interpretation of the imitatio Christi. Mason has recovered Christina’s understudied Franciscan influences, claiming that: “As an Anglo-Catholic of Italian descent, Rossetti was familiar with the cultural and religious presence of Francis in the nineteenth-century, and had visited several Franciscan churches in her 1865 tour” (116). Franciscan theology is featured more prominently in this text than the “Tractarian principles of reserve and analogy” identified by Arseneau (Recovering 67–68). These doctrines require the individual to distance themselves from the divine because the human person is only able to access God by means of type and symbol. By contrast, the ‘spiritual poverty’ of the imitatio Christi enables total unification with Christ, so that the individual shares in the identity of the incarnate God. I am indebted to the work of Linda E. Marshall who has observed the presence of the imitatio Christi in “Goblin Market” and

We Are All Relative Creatures 149 Frederick S. Roden who explores the resonances between the description of Maude’s stigmatic wound and the writings of the medieval mystics. Ilia Delio, a leading specialist in Franciscan spirituality and the works of Bonaventure, informs my theological approach in this chapter. 2 Commonplace book, 1851–1901, Dora Browning Dick, inscribed: “Dora Browning Dick, in affect. memory of Aunt Isabella, nee Steele” on inside cover, Rare Books and Special Collections, Manuscript Collection C0199 no. 290, Firestone Lib., Princeton University.

5

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia

For Louisa May Alcott, the husband is an obstacle on the female artist’s quest to achieve self-determination. He is not only a mirror that reflects the image of God on the wife’s behalf; he is the source of her fulfilment and self-approval, her financial stability and sense of identity. In short, the husband determines the woman’s public role as helpmeet and appendage, and, as such, he must be replaced by a sisterly community focused on the growth and development of others. In an 1868 essay, “Happy Women,” Alcott directly confronts the “surplus woman problem” by sarcastically describing the “fear of being an old maid” as “one of the trials of woman-kind” (203 sic). She counsels against rushing into matrimony without first considering “the loss of liberty, happiness, and self-respect” that is “poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.’ instead of ‘Miss’” (ibid.). The author uncannily echoes Rossetti in her conception of the wife as an inferior member of the female community. In place of the wife, Alcott promotes “a certain class belonging to the sisterhood” who “from various causes, remain single, and devote themselves to some earnest work; espousing philanthropy, art, literature, music” (ibid.). Alcott departs from Rossetti’s approach, however, by directly drawing from the nonfictional sisterhood with whom she surrounds herself—a community that is put forward in the essay as an exemplar for her single female readers. Alcott provides sketches of a number of women of her acquaintance for “those of my young countrywomen who, from choice or necessity, stand alone, seeking to find the happiness which is the right of all” (ibid.). Amongst these examples is an autobiographical sketch of “A.,” the author herself, described as a woman of “strongly individual type, who in the course of an unusually varied experience has seen so much of … ‘the tragedy of modern married life’ that she is afraid to try it” (205). In place of a husband, Alcott’s thinly veiled counterpart pursues an artistic vocation: “Literature is a fond and faithful spouse, and the little family that has sprung up around her … is a proper source of satisfaction to her maternal heart” (205). Alcott’s description of the artistic vocation as a type of spouse bears an interesting resemblance to

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 151 Rossetti’s implicit elevation of the heavenly spouse above the human husband. Yet, unlike Rossetti, Alcott does not explicitly connect the female writer’s ‘marriage’ to literature with her relationship with God. Nevertheless, her later realist novel, Work (1872), the subject of this chapter, portrays the ‘professional’ woman as spiritually ordained because she conceives her identity as subject to God’s will, rather than the will of a husband. Like Rossetti’s Maude, Work charts the heroine’s search for a meaningful vocation, and her rejection of the values of self-reliance and individualism, in favor of her participation in an outward-facing sisterly community. However, where Maude is preoccupied with the spiritual potential of sisterly relationships, Work is concerned with social reform, for the relationships between sisters are portrayed as not only possessing the potential to transform the spiritual and social contributions of women but the capitalist marketplace as well. Alcott implies that if professional work is made available to women, the values of individualism, competition, and self-interestedness will be expunged from society. Crucially, it is the female capacity to achieve sympathetic identification with others that is presented as possessing the transcendent power to alleviate both personal afflictions and social ills. Alcott advocates a philosophy of reform that champions becoming “personally involved with others, and … embed[ding] the alleviation of all poverty, not just physical deprivation, in a Christian doctrine” (Cadwallader 15). This “Christian doctrine” upholds personal contact with marginalized individuals as the proper means of identifying their spiritual and physical needs (ibid.). In her personification of a theology of caritas, Alcott’s heroine, Christie Devon, gradually learns to imitate Christ, but her imitation is not the product of divine revelation. Christie instead practically imitates Christ in her relationships with her elected sisterhood. This sisterly community installs a kingdom of heaven on earth; its sympathetic power transforms the experiences of the ostracized and downtrodden across society. Like Maude, Christie is an artist, having worked as a professional actress, but she cannot achieve personal fulfillment through her artistic vocation. Christie’s ambition to attain greatness isolates her from the surrounding world and disconnects her from her elected sisterhood. Her artistic gifts become gateways to social reform in much the same manner Little Women becomes the mouthpiece for Abigail Alcott’s lived religion. Cadwallader claims, for Alcott “writing became benevolence in action, a way for [her] to minister to those in need by opening the hearts and minds of readers to poverty of all kinds—physical, psychological, and spiritual” (114). Thus, Christie’s formerly voyeuristic gifts as an actress are likewise transformed into a type of mesmeric sympathy that allows her to psychically enter into the sufferings of others, thereby facilitating a

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mystical integration into the trials and tribulations of her sisters. Christie’s final aim is not to enter into the passion of Christ but instead to enter into the passion of the world. Where Rossetti looks upon the material world as a shadow of the world to come, Alcott emphasizes the divine potential that lies dormant in the incarnation. Crucially, Alcott portrays the sisterly community as possessing the power to integrate the person of Christ into the self because its peculiar proclivity for sympathy shapes the intersubjective values that underpin a truly Christian society. She therefore relocates the morally elevated role of women from the domestic sphere into the field of professional work, advocating for the recognition of the contributions of women within the realms of economics, philanthropy, and artistry, as well as morality and ethics. While Work upholds female philanthropy above female artistry, its final portrayal of a female community liberated to reinterpret the canonical work of a male artist looks forward to a future where the social achievements of sisters can create an inspired school of collaborative art. This vision is realized in Alcott’s 1869 text, An Old-Fashioned Girl, which portrays a utopian community of female artists engaging in philanthropic work, while collaborating in the creation of a unique sculpture, “Woman”: an archetypal female figure freed from her associations with domesticity and motherhood to become a prophetic herald of a future where women contribute to all areas of the sister arts without referring to the established canon of male artistry. Alcott portrays her community of female artists as reforming the social and moral purpose of art through championing artistic collaboration above the development of individualism and prioritizing cooperative altruism above the celebration of genius. If Rossetti’s vision of paradise is centered on the types of Trinitarian relationships embodied by sisters, Alcott’s vision of a perfected world is founded on the achievements of a sisterly community that upholds a theology of caritas expressed through collective artistic production.

“The Doctrine of Hatred Must Be Preached as the Counteraction of the Doctrine of Love”: The Destructive Ramifications of Transcendentalist Self-Culture Work tracks Christie’s transition from pursuing the Transcendentalist values of self-reliance and individualism, upheld within the capitalist marketplace to her acceptance of the intersubjective outlook of the sisterly community she creates for herself. Christie discovers the Transcendentalist emphasis on self-culture, contingent upon one’s alienation from others, is detrimental for women. Her initial search for genius and self-reliance precipitates a mental breakdown that reaffirms her dependence on the female community she has left behind. Christie must learn she is only able to transcend the social, artistic, and moral

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 153 obligations placed upon her in the domestic sphere by uniting with other women in the mutual creation of a new social framework based on collaboration and service to others, rather than individualistic fulfilment. At the opening of the novel, Christie announces her intention to leave the house of her guardian, Uncle Enos, to enter the world of work because she hates “to be dependent” (L. Alcott Work 5). Driven by the romanticized and unrealistic vision of “get[ting] rich, found[ing] a home for girls like [herself]; or, better still, be[ing] a Mrs. Fry [or] a Florence Nightingale” (8), Christie’s dreams of self-aggrandizement are associated by her uncle with “redic’lus notions about independence and selfcultur’,” which “won’t come to nothin’ in the long run” (10 sic). The concept of “Self-Reliance,” as defined by Emerson in his essay of the same name, advocates prioritizing the individual’s survival in the world above the fulfilment of their societal obligations and responsibilities: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius” (131). Christie’s rejection of the dependent role society assigns to women complements Emerson’s vision of intellectual single-mindedness because she affirms her determination not to “sit and wait for any man to give me independence if I can earn it myself” (L. Alcott Work 9). However, Emerson’s vision of self-reliance not only prioritizes the individual’s vocation but also discards the value of collaboration. In essence, the subject must single-mindedly block out all social obligations in favor of pursuing a chosen vocation—not simply being content to ignore the criticisms of those who, like Uncle Enos, would deny their capabilities. While Christie is drawn to the idea of achieving public renown, she nevertheless expresses her dislike of “dependence where there isn’t any love to make it bearable” and voices her desire to find work she can “put her heart into, and feel that it does [her] good, no matter how hard it is” (11). Christie condemns her uncle’s pursuit of a monotonous “everlasting work” where he “starves” the soul for “the sake of [the] body” with “no object but money” (10). Christie, then, is searching for a new type of collaborative and philanthropic work located in the female community, which rejects both the Emersonian model of individualism and the capitalistic object of materialism. Indeed, she associates her pursuit of work with the figure of her mother: “Even if I only do what my dear mother did, earn my living honestly and happily, and leave a beautiful example behind me, to help one other woman as hers helps me, I shall be satisfied” (11). Hendler has claimed that Work “complicates the conventional opposition between the masculine public sphere of work and money and the emotional realm of family ties … by having Christie leave the domestic sphere in search of precisely those values it is supposed to uphold” (“Louisa May Alcott” 687). Uncle Enos embodies the porousness between the public and private realms, corrupting the sanctum of the

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domestic sphere with his greed and materialism. Yet, while Christie rejects the soulless aspiration towards wealth embodied by her uncle, she remains torn between the Transcendentalist concepts of “self-reliance and self-culture” and her mother’s example of providing moral guidance for succeeding generations of women (L. Alcott Work 10). The novel traces Christie’s transition from pursuing artistic acclaim to installing a philanthropic sisterhood, thereby providing her with a sense of fulfilment and self-worth. Following her departure from the family home, the narrative explores her experience in the majority of professions open to women in nineteenth-century America in themed chapters titled: “Servant,” “Actress,” “Governess,” “Companion,” and “Seamstress.” Alcott herself had experimented with these professions in her early adultlife in Boston. All these professions prove to be emotionally unfulfilling for Christie, however, and she resigns from each position disenchanted and unsure of her professional calling. Alcott makes it clear that the professions open to women exploit their sympathetic capacities for voyeuristic and selfish purposes. For instance, when Christie becomes an actress, she discovers the profession encourages her to simulate her sympathetic gifts to inflate her sense of artistic superiority and titillate her audience, rather than creating a meaningful connection with them: Her love of admiration grew by what it fed on, till the sound of applause became the sweetest music to her ear. She rose with … a growing appetite for unsatisfactory delights, an ever-increasing forgetfulness of any higher aspiration than dramatic fame. (41) Christie’s experience as an actress exposes the exploitation of female sympathy within the professions to be a means of affirming the selfaggrandizing values of the marketplace. Ultimately, Christie finds the pursuit of genius to be emotionally unrewarding because the solipsism it inspires corrupts her sympathetic tendencies and leaves a contaminated legacy for succeeding generations of female artists: “Am I what I hoped I should be? No, and it is my fault. If three years of this life have made me this, what shall I be then? A fine actress perhaps, but how good a woman?” (43). The conflict Christie experiences between her vocation as an artist and her identity as a woman is rooted in her atomized pursuit of personal success, which follows the Emersonian model of “shun[ing] father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me” (“Self-Reliance” 134). While she leaves the domestic sphere in search of the values it lacks, she makes the mistake of neglecting to seek out a wider female community who would support her in her search for a meaningful vocation. Christie must learn to create her own self-made family within the public sphere if she is to find the values of intersubjectivity and mutual

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 155 support bequeathed to her by her mother. The creation of such a community is incompatible with her aspiration towards genius, for Emerson claims, “The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines” (134). In other words, a consideration for the needs of others suppresses one’s capacity for greatness. Alcott exposes the psychologically detrimental effects of such a philosophy on women through her portrayal of Christie’s breakdown, which manifests itself in an attempted suicide that is the offshoot of her psychomachia. Just as the conflict between artistic genius and Christian obedience drives Maude Foster to a near mental breakdown, so do Christie’s conflicting desires for artistic genius and sympathetic companionship lead to a destructive split within the self. Having tried and tested the full range of professions open to women, and found them to be emotionally unrewarding, Christie walks to the Boston lumber wharf to drown herself. Her desire to end her life is identified with her need to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of her identity, which have become disassociated from one another. Upon gazing into the water Christie experiences a hallucination of an alter-ego, which she longs to reunite with her conscious self through entering the waters below: Something white swept by below—only a broken oar—but she began to wonder how a human body would look floating through the night. It was an awesome fancy, but it took possession of her, and, as it grew, her eyes dilated, her breath came fast, and her lips fell apart, for she seemed to see the phantom, and it wore the likeness of herself. (L. Alcott Work 124) Christie’s hallucination is an out-of-body experience that symbolizes her sense of disconnection with the public identity she has created. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) associates the color white with nihilism and a loss of selfhood: “Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and this stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation?” (186). As an inanimate white oar, Christie has become a lifeless object devoid of human personality and the capacity for self-expression. Ironically, her fostering of individualism has eradicated her identity, for she has divorced herself from the surrounding world and become dislocated from her own existence, a “phantom” who wears “the likeness of herself” (L. Alcott Work 124). If Melville’s Ahab personifies a deranged male individualism that attempts to exterminate any threat to its absolute authority, Alcott’s Christie represents the fragmentation of the female subject who attempts to emulate such individualism at the expense of her sympathetic capacities:

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“A Loving League of Sisters” So plainly did she see it, so peaceful was the white face, so full of rest the folded hands, so strangely like and unlike, herself, that she seemed to lose her identity, and wondered which was the real and which the imaginary Christie. (124)

Hendler has argued that Christie’s breakdown represents “the complete submergence of the female self in an identification with the other— sympathy in its most extreme form” because it demonstrates the heroine’s unhealthy reaction to human loneliness: Christie is unable to form a coherent sense of self independently (“Louisa May Alcott” 691). I would contend that Christie’s decision to stay at the lumber wharf because “She knew it was no place for her, yet no one waited for her, no one would care if she staid forever” (L. Alcott Work 124) indicates her crisis of identity is a product of her isolation from the female community. As Hendler claims, “the coherent boundaries of [Christie’s] ego, are clearly in crisis in this scene” (“Louisa May Alcott” 692), but there is no indication her ego has become conflated with that of another subject. Christie has, instead, submerged herself with the image of the lifeless corpse: a figure with a “peaceful white face” and “folded hands” who is both “strangely like, and unlike, herself” (L. Alcott Work 124). This figure represents the sympathetic self Christie has suppressed while striving for individualistic acclaim, a self that has become separated from her public persona. Her suicidal tendencies are an expression of her need to reconcile her living self with the self that has been figuratively destroyed. Christie’s fascination with the image in the water reveals her unconscious desire to integrate the conflicting aspects of her identity: that which seeks individualistic fulfillment and that which desires a mutually supportive female community. In actual fact, Christie’s suicidal episode is a mystical ‘dark night of the soul.’ A term coined by poet and visionary, St John of the Cross (1542–1591), the dark night of the soul refers to the experience of isolation, separation, and despair the soul passes through on its journey to God. It occurs at the moment the Christian supplicant realizes they can no longer regard themselves as an atomized being whose deepest attachment is to the self. Experiencing the dark night of the soul allows the supplicant to accept that a solipsistic preoccupation with one’s ego generates the belief there is nothing beyond the self, thereby catapulting them into a nihilistic abyss of despair. Christie confronts the image of the isolated self she has cultivated in the water and recognizes it is detached from her spiritual identity. Her dark night of the soul opens the door for her initiation into a Christian community of sisters who will enable her to conceive her human dignity as inextricably intertwined with a wider group of women united in propagating a Christian theology of caritas to the world. It is significant that Christie is pulled out of her psychotic episode by her old friend and erstwhile adopted sister, Rachel. A fallen woman who

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 157 is fired from the mantua-making factory where she works with Christie after her sexual history is discovered, Rachel has left Boston to help other fallen women in a neighboring city—inspired by Christie’s example of loving her “like a sister” (126). Having redeemed herself, Rachel returns to Boston to continue her philanthropic work and happens across Christie at the lumber wharf (127). When Christie claims that she was: “so worn out, and weak, and wicked [… that she] meant to take [her] life,” Rachel responds “No, dear; it was not you that meant to do it, but the weakness and the trouble that bewildered you” (125 emphasis added). Rachel helps Christie to understand her breakdown is the product of the atomized society she exists within, for Christie herself admits: “I have been ill, I worked too hard; I’m not myself to-night” (ibid. emphasis added). It is Rachel’s role to restore Christie to her elected sisterhood, so she is able to regain her sense of self. The remainder of the novel traces Christie’s rehabilitation and her final discovery of her vocation as a female philanthropist whose practice of a type of lived religion allows her to extend her intersubjective sisterhood to the wider world. Christie learns that the matrilineal community is the foundation of an intersubjective society dedicated to empowering the marginalized. Her rehabilitation is facilitated by Cynthy Wilkins, a working-class housewife and friend of Rachel’s, who offers Christie a home after the latter’s suicide attempt. Following her encounter with Cynthy, Christie attempts to promote the values of the matrilineal community to the wider world via her idealistic marriage to David Stirling, resulting in their mutual enlistment in the Union Army. However, Christie discovers that the growth of the matrilineal community depends on her husband’s sacrificial death, for she must relinquish her identification with him to dedicate herself to her elected sisterhood if she is to build a utopian society on the matrilineal model. David’s death enables Christie to dedicate her life to the reformist projects of her interracial sisterhood, united in a common vision of social justice.

“You Will Do My Part Better Than I Could”: Christie’s Rehabilitation and the Emergence of her Sisterhood Christie returns to the domestic sphere to reintegrate the self that has become fragmented in the public sphere, but the matrilineal community she encounters becomes the foundation for the interracial sisterhood that ushers in a new social order at the novel’s close. Following Rachel and Christie’s encounter at the lumber wharf, Rachel provides Christie with “a home, very humble, but honest and happy” (127). The home in question belongs to Cynthy Wilkins, a washerwoman who takes in impoverished and fallen women at Rachel’s behest. Defying the distinctions between public and private spheres, Cynthy extends the domestic sphere

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into the outside world, refusing to limit her motherly obligations to her immediate kindred. She informs Christie her peace of mind is the product of “jest doin’ whatever comes along, and doin’ it hearty, sure that things is all right, though very often I don’t see that at furst” (144 sic). In other words, Cynthy embraces a providential theology that advocates “stand [ing] by the Lord though thick and thin,” trusting that he will “fetch [you] through somehow” (136). Cynthy’s belief that the values of the home hold the potential to redeem the outside world mirrors Abigail Alcott’s faith in the power of matrilineal bonds to revolutionize the relations of the public sphere. Like Abigail, Cynthy attempts to break down the barriers between the nuclear family and the wider world. Upon Christie’s arrival, she informs her: “You’re one of them that can’t live alone without starvin’ somehow, so I’m jest goin’ to turn you in among the children to paster, so to speak” (135 sic). Cynthy recognizes Christie has been deprived of an outlet for her sympathetic capacities and farms her children out “to pasture,” as a means of providing the lonely and isolated young woman with the companionship she so desperately needs (ibid.). Once more, the maternal connection is upheld as the primal bond from which all human relationships stem. When Christie tells the story of her hardship, she is comforted by “the sympathetic face opposite, and the motherly pats so gently given by the big, rough hand” (135), while her initial “treatment” is being allowed to hold Cynthy’s youngest child: “Let me hold her! I love babies dearly, and it seems as if it would do me more good that quarts of tea to cuddle her, if she’ll let me” (130). The self-giving love of the mother is portrayed as healing the divided self, for it is only through experiencing the all-embracing love for another that the individual attains an identity and sense of purpose. Cynthy’s approach to the family is revolutionary in its embrace of a type of universal motherhood where the disenfranchised are liberated to benefit from the fruits of the domestic sphere. In some respects, this mirrors Bronson Alcott’s utopian vision of a consociate family where the peculiar affections for one’s family members are blown open to the wider world, but Cynthy’s understanding of human caritas diverges from Bronson’s because the nuclear family is presented as the foundation for the wider human family of the public sphere. Cynthy does not do away with her primary affiliation with her children; she shares her family with anyone who happens to need it, and at any given time. In this way, the public life of the professional sphere takes its sustenance from the private world of the family and the two are in continual interchange. Cynthy is in accordance with the medieval mystics’ belief that the divine is at work in “the most domestic of affairs” (Lanzetta 161). Indeed, Teresa of Avila reminded her sisters they could encounter Christ in the daily activities of running a household, “The Lord works among pots and pans,” she wrote (qtd. in Lanzetta 162).

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 159 Tara Fitzpatrick claims that Alcott’s “sentimental narrative and her political goals were at odds” because Work reinforces the “sentimental economy” of the marketplace by requiring women to sacrifice their needs in support of the public sphere (31). In actual fact, the public sphere must conform itself to the model of the domestic sphere through prioritizing human relationships above economic gain. Cynthy enables Christie to leave her lodgings where she has been accumulating financial debt and enter into a home where her ‘rent’ is expending the sympathy she lavishes on the Wilkins children—something that is equally beneficial to her. The individualism of the marketplace is not transformed by selfsacrifice; it is rather transformed by a universal recognition of the importance of human connection. No one person sacrifices themselves wholeheartedly for someone else; all are interconnected in an intersubjective and outward-facing familial community that is the extension of the domestic sphere. Christie attempts to further perpetuate the domestic sphere into the outside world by marrying David Stirling, to whom she is introduced by Cynthy. Alcott presents Christie’s husband as an obstacle to her instigation of a female utopia of ‘happy women.’ As with Rossetti, who portrays the mother’s relationship with her children as disconnected from her conjugal bond, Alcott implies marriage must be dispensed with for women to dedicate themselves to the female community. Christie’s union with David is portrayed as a passing interlude that obstructs her benevolent mission. Alcott hints at its limiting potential from the commencement of the couple’s courtship, which is presented as a distraction from Christie’s religious faith: Everything did “go beautifully” for a time; so much so, that Christie began to think she really had “got religion.” […] …. it is unnecessary to explain what was the matter with Christie. She honestly thought she had got religion; but it was piety’s twin sister, who produced this wonderful revival in her soul (221–222) Given the narrative traces Christie’s conversion and her gradual adoption of a practice of lived religion, the fact she mistakes her love for David for “getting religion” indicates her romantic feelings have blinded her judgment and impeded the progress of her conversion (ibid.). When one considers Work was composed at the time of the Second Great Awakening with its emphasis on total submission to the will of God, the “wonderful revival” facilitated by Christie’s love for David stands in the way of her relationship with the divine, just as the husband in Rossetti’s work is a barrier between the individual and Christ (ibid.). As Alcott claims, something is ‘the matter’ with Christie: she is diverging from her

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path of self-discovery to, as Hendler would contend, submerge herself in “identification with the other” (Hendler “Louisa May Alcott” 691). Alcott’s response is to transform Christie and David’s marriage into a charitable mission, for it conveniently takes place at the outbreak of the Civil War. The abolitionist cause finally inspires Christie to redirect her attentions from the insular world of her romantic affections to social justice, and she insists upon being married in her uniform as a nurse, just as David is married in his uniform as a soldier. However, it is David who is martyred to the cause, shot while assisting a group of contraband women and their children to freedom. The act is symbolic, for David must sacrifice himself to make way for the interracial community of sisters promoted at the novel’s denouement. The author implies that if an intersubjective female community is to replace the solipsistic model of the capitalist marketplace, it must rise out of the ashes of the patriarchal hierarchy destroyed by the Civil War. Thus, upon his deathbed, David’s final words to Christie are: “You will do my part, and do it better than I could” (315). In the short term, David’s death liberates Christie to rededicate herself to the female community. It is the birth of her daughter, Pansy, that allows Christie to finally redirect her attentions away from her grief and envision a life without her husband. David’s death initially transforms Christie into a corpselike figure who resembles her reflection in the water during her earlier suicide attempt. Initially described as “tranquil, colorless, and mute … leaving the shadow of her former self behind” (316), Christie is brought back to life by witnessing the image of herself in her daughter: “Don’t let me die: I must live for baby now” (321). Christie finds “unspeakable delight” in the knowledge she has “a double duty to perform towards the fatherless little creature given to her care” (321). As both father and mother, Christie locates the image of the psychically whole self in the daughter she has seemingly conceived through a type of virgin birth, for the reader is barely given any insight into the conjugal relationship of Christie and David following their mutual enlistment (it is implied Christie conceives Pansy during a brief leave of absence when she visits her husband on the front lines—hardly the picture of marital bliss). Alongside Pansy, Christie forms a mutually supportive female family with David’s mother, Ruth, and Ruth’s estranged daughter, Letty. When Uncle Enos questions Christie concerning the division of finances in this “feminine household” (321), Christie explains: “we work for one another and share everything together” (325). As with the Trinitarian relationships portrayed in Maude and the Valentine’s Day verses, the women of the family become interchangeable in their outward-facing orientation to each other. Alcott defines the community they establish as the embodiment of the Christian virtues, founded on the “three good angels” of “faith, hope and charity” (329), which are presented in Corinthians 13:13 as the foundation of Christian life on earth. Charity, or caritas, is the self-giving

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 161 love for the other defined as the greatest of these three principles, and the Stirling women mirror the female Rossettis in becoming a united body that nevertheless enables each person to achieve a greater sense of ‘personhood’ through identification with others. Where Hendler would claim the formation of such sympathetic bonds equates to a loss of selfhood, Christie reconceives herself as a child of God through her participation in intersubjective female relationships: “Searching for religion, she had found love: now seeking to follow love she found religion” (319). It is the institution of marriage that threatens to submerge the female capacity for sympathy into the identity of the other, for the husband is positioned as the primary social subject from which the female is derived. By extricating her heroine from her marriage, Alcott liberates her to create a female society that counteracts both the individualistic vision of male genius and the materialistic values of the marketplace. Uncle Enos responds to Christie’s description of her intersubjective female community with contempt: “So like women!” he grumbles, soliloquizing that the equal division of household labor is not “a fair bargain” when Christie is the sole breadwinner (325). The diversion of Christie’s sympathetic power away from her husband towards the matrilineal community allows her to expand her sisterhood into the wider world. We can read Christie’s conversion experience as a vocational ‘calling’ moment that fulfils the search for meaningful work established at the novel’s opening. Following this spiritual awakening, Christie’s capacity for sympathy takes on a revelatory quality: she becomes a medium for a wider interracial sisterhood through facilitating communication between women from a wide range of ethnic and class groups. Alcott presents sympathy as an external force that speaks through her heroine, who is transformed into a type of oracle. Ultimately, the sisterly community provides an outlet for Christie’s sympathetic gift, which was formerly distorted by her quest for genius. Alcott suggests that self-expression must be replaced with sympathetic identification with one’s sisters. Christie relinquishes her pursuit of acclaim to dedicate her life to her sisters’ empowerment.

A “Sympathetic Undertone … So Magical in Its Effect”: Christie’s Transcendent Sympathy and the Extension of her Sisterhood Christie’s reassimilation into the matrilineal community enables her to expand this community into the public sphere. Following David’s death, Christie propagates the values of her sisterhood into the wider world. David’s martyrdom allows Christie to give herself wholeheartedly to her mission of instigating a universal Christian sisterhood through campaigning for women’s suffrage. At the novel’s denouement, Christie is portrayed attending a women’s rights meeting, likely based on the Seneca

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Falls Convention—an act that is inspired by David’s self-sacrificial martyrdom for abolitionism. Confronted with the site of a diverse group of women who are unable to relate to one another, Christie uses her “steadily increasing sympathy for all” to bring delegates into “truer relations with each other” (331). It is at this moment that Christie utilizes her artistic gifts to bring about widespread social reform, for she gives her “first public speech since she left the stage” (332). In contrast to the qualities of “selfishness, frivolity and vanity” (41) inspired by her acting career, Christie now projects a “subtle magnetism of character” conveyed by a “sympathetic undertone … so magical in its effect” (332–333). Her power of sympathy is finally translated into a tangible, public mode of communication capable of transcending boundaries and uniting women in universal sisterhood. She shares the medieval female mystics’ desire to bring women into a deeper communion with one another through “championing the rights of others” and promoting “selfacceptance” as foundational to Christian women’s “ethical and social concerns” (Lanzetta 86). Hendler’s reading of Christie’s speech takes on far more negative connotations than my own, for he claims Alcott’s failure to literally transcribe Christie’s words belies a “loss of self” that is the byproduct of sympathetic identification (“Louisa May Alcott” 17). In particular, he interprets Christie’s claim that: “[she doesn’t] deserve any credit for the speech, because it spoke itself” (L. Alcott Work 342) as evidence that “feminine subjectivity is predicated in self-negation” (Hendler “Louisa May Alcott” 17). Alcott does not transcribe Christie’s speech because it is a type of divine revelation presented as the inspired outpourings of a heroine who has become a vessel, or medium, for sisterly communion: “What she said she hardly knew: words came faster than she could utter them, thoughts pressed upon her, and all the lessons of her life rose vividly before her” (L. Alcott Work 332). As a type of oracle, Christie has broken down the barriers of selfhood in her capacity to identify with others. This portrayal of a protagonist who leaves her body to achieve mystical communion with her sisterly community extends Margaret Fuller’s vision of transcendent communication between the genders in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843). Christie’s “subtle magnetism of character” (L. Alcott Work 333) is allied with mesmerism, a philosophical theory (often referred to as ‘animal magnetism’) that claims an invisible life-force connects all phenomena, and human beings are able to use their emotional connections with one another to facilitate the healing of ailments. Dorri Beam argues that Fuller used mesmerism to redefine the Emersonian concept of the oversoul. Where in Transcendentalist philosophy the oversoul facilitates the divine vision of the individual, mesmerism champions utilizing the individual’s mesmeric energy to identify the self with others (ibid.). Beam contends that Fuller believed access to

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 163 “such energies were impeded by social identities, relations, and institutions that women could not peel off as easily as Emerson could ‘shun father and mother and wife and brother’” (88). As a way of combating this, Fuller upheld an androgynous vision of the relationship between male and female: In Fuller’s view, pure gender is never resurrected in the flesh; instead, the spheres of Fuller’s great radical dualism are permeable bodies that pass into and out of each other, mingling in various amounts and at varying locations. Fuller defeats the compartmentalisation of gender into separate spheres by releasing gender into the cosmic spheres, where bodies are permeable, shifting, and transmuting versions of their former state. (Beam 96) On gender, Fuller writes: “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another… There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (62). Thus, men and women are connected by a mesmeric force that passes through them, rendering their differences impermeable and transferable: “Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid” (ibid.). One might view Fuller’s mesmeric vision as a way of expanding sympathy, so that it allows women to overcome their limited social roles by embracing all identities and gendered experiences as inherently interconnected. Sympathy, then, does not facilitate the male artist’s individualism but instead allows multiple experiences to co-exist through reciprocal self-giving. Alcott extends Fuller’s vision, so the interconnection of multiple experiences is confined to the female community, thereby allowing women to redirect their sympathetic capacities towards their sisters’ empowerment. Christie’s role as a mesmeric oracle for the sisterhood also mirrors Abigail Alcott’s description of her role as a Home Missionary. Home Missionaries acted as intermediaries between the benevolent societies of the rich and the households of the working classes in an early form of social work. In one of her 1849 “Reports While Visitor to the Poor of Boston,” Abigail wrote: “I could serve the poor most effectively [by] becom[ing] an intelligent and acceptable medium of communication to the rich” (La Plante Boundless 160). Abigail’s description of herself as a “medium” alludes to the spiritualist movement, closely allied with mesmerism, and casts her as sympathetic vessel of communication across social strata (ibid.). The image of the female missionary as a receptacle of sympathetic communication between the classes bears strong resonances with the subtle ‘magnetism’ of Christie’s oratory as a bridge between the socially diverse groups of the suffrage movement. Indeed, Christie is able to conjure “a spirit of companionship” among the disparate group

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because of her diverse experience as a woman who had “known so many of the same trials, troubles and temptations” (L. Alcott Work 333). As a fictional counterpart of Abigail Alcott, Christie seeks to create a community where social divisions are transcended by the sympathetic relations between women. Abigail herself wrote: “I feel most near the divine when in the fullest accomplishment of my human relations” (LaPlante Boundless 182). Christie achieves her resemblance to Christ by facilitating the communion between the members of the sisterly community surrounding her. By spiritually giving herself to others through sympathy, she enables the community to become united as a single body and thereby imitates the person of Christ who ensures mystical communion between humanity and the divine through the incarnation. The final scene of the novel looks forward to the foundation of a feminist society that takes its life from the self-giving principles of sisterhood instigated by Christie. With the Civil War behind her, Christie observes she cannot give anything further to the cause of emancipation, other than her husband who went before her to “behold the glorious end” (L. Alcott Work 334). Christie’s final task is to bring women together across a wide range of class and racial divisions. She surrounds herself with “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor” (343) who are the prototype of the intersectional society of the future. At the novel’s close, the sisters Christie has adopted through her involvement in a diverse range of professions miraculously reappear, as if drawn by the powerful magnetism of her speech: all have heard about it, and all encourage her to “hold forth again” (342). Where Christie was estranged from her sisterhood and divided from herself during her episode of suicidal despondency, her sisters are providentially brought back to her when she is able to use her sympathetic capacities to “lay the foundation of a new emancipation” (334). One by one, each sister reappears to join her around the family table where “with one accord they [lay] their hands on hers” (343). Spanning a diverse cross-section of classes and ethnicities of nineteenth-century America, Christie’s sisterhood is a truly intersubjective and intersectional community that aspires to emulate Christ, for each sister gives herself entirely to the other’s wellbeing. Let us turn, then, to Christie’s Christ-like sisters and examine their truly intersubjective relations with one another.

“A Loving League of Sisters”: Christie’s Intersectional Sisterhood Christie’s dedication to helping her sisters overcome their social ostracization allows her to confront her own complicity in the unequal hierarchies of the public sphere. Her contact with a multi-racial sisterhood inspires her to create an alternative intersectional community, as well as to interrogate how her privileged social position has blinded her

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 165 to the inequalities upon which her elite status is predicated. The plight of Christie’s ostracized sisters galvanizes her to transcend the boundaries of her selfhood and enter into the suffering of others. Christie’s friend Rachel, who in a dramatic twist of fate is revealed to be David Stirling’s estranged sister, Letty, is presented as interchangeable with the heroine, and the sisters’ sympathetic relations with each another ensure their unification as one body. Rachel/Letty takes David’s place following his death and it is implied that David was only ever a proxy for his sister. When Christie first meets “Rachel” in the mantua-making factory, she acts like a suitor and “woo[s] this shy, cold girl as patiently as a lover might” (104), while “Rachel” in turn “watch [es] [Christie] with covert interest, stealing quick, shy glances at her as she sat musing over her work” (103). The relationship between Christie and “Rachel” contains surprising resonances with that of Lizzie and Laura in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” for Christie’s willingness to sacrifice herself for her fallen sister ultimately ensures the redemption of both women. When “Rachel” is fired from her position in the mantua-making factory on account of her disreputable past, she condemns her female colleagues for their inability to practice a type of lived religion and imitate Christ: Your piety isn’t worth much, for though you read in your Bible how the Lord treated a poor soul like me, yet when I stretch out my hand to you for help, not one of all you virtuous, Christian women dare take it and keep me from a life that’s worse than hell. (109) Both Alcott’s Christie and Rossetti’s Lizzie resist the mythology of the ‘fallen woman’ by bringing about their sisters’ redemption through acts of sympathy. At the moment “Rachel” claims that not one of her working sisters will dare to take her hand, flinging out this very hand “with a half-defiant gesture,” Christie symbolically takes it into her own (109–110). This act represents Christie’s determination to redeem her sister by identifying herself with her. She informs the factory-owner, Miss King, : “Some one must trust her, help her, love her, and so save her, as nothing else will. Perhaps I can do this better than you,—at least, I’ll try … even if I risk the loss of my good name” (sic 110). Just as Christ redeems humanity by taking on human flesh, so does Christie ‘save’ her sister through conflating her identity with hers. One wonders if Christie’s act was informed by the actions of Rossetti’s Lizzie who similarly brings about her sister’s redemption through inviting her to unite with her as one body, and thus be purified: Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me:

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“A Loving League of Sisters” For your sake I have braved the glen, And had to do with goblin merchant men. (C. Rossetti Poems 5–20 471–474)

If Lizzie’s act mirrors that of the Christian priest through enabling her sister’s communion with the transfigured Eucharistic body of a feminized redeemer, Christie likewise becomes one body with “Rachel,” since they co-raise Christie’s daughter, Pansy, after David’s death. Christie and “Rachel,” now Letty, are presented as parents in the “feminine household” the child is reared in: The purring and clucking that went on; the panics over a pin-prick; the consultations over a pellet of chamomilla; the raptures at the dawn of a first smile; the solemn prophecies of future beauty, wit and wisdom in the bud of a woman. (L. Alcott Work 321) As the “bud of woman” (ibid.), Pansy is the apotheosis of a gynocentric community, born in an overwhelmingly yonic household devoid of any traces of masculinity. The consultation over chamomilla, historically associated with female fertility, positions Pansy as the offspring of Christie and Letty. Pansy’s containment in an exclusively “feminine household” is retribution for David’s earlier rejection of his sister, as he disowned Letty and left her homeless after he discovered her “shame” (266). Christie claims David “atoned for that harshness to one woman by years of devotion to many,” transforming himself into “‘a brother of girls’ … a man that has a clean heart to love all women as his sisters” (267). As a form of restitution for the abandonment of his biological sister, David dedicates his life to the preservation of the sisterhood and sacrifices himself for its continuation into the next generation. Letty takes David’s place as Pansy’s second parent, uncannily mirroring the close of “Goblin Market” when Laura passes on the story of her redemption to her and her sister’s children in a shared household strangely devoid of fathers and husbands. The resonances between the relationship of Alcott’s Christie and Letty, and Rossetti’s Lizzie and Laura, are not merely limited to the redemptive power of sisterhood. Like Rossetti, Alcott also explodes the dichotomization between ‘pure’ and ‘fallen’ women by emphasizing the fact it is not sexual purity alone that defines a woman’s moral worth. Although Christie ‘saves’ “Rachel” in the first instance, it is “Rachel” who later redeems Christie during the latter’s suicidal episode. This encounter is significant because Christie is presented as the morally weaker of the two characters, even though she has preserved her chastity. When Rachel claims she went away to help other fallen women, so that she “might grow good enough to be [Christie’s] friend,” Christie responds: “See

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 167 what I am, Rachel, and never say that the more!” (126). Likewise, when David confesses he feared Christie would not accept his proposal when she “knew all” about his sister, she responds by asking him: “Did Letty tell you what she had done for me?”—placing her moral fault on an equal footing with Letty’s (272–273). The redemption between the two sisters in “Goblin Market” is also not one sided.1 Lizzie does not experience the same symbolic fall as her sister, but she is not a paragon of domestic virtue. Lizzie maintains her purity by shutting herself off from the world and denying the existence of temptation: “cover[ing] up her eyes,” thrusting “a dimpled finger/In each ear” and running away—thereby abandoning her sister to the temptations of the Goblin merchant men and the sight of their fruits (C. Rossetti Poems 5–20 50 67–68). Lizzie merely avoids sin by following the prescriptions of a social doxa she does not attempt to question, or ascertain the origins of: “We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits” (6 42–43). It is Lizzie’s physical and spiritual combat with the goblins that enables her to take on the role of heroine. In her quest to defeat the goblins, Lizzie is described as beginning to “listen and look” (13 328): observing the world around her and its trials and temptations, for the first time. Laura’s fall therefore enables Lizzie to exercise her agency and form an independent identity, ceasing to define herself through the social mores that surround her. Equally, Letty’s experience of despondency and her redemption at the hands of Christie enables her to later facilitate Christie’s redemption when she succumbs to the temptation of her own ‘bosom sin,’ indulging in a self-involved solipsism that culminates in her attempted suicide. The portrayal of sisterly relationships as mutually transformative is consistent across the range of class and ethnic groups contained in Christie’s intersectional sisterhood. Christie’s encounter with a fugitive African-American cook, Hepsey, during her time as a servant, forces her to confront her privileged social position—something her preoccupation with her struggles has previously obscured from her attention. Christie’s sense of the privileges that should be accorded to her as a woman leads her to refuse some of the work assigned to her. Disgusted at her employer, Mr. Stuart’s, request that she black his boots, Christie argues: “there ought to be a boy to do this sort of thing” (L. Alcott Work 21). Hepsey brings Christie to understand the ability to support one’s self is a privilege, and she must accept the responsibilities upon which her position is contingent: “Dere’s more ‘gradin works dan dat, chile … You’s paid for it … and if you does it willin, it won’t hurt you more dan washin’ de marster’s dishes” (sic ibid.). Hepsey unwittingly forces Christie to confront her unknowing investment in the hierarchy of the marketplace where poor children and African-Americans are forced to do the most degrading work, while

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educated white women like herself are led to believe such tasks are beneath them. The pride Hepsey takes in being remunerated for her work reminds Christie that if she wants to become a truly self-reliant woman she cannot expect to be placed above others on account of her background or social status. Hepsey is unashamed of taking on any labor, providing her humanity and autonomy are recognized, and she therefore offers to clean the master’s boots on Christie’s behalf: “You jes eave de boots to me; blackin’ can’t do dese ole hands no hurt, and dis ain’t no deggygation to me now; I’s a free woman” (sic ibid.). Christie’s encounter with Hepsey enables her to contemplate the nature of freedom and the symbolic importance of allowing women to become self-sufficient. Hepsey locates freedom in being paid for her work, rather than having both her body and labor seized as another person’s ‘property.’ Christie is forced to let go of the introspective fixation on her own needs and place her trials in the wider context of those of her disadvantaged sisters. Upon learning Hepsey was enslaved, Christie forgets “her own small injury at this suggestion of the greatest of all wrongs” and admits that she is “ashamed” of her refusal to black the master’s boots because she should not “feel degraded by it, though I should by letting you do it for me” (22–23). Thereafter, Christie attempts to erase the social distinctions between herself and Hepsey by sympathetically identifying herself with her enslaved sister. Upon learning Hepsey has been cheated out of the money she saved to secure her mother’s emancipation, Christie both sets aside a portion of her own wages and teaches Hepsey to read because she now regards “Hepsey’s cause as hers” (27). This mode of transformative identification is enabled by her ability to sympathetically immerse herself in Hepsey’s experiences, for “Hepsey could give her a comedy and a tragedy surpassing any thing she found in them, because truth stamped her tales with a power and pathos that the most gifted fancy could but poorly imitate” (27). Alcott underscores the importance of giving authentic testimony throughout the novel, since it is only through recognizing the validity of another person’s experience that true reform is achieved: Christie is moved to “tears of sympathy” by Hepsey’s account of her struggles (ibid.). Hepsey’s experiences as an enslaved woman (transmitted through her stories), and Christie’s biography (communicated through her speech), are contained within the narrative as testaments to the wider needs and experiences of the intersectional sisterhood fragmented across the public sphere. It is only through engaging sympathetically with her sisters’ experiences that the heroine achieves communion with them. Alcott also implies the novel itself should be reformed to include a more diverse range of stories and characters. Up against Hepsey’s stories, “novels [lose] their charm” because the authentic struggles of Christie’s AfricanAmerican sister are more urgent, authentic and compelling (ibid.).

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 169 Subtitled “A Story of Experience,” Work exposes the reader to the reality of the struggles of women across a variety of classes, employments, and ethnicities, including Quaker women, washerwomen, fallen women, and fugitive women. Based on Alcott’s own experiences in the workplace, it endeavors to open the eyes of its female readers to the plight of their sisters to galvanize them to join forces in promoting women’s suffrage at the close of the narrative.

“Bigger, Lovelier and More Imposing Than Any Woman I Ever Saw”: Female Creativity and Sisterly Ministry At the close of Work, Alcott demonstrates that by cultivating an independent identity in the workplace and engaging compassionately with the outside world, Christie’s sisterhood is able to create an alternative artistic community focused on the reform of the androcentric traditions of art they have inherited, redirecting the elevation of the individual to the mutual support of a diverse group of others. In the final scene of the novel, Christie and her ‘loving league of sisters’ come together to interpret a painting gifted to Christie by Mr. Fletcher: a rejected suitor who has come to accept the platonic sentiments she feels for him. The painting depicts a scene from The Pilgrim’s Progress: Part II (1688) where Mr. Greatheart leads Mercy and Christiana out of the City of Destruction. As each woman gazes on the picture, she sees her own life reflected in its image. Christie’s mother-in-law, Ruth Sterling, detects “just a hint of Davy” in the figure of Mr. Greatheart, while Hepsey observes that the female figures in the painting “oughter bin black.” Christie and Letty, meanwhile, observe that the child looks like Pansy (342). Each woman is liberated to read her own story into the picture, implying that the sisterly community has been freed to interpret the literary tradition through the lens of its relationships and experiences. Moreover, the fact the painting is a gift from Fletcher suggests the male artist will eventually accept the outward-facing values of the sisterly community. Fletcher agrees to Christie’s offer of friendship and gifts her with a scene from a seminal work of the male canon reinterpreted by both her and her sisters. If Fletcher must be rejected and David Stirling must die to allow the female community to form an independent identity and alternative set of values, this gesture of reconciliation indicates that after a period of gestation both male and female artists will come together collaboratively. Yet, the sisterly community must first be allowed a period of growth because the apotheosis of a new school of interpretation is contingent on the sisterhood’s engagement with the outside world. It is only through participating in philanthropic projects, aimed at aiding, and assisting the most downtrodden members of society, that the female community is

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finally able to instigate a new tradition of female artistry. Just as Maude Foster must become united with Christ before her poetry is able to be transformed into a vessel of his incarnate Word, so must each of Christie’s sisters learn to imitate Christ through focusing their attentions on the needs of others before they are able to reform the emphasis on solipsism and individualism contained within the androcentric traditions of art they have inherited. If Alcott’s Work only charts the inception of a newly formed school of female art, her earlier text, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1868), goes one step further to imagine a female circle that not only addresses the most pressing social issues of the day but also spearheads an idealized utopian community of female artists who create a public commentary on feminist issues in their work. This group consists of sculptress Rebecca Jeffrey, engraver Lizzie Small, author Kate King, and the heroine, Polly Milton, who is a musician. This sisterly community is referred to as “a different race of creatures” who are set apart from the superficial women who dominate fashionable society (227). Alcott’s creation of a “different race” of women stands out in her oeuvre for its total exclusion of men. Whereas Work presents the initial stage in the development of female artistry when women are freed to reinterpret male traditions of art, An Old-Fashioned Girl portrays a self-contained school of female art that does not refer to the seminal works of the male canon. The figure of the self-sacrificing male patron who gives up his romantic claim to make way for the ascension of the sisterhood is also notably absent. Alcott’s distaste for the figure of the husband as an obstacle on the female artist’s journey towards professionalization is made explicitly clear in her portrayal of the relationship between artists, Lizzie, and Rebecca, who “live together, and take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style” (223). Lizzie and Rebecca are almost certainly a lesbian couple, for “they work, eat, sleep and live [together], going halves in everything” (ibid.). The Greek myth surrounding the idealized friendship between Damon and Pythias is often read as an early portrayal of a homosexual relationship, and this interpretation was openly referred to in contemporary novels of the period, such as Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861): a story of the narrator, Robert Byng’s, love for the novel’s titular hero. Alcott was almost certainly acquainted with Cecil Dreeme, for an illustration of the novel’s protagonist is in her sister, May’s, private papers.2 Roberta Seelinger Trites also claims that the relationship between Rebecca and Lizzie was based on the historical relationship between sculptress, Emma Stebbins (a close friend of Alcott’s), and actress, Charlotte Cushman: a romantic union that was an open secret in Boston, referred to as one of the many “Boston marriages” between women (144). Within the realm of her domestic fiction, Alcott obscures her portrayal of Stebbins and Cushman’s relationship with a veneer of respectability, for Lizzie “is to be married in the spring” (229).

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 171 However, in the most unconventional manner, Rebecca continues living with Lizzie after her wedding because “nothing will part” these two “friends” (439). In one of her seemingly most conventional novels for children, Alcott manages to portray an exclusive female community of artists that propagates its values into the wider world without the assistance of a male mentor or patron. The final output of this artistic community is the creation of a sculpture, “Woman,” which is fashioned by Rebecca and reflects the entire community’s conception of what they perceive the ‘true woman’ to be (225). This sculpture deliberately undercuts the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ by referencing many of the images and roles traditionally associated with the ‘true women,’ in order to overthrow them. The statue is described as neither a “saint or a muse, a goddess or a fate, but … a beautiful woman, bigger, lovelier and more imposing than any woman I ever saw” (224). Significantly, Rebecca’s “true woman” is also surrounded by emblems of women’s “various talents,” including a “needle, pen, [and] palette,” as well as “the ballot-box,” which symbolizes the fact that she has “earned the right” to vote (225–226). In this, her most striking portrayal of a sisterly community, Alcott presents a female utopia able to produce a new emblematic image of the ‘true woman’: a self-sufficient artist who is able to make a contribution to society, independent of any contact with men. Alcott does not reject the family in this final image, since the sisterly family remains at the heart of this new vision, but in this most unusual sisterhood, the author finally presents a self-sufficient community that promotes its values to the outside world through artistic production, as well as philanthropic work. Like the sisterhood of Christina Rossetti’s Maude, this community is selfcontained, supporting the female artist in the realization of her ecstatic vision through its outward-facing ethos of care for others. Alcott’s portrayal of two sisterhoods who create new schools of art dedicated to alleviating inequality through empowering marginalized groups of women bears a strong affinity to the vision of social justice promoted in Liberation Theology. Founded after the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church (1962–1965), which strove to reconceive the social role of Christianity in the aftermath of both World Wars, Liberation Theology endeavors to apply the analytical frameworks developed in the social sciences to the Christian’s pursuit of social justice. It emerged in the Latin American churches who were confronting unprecedented levels of poverty, ecclesiastical corruption, and political exploitation at the time. According to Curt Cadorette, Liberation Theologians address the lack of human dignity accorded to the poor and disenfranchised by emphasizing “the power of the poor in history” who maintain “self-respect, solidarity, and hope for the future,” as well as religious faith, in the face of adversity (8). Their approach to the preservation of human dignity

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demands a “change of heart” in the way Christians conceive and practice their faith. “Praxis,” the Liberation Theologian’s term for lived religion, is championed as “the principal task of the Christian community” worldwide (7). As well as seeking liberation from human suffering through charitable projects, praxis conceives the Christian community itself as “a type of liberative practice,” an “example of living freedom … made possible by faith” (8). For Liberation Theologians, Christian communities exist to preserve the rights of their members who “enjoy each other, worship God, and achieve spiritual depth” (7–8). The myriad women’s ministries inspired by Liberation Theology share the vision of intersubjective sisterly redemption upheld in Alcott’s Work. Seizing on women’s status as others in societies that continue to regard them as creatures who are relative to men, these ministries challenge institutional male authority: addressing the needs of ostracized women in communal projects that Ivone Gebara claims are “not sanctioned by church officials” (63). Such ministries defend their autonomous role in the wider community on the grounds that theology is primarily generated through “oral transmission and the simple fact of sharing life” (Gebara 57). Many women who participate in the praxis of Liberation Theology are, like Work’s Cynthy Wilkins and Hepsey, illiterate—but they understand “women are gifted with a deep intuition for human life” and are uniquely equipped to “give counsel” and “provide support” (ibid). Theology, for such women, is formed in the communal relationships expressed in daily life; they reject abstract thought in favor of lived experience. At the heart of their mission is a continuing attempt to embody the person of Christ in their encounters with their impoverished sisters: their praxis is both mystical and incarnational, striving to attain divine union through serving others. The praxis of Liberation Theology in women’s ministries today is a contemporary version of the theology of caritas upheld in Alcott’s fictional sisterhoods. Alcott’s sisterly communities and the ministries inspired by Liberation Theology conceive sisterly relationships as expressions of God’s love for humanity that exude charity to the wider world. Women enact social reform through their power of sympathy for the socially alienated: their ability to identify with their suffering sisters enables them to become mystical vessels who express the needs of the wider female community, facilitating communication across classes and participating in the rehabilitation and recovery of all women, no matter their background, past, or social status. In their desire to act as a single body who reflects the divine, women’s ministries attached to Liberation Theology aspire towards a mystical communion based on the Trinity. By dedicating themselves to one another, women in these communities, endeavor to form a collective identity that acknowledges the innate dignity of each of their members. These ministries combine the communal model of the Rossetti women, who

“Happy Women”: Alcott’s Sisterly Utopia 173 achieve a vision of the divine through identifying with one another’s theologies of renunciation, with the Alcott women’s attempts to propagate the renunciatory vision of the matrilineal community to the wider world, as realized in the literary manifestos of Little Women, Work and An OldFashioned Girl. The women’s ministries in Latin America today share Alcott and Rossetti’s view that a meaningful vocation for women is not located in the pursuit of individual acclaim or genius, but rather in the mystical revelation of divine love generated through sisterly relationships. I conclude this chapter by touching on Liberation Theology because it demonstrates that the practice of women’s mysticism, which generates union with the divine through the experience of lived religion, continues to shape the reformist vision of Christian feminists today. It is quite probable that the women’s ministries associated with Liberation Theology have never heard of Alcott or Rossetti: they are grounded in a vastly different cultural context and denominational affiliation. Yet, their vision of spiritual sisterhood as the fruits of an incarnational theology complement Alcott’s and Rossetti’s attempts to achieve unification with their sisters through their practical and mystical imitations of Christ. Across the boundaries of time and space, these authors and ministries form a distinct spiritual tradition that practices renunciation with the view of empowering their littler, diminutive, and weaker sistren. Alcott’s novels, Work and An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Rossetti’s novella, Maude, are literary manifestos of the application of this spiritual tradition to women’s writing. For Rossetti, the devotional poet is the mouthpiece of her community of sisters who strive to gain admittance to the kingdom of heaven; for Alcott, the female author unites an intersectional sisterly community by creating a new school of art that promotes the innate dignity of women to the wider world. While the authors differ in their understanding of the social role of the devotional woman artist, they nevertheless agree that authorial identity is shaped by religious faith, mystical experience and renunciatory practice in the matrilineal community. If they were alive today, they would doubtless celebrate the continuing survival and reformist power of women’s ministries across the world as the fruits of a shared mystical matrilineal heritage.

Notes 1 This reading has a strong precedent. Galligani Casey writes, “This poem undercuts the traditional patriarchal binary concept that the redeemer is somehow ‘better’ than the redeemed…” (66), while 瀬名波栄潤 observes, “…. a passive maiden learns to take action in order to save other women and establish her potential outside of the domestic sphere” (16). 2 “Cecil Dreeme.” May Alcott Drawings, Loose Images from Green Album. AFAP, 1724–1927. MS Am 2745 IB (29a). Houghton Lib., Harvard.

Conclusion

Both Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti portray the female artist’s affiliation with her intersubjective sisterhood as contingent upon her rejection of the individualistic ideologies promoted by male literary traditions. If the authors’ public works articulate their adherence to their mothers’ theologies of renunciation, they also express Alcott’s and Rossetti’s definitive repudiation of the models of creativity inherited from the Pre-Raphaelites and Transcendentalists. Alcott’s allusion to The Pilgrim’s Progress in Work enacts a subtle commentary on her father’s ideology of individualism, for The Pilgrim’s Progress was seminal in Bronson Alcott’s philosophical writings and was later adapted by Louisa May Alcott to represent the providential theology of her mother in Little Women. When Louisa’s intersectional sisterhood interprets The Pilgrim’s Progress in light of their personal experiences, they reconfigure the values of the male canon and its emphasis on the hero’s solipsistic quest towards fulfillment. Alcott departs from the thematic preoccupations of her father’s interest in Bunyan’s spiritual allegory by focusing on the lesser-known second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1688), which concerns the spiritual journey of the protagonist’s wife, Christiana. In the more wellknown first part of the narrative (1678), Christiana is presented as an obstacle on Christian’s journey to eternal life: the hero runs from the door with his fingers in his ears to prevent his wife and children from convincing him to stay. Christian’s dogged pursuit of eternal life resembles Bronson Alcott’s fidelity to his philosophical principals, at the expense of his family’s wellbeing, in the Fruitlands experiment.1 By focusing on Christiana’s bildungsroman, Louisa allows the redemption of the female protagonist to take precedence over the male hero’s isolated journey of self-discovery. Christiana’s initial disregard for her husband’s distress and her investment in the pleasures of the City of Destruction are conveniently expunged from the painting presented at the end of Work. Instead, the image portrays two female figures holding a baby, protected by a “faithful” male guide (Work 342). Rather than endorsing a bildungsroman that reflects the

Conclusion 175 prejudices of a male writer, Fletcher’s painting allows the sisterly community to re-tell Christiana’s story from its own perspective. The ability of each sister to interpret the painting analogically in reference to her own biographical experience suggests that, like Abigail Alcott, the community embraces a providential theology concerning the trials and tribulations of daily life where each person is liberated to redirect their suffering towards the greater good of others through working in concert with the divine. The individualistic Romantic currents that permeated Alcott’s and Rossetti’s artistic milieux both found outlets in the authors’ commentaries on The Pilgrim’s Progress. Rossetti’s 1866 poem, “The Prince’s Progress” (89–104), is an ironic retelling of Bunyan’s narrative that signals her scepticism about the archetypical Romantic ‘questing’ hero. A “Sleeping Beauty” fairy-tale, this poem narrates the story of a prince who fails to overcome each of the obstacles he encounters on his journey to meet his predestined bride, eventually arriving late at the nuptial celebrations to discover she has died before he can give her the kiss of life. Rossetti portrays the Prince’s spiritual blindness as the source of his eventual downfall. His journey is centered on his own emotional and erotic fulfilment, and he is unable to recognize the typological signs that warn him of the impending spiritual danger.2 For instance, he first delays his journey upon meeting an overly sexualized “wave-haired milkmaid” who offers him a draught of milk if he will pay “her fee” (58 72). This “fee” is a promise to “sit under this apple-tree/Here for one idle day at [his] side” (81–82). Despite the obvious association of the apple-tree with the fall, the prince is oblivious to such intertextual allusions, believing that “for courtesy’s sake he could not lack/To redeem his royal pledge” (87–88). By portraying the hero’s deference to his chivalric courtesy as a pretext, Rossetti relocates the culpability for the fallen woman’s sexual indiscretions to the male protagonist. The milkmaid’s sexual power is discernible to both reader and prince; she writhes her hair around the prince like “shining serpent-coils” (94). Georgina Battiscombe has hypothesized that Rossetti’s creation of a prince whose procrastination inadvertently kills his bride was a veiled rebuke to Dante Gabriel Rossetti for his protracted five-year engagement to Elizabeth Siddal (116). Dante Gabriel seems to have been aware of the strain of his sister’s critique: his 1866 woodcut illustration, “You should have wept her yesterday,” depicts a figure, suspiciously like himself, being thrown out of the Princess’s palace by a “severe female” whom Christina admitted in a letter “somewhat resembles my Phiz” (qtd. in Battiscombe 124). Significantly, the poem presents this lone female figure as surrounded by a group of sisters who condemn the prince for arriving on the scene after the princess has died:

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Once again, Christina emphasizes the futility of the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with a dead beloved, who is presented as the ideal counterpart for a self-involved male artist. Here, the sisterhood suggests the prince has subconsciously desired the beloved’s death because he showed no urgency when she was in danger of losing her life. The attendants’ punishment for the adjournment of the prince’s journey is extreme: in the illustration he is arrested at the door and forcibly ejected from the palace by a group of severe looking waiting women whose flintlike faces belie their sensuous, free-flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair and medieval attire. The prince is finally forced to face the destructive ramifications of his spiritual blindness, for he covers his eyes in shame. The tenor of this illustration is significant because it demonstrates that, far from expecting his sister to blindly affirm his ideology of individualism as a satellite of the Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel understood her allusions to his spiritual blindness and acknowledged her religious faith as an important facet of her artistic identity. Dante Gabriel’s illustration does not merely acknowledge the centrality of his sister’s religious faith; it also recognizes the presence of a self-contained female community that drives male individualism from the enclosed space within which it exists. Where Louisa May Alcott’s reinterpretation of a seminal text of her father’s library allows some room to imagine a future where the male protagonist might be brought to a realization of the value of a female model of interpretation, Christina Rossetti condemns her protagonist’s rejection of a religious framework from the outset as insurmountable.3 Just as the Rossetti men’s dismissal of the spiritual authority of their mother ensures their exclusion from both the matrilineal community and the elect, so does the prince’s inability to recognize his unconscious desire for the death of his beloved ensure his banishment from the female space of the palace. There is no evangelical strain to Rossetti analogical narrative: the prince’s fate has been predetermined by his own obtuseness. Unlike Alcott, Rossetti has no faith in the female community’s power to transform the outside world through a universal application of its sisterly relationships, for the sisterhood does not even try to redeem the self-involved male hero. One senses that to do so would be to waste their time. Alcott’s and Rossetti’s vision of a self-contained community of female artists diverges at the point of the authors’ conception of the social purpose of women’s art and its engagement with the wider world. Social reform remains at the heart of the idealized female utopia presented in both Alcott’s Work and An Old Fashioned Girl. It is notable, though,

Conclusion 177 that Alcott excludes the male artist from her sisterly utopia in the latter text. While the male artist may be capable of achieving an egalitarian collaboration with his female counterpart, he must not be allowed to disrupt the sacred sanctuary of the sisterhood, upon which the eventual reformation of society is founded. This community’s transformative theology of caritas is derived from a feminine mode of perception that privileges the experience of marginalized others; the female artist achieves communion with this group of disenfranchised sisters by imitating Christ. Integration into Rossetti’s Christian sisterhood likewise depends upon a mystical union with the person of Christ, but this union is directed towards the achievement of a perfect communion between sisters in afterlife. The authors’ differing conceptions of the christic union between sisters stem from their mothers’ diverging theologies of renunciation. Louisa May Alcott embraces Abigail Alcott’s providential understanding of suffering through presenting the sacrifice of one’s needs to those of the other as integral to the reformation of society. In contrast, Rossetti remains focused on the relations of the sisterly community as reflections of the divine relations between the persons of the Holy Trinity. The sympathetic communion between Rossetti’s sisters is a product of their union with the divine, which is achieved through accessing the sacraments of the Church and shunning the toxic influences of a postlapsarian world. For Alcott, the divine union between sisters is attained through engaging with the material world to create an intersubjective society that embraces outward-facing orientation towards others. Nonetheless, Alcott and Rossetti are in concert in their vision of a sisterly community that achieves spiritual unification through sympathetic identification with others, allowing each of its members to transcend the barriers of selfhood through their practice of mysticism. Both authors reject the pursuit of genius and exceptionality, in favour of creating a communal vision of female creativity founded on the pursuit of the divine, and the promotion of Christian values. These sisterly communities are embodiments of the theologies of renunciation espoused by the authors’ mothers and focus on the importance of relinquishing the solipsistic pursuit of genius to achieve an ecstatic communion with one’s sisters. The authors’ canonical works promote the maternal values of the matrilineal community to the world at large, encouraging the wider female community to take up the sympathetic relations between women modelled by the Alcott and Rossetti families, and form their own elected Christian sisterhoods. Alcott’s and Rossetti’s understanding of the social purpose of these sisterhoods may differ, but their conceptions of the female predecessor from which they take their being are remarkably similar. While Alcott envisions a “true woman” who is “bigger, lovelier and more imposing than any woman I ever saw” (An Old-Fashioned Girl 224), Rossetti imagines a mother who is at once

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“a hero and a giant” (Letters 2 158). In the cases of both of these imaginary sisterhoods, it is that “mighty maternal love” that makes these “little women” truly matches for “very big adversaries” (ibid.).

Notes 1 The resonances between this passage and the Fruitlands experiment have been noted by Matteson (157), but he does not make any link to Alcott’s Work. 2 The Prince’s inability to recognize the symbols of Christian typology have likewise been discussed by Arseneau (“Pilgrimage”) and Dawn Henwood. 3 It is worth noting here that The Pilgrim’s Progress was a highly influential text in the Rossetti household. Packer claims that it was one of the first texts Frances Rossetti read to her children before they had learned to read themselves (13). Through reinterpreting a seminal text within the family tradition from a feminist perspective, Christina draws on the canon to openly challenge her brother’s rejection of the Tractarian religious faith. Christina’s revisions to Bunyan’s narrative would have been doubly significant to Dante Gabriel when he came to illustrate her poem, for the text would have contained significant childhood and familial resonances relating to the matrilineal tradition of spiritual instruction. Since The Pilgrim’s Progress was a text that the Rossetti siblings came into contact with through the matrilineal line, it is also apt that Christina creates a self-enclosed community of women who condemn the male protagonist at the poem’s denouement.

CODA Nineteenth-Century Women’s Matrilineal Theologies of Renunciation

I embarked on this work to uncover the obscured communities of nineteenth-century women who underpinned Alcott’s and Rossetti’s respective visions of sympathetic and divine sisterhood. Beyond the immediate purpose of revealing the inspirational power, intellectual rigor, and spiritual brilliance of the women behind the works, I set out to show that nineteenth-century women’s authorship is not solely defined by constructed patrilineal canons, even when the authors in question are closely connected to the forefathers of these canons through either familial ties, or wider socio-cultural networks. The case-study of Alcott and Rossetti reveals that Christian women inherit a legacy of shared metaphysical experience that finds its origins in women’s mysticism. The women of these matrilineal communities access the divine and propagate visions of left-handed societies through sisterly communion that transcends cultural and denominational disparities of experience. It is my hope that the patterns and resonances I have identified in the visions of the Alcott and Rossetti women will inspire further research on the metaphysical Christian experiences, theologies of renunciation, and matrilineal heritages of nineteenth-century women on both sides of the Atlantic. This coda to my work on Alcott and Rossetti maps out what it might look like to recuperate matrilineal heritage in its myriad manifestations and thus delineate the engagement with theologies of renunciation of a further group of nineteenth-century Christian women writers in the United States and Britain.

“Letting Go a Presence for an Expectation”: Emily Dickinson’s Doubting Theology of Renunciation The most important female American poet of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), has been defined by her renunciatory outlook and lifestyle. Like many medieval mystics, Dickinson responded to her authorial vocation by confining herself to the home and dedicating her everyday life to recording the metaphysical struggles, traumas, and experiences she received privately. Clothing herself in white as a sign of

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her devotion to her poetic calling in a manner that resembled the consecration of a religious visionary or a sanctified prophetess, Dickinson further unwittingly emulated her mystical foremothers by producing a prolific body of life-writing and verse that remained largely unpublished in her lifetime. As a contemporary of Louisa May Alcott whose New England milieu intersected with the Transcendentalists, Dickinson’s engagement with the ideologies of individualism that permeate the Romantic tradition are mediated through the figure of Emerson, who paid several visits to Dickinson’s brother and neighbor, Austin, and his wife and her close friend, Susan, from 1857. Joanne Felt Diehl has characterized Dickinson’s response to Emerson as expressive of an internal psychomachia or self-division whereby the Emersonian aspiration to identify with the external world through the conscious mind falls short and the poet is confronted with the jarring division between self and other, unable to access the oversoul (174). Dickinson’s renunciation can therefore be viewed as a reaction to the unsustainability of the Transcendentalist project for women. Her renunciatory practice can also be read as an expression of her ongoing rejection of her father’s attempts to sanction her metaphysical experience within the hierarchical structures of the Congregational Church through his persistent endeavors to facilitate her conversion.1 It is widely accepted that Dickinson’s renunciation was a conscious choice; yet, the devotional nature of her renunciatory aesthetics remains disputed. Diehl associates Dickinson’s attitude with her rejection of the Romantic tradition and subsequent “awareness of her own isolation” (11) where Angela Conrad reads Dickinson’s “reclusion” as a sign of her affiliation with women’s mysticism (xii). Conrad claims Dickinson’s aspiration towards “immediate contact with the divine” resembles the “spiritual exceptionalism” adopted by female visionaries (xiv). Shira Wolosky synthesizes these views by claiming Dickinson experiences a conflict between individualism and renunciation, but she views both artistic outlooks as unsatisfactory. When taken in its entirety, Dickinson’s work lacks the qualities of resolution and consolation we might find in the devotional verse of a selfconsciously Christian female poet like Rossetti. However, Dickinson’s preoccupation with the deferral of divine union is integral to her renunciatory aesthetics. Dickinson embodies what I term a ‘doubting theology of renunciation’: she rejects the internal division precipitated by individualistic ideologies in favor of striving upwards towards a divine revelation that can never be verified. She writes from a liminal space between individualism and divine union, and her verse is preoccupied with imagining the transcendent possibilities a theology of renunciation might activate, as well as the nihilistic abyss its failure might precipitate. Dickinson’s religious doubt is at its height when confronting the individualistic egotism of a patriarchal God who precedes the figure of

CODA 181 ‘poet as prophet’ upheld in American Romanticism. In number 747 (1863), Dickinson conflates the capriciousness of a tyrannical and allpowerful God with the arbitrary control an author wields over their fictional creations: “It’s easy to invent a Life – / God does it – every Day –” (333 1-2). The flippant ease with which the poet characterizes her ability to create (or, in this case, ‘simulate’ as is conveyed by the self-generating verb ‘invent’ – one that privileges human genius above the sanctity of created phenomena) indicates a lack of investment in the fate of her fictional creations or ‘lives,’ one that is mirrored by a self-satisfied God who creates the world as a sign of his virtuosity: “Creation – but the Gambol / Of His Authority –” (ibid. 3-4). This imagined individualistic God conceives his Creation as a perverse experiment executed to evidence his divine power: The Perished Patterns murmur – But His Perturbless Plan Proceed – inserting Here – a Sun – There – leaving out a man – (ibid. 9-12) The creator’s “Perturbless Plan” is exacted without consideration for its impact on creation (ibid.). Likewise, the poet also inserts their “Perturbless Plan” on the world of the page without due regard for the life of their subject beyond that subject’s display of the poet’s innate craftsmanship (ibid.). Authorial individualism, for Dickinson, is the primeval origin of religious doubt. Dickinson is unable to transcend her vision of an egotistical God because her religious doubt impedes her ability to envisage a world to come. Number 725 (1863) painfully affirms: “I’m finite – I cant see” (sic 324 4) when the poet attempts to visualize “Their hight in Heaven” (sic ibid. 1), referring to elect. Significantly, the misspelled “hight” remains trapped in its own literality: it can be nothing more than a measurement, as opposed to an imagined space that exists beyond the material world (ibid.). The poet cannot visualize any form of being beyond the limitations of their own finitude and, as such, “Their hight in Heaven” (which does, indeed, presuppose the existence of the elect, while it yet remains faceless) “comforts not”: the existence of such a company remains static and ineffectual as long as the poet is unable to access or interact with it (ibid.). The possibility of metaphysical transcendence is continually undermined by its inability to manifest itself, rendering the heavenly sphere a mere “House of Supposition” “skirted” by “Acres of Perhaps” where all ideal forms remain as contingent and gestational as the opaque metonyms that offer up their own ghosts in a world where every image is equivalent to an invisible counterpart that cannot be visualized (ibid. 4-5). Dickinson inhabits a liminal space between doubt and faith, as described in Number 743 (1863): “Behind Me – dips Eternity – / Before Me –

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Immortality – / Myself – the Term between” (332 1-3). She may acknowledge the objective existence of both “Eternity” and “Immortality,” but as the “term between” she is destined to access neither—remaining forever imprisoned in the poet’s world of imagined forms and possibilities as a type of mediatrix who cannot facilitate her own transfiguration (ibid.). When authorial individualism is relinquished, Dickinson is caught between the closed world of self that no longer possesses the capacity to encompass the whole universe and the infinity beyond self that is unable to encompass the poet in its own divinity. Renunciation is an ascetic practice that allows the poet to affirm the possibility of eternity through her very inability to verify it. Dickinson renounces the dualistic divide between corporeal and spiritual to affirm the existence of both, while acknowledging her inability to reconcile the two. Thus, in Number 782 (1863), Dickinson writes: “Renunciation – is a piercing Virtue/The letting go/A Presence – for an Expectation” (349 1-3). Like the ancient prophet who obliterates physical sight to overcome spiritual blindness, Dickinson defines renunciation as “The putting out of Eyes”; she must relinquish her limited sight to affirm the existence of an object beyond the scope of that sight (ibid. 5). Dickinson’s doubting theology of renunciation allows the static position of doubt to annihilate itself in the face of the possibility of divine transcendence, so that the existence of that very transcendence may never be contested. The poem closes with her reducing herself to an infinitesimal scope, so that she may finally be obliterated by the vision she cannot attain: “Smaller – that Covered Vision – Here –” (ibid 16). As the “Covered Vision” emerges, the poet in her “smallness” vanishes from the page—leaving the reader to grasp at the illusive transcendence that has continually evaded the poet (ibid.). Dickinson’s doubting theology of renunciation resists the ideology of individualism upheld in American Romanticism. In the absence of a matrilineal community who would facilitate a mystical revelation of the divine, Dickinson inhabits a liminal space between the inward-facing outlook of authorial individualism and a total unification with the Creator enabled by ecstatic self-giving. Unable to achieve the spiritual transfiguration to which she aspires, Dickinson instead deploys her doubting theology of renunciation to obliterate the self and create space for her readers’ possible spiritual transfigurations. Her internal psychomachia, characterized by a conflict between a destructive individualism and transcendent spiritual communion, mirrors that of Rossetti—but Dickinson lacks the divine maternal figure who acts as mediatrix between material and spiritual worlds. Likewise, she shares Alcott’s critique of Emersonian individualism as an arbitrary exercise of power but lacks the sisterly community Alcott deploys to counteract this ideological tyranny with a self-giving theology of caritas. An isolated female mystic who stands outside the male literary tradition, Dickinson is unable to

CODA 183 access the female community who would facilitate the divine mystical union to which she aspires. As such, the vision of her divine union is bequeathed to her readership who possesses the power to either embrace her aspirational doubt, or imbue it with faith.

“Where Did Your Christ Come from? From God and a Woman”: Sojourner Truth’s Spiritual Motherhood If Dickinson is emblematic of the fate of the nineteenth-century female poet who cannot identify an alternative matrilineal community with whom to affiliate herself, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) demonstrates how a woman who has known, and yet been deprived of, her matrilineal heritage might deploy the spiritual legacy of her motherhood to envision a transformed left-handed society. Born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree, Truth renamed herself after her 1836 escape to freedom when she was later “called in spirit” to “travel east and lecture,” thereafter providing testimony concerning the mystical experience that led to her conversion, as well as promoting abolition and women’s suffrage (Truth 73). Truth is notable for developing a model of African-American spiritual motherhood centered on the mystical adoption of an interracial society in a period when the concept of ‘Republican Motherhood,’ largely deployed to justify women’s reformist work, was open only to middle-class white women. Republican Motherhood advocated for the political power of the mother in the American household by arguing that the moral values of the nation were transferred from mothers to sons and thereafter perpetuated in the public sphere. This concept was, in Leslie J. Harris’s words, “deeply entrenched in specific expectations of gender, race and class” and was “problematic for slave mothers who lost control of the most basic elements of their lives” (300). Truth rejects Republican Motherhood and upholds the spiritual authority of the African-American mother, who has faced spiritual and maternal deprivations and is able to ‘mother’ the body politic and assist in its spiritual regeneration through working towards an egalitarian interracial sisterhood. According to Rosetta R. Haynes, the African-American spiritual mother refigures “the physical degradation of enslaved women” by placing her faith “in the power of divine authority to overcome human opposition” (3 156). The spiritual mother extends the role of the ‘outraged mother’ by viewing her enforced separation from her children as a justification for mothering the nation. Truth combines the ideal of sympathetic identification championed by Abigail Alcott with Frances Rossetti’s role as intermediary who enables her children to access divine transfiguration through spiritual unification with the mother. Truth’s divine motherhood is enabled by a mode of mystical revelation that empowers her to view her experience of deprivation through a

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providential framework that presents her spiritual survival, and the religious testimony that emerges from it, as integral to the conversion of others. Truth’s mediated memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), dictated to her amanuensis and editor, Olive Gilbert (1898–1981), presents her mother, Mau-Mau Bett, as a spiritual role-model who lays the foundation for her daughter’s future mystical revelations. Mau-Mau Bett’s conceptualization of the divine is based on her private spiritual intuition, which empowers her to develop a vision of a privileged, intimate relationship between the enslaved child and God. In conversations with her children, Mau-Mau Bett describes God as “the only Being that could effectually protect them” and develops a providential vision of human cooperation with the divine: “when you are beaten, or cruelly treated, or fall into any trouble, you must ask help of him, and he will always hear and help you” (Truth 12). Throughout her mediated memoir, Truth follows her mother’s example by attributing her survival and liberation from slavery to her collaboration with God in the execution of his providence. Truth offers prayers for her preservation during the most crucial moments of her life and interprets the serendipitous convergence of circumstances and events as the direct answer to these prayers. In recounting her autobiographical narrative to Gilbert, Truth affirms, “And now … though it seems curious, I do not remember ever asking for any thing but what I got it . And I always received it as an answer to my prayers” (sic 19). As a biographical work, Truth’s mediated memoir presents the providential trajectory of her life as finding its fulfillment in a mystical revelation of God and conversion experience, the impetus for her subsequent pursuit of spiritual motherhood. Truth is prevented from being returned to her ‘master’ after he hires out her services to a Quaker couple by a vision of God, who, “with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning,” reveals that “he pervade[s] the universe (47). In the tradition of the medieval mystics, Truth’s revelation inspires an awareness of her human insignificance in the eyes of God, precipitating “a dire dread of annihilation” (48). Truth’s emerging awareness of her spiritual insignificance advances the divine protection she seeks throughout the text. At the moment she becomes aware of her spiritual inconsequentiality, she realizes her ‘master’ has abruptly left without explanation—tacitly accepting her desire to secure her freedom under the 1827 New York Emancipation Act. Truth provides no explanation for her ‘master’s’ abrupt departure, but it raises the question of whether he partook in her mystical revelation in a moment of unsought spiritual communion. Like the Protestant mystics before her, Truth’s immanent experience of the divine enables her to resist injustice and undertake an evangelizing mission. Following her vision, Truth becomes an itinerant preacher whose advocacy for

CODA 185 abolition and women’s suffrage hinges on the direct testimony she receives from God. As a preacher, Truth adopts a new identity as a spiritual mother, which she puts forward in her famous “Ar’n’t I a woman?” speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention of Akron, Ohio. Responding to demands that she desist from taking the stand on account of her race, as well as the hypotheses of Methodist preachers who “claimed superior rights and privileges for man on the ground of superior intellect” and the “manhood of Christ” (Truth 99), Truth provided a catalogue of all she had endured as an enslaved woman, punctuated with the refrain ‘Ar’n’t I a woman?’—a subversion of the abolitionist motto, ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ Foregrounding the spiritual superiority evidenced by her endurance of outraged motherhood as a woman who had borne “thirteen chilern and seen ‘em … all sold out into slavery” (sic 100), Truth strikingly pre-empted Christina Rossetti’s claim to women’s spiritual equality with men on account of their maternal role by presenting her audience with the question, “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him” (sic 101). Truth centralizes what is implicit in Rossetti’s matrilineal theology, namely, that mothers secure the redemption of their children because Christ’s salvific role as redeemer was made possible by the spiritual cooperation of his own mother, a spiritual cooperation that mirrors Truth’s collaboration with God’s providence. Significant to Truth’s assumption of spiritual authority is its grounding in her power as an orator. She stands out among the subjects of slave narratives for her continuing illiteracy, which was undercut by the electrifying auditory power she deployed to affect her audience emotionally, physically, psychologically, and intellectually. Her prophetic persona curiously resembles the heroine of Alcott’s Work, Christie, who correspondingly utilizes her sympathetic power as an actress to draw her audience into an interracial sisterhood united in the common cause of women’s suffrage. In complementarity with Christie, Truth’s oratorical power likewise generated a wider interracial, Christian sisterhood. Jean M. Humez claims that Truth’s career as a preacher integrated her into a variety of “networks of sympathetic antislavery neighbors” (34), eventually resulting in the creation of her mediated memoir with Olive Gilbert. Truth’s interracial sisterhood included the author and abolitionist activist, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), a close friend of Abigail Alcott. The resonances between Sojourner Truth’s matrilineal theology and the historical models of the Alcott and Rossetti women are surprisingly numerous. Truth’s vision of divine maternity coincides with Christina Rossetti’s championing of the earthly mother as an intercessory vehicle who enables her children to ascend upwards into the communion of saints. In divergence with Rossetti, however, Truth utilizes her

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experience of outraged motherhood to stake a broader claim for the wider spiritual motherhood of African-American women. For Truth, divine maternity is integrated in a reformist project that mirrors Louisa May Alcott’s vision of an interracial sisterhood borne out of the immediate matrilineal community. A remarkable testament to the legacy of African-American motherhood, Truth’s Narrative demonstrates that a persecuted and dispersed matrilineal community can provide a foundation for the spiritual reformation of society at large by dint of its very survival.

“O God, No Blasphemy It Is to Feel We Loved in Trinity”: Mystical Communion in the Matrilineal Community of “Michael Field” Sojourner Truth’s formation of a fully developed matrilineal theology in the face of the dispersion of the nuclear family speaks to the immense possibilities for shared subjectivity and mystical communion in the matrilineal community itself. These possibilities are realized in the contained matrilineal community of “Michael Field,” a literary pseudonym for aunt and niece, Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913). Bradley and Cooper produced eight collections of poetry, twenty-seven plays, and thirty manuscript volumes of collaborative diaries, Works and Days, from 1879–1914, the year of Bradley’s death, when she brought out an edited collection of Cooper’s early work, Dedicated, following the latter’s death the previous year. It is germane to provide a short biographical sketch of Field’s life and praxis, since their shared life together shaped their compositional process and critical reception. Their mutual life began in 1864 when Cooper was two and Bradley eighteen, after the latter assumed responsibility for the former when the birth of Cooper’s sister, Amy, resulted in the extended convalescence and ongoing invalidism of her mother, Emma. Four years later, Bradley left the Cooper household to pursue her literary studies at the Collège de France; Newnham College, Cambridge and University College, Bristol where Cooper eventually joined her in 1879 at the age of 17. The authors’ literary collaborations commenced at this time, alongside their romantic relationship, explicitly documented in correspondence and journals. Thereafter, they embarked on a collaborative career as Aesthetic poets and dramatists. Their Pagan spiritual and erotic beliefs characterized their early work but was superseded by the devotional verse that followed their mutual conversion to Catholicism in 1907. This conversion was precipitated in part by Cooper’s ill-health but was more closely connected to the poets’ mutual grief for their beloved dog, Whym Chow: a pet they had simultaneously regarded as a proxy child and force of pantheistic divinity. Thereafter, Cooper and Bradley

CODA 187 embarked on a new celibate life together that culminated in their respective deaths of cancer in 1913 and ’14. Field’s shared life and output are remarkable in that “in many ways [it] belongs altogether outside the tradition of Victorian women’s verse,” expressing a startling freedom from the heteronormative values and societal mores of nineteenth-century Britain (Leighton 203-204). Their shared authorial identity demonstrates that, in its most extreme embodiment, the matrilineal community can contain all aspects of female experience, which are, in this historically specific case, eventually sublimated to the spiritual. It should be noted, however, that both women felt their mystical transformation was the apotheosis of their shared selfhood. While the early stages of Field’s recovery in the 1990s focused on the authors’ earlier Bacchic, Pagan work at the expense of the Catholic poems, a growing body of millennial critics have explored Field’s Catholic output as “the legacy of the [authors’] earlier euphoric paganism [transformed] into its newly configured emotional guise” (Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo 48). Leire Barrera-Medrano’s scholarship is significant for uncovering Field’s devotional roots in the tradition of Spanish mysticism, a mode of spiritual writing focused on “transcend[ing] the boundaries of language and liberat[ing] previously untapped resources of expression” (212). I build on the current trend in Field scholarship by arguing that the poets’ mystical theology realized their pursuit of ecstatic experience as Pagans. Bradley and Cooper’s metaphysical union forced them to locate themselves in a vision of divine immortality. Paganism proved insufficient because the poets’ matrilineal union was multifaceted: motherly, sisterly, and erotic, it required a multi-dimensional vision located in the fluid relations of the Trinity. The authors presented themselves as single entities who were both distinct and united, locating their particularity in the ways they related to one another. Field’s development of a Trinitarian poetics was inspired by Whym Chow, whom they regarded as their spiritualized child. Bradley expounded on the importance of Whym Chow, soon after his purchase, in Works and Days. In an entry for January, 1898, Whym Chow is described as an emblem of Field’s mutual “desire to get into another kingdom,” a “kingdom of animals” that exists on a continuum with the “kingdom of the dead” and is able to achieve “companionship” with the whole of creation (Field 265). Following Whym Chow’s death, Cooper experienced a revelation of the Christian God that incorporated the poets’ Bacchic sensibilities into a vision of immortality: Wednesday 14th [February 1906] Sun—our South sun! How immediate the sun! That is why Chow is with us—flash after flash we see him; & all his living zeal is round our spirits.

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In her subsequent entry to Works and Days, Cooper recorded her reconciliation “with the only True Church”—making it clear the Bacchic God with whom Whym Chow was associated was also the Trinitarian God of the Catholic faith (ibid. 1907). The passage describing Whym Chow’s transfiguration furnishes a unique record of the process of Field’s conversion, which laid the foundation of their Christian poetics. Metaphorically conflated with the Sun, Whym Chow is associated with both the source of Pagan worship and the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity. By re-christening the dog “Now-Now,” Cooper expresses an incarnational faith that presents the union between God and creation as ever-present in nature (ibid.). Following Whym Chow’s death, the authors turned to Catholic mysticism as a theological framework that could combine their ecstatic, Bacchic love for one another with a wider vision of divine immortality. Whym Chow’s death marked a new phase of Catholic poetics that culminated in the publication of Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914), a poetic requiem that recorded the transformation of the dog from a Bacchic demi-god to an earthly manifestation of the Holy Spirit. In a reverse trajectory to the Rossetti women, whose mystical union originates in the procreative source of the mother, Field regard their divine union as activated by Whym Chow: the spiritual child who proceeds from their divine love for one another. In Number V, “Trinity,” Whym Chow is presented as a divine, communicative medium between Cooper and Bradley, who transmits the poets’ love into perpetuity as the “Unconscious Bearer of Love’s interchange” (Field 185 18). In a moment of radical challenge that flirts with blasphemy, Bradley demands that God accept the veracity of the matrilineal community’s Trinitarian configuration: “O God, no blasphemy/ It is to feel we loved in trinity, / To tell Thee that I loved him as Thy Dove” (185 3-5). Bradley boldly adopts the formation of the Trinity for her contained matrilineal unit, usurping this formation from God himself, and reimagining Whym Chow as the Holy Spirit, transformed from dove to dog. Implicit in her usurpation of the Trinitarian form is a need to find an equivalent to the divine in the matrilineal community’s relations with one another: her love for Whym Chow is equivalent to the love the Father bears for the Holy Spirit, proceeding from his union with the Son. Bradley concurs with the Rossetti women’s claim that the fluidity of relationships between women, derived from mutual identification within the matrilineal community, is the human model that most closely resembles the self-giving relationships of the Trinity.

CODA 189 Field’s remarkable literary output, defined by their collaborative poetics, proves that sympathetic identification between women in the matrilineal community can be all-encompassing, incorporating motherly, sisterly, erotic, and spiritual relations. Their renegade lifestyle and unconventional writing process challenges the Bloomian theory that all models of authorial identity are characterized by a struggle with one’s androcentric antecedents. Central to Field’s ability to resist dominant male paradigms of authorship is their fundamental queerness: the unconventional nature of their romantic relationship, which defies even present-day norms in its incestuous matrilineage, nevertheless allows Field to create a fully fledged alternative framework for the benefit of the female community. It is intriguing that the self-contained matrilineal community encompassed by Field echoes the poetics of the Rossetti women by turning to the Trinity as a vehicle for imagining a matrilineal mystical union bridging earthly and heavenly spheres. For Field, incorporation into the Trinitarian God was the ultimate manifestation of their love for one another. As such, they admired Christina Rossetti as a mystical poet who straddled material and spiritual states. Concerning Rossetti, Field wrote in Works and Days: “She has neither out-look or inlook; […] she has music & fragrance & flight; she passes among us a singing bird & her song drops spices … Take her anywhere—she is the poet” (sic Field 279). Field’s matrilineal community may have been self-contained, but they were aware of a wider community of female poets with whom they were spiritually affiliated. As the “singing bird” that flies between earth and heaven, possessing neither “out-look or inlook,” Rossetti was the precursor of Field’s mystical matrilineal community because she was the poet whose Trinitarian poetics propelled her own mother and sister into the world to come (ibid.). Perhaps Bradley and Cooper not only hoped to meet Whym Chow in the heavenly sphere, but Rossetti herself as the poet of “music & fragrance & flight” (ibid.) who sought a mystical union with the matrilineal community for all of eternity.

“But You Have Come!”: Transatlantic Spiritual Sisterhood and Mystical Communion in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle In the composite authorial identity of “Michael Field,” scholars and students of nineteenth-century women’s writing witness the capacity of the matrilineal community to contain a diverse range of female experiences and relationships. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle (1907) expands the metaphysical transcendence of matrilineage to map nations, envisaging a transatlantic sisterhood emerging from the phenomenon of transatlantic marriage that gripped the British and American aristocracy and moneyed classes from the 1870s until the outbreak of the First

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World War. Burnett (1849–1924) was an Anglo-American novelist whose family immigrated to the United States when she was 16 years old in 1865. From the 1880s she embarked on regular transatlantic trips to England where she purchased a second home and authored two of her most famous children’s novels, A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). During this period, she was uniquely well situated to observe the dynamics of numerous transatlantic unions forged with the view of repairing dilapidated English estates because her dual nationality enabled her to permeate both the British and American milieux of the spouses of her acquaintance, as well as to observe the misunderstandings and discontents occasioned by the cultural differences with which she was so intimately familiar. From 1870–1914, over 450 American heiresses, the daughters of wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs, married European aristocrats—over a quarter of whom were British.2 These ‘title-heiress marriages’ were the subject of fascination in the American media and popular culture: discussed in gossip columns, short stories, and both popular and canonical novels. They were viewed as a microcosm for the growing rapprochement between Britain and the United States, evidenced by the increase in international travel, mutual business collaboration and investment, as well as the wider transatlantic dissemination of American mass culture. However, as these international marriages proliferated, the American press became progressively disillusioned with their outcomes. Increasingly, it was apparent that the American unfamiliarity with the British class structure led many powerful businessmen to unwittingly encourage their daughters to enter alliances with “cash-strapped young [men], needing money either for the upkeep of a crumbling familial estate or to service debts accumulated during years of fashionable debauchery” (Woolf 162). Entering the midst of this debate in 1907, Burnett’s text indicates the most effective antidote for alleviating the breakdown in national and gendered relations is the transformative power of transatlantic sisterhood. The Shuttle is set in the 1870s (the height of the international marriage craze) and examines the destiny of a naïve American heiress, Rosalie Vanderpoel, who is duped into marrying a brutish Baronet, Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Anstruthers has mortgaged his estate, Stornham Court, in his pursuit of a destructive and debauched lifestyle. He is verbally, physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive to his wife. His psychological manipulation and control of Rosy are eventually thwarted by her younger sister, Bettina. Unlike Rosy, described as “an innocent, sweet-tempered girl with a childlike simpleness of mind,” Betty represents a new type of American woman who possesses “a genius for life, for living herself, for aiding others to live, for vivifying mere existence” (Burnett 2007 13 76). She travels to England while Anstruthers is abroad, setting Stornham in order and assisting in the recovery of her sister’s health. On Anstruthers’ return, she resists his physical advances,

CODA 191 which culminate in an attempted sexual assault prevented by her future husband, Lord Mount Dunston. After Anstruthers is whipped by Mount Dunstan, he descends into madness and wastes away—leaving Betty to reunite Rosy with the Vanderpoels and restore a second dilapidated estate in Dunston Park. In her portrayal of the relationship between Rosy and Betty, Burnett suggests the mystical communion between sisters transcends national boundaries, customs, and cultures, as well as the hardships and abuses nineteenth-century women face. Whatever the pitfalls of the international marriage, Burnett regards the union as inextricably intertwining the fates of Britain and America. As such, it falls to the all-enduring mystical sisterhood to set the deterioration in the relations between nations, encapsulated in the title-heiress marriage, to rights. This restoration of transatlantic relationships and female fulfilment is, in part, secured through a theology of renunciation: both Rosy and Betty are spiritually purified by the sacrifices they make for one another, their loveinterests, and families, and these sacrifices are portrayed as integral to the eventual restoration of the transatlantic family-unit. The survival of the sisters’ bond through 12 years’ separation is also portrayed as an act of providence: both women pray for their reunion and Rosy’s redemption, and each conceives the power of prayer as integral to the development of their transatlantic fates. Each sister is subject to moments of mystical revelation, and it is apparent that their bond extends beyond the immanence of physical companionship. Rosy regards Betty’s arrival at Stornham Court as the prophetic answer to her prayers. She informs Betty of the spiritual counsel she has received from the local curate, Mr Ffolliott, who has intuited the nature of her abusive marriage and consoled her with his faith in the work of God’s providence: “God will help you. He will. He will” (Burnett 2007 187). At first, Rosy, who has been beaten into submission, cannot place faith in the existence of a God “who has not forgotten [her]” (ibid. 187). Yet, on relaying the story of Ffolliott’s spiritual guidance to Betty, “A strange, almost unearthly joy … flash[es] across [Rosy’s] face” (ibid. 193). In Betty herself, Rosy identifies the hand of providence: ‘It must be true,’ she said. ‘It must be true. He has sent you, Betty. It has been a long time — it has been so long that sometimes I have forgotten his words. But you have come!’ (ibid.) The interpretation of Betty’s arrival as the direct response to Rosy’s prayers suggests that the tensions between the British and American nations cannot sever the spiritual communion between sisters, which transcends national borders. Rosy’s reaction to Betty’s presence proves the sisters’ continuing mystical union has not been ruptured by the transference of Rosy’s national allegiances.

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Rosy’s reunion with Betty and her final redemption are also the product of her theology of renunciation. The spiritual relationship she cultivates with Ffolliott, the impetus of her prayers and Betty’s eventual arrival, generates a romantic love for the curate that can never be reciprocated. Barred from pursuing a relationship with Ffolliott by her marriage, as well as the false rumors Anstruthers spreads concerning an adulterous union between them, Rosy never informs Ffolliott of her feelings in the knowledge that a romantic relationship will destroy his reputation and prevent the longed-for reunion with her family in New York. Rosy’s sacrifice of her love for Ffolliott enacts a type of spiritual purgation, the fruits of which are her rescue from Anstruthers. The cost of her sacrifice is revealed to her in a mystical dream that culminates with her own “strange loud cry,” bringing it home “that the years would go on and on, and at last some day [Ffolliott] would die and go out of the world … And he would never know” of her love for him (Burnett 2007 410). Rosy’s dream and her physical reaction suggest that her theology of renunciation is the product of a divine providential plan that brings about the reunion between herself and Betty. Crucially, Rosy is able to channel the sacrifice of her love for Ffolliott towards the spiritual rescue of Betty during Anstruthers’ attempted assault. When Betty goes missing, Rosy sends Mount Dunston to search for her, intuiting from personal experience that Betty loves him. In a literal and figurative dark night of the soul, Rosy spends the night praying for her sister—offering up her suffering for Betty’s safety—and unwittingly bringing about Betty and Mount Dunston’s union through her actions. Upon their return to Stornham the following morning, Rosy testifies that “a great gulf had been crossed [between Betty and Mount Dunston] in some inevitable, though unforeseen leap” (ibid. 460). Unbeknownst to her, that leap has been precipitated by her sacrificial offering of her romantic love in exchange for her sister’s survival. The redemption that is enacted through the sisters’ relationship is not one way: like Lizzie and Laura in “Goblin Market,” Betty and Rosy redeem and rescue each other. Rosy may be compelled to offer the sacrifice of her romantic union with Ffolliott for the sake of her reunion with her sister, but this is carried out in the understanding that the sisterly bond is superior to the romantic one. Although Betty is the sister Burnett describes as possessing “an unfair endowment” of material and spiritual good fortune, she is also required to make an act of spiritual purgation before she can attain fulfillment through her respective (re)unions with Rosy and Mount Dunston (ibid. 81). It is not enough that Betty leads an upstanding life; she must also experience a mystical revelation of the divine. When Mount Dunston is taken ill with typhoid fever, Betty feels compelled to organize a religious service for the sick, even though she is aware that she is only “religious” in “times of great pain and terror.”3 Her enforced reliance on God, expressed through the “clamouring” of her “insistent” prayers,

CODA 193 finally reaches its climax when she comes into direct union with the divine: Without warning, a wave of awe passed over her which strangely silenced her—and left her bowed and kneeling, but crying out no more. The darkness had become still, even as it had not been still before. Suddenly she cowered as she knelt and held her breath. Something had drawn a little near. No thoughts—no words—no cries were needed as the stillness grew and spread and folded her being within it. (Burnett 2006 Chapter 43 “Listening” para. 31) Betty’s spiritual experience closely emulates what is characterized as the ‘first moment’ in the Christian mystic’s ongoing career of spiritual revelation. This is the first ecstatic experience that propels the mystic into life-long unification with the divine, precipitated by an act of prayer where the devotional subject becomes aware they are in communication with something greater than themselves, in much the same way Sojourner Truth realizes God “pervade[s] the universe—and there [is] no place where God [is] not’” (Truth 47). Despite the fact she does not ask for such a revelation, Betty is suddenly propelled into the stillness of God’s infinity, encompassing the whole universe and enfolding her in its being to keep the darkness at bay. The sudden advent of Betty’s religious faith in a moment of crisis is integral to the eventual fulfilment of her destiny and attainment of her happiness. Firstly, Betty’s suffering strengthens her relationship with Rosy; the knowledge that Mount Dunston may die unaware of Betty’s love for him leads Betty to a greater appreciation of the uplifting nature of Rosy’s selfsacrificing love for Ffolliott. Secondly, Betty’s sacrificial offering ensures Mount Dunston’s recovery; he becomes “conscious of being drawn back” to her during the outpouring of her prayers (Burnett 2007 458). Thirdly, Betty’s suffering divests her of the remnants of a pride that would threaten to annihilate her spiritual integrity. Visited with the realization that the experience of unrequited love would destroy her vitality, Betty realizes she is no different from anyone else in her human dignity and intense experience of love. Betty may represent a new type of transatlantic heroine who is capable of both repairing the broken ties that connect the British and American nations, and rescuing her sister from an abusive marriage, but her divine power is finally rooted in her spiritual renunciation. The novel’s final vision of a transatlantic sisterhood that expands outwards to incorporate a newly envisaged Anglo-American family is dependent on the sisters’ ongoing mystical communion, both with God and one another. The Shuttle presents the solution to the ongoing antipathy between Britain and America as a mystical transatlantic sisterhood that transcends national borders and defers to divine providence as the shuttle of fate that shapes (inter)national destinies, rather than the individualistic

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desire to divide and conquer. Significantly, Burnett portrays transatlantic sisterhood as possessing the power to reimagine (trans)national identity, which (in the model of Rosy and Betty) is constructed through selfsacrificial relationships, underpinned by shared theologies of renunciation, that intertwine the fate of the two nations in a mutual attitude of self-giving. At the close of the novel, Rosy’s reunion with the Vanderpoels and Betty’s betrothal to Mount Dunstan produce a new transatlantic family-unit that rejuvenates the heritage of the British aristocracy and invests American entrepreneurship with the dignity of an ancient lineage and higher moral purpose. The Shuttle demonstrates that Anglo-American sisterhood is able to construct its own transatlantic mythology, derived from the intersubjective, self-sacrificial, and mystical relationships between women. As the preceding pages have established, at least a dozen canonical and recovered nineteenth-century British and American women created visions of female authorship that resisted the individualistic model inherited from British and American Romanticism by either creating theologies of renunciation or deferring to mystical matrilineal heritages. Emily Dickinson is an isolated and historically exceptional figure who constructs an alternative to authorial individualism in the absence of a matrilineal community. Confronted with the tyrannical inclinations of the Romantic individualist who attempts to emulate an arbitrary and capricious God, Dickinson deploys her religious doubt to entertain the possibility of a mystical communion she is unable to access. She creates a doubting theology of renunciation: relinquishing her individualistic selfhood to allow the reader to envisage an empowered, divine subjectivity that transcends the author’s limited ego. Dickinson’s poetry testifies to the fact that a nineteenth-century woman can be conscious of the inadequacy of a patrilineal literary heritage and exploit her very alienation from this heritage to conceptualize a superior alternative, even if this alternative is yet to be realized. Contrastingly, Sojourner Truth demonstrates that the female author is capable of withstanding the assault upon, and subsequent dispersal of, the matrilineal heritage from which she is derived. Truth utilizes the theology of her long-deceased mother to envisage her life as an act of continuing collaboration with God’s providence. Her persistent endeavors to generate a mystical relationship with the divine enable her to extend the matrilineal community to the wider nation by creating a model of spiritual motherhood. As a powerful orator, Truth reminds us that female authorship extends beyond the literary text. Her collaboration with Olive Gilbert reveals that sisterly networks can emerge through the privileging of marginalized voices, thereby enabling these voices to become authorial subjects.

CODA 195 Authorial collaboration is central to the composite identity of “Michael Field”: the name given to two female poets whose intersubjective identification with one another allows both women to define themselves as a single authorial subject. Field’s unique collaborative practice reveals that, in its most extreme distillation, the matrilineal union is able to contain all aspects of female experience, from the maternal to the sexual to the spiritual. Ultimately, though, it is the mystical union that contains all aspects of the multifaceted matrilineal bond, for the model of the Trinity facilitates a fluidity of personhood that allows the poets to move between a variety of metaphysical states as they enter into transcendent communion with one another and the divine. In the example of Field, we witness the startling capacity of the self-contained matrilineal unit to exist outside the mores of the period and develop its own conceptualizations of authorship, motherhood, sexuality, and spirituality. Frances Hodgson Burnett reminds us that the matrilineal community is not only able to contain all aspects of female relationships but is also able to metaphysically cross borders and bridge cultures. Burnett explores the possibility that the propagation of a spiritual sisterhood across the transatlantic world might enable women to access a transcendent matrilineal heritage that possesses the power to redeem nations. Through their shared providential outlook, sisters retain their mystical communion in the face of separation, while their theologies of renunciation enable them to facilitate each other’s redemptions. Burnett’s conceptualization of transatlantic spiritual sisterhood raises the intriguing possibility that a shared transatlantic matrilineal heritage generates an ongoing mystical consciousness that invests women with the knowledge they are in communion with a wider spiritual sisterhood that shares their intersubjective vision of the world. It is out of such an invisible, yet everpresent, mystical sisterhood that Alcott and Rossetti write. In my recovery of Alcott’s and Rossetti’s matrilineal heritage I have demonstrated that matrilineal relationships are able to counteract the legacy of authorial individualism passed down through male literary traditions. This Coda has explored the wider application of the term ‘matrilineal heritage’ in its myriad manifestations: as a spiritual bond that finds its apotheosis in the wider adoption of the nation, a selfcontained relationship that encompasses all aspects of female experience, and a form of mystical communion that transcends barriers of separation. I have even attempted to show that the lack of a matrilineal heritage can conversely generate an awareness of its existence in the mind of a female poet who strives to create an alternative to the paradigm of male genius. There are many other nineteenth-century female authors whose affiliation with women’s mystical theologies of renunciation warrants further attention: Laetitia Landon (LEL), the Bronte sisters, Fanny Fern (1811–1872), and Susan Coolidge (1835–1895), to name but a few. These women share an awareness that their Christian vision of the world

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unites them, even if they remain unaware of one another’s existence for the duration of their earthly lives. These remarkable nineteenth-century women, who embody the term ‘matrilineal heritage’ in diverse and manifold ways, perceive themselves as belonging to a wider mystical community that transcends the finite model of male individualistic genius: they are left-handed women of a left-handed society.

Notes 1 Jane Donahue Eberwein claims that after Edward Dickinson “renewed his conversion commitment” in 1873, he organized a meeting between his daughter and the Rev. Jonathan Jenkins to aid the former’s conversion and “provide her anxious parent with reassurance as to her soul” (12 1). 2 The proceeding contextual information on international marriages is taken from the scholarship of Paul Jonathan Woolf (160–164). 3 This scene has been edited out of the most recent 2007 reprint edition of The Shuttle, published by Persephone Books. It is located in the Project Gutenberg 2006 e-book edition of the text (Chapter 43, “Listening,” para. 26). It is notable that Burnett’s account of Betty’s mystical experience is expunged from the most recent edition of The Shuttle, demonstrating that it can be difficult to trace the tradition of women’s mysticism evident in nineteenth-century women’s authorship.

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Appendices

Appendix 1 “Rolf Walden Emmerboy” Transcription The next fragment I offer you is a poem by the flower of American literature whose towering mind sweeps the blue fundament like the fowl of Job watching the stars and other mundane bodies with his gossamer wings, or perched on the dry and withered boughs of modern philosophy like the snowy and meditative crow pecking at the hollow nuts of human life and warbling larky melodies with a gushing sweetness rare to hear, crying to the world, “O fellow worms, Mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity, Howls the sublime and calmly sleeps the soft Ideal in the whispering chambers of Imagination.” Oh- sweet it is to hear it, but then out laughs the stern Repulsive and saith— lo—the grotesque, “What ho arrest that agency and bring it hither” and so the vision fadeth. The marvel of fancy I offer you is entitled… Phoenix Louisa May Alcott. “Rolf Walden Emmerboy.” Undated. Series III B (106) MS 2745. Alcott Family Additional Papers, 1724–1927. Houghton Lib., Harvard.

Appendix 2 “Two Scenes in a Family” Transcription The night was dark and windy. The wind whistled mournfully over the barren hills and leafless trees. In a small house round a bright fire sat a group of happy faces. The room was simply furnished, though here and there some small object showed that they had seen better days; a wellstocked bookcase, a few rare pictures and, more than all the countenances on which the fire fell brightly round the table, sat five persons. The pale anxious face and busy fingers that plied the needle so swiftly could be mistaken for none but the mother. Sitting at her feet was a child who was fondly watching over the pussy that lay purring in her lap. Beside her sat another, some years older, a book lay on her knee, but she was looking up at the others, the quiet little form with an air of such

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perfect repose and contentment about it that few would not envy it. The firelight seemed to linger lovingly on the rosy cheek and bright locks. Beside the mother sat two more daughters, one in whose gentle face and quiet eyes shone a good and happy spirit, the perfect neatness of the dress and the taste with which the sunny brown hair was parted back and lay in a shining crown above contrasted strangely with the face beside her so thin, dark and restless, yet not without a certain beauty in the small dark eyes and finely formed head, betokening will and strength of mind. One hand was hidden in the disordered hair that fell over it, the other tossing over some papers that lay before her and listening carelessly to the clear musical voice near her. The speaker was a face seldom seen in our land, the thin gray hair fell over a high full forehead. There was a soft holy light in the eyes and about the whole person, something fine and sacred that brought to the mind of the faces of the old philosophers so strangely beautiful in their grace and simplicity. In low earnest tones, he said, “Why should we be troubled, rich and poor have each these cares and sorrow, but the hearts of the pure, warmed and purified by their own griefs feel for others and their few joys are shared freely with those less fortunate. Wealth brings selfishness and the love and care of the poor and lowly is forgotten. Then are we not happier than they, and can we not wish for riches if they take from us the quiet joy and contentment that now are ours.” “But father, it is so pleasant to be rich and not to be troubled with debts, to live in ease and comfort and enjoy all the lovely things money can give us. People must be so happy. I think I should be as kind to the poor, or perhaps kinder. If I could help them more, is it wrong to wish to be rich?” asked the child with the book. “No Lizzie, I think nothing could harden your gentle little heart, but time alone will show, the darkness of the world can dim even the brightest spirit, can take from it all it loved or cared for,” said the father with a sigh. “I know I should be better, happier and of more use if I had more money, everybody must be. The world need not hurt us if we have strength enough not to let it. Money cannot hurt us. I think not me, at least. The power of doing good always makes people happy. Wouldn’t you like to be rich Annie” broke out the brown girl, “think how good it would seem to have all we want and not be doomed to pass our lives doing what we hate.” “I don’t know,” said the sister, looking into her wild face, “I should like it for the many pleasant things I could do with it, yet I am not sure but the little we can do while poor brings a truer joy than the careless alms of the rich. What do you think, mother?” “I cannot decide” answered the mother “the moral and social laws are entirely false. While the rich waste, the poor will want, while there is no sympathy and love, there will be sin and misery. When the rich will give of their abundance wisely and kindly, will the poor live virtuously and

Appendices 213 happily. It is not only what we give, but how we give it. A gentle word enriches a generous action, the wounds made by cruelty cannot be healed by money, but truthful kindness can restore joy and peace to the loneliest hearts. Wealth may be made a source of true happiness to high and low, but I feel that time will never come.” “It never will,” said the Father, “till a greater event has taken place, till charity is a principle, not a task. Not till men feel deeply and truly that it is better to give than to receive will poverty cease, and equality appear. Let us wait till we are tried, for we may be found wanting. Wealth is a greater trial than poverty, for the golden walls it builds around our hearts, we love not to break. We are dazzled by the bright bars that shut out love and Charity and we do not feel that the more we seek and honor it, higher grows the wall till the sweet virtues are cast away, leaving the soul they would purify to wear its golden fetters, but the cold dark stories that in poverty lie before us, keeping from us what we need, we eagerly seek to pass over them to the rest beyond, and as we suffer and hope, feel for those like ourselves. Then let us strengthen ourselves in humility that pride shall not cast us down.” Louisa May Alcott. The Portfolio. The Pickwick and The Portfolio: autograph manuscript: Various Issues of the Alcott Children’s Newspapers. November 18th, No. 7. Alcott Family Additional Papers, 1724–1927. MS 2745 B (104), Houghton Lib., Harvard.

Appendix 3 “Wealth” Transcription A large room splendidly furnished. The brilliant light of the chandeliers fell on the loveliest pictures and statues, velvet couches and counters, ornaments while the glowing fire cast a rosy glow over the marble chimney piece and soft dark carpet. Four young ladies occupied the room. The eldest lying on an ottoman was reading the last new novel. There was not happiness in her handsome face and she laid comfortably back as if they could expect nothing more of her. At a table sat another who was engaged in filling a costly album with nonsensical poetry. Her miserable face and restless movements told she was not as much at ease as her indolent sister. The third, a rosy child no longer, but a tall beautiful girl for whom fashion and art had done much but nature more. She was looking over a book of engravings, and now and then, as her eye rested on a lovely little cottage with a group of happy children beside the door, a sad smile passed over her face and, with a sigh, she would turn to look on lighted ballrooms and romantic scenes. The younger daughter sat in a recess idle, teasing a cross little lapdog and talking to a frightened little bird who fluttering in its golden prison longed in vain for the free fresh air it could not reach. In a cold lonely corner of the room was crouched a poor little pussy whose quiet purr told that there was one contented heart in that pleasant room, filled with everything heart could desire but happiness.

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“Oh dear,” sighed the eldest, dropping her book, “What a dismal evening. If this tiresome rain had not come, we might have been enjoying Jenny Lind’s music. How full of trouble this world is.” “Well, I wish I was dead,” said the second. “What is the use of living if one is rich. People have us only for that. However bad we may be, no one cares whether we are dead or alive, and yet I think I used to be very happy with my old clothes and freedom. What a dreadful world we live in.” (and with a sigh she went on writing). “It’s a very tiresome one,” yawned the little girl in the window, pushing away the dog. “Nothing worth looking at. I shall ask father to get me something new. What did I used to like and never get tired of?” “Your pussy,” answered Lizzie, looking up from her book and pointing to the neglected favorite who came from her stray corner, and whose soft purr and gentle eyes seemed to reproach her young mistress. “I don’t care for her now,” said she carelessly, “though she is a dear little thing. I used to love her, but I am never satisfied with anything now—but here are father and mother.” The same quiet man entered, but the hopeful expression had passed away from his face. He was pale and thin and a sad, lonely feeling might be read in the sorrowful eyes and bowed form. A plump old lady resting upon his arm seemed the personification of peace and plenty, but as she sank into a luxurious chair before the bright fire, and threw off her rich furs, she exclaimed in a discontented voice, “The beggars are a public nuisance. I cannot stir out. I am surrounded with vagabonds and poor wretches who torment one’s life out for this thing and that. Ah me, what a trouble it is to be rich if they would but let me alone, I should be satisfied.” “Why always long for that which is beyond your power to obtain,” said the father, beaming over Lizzie, who looked up tenderly into his pale face. “Now husband, that is a very strange speech, for you know I am very charitable to the poor? Did I not give $60 dollars towards the house for the aged? Did not I give $50 towards the last festival, besides numberless unknown charities? Well in this world, one gets no credit for one’s virtues? My girls, how stupid you all are. What is the matter?” “I have been thinking,” said the brown girl, “How much happier we were in our cold home at C. than we have ever been here. There we enjoyed our little pleasures with gratitude when we had care and sorrow and poverty of our own. We felt for those who suffered like us and in that pity found comfort for our own griefs. How useless are we now, wishing for everything and satisfied with nothing. How unlucky for us to be rich, we have abused it sadly. (and pushing her book and pen from her, she laid her face on the table and cried with a vengeance).” “Now, of all the ungrateful girls that ever touched a dollar, you are the most,” so said the mother with uplifted hands, “you who wished, longed, prayed for wealth, to be so scornful now you have it. What has happened to you all? Do you feel so girls?”

Appendices 215 “I am happy enough,” said the eldest, turning over a new leaf and sinking back on the soft cushions. “If father was well and happy, I should be too,” sighed Lizzie with her tearful eyes. “As for me, I should be perfectly satisfied if I could only have what I want always. If I could never get tired of my playthings,” said the younger. A long silence ensued, which was broken by the mother… Louisa May Alcott. The Portfolio. The Pickwick and The Portfolio: autograph manuscript: Various Issues of the Alcott Children’s Newspapers. November 26th, Number 5. AFAP, 1724–1927. MS 2745 B (104). Houghton Lib., Harvard.

Appendix 4 “Our Madonna” Transcription A child, her wayward pencil drew On margins of her book Garlands of flowers, dancing elves, Bird, butterfly and brook. Lessons undone, and play forgot Seeking with hand and heart The teacher whom she learned to love Before she knew’t was Art. A maiden, full of lofty dreams, Slender and fair and tall As were the goddesses she traced Upon her chamber wall. Still laboring with brush and tool, Still seeking everywhere Ideal beauty, grace and strength In the “divine despair.” A woman, sailing forth alone, Ambitious, brave, elate, To mould a life with a dauntless will, To seek and conquer fate. Rich colors on her palette glowed Patience bloomed into power; Endeavor earned its just reward, Art had its happy hour. A wife, low sitting at his feet To paint with tender skill

216

Appendices The hero of her early dreams, Artist, but woman still. Glad now to shut the world away, Forgetting even Rome; Content to be the household saint Shrined in a peaceful home. A mother, folding in her arms The sweet supreme success; Giving a life to win a life, Dying that she might bless, Grateful for joy unspeakable, In that brief, blissful past; The picture of a baby face Her loveliest and last. Death the stern sculptor, with a touch No earthly power can stay, Changes to marble in an hour The beautiful, pale clay. But Love the mighty master comes Mixing his tints with tears, Paints an immortal form to shine Undimmed by coming years. A fair Madonna, golden-haired, Whose soft eyes seem to brood Upon the child whose little hand Crowns her with motherhood. Sainted by death, yet bound on earth By its most tender ties, For life has yielded up to her Its sacred mysteries. So live, dear soul, serene and safe, Throned as in Raphael’s skies, Type of the love, the faith, the grief Whose pathos never dies. Divine or human still the same To touch and lift the heart: Earth’s sacrifices to Heaven’s fame, And Nature’s truest Art. Louisa May Alcott. “Our Madonna”. “A typescript of ‘Our Madonna’ copied from the Woman’s Journal.” December 30,

Appendices 217 1879. Box 5, Folder 7, The Guide to Alcott Family Papers 1814–1935. Fruitlands Museum. The Trustees of Reservations, Archives & Research Center.

Appendix 5 “Story of an Apple” Transcription In a beautiful garden there stood a tree under which lay a fine, rosy apple. A little child flying about picked it up, looked at it, and seeing it so fair and beautiful, ran away to show it to her mother. At the garden gate [stood] a poor little ragged boy who looked longingly at it, saying, “Ah, if my poor sick mother could only have that, how happy I should be!” The child, after thinking a moment, gave it to him and then ran laughing away (to think how generous she had been) to her mother who had seen her from the window. The poor boy went away looking at the rosy apple and feeling very happy. In a miserable hut lay his sick mother. He came softly to the bed and gave it to her. She had had no fruit during her sickness and even the sight seemed to refresh her. When it was eaten, he took one of the seeds and planted it beside the door. His mother died soon after, and the boy was soon old enough to get his own living. Many years passed and he was a man and had a family, he took his children to the old home, and there beside it stood a beautiful tree full of ripe and rosy fruit. They gathered and ate them and the father thought of the little sunny haired child who had given him the apple for his sick mother years ago. The tree grew old, the winter winds broke, the boughs bore no fruit. A woodman came and cut it down, carried home the branches, and in the evening made a bright fire of them on the hearth by which his children sat and told stories. Tupman. Elizabeth Alcott. The Portfolio, 9th December, No. 9. The Portfolio. The Pickwick and The Portfolio: autograph manuscript: Various Issues of the Alcott Children’s Newspapers. Alcott Family Additional Papers, 1724–1927. MS 2745 B (104), Houghton Lib., Harvard.

Appendix 6 “Extracts from Bradley’s Sermons” Transcription We are taught to consider heaven as a state, rather than a place; but we have reason to conclude from several passages of Scripture, that there is some portion of the universe set apart to be a palace of its great King; that there is within the boundaries of the creation some glorious world, where Jesus in his human form now lives and reigns, and where he will eventually assemble, with the immeasurable company of angels, all the sinners of mankind whom his blood hath purchased—Page 3. Daily experience proves that no outward means can remove the stain of sin, or do away its filthiness. While we are contending that baptism

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has this power, thousands around us, who have been baptized in the name of Christ, are giving a death-blow to all our reasonings through their ungodly lives. This, as well as every other ordinance, is indeed sometimes made the means of communicating blessings to the soul; but there is no inseparable connection between the outward visible sign and the inward spiritual grace of any sacrament. A man may go to the table of the Lord, and yet not discern the Lord’s body there. He may be washed in the water of baptism, and yet be as much “in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity,” as Simon Magus or Judas Iscariot—Page 9. If we know anything of real religion, we know that our affections are not always in active exercise, when we are engaged in the work of prayer or praise. Our hearts are often cold and dead. We strive to raise them up to something like devotion, but they seem at seasons as though they had lost all feeling, and we become as insensible as stones. This deadness must be ascribed partly to the weakness of our nature. The Christian mourns over it, and prays and strives against it, but his watchfulness and efforts will not be always successful. After all his exertions, his heart will sometimes be cold and his devotions languid. It is not so in heaven. They who sing of salvation there, sing of it “with a loud voice” and an overflowing heart. No coldness of feeling, no deadness of love, distresses their souls. All is fervour and zeal, spirit and life—Page 29. Do we hope to join this peaceful company in heaven? Let us first learn to be of one mind here on earth. O what a lamentable difference is there, in this respect, between us and these inhabitants of the heavenly word! What discordant sentiments and feelings reign among us! What jealousies and bitter strifes interrupt out harmony! As for divisions, some of us have ceased to regard them as evils, and a spirit of schism and ambition begins to be looked on as virtue rather than a sin. Brethren, these things out so not to be. They are sad spots in our feasts of charity. They savor not of heaven. They are fruits of a tree, which has never flourished there. Before we can ever enter yonder world of union and of peace, the wisdom, which is from above, must have taught us to root out pride and malice from our hearts, and bitterness and evil speaking must no longer be suffered to defile our lips! We cannot all perhaps be of the same opinion, but let us at least be of the same spirit; and let that be a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price; let it be the spirit of our Master, who was meek and lowly in heart; who, “when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously”—Page 31. Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti. The Literary Diary; or, Complete Common-Place Book. “Sermons by the Revnd. Charles Bradley, Curate of High Wickham.” 143–145. Box 12–18. Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver. Scanned copy received from archivist. Email. 25th March, 2020.

Appendices 219

Appendix 7 “The Maid of Sorrow” Transcription Edinburgh. Septbr. 15th 1783. The following simple narration speaks much instruction, and may be of use to parents and youth. A Gentleman in the medical line was some time ago asked to visit a patient and was conducted by an elderly woman up two or three pair of stairs, to a gloomy, shabby, sky-lighted apartment. When he entered, he perceived two young females sitting on the side of a dirty bed without curtains; on approaching he found one of them was nearly in the agonies of death, supported by the other, who was persuading her to take a bit of bread dipped in spirits. The pale emaciated figure refused, saying, in a feeble languid voice, “That it could but contribute to prolong her misery, which she hoped was drawing to an end.” Looking at the Doctor, she said, “you have come too late, sir, I want not your assistance:— Oh! could thou minister to a mind diseased Or stop the accents and passage to remorse.” Here she fetched a deep sigh, and dropped upon the bed—every means of relief was afforded, but in vain; for in less than two hours she expired. In a small box by the side of the bed were found some papers, by which it appeared that the young woman had more than ordinary education—that she had changed her name, and concealed that of her parents, whom she pitied, and whose greatest fault had been too much indulgence, and a misplaced confidence in the prudence of their favorite daughter. With some directions respecting her funeral, the following pathetic lines were found, and some little money in the corner of the box was assigned to have them assigned on her tombstone. Verses for my tombstone if ever I shall have one, by a Prostitute and a Penitent. “Here rest the reliques [sic] of a woman undone Who dying, wish’d her days had ne’er begun.” The wretched victim of a quick decay, Reliev’d from life, on humble bed of clay, The last and only refuge for my woes, A lost love-ruin’d female I repose. From the sad hour I listen’d to his charms, And fell half-forc’d in the deceiver’s arms, To that whose awful veil hides every fault, Sheltering my sufferings in this welcome vault; When pamper’d, starv’d, abandon’d, or in drink,

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Appendices My thoughts were rack’d in striving not to think, Nor could rejected conscience claim the pow’r, T’improve the respite of one serious hour. I durst not look to what I was before, My soul shrunk back, and wish’d to be no more, Of eye undaunted, and of touch impure, Old, ere of age, worn out when scarce mature— Daily debas’d, to stifle my disgust Of forc’d enjoyment, in affected lust! Cover’d with guilt, infection, debt and want, My home, a brothel, and the streets my haunt; Full seven long years of infamy I’ve pin’d, And fondled, loath’d, and preyed upon mankind: Till the full course of sin and vice gone through, My shattered fabrick fail’d at twenty-two! Then death, with ev’ry horror in his train, Here clos’d the scene of naught but guilt and pain! Ye fair associates of my op’ning bloom, O, come and weep and profit at my tomb; Let my short youth and blighted beauty prove, The fatal poison of unlawful love. O, think how quick my foul career I ran, The dupe of passion, vanity, and man; Then shun the path when soft temptations shine, Yours be the lesson—sad experience mine. Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces by W. Creech.

Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti. The Literary Diary; or, Complete Common-Place Book. 34–37. Box 12–18. Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver. Scanned copy received from archivist. Email. 25th March, 2020.

Index

abolitionism 162 “Address to the moon by Mrs. Dorset” (poem) 110–11 Aenid (Virgil) 16 African-American motherhood 183–6 Alcott, Abigail 11, 44, 183; on divine union between sisters 177; faith in matrilineal bonds 158; as inspiration for daughter’s collaborative life-writings 77; journals 65; life-writing of 61–89; practice of lived religion 69–74; relational sympathy model 64–9; “Reports While Visitor to the Poor of Boston” 163; role as home missionary 163 Alcott, Anna 69–74 Alcott, Bronson 29, 30, 65–6, 71, 174; individualism ideology 41–6; mode of instruction 86; re-enactment of Eden myth with daughters 85–6; utopian vision of a consociate family 158; vision of predestination 74–7 Alcott, Elizabeth 10; “Story of an Apple” 84–6, 106, 217 Alcott, Louisa May 1, 28, 126, 174, 177, 195; early reception 29; “Happy Women” 150–74; lifewriting of 61–89; Little Women 69–74, 151, 174–5; An OldFashioned Girl 152, 170, 173, 176–8; “Our Madonna” 80, 83, 215–16; reformation of Transcendentalist heroes 46–52; rejection of Bronson’s ideology of individualism 41–6; resisting male authority 28–52; “Rolf Walden Emmerboy” 46–7, 52, 211; “Transfiguration” 86–9, 106; “Two

Scenes in a Family” 74–6, 211–13; vision of self-contained community of female artists 176–7; “Wealth” 75, 213–15; Work 17, 50, 126–7, 128, 151, 152–7, 159, 169, 172, 173, 174, 176–7, 185 Alcott Letters 80 The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (Bedell) 31 Alighieri, Dante 38 Allan, David 94 American Protestantism 1 American Romanticism 181, 182, 194 Amor Platonico 112 angel in the house 57 animal magnetism 162 anxiety of authorship 19 anxiety of influence 19 Aquinas, Saint Thomas 147–8 archive 14– 15, 22, 61–2, 70 Archive Stories (Burton) 62 Arseneau, Mary 12, 94 Atlantic Double Cross (Weisbuch) 20 Auerbach, Nina 19 Bailey, Susan 11–2 Barnes, Elizabeth 64 Barrera-Medrano, Leire 187 Bartolommeo, Fra 6 Basilica della Santissima Annunziata 6 Battersby, Christine 18 Battiscombe, Georgina 175 Baumfree, Isabella 183 Beam, Dorri 162–3 Bedell, Madelon 31 Behind a Mask (Alcott) 30 “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh” (poem) 139

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Bellas, R.A. 29 Bernier, Celeste-Marie 63 Bett, Mau-Mau 184 Between Women (Marcus) 58 “The Blessed Damozel” (poem) 36, 39–40 The Blithdale Romance (Hawthorne) 45 Bloom, Harold 19, 20 Boudreau, Kristin 58 Bouts rimes competition 133 Bradley, Charles 101, 104, 217–18 Bradley, Katharine Harris 17, 186–9 brides of Christ 135, 139 Brodhead, Richard 75 Bronfen, Elizabeth 19 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 34 Bunyan, John 3, 45, 72–4 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 17, 189–96, 195 Burton, Antoinette 62 Butler, Alban 147 Cadorette, Curt 171 Cadwallader, Robin 12, 127, 151 Called to be Saints (Rossetti) 134 Calvinist Doctrine of the Total Depravity of Man 1, 11, 68 canon 15, 24, 69, 71, 79, 88, 127, 152, 169, 170, 174 caritas 12, 127, 151, 156, 158, 172, 182 Casteras, Susan 142 Catholicism 121 Cecil Dreeme (Winthrop) 170 “The Celestial Railroad” (short story) 45 celibacy 130 Chatterton, Thomas 34–5 Child, Lydia Maria 185 Christ 4, 8; brides of 139; passion of 140–1 Christian sisterhood 2; structures of thought 22 Christian values, promotion of 125–8 Christian Year (Keble) 88 Christina Georgina Rossetti; Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti (nee Polidori) (painting) 28 Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time (D’Amico) 12 Coakley, Sarah 93, 96

collaborative journaling 62 Collins, Charles Allston 143 Commonplace Book 14–5, 94–5, 101, 103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120 communion 21–4 communion of saints 2, 4, 5, 16, 22, 94, 97, 101, 185, complexion theory 42 Congregational Church 180 conjugal bond, maturation of 78 Conrad, Angela 180 Contagious Diseases Acts 121 Convent Thoughts (painting) 143 “A Convent Threshhold” (poem) 142 Coolidge, Susan 195 Cooper, Edith Emma 186–9 Cousins, Ewert H. 9 Crump, Rebecca 38 Cult of True Womanhood 171 Cushman, Charlotte 170 Daly, Mary 92–3 D’Amico, Diane 12 Dante 16, 110 dark night of the soul 156 Darwin, Charles 1 De Beauvoir, Simone 11 De Sélincourt, Basil 18 “Dead Love” (poem) 32–3 Decker, William Merrill 62 Dedicated (Cooper) 186 Demeter 16 Derrida, Jacques 16 devotion 5–8 Dickinson, Emily 17, 179–83, 194 Diehl, Joanne Felt 180 Discalced Carmelites 130 disciplinary intimacy 75 Divine Comedy (Dante) 16, 110 divine grace 22, 101, 102, 116, 122 divine maternity 93–4 divine retribution 18 doctrine of separate spheres 57, 59, 130 Douglas, Anna 71 “Dreamland” (poem) 36–7 economy of love 83 Eden myth 85–6 Eden’s Outasts (Matteson) 61 “Eli’s Education” (short story) 52

Index 223 Emerson, Edward W. 47 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 19, 153 empowerment of others 61–89 Estes, Angela M. 30 Eurydice 16 Evangelicalism 104, 116 “Evening Hymn” (poem) 139 evolution 1 “Extracts from Bradley’s Sermons” 217–18 The Face of the Deep (Rossetti) 57 faith 102–5 fallen women 121 fate 37, 52, 66, 71, 87, 89, 165, 171, 176, 181, 191 Favret, Mary 63 female mystics 58, 64, 66, 93, 180 female priesthood 120–1, 146, feminine divine 80 Fern, Fanny 195 Fetterley, Judith 17 Field, Michael (pseudonym) 17, 186–9, 194–5 Fitzpatrick, Tara 159 folk theology 68 Fruitlands commune 19, 44–5 Fuller, Margaret 162–3 Garlick, Barbara 29, 35 Gebara, Ivone 172 gender inequality 2–3 Genesis 8 genius, Transcendentalist conception of 19 The Germ (magazine) 19, 35–8 gesso 13–7 Gilbert, Olive 184, 185, 194 Gilbert, Sandra 19, 20, 130, 144 Giles, Paul 20 Ginzberg, Lori D. 127 “Goblin Market” (poem) 119–23, 146, 165, 167 Gradert, Kenyon 67–8 Gravil, Richard 20 Gray, Carol 29 Great Chain of Being 111 Gubar, Susan 19, 20, 130, 144 Halfway Covenant 68 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 16 “Happy Women” (Alcott) 150–74 Harris, Leslie J. 183

Harrison, Anthony H. 33 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 45 Hawthornian model of the infallible author 64 Haynes, Rosetta R. 183 Hemans, Felicia 94 Hendler, Greg 58, 64, 161 Hewitt, Elizabeth 63 Heywood, Paolo 7 Hirsch, Marianne 19 Hodge-Podge (newspaper) 14, 94, 97, 100–1 Hollywood, Amy 9 Holy Spirit 10 home missionaries 163 Homer 16 homosexuality 130 Houghton Library 14, 22 Humez, Jean M. 185 Hunt, Holman 37 Hunt, William Holman 35 Hutner, Gordon 64 “Hymn for Ascension Day” 97, 99 icon and iconography 5–6, 8, 17; gold leaf 22; Mary as patron of 20–1; pilgrimage 20–1; preparing the wood 8–13 ideology, definition of 18 imitatio Christi 13, 126–7, 127, 131, 135, 139, 140–4, 146 immortality 182 incarnational theology 173 individualism 7, 11, 16–20, 29, 31, 38, 41–6, 48, 52, 59, 63, 67, 105, 128, 132, 134–5, 144, 152, 153, 155, 159, 163, 170, 174, 176, 180–2, 194 James, Henry 49 Jantzen, Grace 9 Jarvis, Claire 67 Jensen, Meg 30 John of the Cross, Saint 156 Jo’s Boys (Alcott) 80 Julian of Norwich 64, 93–4 Keble 88 Keble, John 88, 134 kenosis 93 “The Kingdom of God is Within You” 88 kinship 58

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Kohn, Eduardo 7 La Plante, Eve 61 “The Lady of Shalott” (poem) 37 Landon, Laetitia 94, 195 Lane, Charles 43, 45 Lant, Kathleen Margaret 30 Lanzetta, Beverly J. 9, 59 LaPlante, Eve 11, 61, 76 Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets (Rossetti) 10 left-handed societies 57–60; elevation of 92–123 Leighton, Angela 19 Letter and Spirit (Rosetti) 125 A Letter from a Grandfather to his Grandson (Jacob) 111–12 The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott 42 The Letters of Christina Rosseti 3, 32–4, 43, 93, 120, 178 Liberation Theology 171–3 life-writing 14 “A Little Kingdom I possess” (poem) 88–9 Little Women (Alcott) 3, 11, 15, 69–74, 113, 151, 174; inspiration for 64; matrilineal communities in 122, 123; two early sketches for 74–7 Lives of the Saints (Butler) 147 Lorencova, Radmilla 7 Loreto, Luca 5–6 Lossky, Vladimir 7 Louisa May Alcott Illuminated By The Message (Bailey) 11–2 “Louisa May Alcott’s Walpole” (exhibit) 22–4 “Love’s flame” 108–9 Lowe, Brigid 58 “The Lowest Room” (poem) 34 Ludlow, Elizabeth 12 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert/ Gubar) 19 “The Maid of Sorrow” 120, 121, 219–20 male authority 28–52 male genius 19 Mandelker, Ira L. 71 Manning, Susan 20 March, Amy 75 March, Beth 75 March, Jo 75

Marcus, Sharon 58 “Mariana” (poem) 37 marital relationship 78 marriage: as only vocation for women 130; sisterhood as alternative to 130 Mary 20 masochism 67 Mason, Emma 12, 92–3 maternal bond 77–83, 105 maternal love 2–3 matrilineal communities 5–6, 122; lifewriting of 14 matrilineal heritage 1, 5, 7, 12, 14, 17, 21–2, 145, 173, 179, 183, 194–6; and religious faith 102–5 Matteson, John 42, 61 Maude (Rossetti) 17, 126, 128, 129–48, 132, 151, 171, 173; imitatio Christi 132, 140–4, 146; moral of story 131; spiritual transformation of poetry in 136–40; teenage protagonist in 120; temptation of originality in 132–6; Trinitarian relationships in 144–8; William Michael’s preface 129 May, Leila, Silvana 125–8 May, Samuel 11 McGann, Jerome 14–5, 38 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 37 mediatrix 21, 71, 94, 97, 99, 105, 126, 182 Melville, Herman 155 mesmerism 162 meta-ontology 7 The Methodist Episcopal Pulpit (Bradley) 101 Michie, Helena 122 Millais, John Everett 37 Moby Dick (Melville) 155 Monsell, John Samuel Bewley 139 Montgomery, Ellen 70–1, 72–4 Moods (Alcott) 47–8, 51–2 Mother of God 20–1 The Mother/Daughter Plot (Hirsch) 19 mother-daughter relationship 78 Mummy Room 10 My Heart is Boundless (LaPlante) 11, 61 mysticism 2, 5–8, 58, 93, 147; as form of narcissism 11; matrilineal theologies of 8–13; Puritan 71

Index 225 The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Truth) 184 nation 183, 194, 195 Negotiating with the Dead (Atwood) 16 New Poems by Christina Rossetti (Michael) 39 New York Emancipation Act (1827) 184 Nieriker, Ernest 80 Nieriker, May Alcott 79, 89 Nightingale 10 Nobel, Marianne 67 “The Novice” (poem)’ 142 Odyssey (Homer) 16 “Of my Lady in Death” (poem) 36 “Of my Lady in Life” (poem) 36 An Old-Fashioned Girl (Alcott) 152, 170, 173, 176–8 ontological anthropology 7–8 Orchard House 81–2 original sin 11 Orlando, Emily J. 33 Orpheus 16 “Our Madonna” (elegy) 80, 83, 215–16 Ouspensky, Léonide 6 outraged motherhood 185–6 oversoul 45, 162 paganism 16, 186–8 Palazzo, Lynda 12, 92–3, 131 “Parable of Ten Virgins” (poem) 138–9 Parker, Theodore 11 Passover 121 Pateman, Carole 58 patriarchal hierarchy 9 Peckham, Rosa 81 Pedersen, Morten Axel 7 Persephone 16 “Perturbless Plan” (poem) 181 Peterson, Linda H. 14 Pfunter, Deborah Lynn 95 Philips, Jacob 111–12 The Pickwick 14, 83–4 Pietrocola-Rossett, Isabella 139 pilgrims and pilgrimage 21 The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) 3, 45, 72, 77, 113, 169, 174 Poe, Edgar Allan 36

Poovey, Mary 18 The Portfolio 14, 75, 83 praxis 172 predestination 11 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 32, 35–6, 41 Pre-Raphaelitism 1, 6–7, 13–4, 18, 19–20, 35, 38, 41, 133, 143, 174, 176 priesthood, female 120–1, 146 “The Prince’s Progress” (poem) 175–6 prostitution 121 providence 4, 15, 31, 38, 46, 51, 66, 79, 89, 184, 185, 191, 193, 194 providential theology 158, 174, 175 psychomachia 133, 155, 180, 182 Puritan communities 67–8 Puritan mysticism 71 queer women 189 Ratzinger, Joseph 99 “The Raven” (poem) 36 Recovering Christina Rossetti (Arseneau) 12, 94 redemption 105–7 Reformation 121 religious heterodoxy 59 renunciation 1–2, 66–7, 105–7, 177, 179–83; doctrine of 17; doubting theology of 179–83, 194; and imitatio Christi 131; matrilineal theologies of 8–13; theologies of 17 “Repining” (poem) 37 “Reports While Visitor to the Poor of Boston” 163 repression 19 Republican Motherhood 183 retribution 18 revealed reality 7 Rioux, Anne Boyd 70 The Rivulets (Rossetti) 14, 96, 114–16, 120, 121 Roe, Dinah 12, 31 “Rolf Walden Emmerboy” 46–7, 52, 211 Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) 121, 130 Romanticism 1, 3, 19, 180, 181, 182, 194 Rosenberg, Gabriele 97 Rosenblum, Dolores 29

226

Index

Rossetti, Christina 1, 30, 174, 195; allegiance with religious sisterhoods 131; assertion of female poet's independence 32–5; Called to be Saints 134; deferral of redemption 105–7; early life 28; The Face of the Deep 57; “Goblin Market” 119–23, 146, 165, 167; imitatio Christi 13; intersectional sisterhood 164–9; on left-handed societies 57–60; Letter and Spirit 125; on maternal love 2–3; Maude 126, 128, 129–48, 151, 171, 173; as oracle for sisterhood 163; poetic entries to The Germ 35–8; portrayal of the PreRaphaelite corpse 35–8; rehabilitation of 157–61; resisting male authority 28–52; The Rivulets 14, 96, 114–16, 120, 121; strategy of depreciation 33–4; subversion of the female intercessor 38–41; theology of renunciation 105–7; Time Flies: A Reading Diary 92, 113–18, 120; Trinitarian poetics 96–102; vision of self-contained community of female artists 176–7; “A Year Afterwards” 38–41 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 28, 30, 38–9, 104, 107, 108, 110, 112, 175–6; “The Blessed Damozel” 36; correspondence with Christina Rossetti 32–5 Rossetti, Frances 14, 28, 94, 105, 122, 144, 183; “Extracts from Bradley’s Sermons” 217–18; “The Maid of Sorrow” 120, 121, 219–20; as source of divine revelation 112; spiritual authority 107–13 Rossetti, Maria 10, 30, 41, 143; influence on Christina’s discourse of lived religion 113–18; intercessory role of 110; The Rivulets 96 Rossetti, William Michael 28–9, 40, 107, 110, 111, 119, 129, 133, 137 Rossetti Archive 14–5 The Rossettis in Wonderland (Roe) 31 Rostenberg, Leona 30 sacrament 10, 112, 115, 120, 121, 126, 141, 146, 177, 218 Sanborn, F.B. 88 Santissima Annunziata 6 Second Vatican Council 171

Seek and Find (Rossetti) 93 self-culture 152–7 self-exploration 30 self-expression 30 “Self-Inquiry” 78–9 self-reliance 30, 153 Seneca Falls Convention 161 Sewall, Ellen 50 Shakespeare, William 16, 37 shared consciousness 4, 59, 64, 68–9, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 86, 89, 96, 107, 109, 116, 122 Shefer, Elaine 37 Showalter 131 Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham 22 The Shuttle (Burnett) 189–96 Siddal, Elizabeth 32–3, 35, 38, 40, 175 Simply Bonaventure (Delio) 131, 135, 139, 142, 144, 149 sisterhood 125–8; as alternative to marriage 130; emergence of 157–61; extension of 161–4; interracial 157, 160, 161, 183, 185–6; intersectional 164–9; radical status in Victorian Britain 130; transformative power of 129–48 social reform 2, 12, 47, 123, 127, 151, 162, 172 socioliterary experience 63 “Soeur Louise De La Misericorde” (poem)’ 142 Some Reminescences (W.M. Rossetti) 28 Sonnets and Canzonets (B. Alcott) 29 soul sleep 36 special-purpose blank books 62 spiritual motherhood 183–6 Stebbins, Emma 170 Stepanski, Lisa M. 63 Stern, Madeline B. 30 stilnovisti 105 “Story of an Apple” 84–6, 106, 217 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 67–8 strategy of depreciation 33–4 Sturge, Donald 29 submission 66–7 Summa Theologica (Aquinas) 147–8 surplus woman problem 150 sympathy 15, 58–9, 63, 64–6, 75–6, 151–2, 154, 156, 159, 161–5, 168, 172, 212 temptation of difference 122

Index 227 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 37 Teresa of Avila 64, 130, 158 Thoreau, Henry David 19, 48–50 Thoreau, John 50 “The Thread of Life” (poem) 33 “Three Nuns” (poems) 141 Time Flies: A Reading Diary (Rossetti) 92, 113–18, 120 title-heiress marriage 190–1 “To Mother” 83–4 Todd, Janet 64 Tompkins, Jane 15, 70 total depravity 1, 11, 68 Tractarian Doctrine of Analogy 103 Tractarianism 10, 12, 36, 59, 104, 105, 116, 131, 134 transatlantic scholarship 20 transatlantic sisterhood 189–90, 193–4 transcendent reality 7 “Transcendental Wild Oats” (short story) 43–6, 52 Transcendentalism 1, 6–7, 13–4, 18–20, 41, 43, 46–52, 66, 152–7, 162, 174, 180 “Transfiguration” (elegy) 86–9, 106 trasfiguration 88 Trinitarian God 93, 98–101, 188–9 Trinitarian person 96, 99 Trinitarian poetics 96, 122, 187–9, 189 Trinitarian relationships 109, 123, 125, 127, 144–8, 152, 160 Trinitarian theologies 123 Trinity 4, 96, 125 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 170 Truth, Sojourner 17, 183–6, 194 “Two Scenes in a Family” 74–6, 211–13 typology 98, 101

vale of tears 87 Valentine’s Day verses 94–6 Valentine’s Day verses 98–102, 104–5, 105–6, 107, 108, 112 Virgil 16 Virgin Mary 20 Vita Nuova (Alighieri) 38

ultimate reality 9 “Under the Rose” (poem) 34 Unitarianism 10–1, 72

Zboray, Mary Saracino 62 Zboray, Ronald J. 62 Zion’s Herald 73

Walpole 22–3 Warner, Susan 69–71 Watts, Isaac 78 “Wealth” 75, 213–15 Weathers, Winston 148 Webster, Augusta 2 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Thoreau) 48–9 Weisbuch, Robert 20 West, Kristina 69 Whym Chow: Flame of Love (Cooper and Bradley) 188 Whym Chow (pet dog) 186–8 The Wide, Wide World (Warner) 69–70, 72–4 Williams, Todd A. 113–18 Winthrop, Theodore 170 Wolosky, Shira 180 Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller) 162–3 women: marriage as only vocation for 130; as relative creatures 130–2 Women’s Rights Convention (1851) 185 Woolner, Thomas 36 Work (Alcott) 17, 50, 126, 128, 151, 152–7, 159, 169, 172, 173, 174, 176–7, 185 Works and Days (Bradley and Cooper) 186–9 “A Year Afterwards” (poem) 38–41