Not "As She Fulfills His Dreams" but "As She Is": The Feminist Voice of Christina Rossetti

The canonization of Christina Rossetti as a woman and poet gained considerable momentum after her death due primarily to the number of platitudinous obituaries written about her and to William Michael Rossetti's idealized (and vastly edited) construct of his sister's life and his attempts to censor and/or alter the mood and content of her previously unpublished poetry. Some of these works he suppressed altogether, possibly because their message was too personal or contradictory to the picture he had painted of his sister, and, in many cases, he felt free to alter words in some of the poems . . . to tone down the sensuality which is one of the strongest characteristics of her poetry, but which seemed inappropriate to her brother (Jones 228). As a result of all of these posthumous actions, Rossetti's artistic successes and talents were stressed far less than the example she supposedly set of the perfect Victorian woman who posed no threat to the masculine portion of her society in either a personal or professional capacity. Her verses were lauded as examples of her life of self-sacrifice, simplicity, personal suffering, and lack of egoism and were professed to indicate her wholehearted support of the patriarchal social system in which she lived. At the time of her death, very little was mentioned of her work as a lay helper at Highgate, a sanctuary for fallen women, her active support of antivivisection, her interest in projects for women's education, and her acquaintance with the organizers of a Factory Girls' Club (Leighton 123). Even less was revealed about her volatile temper, failed love affairs, and her devotion to her art. Today, much of the research on Rossetti has focused on who the real Christina Rossetti was, how she really viewed the world in which she lived, and how those views and feelings manifested themselves in her verses. Scholars have attempted to answer such questions as how her religious canon exemplifies and explains her philosophy about life and God, what her succession of passive and dying women reveals about her thoughts of male/female relationships, and what her poetry tells us about her views of woman's place in this world and the next. Because Rossetti herself was an in-