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Abstract
This article makes a case for Christina Rossetti's environmental ethics, which are grounded in her Tractarian literary influences. The Tractarian concepts of analogy and reserve are of particular relevance to Rossetti's view of nature. Reserve refers to withholding absolute understanding. One way in which reserve is practiced is by analogically reading nature in order to attain spiritual knowledge. Nature is valued in this theological system as God's way of communicating to humankind. While Rossetti uses these esthetic concepts throughout her work, we see their environmentalist implications most clearly in her late devotional prose work Time Flies (1885). Time Flies is written in a diary format, which allows Rossetti great creative freedom. The text contains poetry and readings of scripture, but many of its entries contain Rossetti's analogical readings of the natural world. The message that emerges in Time Flies is ultimately one of conservation over renunciation.
Notes
1. For an introduction to ecocritical approaches to Romanticism, see Bate and Kroeber.
2. Christina Rossetti wrote six books of devotional prose: Annus Domini (1874), Seek and Find (1879), Called to be Saints (1881), Letter and Spirit (1883), Time Flies (1885), and The Face of the Deep (1892).
3. For a thorough treatment of Tractarian esthetics, see Tennyson especially chapter two.
4. While emotion is central to Wordsworth's view of poetry, he does qualify this statement: “Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply” (62).
5. For a thorough review of critical treatments of Rossetti and the Tractarians, see CitationD'Amico and Kent.
6. Marshall offers some excellent science-based insights into several of the more difficult passages of Time Flies.
7. CitationHeidi Scott has also written a brief environmental criticism of Rossetti's most famous poem, “Goblin Market.” Scott argues that the male goblins in the poem are associated with animals and the young girls are associated with plants.
8. See, for example, the poetic entries for January 4, January 29, February 11–12, February 15, April 20, May 28, June 2, June 6, June 12, and June 21.
9. See, for example, “Winter Rain,” “My Dream,” “The First Spring Day,” “Up-Hill,” and many more.
10. In a letter to Caroline Maria Gemmer from May 1887, Rossetti says of Time Flies, “it is something of a favorite with me amongst my own books.”
11. Here Rossetti is echoing CitationDante Gabriel Rossetti's statement in the introduction to his Early Italian Poets (61).
12. Burlinson sees the spider passage as an exception to Rossetti's conservationist politics. Since Rossetti is providing the artificial light in the room that creates the shadow, she is, according to Burlinson, torturing the spider unrepentantly (187–8).
13. CitationHarrison sees the pill millipede and the spider/shadow anecdotes as typifying Rossetti's “Ruskinian perceptions of Vital Beauty” (34–35). CitationRuskin's Vital Beauty refers to the beauty and vitality found in living things. Of course, Ruskin's theories were also very much influenced by his Tractarian upbringing (see Modern Painters volume two, part three, section one, for Ruskin's concepts of Typical and Vital Beauty).
14. White proposes Saint Francis of Assisi as a potential model for this alternative Christian view of nature. “Francis,” CitationWhite writes, “tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God's creatures” (13).
15. The full quotation reads, “With Time Flies, Rossetti fully enters a new phase in her poetic career. In thinking of her responsibility as a Christian, she answers her earlier laments over life's vanity and her ‘restive heart’; she becomes a poet who not only sighs, longing for God, but also one who sings, both accepting the pattern of her life as God's will and looking forward to the joy of heaven” (D'Amico 159–60).
16. As an anonymous reader pointed out, this passage appears to be deliberately revising the implications of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem “The Woodspurge” (dated 1856). Upon observing the plant, the speaker of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem finds no religious message, but only learns that “The woodspurge has a cup of three” (16). For a useful reading of this poem, see CitationMcGann (45–46).