2 - Body
Summary
Three sang of love together: one with lips
Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;
And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow
Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
And one was blue with famine after love,
Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low
The burden of what those were singing of.
One shamed herself in love; one temperately
Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished died for love. Thus two of three
Took death for love and won him after strife;
One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:
All on the threshold, yet all short of life.
(‘A Triad’ (PP 50, ll. 1–14))’A Triad’, written in 1856, is one of Rossetti's typically cutting and uncompromising representations of the amatory possibilities available to Victorian women. The love that women are socially encouraged to pursue brings shame, despair, and death; even the supposedly ‘successful’ wife survives like a prize pig, in a most unenviable state of complacency and lifelessness. To shame oneself as a mistress, to shrivel away in ‘famished’ spinsterhood, or to be bound to a ‘soulless’ marriage: Rossetti paints woeful destinies for one and all.
Acute social criticism exists in Rossetti's work in tandem with her emphasis on dreams, secrets, and the vanity of earthly preoccupations. There is a marked tension between her resistance to dominant bourgeois ideologies and her longing to retreat from the world: explicit protests against the injustices and inequalities of mid-Victorian England are paralleled by imaginative recourse to a utopian afterlife or, as in ‘From the Antique’ (PP 37), to a fantasy that one could simply cease to be:
It 's a weary life, it is; she said: –
Doubly blank in a woman's lot:
I wish and I wish I were a man;
Or, better than any being, were not:
(ll. 1–4)The opening lines here are proto-feminist in their expression of dissatisfaction, but the desire to claim the privileges of masculinity is soon overpowered by the wish to be ‘nothing at all in all the world, | Not a body and not a soul’ (ll. 5–6).
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- Information
- Christina Rossetti , pp. 31 - 54Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1998