The Poet of ‘small-gemmedness’: Christina Rossetti as a Pre-Raphaelite Orientalist

Christina Rossetti and Ford Madox Ford conceive Orientalism as closely associated with imperialism in their fondness for the Eastern commodities brought to Britain from every corner of the expanding British Empire. Silk, peacock feathers, blue china, Persian cats and carpets, as well as opium, were only a few of the imports that deeply touched Rossetti's and Ford's imagination, confirming what Said defined as ‘the continuing imperial design to dominate Asia’ (1977: 322).

Both Rossetti and Ford were consumers of Oriental goods, which were marketed in specialised department stores such as Liberty's East India House in Regent Street, Whiteley’s, Debenham and Freebody, and Swan and Edgar. Notably, Rossetti, in her poem entitled ‘A Birthday’ (1861; in C. Rossetti 2008), wishes a ‘dais of silk and down’ (l. 9) all hung with Oriental decorations: vair, purple dyes, pomegranates, peacocks with a hundred eyes, and gold and silver grapes. But her interest in the East is also attested to as early as 1842, when she wrote a poem entitled The Chinaman as a school assignment on the subject of the Anglo-Chinese Opium War. Defined by W. M. Rossetti ‘the first thing that Christina wrote in verse’ (1904: 464), The Chinaman reveals her fascination with the Far East, where the men in her poetical description wear pigtails as signifiers of Chinese culture:

In this juvenile Oriental poem, Rossetti seems to be criticising imperialism and military aggression by giving prominence to metonymic expressions of ethnicity. Stylistically, the Chinaman becomes the focus of the narrative and is associated with certain verb forms (‘have cut’ and ‘left me’), which project the conceptual metaphor imperialism is violence. Rossetti builds up an image schema of imperialism in her mind and shares that particular image schema with her readers in order to raise awareness of imperialism's crimes.