Mysteries Beyond Angels in Christina Rossetti’s From House to Home

Abstract

Credited with an ‘aesthetics of renunciation’, Christina Rossetti suffers a fate worse than death: according to Sandra Gilbert, who coined the term, such an aesthetics requires ‘Rossetti, banqueting on bitterness, [to] bury herself alive in the coffin of renunciation’. Key to this gruesome imperative is the devotional dream-vision From House to Home,¹ which both Gilbert and Dolores Rosenblum see as clearly formulating the straitened aesthetic set forth much more complexly in Goblin Market, written some five months later. Even though Rosenblum detects in From House to Home the emergence of a galvanic ‘poetry of endurance’ from the grave of poetic self-assertion, both she and Gilbert would have Rossetti wring her art from deprivation. Rossetti repels ‘the self-gratifications of art and sensuality’, goblin-fruits she would resist, or, in the case of From House to Home, the inward Eden and the angelic male muse she would reject, in painful expectation of heavenly fulfilment.²