“When I am Dead, my Dearest …”: Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti

Abstract

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously argued that modernism—in particular, formalist and language-centered, experimental literary modernism—was “constructed not just against the grain of Victorian male precursors” but as part of “a complex response to female precursors and contemporaries” and that the reaction “against the rise of literary women became not just a theme & but a motive for modernism.” Gilbert and Gubar implicate Pound and Eliot’s “twin strategies of excavation and innovation” and “the linguistic innovation associated with the avant-garde”—they specify puns, allusions, and “arcane and fractured forms”—in a project of cultural elitism that excludes women. Despite the “intermittent” participation of “a Gertrude Stein and a Djuna Barnes,” they contend, formal innovation of this kind is “a men’s club.”¹ Like most pioneering, first-generation feminist criticism, No Man’s Land has received its share of sharp critique, some of it justified. It is, for instance, hard to understand Gertrude Stein’s participation in poetic modernism as “intermittent.” In the wake of this study, furthermore, modernist studies as a field of inquiry has multiplied and expanded; the critical discourse has chronicled and reflected the emergence of “modernisms” both as phenomena and term, while critiques across the ideological and methodological spectrum reflect a greater understanding of gender, racial, and poetic heterogeneity in a period long misunderstood as monolithic.²

“I am Christina Rossetti”

—Virginia Woolf

Christina & sets my teeth on edge

—Ezra Pound