Abstract
‘Tudor House and its grounds became a sort of wonderland; and once the author of “Wonderland” photographed us in the garden.’1 Thus Christina Rossetti affectionately remembers the exotic pets, and other eccentric inhabitants, of her brother’s bohemian residence at Tudor Walk in Chelsea. The ‘Wonderland’ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s home was documented during four days in the Autumn of 1863 by Charles Dodgson, two years before the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A photograph of the Rossetti family group survives that, rather than a Carrollian wonderland, discloses a carefully posed and rather mundane domestic scene (Plate 1). William Michael and Dante Gabriel frame Christina and her mother, who are positioned at the bottom of stairs, which lead to the garden. Christina here takes her favourite ‘lowest place’, while her mother is seated on a chair beside her.2 Unlike another plate taken that afternoon, with Maria replacing her brother William Michael, the figures are crisp and clear. The details of their mid-Victorian dress, the shabby stairs, the fallen autumnal leaves, all present themselves as an access to the moment (or several moments) of the photographic exposure.
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Notes
Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: a Biographical and Critical Study, second edition (London: Hurst and Brackett, 1898) p. 134.
See Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Lowest Room’ (Crump 1: 200) and Kathleen Jones’s biography, which is focused around this motif as the organising principle of Rossetti’s life. See her Learning Not to be First: the Life of Christina Rossetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Jennifer Green-Lewis, ‘Landscape, Loss, and Sexuality: Three Recent Books on Victorian Photography’, Victorian Studies 39.3 (Spring 1996) 391–404 (p. 393).
The books reviewed are: Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995);
John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994);
Ellen Handy (ed.), Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision: the Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson (Norfolk, VA: The Chrysler Museum, 1994).
Lindsay Smith, ‘The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photographic Theory’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 256.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ (1927), SE 21: 157.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993) p. 9.
Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) pp. 156, 157.
Liliane Weissberg, ‘Circulating Images: Notes on the Photographic Exchange’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté, Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) p. 113.
Jerome McGann represents one of the two schools of new historicism in nineteenth-century studies. His analyses are characterised by an interest in recovering the materiality of literary production and reception. McGann insists that the ‘concrete particulars’ of literature can and must be unearthed, that its referentiality can be retrieved. See his Introduction to Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome McGann (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) pp. 7–11.
See also his study A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).
Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) p. 216.
Séan Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, second edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998 [1992]) p. 6.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) p. 162.
Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) p. 53.
Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) pp. 138–9.
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© 2000 Alison Chapman
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Chapman, A. (2000). ‘A Bizarre Medium’: the Return of the Dead and New Historicism. In: The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286009_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286009_2
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