Victorian Poetry:A Paper Collection, Cordelia Clark [black books to read .TXT] 📗

rejects Heaven, or perhaps they recognize the moor as home, because the devil’s pride has got them by the heart…These creatures are the dark part in us, the unmatable, the utterly alone. They have their sweet moments, their moments of beauty and rapture, but their ravings are not comfortable and not good. They do not wish those they love greater torment than they have themselves. They only wish never to be parted from their lover—either in torment or in joy….But the dark people go on to the moor to rejoice in the pride of their loneliness, to exalt their exile and their sufferings (Wilson,77-78).
The narrator of “Remembrance” has such a relationship with the moor, and is thus desolately violent because she is volatile and rejoices in being “utterly alone.” Bronte’s use of “now when alone” in line five and praise of her spirit in line 11 illustrate this. “Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers/After such years of pain and suffering!”(11-12). Wilson asserts that “the dark people go on the moor to rejoice in the pride of their lonliness” and “exalt their exile and their sufferings.” The female speaker of “Remembrance” is doing just this when she refers to her own spirit as faithful after years of suffering.
A sense of time as separation is further developed in stanza four:
Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!(13-16).
Here time is once again referenced, except this time the female speaker and the beloved are separated by her placing him in past tense. The beloved is referred to as “sweet Love of youth” in line 13, which relates back to the argument regarding Romanticism of memory. As she asks forgiveness for “forgetting” her lover in the context of being caught up in “other desires” and “other hopes,” it is evident that the idealized form of memory introduced in the first stanza wears away. As this ideal wears away, the narrator’s fear is manifested, as consciousness is subject to erosion, which supports Freud’s ideas on Obsessive Neurosis discussed earlier. Vines asserts that it is through this separation of the female speaker and the beloved that Bronte undoes the theme of mourning at the same time that she creates it.
Simultaneously and mournfully, the self renounces both a lost beloved and a prohibited maternal object, weaning itself from longing and repudiating its own self destructive wish for extinction in the tomb—and the womb—of its love. But if the speaker of the poem in this way embraces mourning and substitution, obeying patriarchal law of renunciation, there is another level on which the poem fiercely refuses that surrender, and repudiates the work of mourning. In this sense, “Remembrance” undoes the work of mourning even as it performs it (111-112).

The “patriarchal law of renunciation” that Vines is referring to is the sense of romanticism that is present in the first stanza. It is also present in the fifth and sixth stanzas:
No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shome for me;
All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee (17-20).

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy! (21-24).

Elisabeth Bronfen discusses romanticism within the female construct as it relates to mourning. She uses an anecdote in her article “Dialogue with the Dead: the Deceased Beloved as Muse” about Charlotte Stieglitz, a women who, in 1834, two years prior to the publication of Bronte’s “Remembrance,” committed suicide in an effect to inspire her poet husband:
Yet even more disquieting, and for a critic even more fascinating, is the strange mixture of seduction by a false pathos of romantic and pietistic delusions and the calculation of effect inherent in her act, the doubling of deluded victim and consciously responsible actress. For she exposes the conventions of feminine self sacrifice at exactly the same moment that she fatally enacts them. Far from being innocent or naïve, her suicide is pregnant with literary citations; in fact it is a cliché—suggestive of both Werther’s and Caroline Von Guederode’s suicides after failed romances, of the iconography of sacrificial brides and martyrs dressed in white, for whom death is a mystic marriage and erotic unity with God, as well as that of women dying in childbirth (242).

Bronfen suggests here that romanticism is what seduced most women into playing the role which the female speaker of “Remembrance” definitely plays: the role of feminine self-sacrifice. Self sacrifice is exemplified in line 20: “All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.”
Emily Bronte’s “Remembrance” discusses the definitions of memory as they relate to memory’s recollection, separation, and indication of failure. Time, a re-occurring theme, is interjected throughout the work to further describe what she expresses regarding recollection, separation, and indication of failure. Memory is defined as a sense of mourning. “Remembrance” reveals a false sense of Romanticism, which is an indication of failure. Recollection of memory, as Bronte’s view that memory never dies, is based upon the accessibility of the memory to the individual. Time’s relationship to Romanticism is that it causes the false ideology of Romanticism regarding feminine self-sacrifice to erode away, as seen at the end of “Remembrance” when the female speaker asserts that “existence could be cherished,/Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy”(23-24).

Works Cited


Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Dialogue with the Dead: the Deceased Beloved as a Muse.” Ed Regina Barreca. Sex and Death in Victorian Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1990.


Bronte, Emily Jane. “Remembrance.” Gondal Poems. Folcroft Library Editions. 1938.


Gezari, Janet. “Fathoming Remembrance: Emily Bronte in Context.” ELH 66 (1999) 965-978


Vines, Steve. “Romantic Ghosts: The Refusal of Mourning in Emily Bronte’s Poetry.” Victorian Poetry. 37 (1999) 99-116


Wilson, Romer. The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Bronte. New York: Albert and Charles Bon Inc. 1928.


Nevermind My Bruises:
Lesbianism, Dominance, and Sexual Corruption
In Christina Rosetti’s “The Goblin Market.”
By Amanda Cordelia Clark
English 322
Paper III
Dr. Khwaja
“Come Away, O human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand.”
--William Butler Yeats
“The Stolen Child”

In his poem, “The Stolen Child,” William Butler Yeats’ entreats the human child to escape the woe of human life and join the land of the fey, on the premise that the human world holds more sorrow. Similarly, Christina Rosetti twists this idea in her poem, “The Goblin Market,” in such a way that the fairy folk provide both escape and entrapment. Through this, Rosetti weaves lesbianism, dominance, and sexual corruption. All of this, however, is hinged upon the desire that Laura and Lizzie have to be free from the sexual suppression that was characteristic of Victorian sexuality. From this comes the derivation of goblin seduction, sexual dominance in the relationship that Laura and Lizzie have with each other as well as the goblin men, the purifying power of lesbianism, and sexual corruption on behalf of both sisters.
In order to fully understand the ideas of dominance, lesbianism, and sexual corruption presented in Rosetti’s “Goblin Market,” what attracted Lizzie and Laura to the goblin men in the first place must be understood. The mention of “Morning and Evening” in line 1 with relation to the goblin men selling fruit is representative of the birth cycle of each new day. This is the first connection of the goblin men to sexuality. The first stanza lists all of the fruit that is sold by the goblin men. This represents what is attractive about the goblin men because it has sexual undertones. Constant references to fruit are references to fertility. Line 11 depicts wild fruit: “wild, free born cranberries.” As Lizzie and Laura are suppressed due to the societal nature of Victorian sexuality, they are attracted to the wild nature of the fruit. The mention of “Evening by Evening” in line 32 is forshadowing the fall of both Laura and Lizzie to the sexual corruption by the goblin men. Lizzie was attracted to the goblin men because they first seduced her sister, which is evident in line 52 when Laura “reared her glossy head.”
Lines 34-39 depict the beginning of submission to the goblins:
Laura bowed her head to hear
Lizzie veiled her blushes
Crouching close together
With clasping arms and cautioning lips
With tingling cheeks and fingertips.
This is the beginning of submission to the goblins because Laura has “bowed her head.” At the start of Rosetti’s poem, Laura is the sexually dominant in the relationship between her and her sister. This is evident in the line in which Laura commands Lizzie to “lie close.” “Lie close, Laura said” (40). Laura then moves from becoming the sexually dominant with Lizzie to being dominated by the goblin men. This is seen when Laura comes home from dealing with the goblin men and shows that she has become addicted to their wares.
Nay, hush, said Laura
Nay, hush, my sister
I ate and ate my fill
Yet my mouth waters still
Tomorrow night I will
Buy more, and kissed her
Have done with sorrow (163-169).

Lizzie is later dominated by the goblin men and then becomes the dominant in the relationship with Laura. This is seen when she orders Laura to feast on her. “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices” (468). Perhaps Laura turns to the goblin men because she is restless in her sexual role in her relationship with Lizzie. This is seen in lines 52-55 where she is compared to a “restless brook:”
Laura reared her glossy head
And whispered like the restless brook
Look, Lizzie, Look, Lizzie
Down the glen tramp little goblin men.

Another reason that Laura may have turned to the goblin men was that when Lizzie warned Laura of the goblin men, she was simply repeating what Laura had told her, without adding her own ideas: “O cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,/You should not peep at goblin men” (48-49). This is a repetition of what Laura had says, as she says it earlier in lines 40-45:
Lie close, Laura said
Pricking up her golden head
We must not look at goblin men
We must not buy their fruits
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry, thirsty roots.

The difference between what Laura says to Lizzie about not looking at the goblin men is that Laura actually gives Lizzie a well thought out reason for not looking at them “who knows upon what soil they fed/their hungry, thirsty roots (44-45). Lizzie simply repeats that she must not do it. Perhaps Laura wanted something that was more violent, more forbidden. Ultimately she gets what she wants because she gets a more sexually violent relationship from both Lizzie and the goblin men. Lizzie becomes more sexually violent in lines 471-472: “Eat me, drink me, love me/ Laura make much of me.” Laura’s violent relationship with the goblin men is seen in line136: “She sucked until her lips were sore.”
Lizzie originally has a resistance to becoming more dominant in the relationship because she plugs her ears, closes her eyes, and runs from the goblin men:
No, said Lizzie, no, no, no
Their offers should not charms us
Their evil gifts would harm us
She thrust a dimpled finger in each ear, shut her eyes and ran (64-68).