[In the following excerpt, Boos discusses love and sexuality in Rossetti's The House of Life.]

“Love” in Rosetti, as in almost all nineteenth-century poets, is a metaphor for all that is best and most concentrated in life—memory, sensuousness, idealism, the aesthetic and the intense. Whereas in Keats' poetry the knowledge of warm human love seemed of greater significance even than death, and to Peter and certain Decadents aesthetic experience or love was the self-expression of a private identity perpetually verging on extinction, Rossetti offered a middle view; private experience must involve some other human being or be a response, even if purely subjective and internal, to a minimally social relation. Yet he considered the possibility that even this experience might be nullified by death or error, or might only be able to exist in painfully uncertain and attenuated forms.

An ambiguity pervades the sequence, however, as the result of Rossetti's unclarified and perhaps inconsistent attitude toward sexual love. In his narratives and ballads sexuality is more frequently and overtly associated with moral guilt, although considered inevitable. “The House of Life”, by contrast, has virtually no moral context; whether the love it celebrates is socially appropriate or “caused” is not explained. The relative absence of value judgments in this sequence and in some of the exotic ballads may explain their greater popularity with the Decadents and later Victorian readers. However one of the sequence's principal obsessions is guilt. The cause of this guilt is never stated, but I feel it is some combination of regret for lost time or opportunity and diffused suggestions of an inevitable taint imposed upon all sexual emotion.

This diffused guilt evokes accusing voices or presences imaging one or several “other” selves. At first Rossetti's “other” self had been associated with images of the beloved and the (indirectly, limitedly) attainable; at the end the non-selves have become a hovering dissolution and guilt, and the tiny self in a house of mirrors quivers beneath the toweringly magnified spectres. In my opinion death is covertly associated with guilt throughout the entire sequence. The many shadowed veils, dim reflections, and frail screens could well be coverings for an irrational, nebulous, contextless guilt. Love and the beloved seem always to suggest time passing, death, separation, the highest intensities of a doomed life. Even though only a few sonnets directly interweave the sense of guilt for lost time, death, and romantic love, to Rossetti erotic love is consistently, among other things, the concentrated symbol of the obscenely hastening hour.

In “The House of Life” Rossetti has associated, in the shifting way in which possibly they were experienced, several of the most recurrent Victorian preoccupations and perceptions—the fragmentation of the self through temporality, guilt-in-isolation, and the strangulation of all sex, art, love, and pleasant nature, not only by bourgeois convention, but by the great gray blankness of the cold and faceless world:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams. …
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. …

(Arnold, “Dover Beach”)

He is not here; but far away
          The noise of life begins again,
          And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

(Tennyson, “In Memoriam”, st. 7)

The preoccupation with marriage, evident in the Victorian novel and to a lesser extent also throughout Victorian poetry, seems clearly the attempt to erect a symbolic working agreement between the private self and convention, and between sexuality and the existence of another ego. It was assumed that the feminine ego was to be subsumed into the masculine; at best the married partners provided each other defense against transience, guilt, and confusion of identity, forming together a larger subdivided ego with which to oppose a frigid, hostile world.

Victorian society has been attacked for its doctrinaire exaltation of individualism; it must be remembered that the few educated Victorians who were impelled to record their emotions also found this atomization deeply painful; much of the intensity of Victorian literature comes from this constant sensation of pain. To shore himself against ruin each must emphasize the quality and value of his own “soul”, his discrete self—therefore the Rossettian magnifying, cavernous, and inexhaustible horror when the self begins to divide or dissipate or blur.

It has been many times noticed that Victorians struggled to interfuse past and present, and there is no need to belabor Rossetti's concern with memory and “eternal moments”. No one can explain why suddenly in the nineteenth century individuals became more aware of history, progression in time, and therefore of their own constant progression, moment by moment, towards death and away from memory.¹ But all poetic evidence testifies to the intense preoccupation with youth and the dawn of consciousness, the intense fear of time; and perhaps Victorian science, historicism, and religious doubt were results as well as causes of this anxiety. History no longer seemed a simple Augustinian progression, but a resurgence before decay; no wonder it was hard to believe that a non-historical heaven would suddenly climax and transform this slow unwinding into a completely different state of existence. Intensity gave man a sense of his own significance, his own ability to unite several levels of time (or cyclic recurrences) at once, or even be “above” time, more complex (and therefore more enduring?) than simple history. Also intensity was “instantaneous”—thus, as nearly as possible, not in time at all.

The connection of the self and sexuality is a more elusive psychological problem, needing more than a knowledge of Victorian literature to explain. It seems to me, though, that parts of the Freudian model serve accurately for at least three poets of the period—Tennyson, Arnold, and Rossetti. All three considered the early poetic or sensitive self to be largely directed towards a sensual or sexual vision (Arnold, “The Strayed Reveller”, “A Summer Night”; Tennyson, “A Vison of Sin”) and in varying degrees all felt both pride and guilt in these sensations. Several early Tennyson poems present not art (as often claimed) but sloth as the enemy to be overcome—and sloth is allied with sexuality, as it is later in the Idylls. Yet (shallow) visions of women had formed much of Tennyson's early poetic exercises (“Claribel”, “Adeline”, “Margaret”, “The Ballad of Oriana”, “Rosalind”, “Eleanore”, “Lilian”, “Kate”). To him duty demanded both that he write and that he exorcise his “libidinous” visions; he did both, but since the visions and his art were the same impulse, much of his later work seems as though something has been drained from it. Arnold also successfully learns to espouse seeing life steadily in a world exorcised of the intense visions of Marguerite and an alter ego of free beauty. (Empedocles, Sohrab, and Rustum seem personae who suffer from emotional atrophy as a result of similar successes).

Rossetti is the only mid-Victorian poet who expresses throughout all his poetry the intuition that love, art, and guilt must be allied. He must be given a certain intellectual credit for not sorting out these inherent confusions in the stringently damaging ways necessary to most other Victorians; he did not immediately set a guard of order and calm on his own psyche's unpleasant multitudinousness; he sensed that art must reflect inner truth whatever the limitations or incompatibilities it recorded. Rossetti's association of love-sex-guilt-art may explain why he was so violently praised by his immediate successors, but also why in this century he has seemed remote to critics until recently. Miyoshi's irritated eruption at Rossetti's confusion of body and spirit² is possibly because to him no metaphysical problem surrounds their relation, and he cannot understand Rossett's vague distress. But granted Victorian terminology their relations were inexplicable, and it was necessary to postulate both a merging of spirit and matter and the ability of each to carry what had formerly been the separate values of the other.

Other critics, too, have spoken of Rossettian inconsistency and the insignificance of his themes—for example, Weatherby and Baum. While mid-twentieth-century discussions of Rossetti either tend to repeat and expound his themes directly within their own context (passion and death ad nauseam) or dismiss them as inconsistent, Victorians such as Swinburne recognized what to them was the accuracy of linking conscious life to the guilty unconscious. Human beings may still flee a guilty unconscious, but it is not necessarily assumed to be embodied in an idealized / sexual woman image. Portnoy or Herzog seem more concerned about whether they have failed a tradition or denied a series of values; not the love vision but their own sagacity or potency or social awareness has failed. And then there is what I predict will be an ever lengthening line of middle-aged heroes suffering from Liberal Guilt—having denied a fragmentarily glimpsed vision, they meditate on present entropy.

Rossetti's emphasis on the abstraction Love or the Lady can seem too easy a projection of the ideal for the self onto the object desired, an oversimplified dualism. However, it can be placed in an extensive tradition of Victorian preoccupations with the split, twin, and guilty double attempting reunion with the conscious self. Rossetti deserves to be taken seriously on his own terms, though they are difficult to define. One senses that Rossetti is using a psychological language rendered suddenly dated by changes in taste, but not sufficiently dated to grant him the distancing analysis accorded other presumedly more typical Victorians.

Notes

1. Both Jerome Buckley's The Triumph of Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1966) and Barbara Charlesworth's Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin, 1965) treat these shifts in time-sense during the Victorian period.

2. Maseo Miyoshi The Divided Self, 252, 253-257.