The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on September 16, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp063
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
Nowhere or Somewhere? (Dis)locating Gender and Class Boundaries in Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses
University of Athens
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Abstract |
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This article attempts a novel reading of Christina Rossetti’s little known children’s narrative, Speaking Likenesses (1874), through an examination of the socio-historical background, and specifically the Victorian debates on prostitution and child prostitution, which had reached their peak in the years surrounding the conception of the story. Rossetti employs fantasy in order, firstly, to allegorise contemporary social issues faced by women of that period and, secondly, to satirise the mixed and often contradictory Victorian attitudes concerning childhood. With her juxtaposition of two different social contexts, middle and working class, in which little girls grow up, Rossetti is testing out the degrees of independence granted to young girls of different classes, questioning the middle-class fear and suspicion of a girl’s/woman’s autonomy. Both social settings described disrupt Victorian expectations concerning impulses, behaviour, and degrees of safety that each one fosters. Through a conflation of the dangers (competitiveness, aggression, abuse) encountered in both settings, Rossetti is able to cast doubt on the supposed virtues of middle-class seclusion and overprotection. In this sense, ‘Nowhere,’ the name she gives to her frightening imaginary site, is more likely to be ‘Somewhere,’ the real, middle-class locus of familiar threat.