Rossetti's The Convent Threshold
Poetry of Love and Sacrifice--A Feminist Reading
Christina Georgina Rossetti's poem is interpreted as an expression of grief over the loss of the Mother.
Who is the lost Mother?
She is the one with whom the child enjoyed the state of primordial closeness before entry into the real world of speech, learning and the intellect.
She is the Divine Feminine who has been subsumed by monotheistic patriarchal religion.
She is associated with Julia Kristeva’s semiotic, the pre-linguistic site of rhythms and pulses, described by Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics as “a wholly provisional articulation that is essentially mobile and constituted of movements and their ephemeral stases.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks of her, in Women Who Run With the Wolves, as the Wild Woman, who exists in the seasons, in Nature and deep in the psyche of women. “She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart.”
Rossetti's Recurring Theme
In many of Rossetti’s poems, a recurring theme is the loss of love, suffering and endurance. In a feminist reading, this could be viewed as the pain at losing the sense of maternal closeness and the necessity of entering the ‘real’ world.
The Conflict Between Desire and the Need for Conformity
The poem centers round a woman who renounces her lover and enters a convent, the quintessential institution of the patriarchal order, because of a feud between their families. Conflict ensures in her determination to bear her burden with stoicism, and her desire for union with the M(other).
The woman laments the spilling of “blood between us, blood, my love”. Blood imagery has various connotations that refer to the loss of the Mother. It is related to giving birth, the actual separation from the maternal womb. It also is associated with the spilling of blood on the bridal sheets, symbolizing entry into the patriarchal order. Finally, blood is proof of sacrifice, the renunciation of the Mother.
In the poem, images of the earth, often associated with the Mother’s body, are endowed with fruitfulness and sensuousness. Youths are “milk-white” and “wine-flushed” are “blooming as peaches pearled with dew”. In contrast, the renunciation of the earth and its joys is portrayed in the graphic images of Christ’s bearing of the cross.
“They bore the cross, they drained the cup
Racked, roasted, crushed, wrenched limb from limb.”
The woman’s repressed longing for the mother is revealed in dreams, the language of the unconscious. She dreams of a “spirit with transfigured face” who demands light and knowledge, tenets of patriarchy. However, although “light was poured on him, more light” and he was “drunk with knowledge”. He was still “athirst with thirst it could not slake”. The spirit hence realizes the unimportance of knowledge in relation to love, the Mother’s domain, which is “all in all”
The woman struggles to suppress these images.
“For all night long I dreamed of you:
I woke and prayed against my will….
My words were slow, my tears were few;
But through the dark my silence spoke
Like thunder”
The cost of repressing her desire for the Mother is physical; she ages overnight. This phenomenon occurs when one suffers shattering trauma. Her “frozen blood” is a powerful symbol of the death of the vital energy or life-force. In archetypal psychology, this signifies that she is devoid of feelings. In this state, as Estes writes, “nothing could move, nothing could become, nothing could be born." This is the price we must pay in order to be accepted in the patriarchal order and reject the mother—to be dead within.
Sources:
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Rider, 1992
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1985
Christina Rossetti, Jan Marsh (Ed), J.M Dent, 1996
