Speaking (out) of Silence: The burden of womanhood in Christina Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata” and William Morris’s “The Defence of Guenevere”

Abstract

An era punctuated by contradictions and uncertainty, the Middle Ages represented a powerful looking glass for the flawed and highly duplicitous Victorian society. Deeply unhappy with the cultural and aesthetic chaos resulting from the Industrial Revolution, it was not uncommon for Victorian writers to use medievalism as a means to oppose the belief systems characterising their time. The main concern of the essay resides in the ideological and thematic similarities in the medievalist poetry of two Victorian authors: Christina Rossetti and William Morris. Despite them being barely acquainted, the poets established a literary dialogue revolving around the dichotomy silence/sound and made use of analogous strategies to resist the unjust confines and limitations enforced on women by nineteenth-century gender politics. The paper aims to show how the burden of womanhood – a condition endured by Rossetti in life and in art – prevented the poetess from overtly voicing criticism of the patriarchal literary tradition. If William Morris, through his “Defence of Guenevere”, openly questioned conventions and succeeded in articulating female desire, Rossetti, as it is shown by her “Monna Innominata”, found herself tangled in the cultural attitudes of her time and had to mask what she was articulating. Through the voices of their medieval heroines, which can still be heard today, both writers engaged in acts of critical ventriloquy to overturn female passivity and to violate the code of feminine behaviour.