Fantastic Metamorphoses and the Subversion of Traditional Gender Roles in Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses

Abstract

Regarded as “a peculiarly revolting book” by the Times Literary Supplement, Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874) consists of three different stories that are woven together as one through a frame story. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and its sequence, Through the Looking Glass, in these stories, Rossetti aims at revealing the least attractive side of each of its child-characters through fantastic transformations. To this end, the characters, particularly in the rst and the last stories, encounter their strangely disgured doppelgangers who reect the aws and short-comings of their originals. Written in an age when radical transformations were taking place within the society which accordingly triggered the rise of Victorian Medieval Revival, Rossetti's interest in fairy tales is quite signicant. Although at rst glance the stories seem to reaf rm conventional gender roles, the frame story denies such a claim through the mockery of the Aunt; the story-teller. Rossetti, through the Aunt satirises the double standards that are at work for men and women in the Victorian society. Additionally, through the stories, Rossetti criticises Victorian interest in social Darwinism which necessitates that the ttest survives at the expense of the weakest; that is men at the expense of women, and upholds religious moral codes. To conclude, in Speaking Likenesses, Rossetti satirises the double standards of the society in terms of their expectations regarding “proper” masculine and feminine conduct. By way of her employment of the fantastic metamorphoses, she liberates women from their sexual as well as socio-economic victimisation in the Victorian society.

Keywords

• Christina Rossetti
• Speaking Likenesses
• Victorian Medieval Revival
• Fairy Tales
• Metamorphosis
• Carnivalesque
• Gender Inequality
• Social Darwinism