‘Like Two Pigeons in One Nest’: Marriage, Sisterhood, and Homoerotic Desire in the works of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson
Poets Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson were born five days and an ocean apart in December of 1830. The two were active around the same time and, thus, existed within very similar literary contexts. While their direct influences on one another remain unclear, their works undoubtedly engage with many of the same themes and concerns, particularly involving women’s place within nineteenth-century society. Both Rossetti and Dickinson explored the complex and often fraught relationships between women, and both authors expanded on how these relationships manifested during an era that largely scorned female expressions of sexuality.
That being said, there exist many fundamental differences between the ways Rossetti and Dickinson portray female love, and their writings express varied representations of various feminine institutions, including food, marriage, sisterhood, and sexual desire. The following essay looks to explore the ways in which love between two women was characterised by two different female authors of the Nineteenth Century. Through an exploration of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, this paper will seek to establish the author’s positive view of sisterhood, as well as her complicated emotions towards the institution of marriage. Further, it will examine the often-overlooked correspondences of Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, and the ways in which these writings shed light upon Dickinson’s emotions towards female love. Additionally, this essay will consider the encoding of transgressive sexual behavior within the language of sisterhood, platonic love, and childhood innocence. Through contrasting Rossetti and Dickinson’s portrayals of sisterly love, this paper hopes to establish the importance of these themes in nineteenth-century literature, while also expanding upon how both women used the marriage and sisterhood as a representation of their own feelings towards women’s place within nineteenth-century society.
It is important to first establish the context in with both women were writing. Victorian women were confined to strict gender roles, with marriage serving as a defining institution. This section could explore how Victorian societal expectations shaped the literary output of female authors, especially in their depiction of sisterhood and same-sex desire.
Victorian society impressed strict pressures upon women to fit the ideals of domesticity, chastity, and marriage. Marriage was considered the ultimate ideal for women and their main way to attain social position, so allowing little space for personal freedom or alternative relationships. As will be further explored in this essay, 19th-century female friendships were often idealized, and such relationships were considered ‘safe’ when they were platonic, hence providing same-sex affection room to secretly exist. Yet Rossetti and Dickinson utilised this social looseness to create complex and often subtle portrayals of female love and romance. Equally innovative, both authors undermined the traditional marriage paradigm by suggesting that a sisterly love or friendship could hold deeper emotional fulfillment than marriage itself might allow.
In Goblin Market, Rossetti indirectly challenges the institution of marriage through her accentuation of the importance of sisterly bonds as opposed to heterosexual ones. The fact that Lizzie saves Laura through a sacrificial act, placed within the context of the male characters' antagonist roles, suggests that true salvation arises from the relationships of support between and among women. The sisters' true joy originates not in marriage but in their relationship with each other. This critique of marriage as an institution that is either insufficient or destructive addresses larger Victorian issues regarding women's societal functions.
Similarly, Dickinson critiques the institution of marriage through her poems and letters, framing it as a confining ritual that robs women of their individuality and freedom. By pointing out such societal restrictions, one is able to examine how both Rossetti and Dickinson used their literary work to subvert traditional Victorian discourse regarding women's roles. Their portrayals of sisterhood and same-sex desire, for that matter, can be seen not merely as personal or poetic inquiries but rather subtle acts of resistance against an establishment that conspired to limit women's lives and ambitions.
Rossetti’s Goblin Market is a complex story of loss and redemption hidden within a rhyming fairytale. On the surface, it is a story of monsters in the night, tempting young girls with a forbidden treasure. A slightly deeper reading understands Rossetti’s Goblin Market is a story of temptation and redemption. In the poem, Laura represents women who succumb to sexual temptation and become fallen women in the eyes of society. Laura’s curiosity in the goblin men begins innocently, but after consuming the fruit, she quickly becomes frantically lustful for more. Lizzie, the more pure sister, embodies the belief that women should be able to control their desires and impulses, and it is the chaste Lizzie who is able to save her curious sister Laura. Margaret Homans describes how the work ‘has become canonical for considerations both of the thematics of female sexuality and of the thematics of female voice’.
Also worth further analysis, however, is the relationship between the two sisters. While sisterhood and the redeeming power of sisterly love are certainly major themes of Rossetti’s work, there is doubtlessly a sexual undertone to the sisters’s interaction after Lizzie returns from trying to buy the goblin fruit for Laura. When Lizzie returns to her sister, she cries out,
‘Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.’
Laura then ‘kiss’d and kiss’d her with a hungry mouth’, sucking the juices, but also inviting a more sexual or homoerotic interpretation of the scene. Martha Vicinus notes that ‘lesbian presence could be covered by long-standing heterosexual sins, such as adultery or prostitution,’ which situates the girl’s passionate interaction as a natural and non-sexually deviant reaction to Lizzie’s assault.
Rossetti describes how the Goblins attacked Lizzie, writing,
‘They trod and hustled her,
Elbow’d and jostled her,
Claw’d with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,
Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,
Stamp’d upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat’.
The jarring scene is inarguably calling upon the language of sexual assault and rape, and Margaret Homans describes how the Goblins ‘reduce [Lizzie] to her vulnerable body’ – in other words, they rob her of her womanhood more forcibly than they had robbed the more willing Laura of hers. However, the pious Lizzie ‘utter’d not a word;/ Would not open lip from lip/ Lest they should cram a mouthful in’. Through her nonparticipation in the assault, Lizzie maintains some of her value and dignity as a woman, and Homans describes how Lizzie ‘subverts the goblins by turning their assault against their intentions, reappropriating their objectification of her body and transforming that objectification into her own positive strategy’. By reclaiming agency of her and her sister’s bodies, Lizzie frees them from the effects of the Goblins and their curse, and ‘Laura, thanks to her sister's cure, is no longer the stony and silenced victim of the romantic lyric's conventions of male desire but the narrator of her own story’. Laura finds that what she had desired will never satisfy her the way her sister can. As Rossetti puts it, ‘For there is no friend like a sister/in calm or stormy weather’.
The motif of forbidden fruit in literature is a traditionally female one, and Rossetti relies on it heavily in Goblin Market. At the beginning of the poem, Lizzie urges, ‘We must not look at goblin men/We must not buy their fruits/Who knows upon what soil they fed/Their hungry thirsty roots?’, establishing distrust for the fruit, and she further warns her sister, ‘Their offers should not charm us/ their evil gifts would harm us’. Akemi Yoshida describes how Rossetti uses the ‘motif of poisonous fruit, beautiful to the eye but fatal to the one who tastes it’. Yoshida asserts that Rossetti’s use of the forbidden fruit, however, is subversive, as ‘Rossetti tries to nullify the ominous fatality symbolized by fruit as anachronistic, and to liberate her female characters from those mythic roles into which fruit seems to fix women’. This idea relies on the audience’s knowledge of stories like those of Eve or Persephone, who faced their downfall in the wake of consuming forbidden fruit. Within the context of Rossetti’s poem, fruit ‘should be understood as a metaphor for erotic attraction and sexual delights’ and Yoshida further elaborates, ‘fear of the curse of the fruit suppresses in females not only their sexual interests, but also their capacity to grasp the reality through their perceptions’. By eventually rejecting the power of the fruit, Lizzie and Laura reject sexual deviancy and are thus able to save themselves from becoming fallen women.
In Goblin Market, the consumption of the goblins’ fruit is an act that physically affects Laura’s body, transforming her from a curious, innocent girl into a ‘fallen’ woman. The emphasis on bodily imagery—Laura’s ‘hungry’ lips, Lizzie’s bruises, and the goblins’ violent attacks—underscores the physicality of female desire and the consequences of indulging in it. This section could explore how Rossetti uses the body to express both the dangers of unrestrained desire and the possibility of redemption through sisterhood.
Similarly, Dickinson frequently uses the metaphor of hunger and thirst to represent her own desires. In poems such as ‘A Wife—at daybreak I shall be’ and ‘Ourselves were wed one summer,’ the body becomes a metaphorical battleground where societal expectations clash with personal longing. Dickinson’s depiction of marriage as a ritual that erases the autonomy of women can be read as a critique of how Victorian society demanded that women’s bodies conform to specific roles—whether as wives, mothers, or caretakers.
While Rossetti utilised fruit as a representation of femininity and a connection to the feminine institution of food and cooking, Dickinson rejects the idea of abundance, instead embracing hunger as a rejection of traditional female values. The only representation of starvation in Goblin Market comes when the fallen and ailing Laura refuses to eat– otherwise, the poem focusses on abundance. Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, ‘uses thirst and starvation metaphorically to represent a broad spectrum of needs: spiritua;, emotional, and intellectual’. In simpler terms, Dickinson uses hunger to represent not a state of disgrace, but a state of physical and emotional yearning.
This hunger can be linked, in other ways, to Goblin Market. Vivian Pollak describes how Dickinson’s ‘strategy of shrinking vital needs to the point where crumbs and drops suffice,if pushed to the limit, results in the extinction of appetite’. This extinction of appetite is sought and achieved by Laura, whose appetite for the Goblin’s fruit is eventually extinguished through Lizzie’s actions. Pollak further explains how ‘the imagery of eating and drinking is especially appropriate to this theme, drawn as it is from woman’s sphere’. Whether the narrative focusses on over-abundance or on the ‘figure of the starved, stunted child’ that was ‘essential’ to Dickinson’s own self-characterisation, the theme of food provides an undeniably feminine theme to the works of both Rossetti and Dikinson.
Neither Rossetti nor Dickinson either married, but this did not mean they were inexperienced in marriage or love. In fact, both writers held strong opinions towards marriage as a concept and this is portrayed through their works. Goblin Market portrays marriage as an integral yet forgettable aspect of a happy ending– one denied to ‘Jeanie in her grave,/ whop should have been a bride;/ but who for joys bridges hope to have/ fell sick and died’. Conversley, Dickinson sees marriage as a thief of childhood innocence, ripping her girlhood away and stealing her friends from her. The following section will compare and juxtapose Rossetti and Dickinson’s opinions towards marriage as it is represented in their works.
Rossetti’s poetry present a bleak reality for women, both married and unmarried, in Victorian England. Whereas men had the ability to make choices on behalf of their family, have sex without being ashamed, and exist with genrally less cricisism than a woman , women were not afforded any slack, and one mistake could leave a female reputation in ruins. The power and privilege imbalance between men and women in Victorian England was not foreign to Rossetti, and this possibly influenced her own decision not to marry. However, marriage is also portrayed by Rossetti as the happiest possible ending for the women of the poem– they are provided the security and protection of a husband while maintaining their proximity to their female conncections. Rossetti was a dynamic individual, who believed both in traditional marital and christian values, and in the injustices faced by Victorian women. The one view that her poetry clarifies, however, is that the existence of a woman in a society that prescribes either suffocating marriage or fatal ostracization was inherently a tragedy.
Mermin elaborates on the interaction between Rossetti’s traditional and feminist ideals, describing Rossetti’s belief that women should be shielded from the knowledge of sex and sexual deviancy coexists with her knowledge that many women have sex forced upon them without their informed consent. In such situations, Rossetti, unlike many of her male counterparts, allows the woman some grace, letting the bonds of sisterhood act as a redeeming force to the fallen sister. By reaffirming her connection with her femininity and the safety of the female world, the woman is saved from being tainted by men, and Lizzie is able, ‘to know good and evil and not succumb to evil.’
As Martha Vicinus describes, ‘marriage represents heterosexuality more forcibly than any other public institution; support for it, as well as attacks on it, reveal larger social concerns about masculinity and femininity’. Rossetti and Dickinson both put forward nuanced views of marriage from the female perspective– where Rossetti sees protection and tradition, Dickinson sees abandonment and a rejection of innocence. The following analysis of Dickinson’s correspondence to her sister-in-law and lover will shed light on Dickinson’s complicated views surrounding marriage.
Susan Dickinson, nee Gilbert, was a major influence on Emily Dickinson, both personally and in regards to her writing. Some of Dickinson’s most evocative lyrics were written as correspondence with Susan, and the rawness of these communications helps to underscore the depth of Dickinson’s emotions for her sister-in-law. The line between sisterly and romantic love is hazy in many of Dickinson’s letters.
Sue’s marriage marks the end of both her and Emily’s childhoods. As Pollak describes,
‘The poem stops short of an unequivocal assertion that [Emily Dickinson] and Sue were originally wed to each other, but Dickinson’s reaction to Sue’s marriage can be explained only if we assume that she felt displaced by Sue’s husband [...] Together, she and Sue were “Queens” or powerful women and Sue’s marriage is compared [...] to a coronation. Dickinson, however, was dethroned by it’.
The letters from Emily Dickinson to Susan reveal the deep emotional and romantic connection she shared with her sister-in-law, as well as the sorrow and longing she experienced after Susan’s marriage to her brother. In ‘One Sister have I in our house,’ Dickinson shapes a relationship wherein sisterhood takes precedence over conventional consanguine ties, hence pointing out the ambiguities inherent in her relationship with Susan. The use of the term ‘sister’ in this context complicates the boundary between sibling love and romantic love, thus muddling the lines that would have been considered socially acceptable during the Victorian period. In naming Susan as her sister, Dickinson simultaneously expresses the depth of their emotional bond while shielding it from outside scrutiny, thus allowing their relationship to exist within the bounds of acceptable closeness while hinting at something much deeper.
The line ‘Herself to her a Music / As Bumble-bee of June’ underlines Susan's uniqueness and the privacy of the relationship Dickinson shared with her. Dickinson now calls Susan her own ‘Music,’ thereby emphasizing the very unique and special relationship they both had-a relation which was very different from other relationships she experienced. The metaphorical reference to the ‘Bumble-bee of June’ conjures images associated with nature, fertility, and vibrancy, indicating that Susan contributed a distinct sense of joy and completeness to Dickinson’s existence. This depiction of Susan as a unique and treasured entity implies an emotional connection that transcends simple familial affection and suggests the presence of a more profound emotional, if not romantic, bond.
The stanzas that begin with ‘Ourselves were wed one summer, dear’ create a sense of union by describing the relationship in explicitly marital terms. Dickinson imagines a wedding of sorts, her and Susan joining in a union, using the terms of marriage to describe their relationship. The image ‘Your Vision — was in June’ suggests a brief moment of joining and joy, perhaps before Susan's marriage to Dickinson's brother Austin. Yet, Susan's marriage marks the end of their shared intimacy, and so Dickinson mourns, ‘When Your little Lifetime failed, / I wearied — too — of mine’. Here, Dickinson reflects on the interruption Susan's wedding caused in their relationship and portrays it as the death of their shared dreams, the figurative death of Dickinson's psyche.
This sense of loss is heightened in the poem's final lines: ‘Your Cottage — faced the sun — / While Oceans — and the North must be — / On every side of mine.’ The imagery of their two futures branching in opposite directions, with Susan's life of marriage facing the warmth of the sun and Dickinson's being wrapped in coldness and distance, conveys quite powerfully the deep loneliness Dickinson feels at the thought of Susan's marriage. Pollak's examination of these lines further underscores the feeling of emotional disconnection, as Dickinson employs geographical distance to metaphorically illustrate the emotional divide that has emerged between the two women after Susan’s marriage. This metaphor serves to convey the anguish and estrangement that Susan's newly assumed role as a wife has inflicted upon their relationship, which previously resembled an intimate and romantic bond.
In ‘A Wife — at daybreak I shall be,’ Dickinson elaborates on her grief about the passage from girlhood to womanhood. This poem highlights Dickinson's ambivalence toward marriage as an institution that corrupts the innocence and independence of childhood. The swift transition from ‘Maid’ to ‘Bride’ embodies the Victorian conception of femininity, which views the progression from girlhood to the obligations and limitations associated with marriage as a quick progression, a change that Dickinson illustrates as unavoidable yet laden with emotional complexity. The phrase ‘How short it takes to make a Bride’ implies that this metamorphosis occurs suddenly, allowing minimal opportunity for contemplation or agency. This ambivalence towards the institution of marriage reflects Dickinson's own feelings about Susan's marital situation, where the intimacy and companionship they had shared were fast being replaced by the cares and duties imposed upon a Victorian wife.
Finally, the recurring theme of coronation in ‘we were Queens’ and ‘You — were crowned in June’ operates as an extended metaphor relating to Dickinson's feeling of alienation. Whereas Dickinson and Susan may have shared a state of ‘Queens’ in younger life, Susan's marriage promotes her to sovereign status in another land, leaving Dickinson alone in winter, figuratively, her emotions ‘sown in Frosts’.The contrast of summer and winter, bloom and frost, here heightens the alienation that has taken place between them and demonstrates Dickinson's intense sense of loss for a relationship that, free and strong once, now is supplanted by marriage rituals. These poems capture the profundity of her emotional and perhaps romantic relationship with Susan, using the language of sisterhood, marriage, and nature to encode same-sex desire. As it is with Goblin Market, where sisterhood becomes a space to explore female desire, Dickinson's poetry allows her to explore the complexities of love between women under the safe guise of sisterhood. The relationships among women form a complex and intricate framework in the literary contributions of both Rossetti and Dickinson to examine the repressive nature of matrimony and to envision other modes of affection and connectedness.
Ellen Hart laments some critics’s dismissal of Dickinson’s same-sex experiences due to her inclusion of male interests in her works, saying of such critics,
‘They have difficulty accepting that Dickinson had intense romantic relationships with men at different times in her life, which coexisted with her lifelong attachment to Susan. It may also be difficult for critics to see language between two women as marked by desire when the biography suggests that the relationship did not necessarily involve physical intimacy. Such is the power of the taboo against homoeroticism and so narrow the range of definitions of love’.
Hart also encouraged deeper analysis of these correspondences and shorter poems written for specific recipients, noting that ‘many critics who assume a heterocentric point of view are led away from readings that recognize homoerotic passion’. To Hart, it was important to understand the male figures in Dickinson’s poetry as serving the function of enforcing heterosexuality. This links the men of Dickinson’s poetry with the husbands at the conclusion of Goblin Market, and as Dorothy Mermin describes, the poets write within a world ‘in which men serve only the purpose of impregnation. Once both sisters [of Goblin Market] have gone to the goblins and acquired the juices of their fruits, they have no further need of [men].
On these male figures, Pollak writes, ‘[Dickinson] often introduces a symbolic male figure who relieves her of the burden of repudiating either her homosexual or her heterosexual identities’. Like Rossetti, Dickinson is citing heterosexual marital ties as a way of dismissing suspicion of homosexual tendencies, allowing her writings to read as the overly-emotional correspondence of two girl friends. Pollak explains Dickinson’s need to encode her emotions within her poetry, stating, ‘although some feminist critics have suggested that homoerotic female friendships in nineteenth-century America were easily reconciled with heterosexual commitments and untainted by guilt, for Dickinson, the bonds womanhood are more confining’. Although nineteenth-century society was tolerant and even accepting of platonic female relationships being expressed using the language of romance, Dickinson was aware of the need to hide her more overt desires.
Thus, her letters were not explicit declarations of love or lust, which allowed them to exist without scrutiny. Vicinus explains how these letters were able to evade detection, explaining, ‘we do not insist on heterosexuals naming their bedtime activities in order to be defined as sexually active, but we seem to demand this of lesbians’. Accoridng to Vicinus, in order for a lesbian act to have taken place, it must be explicitly described– therefore, Dickinson is in the clear.
The concept of sisterhood further complicates Emily Dickison’s relationship with marriage. When her best friend and lover Susan Gilbert marries Dickinson’s brother, the two women are suddenly bound by a familial title. Dickinson often portrays sisterhood through the lens of childhood innocence, stressing how her sister-in-law’s growing and marrying has affected their relationship. Emily Dickinson’s letters and poems, particularly those addressed to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, reveal an intricate web of emotional intimacy, romantic longing, and desire that often blurred the boundaries between sisterhood and romantic love. Dickinson’s portrayal of marriage as a confining institution that obliterates female freedom and autonomy further critiques the societal expectations imposed on women, particularly those with same-sex desires. By positioning Susan’s marriage as both a loss and a betrayal of their bond, Dickinson subtly challenges the heteronormative structures of the time, using her poetry to create a space for female love that existed outside traditional marital frameworks.
Dickinson sees marriage as ‘a ritual that obliterates the freedom she associates with girlhood’, and is thus opposed to the concept. To Dickinson, Susan’s marriage is a betrayal of their sisterhood, forever separating them while simultaneously tying the lovers together familially. For Rossetti, on the other hand, marriage is to be expected, and ‘sisterhood acts as a protecting framework within which women can fall and recover their way, a literary convention within which female sexuality can be explored and reabsorbed within the teleology of family’. Rossetti sees sisterhood as a woman’s main source of comfort and safety, with her marriage to a man serving the purpose of providing income and children.
Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson, though working within the restrictive social and literary norms of the nineteenth century, were able to encode their thoughts on female relationships through complex metaphors of sisterhood, hunger, and love. In Goblin Market, Rossetti uses the symbolism of fruit and the redemptive power of sisterhood to explore themes of female sexuality, temptation, and desire. Through the figure of Lizzie, Rossetti suggests that women, even those who have ‘fallen,’ can find redemption not through marriage or male intervention, but through the protective and loving bonds shared with other women. This bond allows space for the exploration of desire and recovery from societal condemnation, with sisterhood acting as both a shield and a refuge for transgressive female relationships.
Female relationships in 19th-century literature are often ‘heterosexualized’ by critics, downplaying the significance of the emotional and romantic bonds between women. By reframing these relationships as queer, modern scholars have illuminated new dimensions of Rossetti and Dickinson’s work, suggesting that they were navigating their own desires within the restrictive moral codes of their time. Within Rossetti’s Goblin Market, the profound connection between Laura and Lizzie functions along a continuum of female closeness. The physical tenderness and emotional reliance exhibited by the sisters might not overtly indicate a romantic or sexual bond; however, modern criticism facilitates a more intricate comprehension of how women’s relationships manifested beyond strict heterosexual norms. Similarly, Dickinson's letters to Susan Gilbert can be contextualized through the lens of queer theory, proving to be signs and signals of a love relationship that extends beyond the culturally accepted boundaries of friendship.
Queer readings of Rossetti and Dickinson highlight how both authors use language to veil and reveal desire simultaneously. In Goblin Market, the fruit the goblins offer represents heterosexual sexual attraction, while the sisters find safety within their homosexual actions. In Dickinson's letters and poetry to Susan, messages of love are shrouded in metaphor and ambiguity that capture Dickinson's feelings for Susan. By considering how these authors ornament language to express same-sex desire, one can achieve a more intense comprehension of their artistic strategies that sought to counter Victorian norms.
Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson presented works that were multilayered and complex, challenging the existing Victorian notions of women, marriage, and sexual identity. Sisterhood and religious imagery serve as metaphors for both authors in interlacing same-sex desires between women in subtle yet powerful ways. Setting their ideals in the culturally sanctified forms of sisterhood and spiritual desire, they could resist the repressive norms of their times and could envision other ways of love and relationality.
Their works continue to resonate with modern readers, particularly those interested in queer literary studies. And indeed, with current scholarship reading their poetry and letters through the prism of queer theory, new layers of meaning leap into focus, confirming these women as pioneers in representing the vagaries of female want. Ultimately, the visions of sisterhood and same-sex love that Rossetti and Dickinson wove reflect the personal struggles with convention of each yet also speak to today with remarkable consistency in reflections on the nature of human connection and the many forms love can take.
Through their works, Rossetti and Dickinson highlight the limitations placed on women’s sexuality, but they also offer powerful alternatives to the expected roles of wife and mother. Both authors use the language of sisterhood and intimate female friendship as a means to explore, encode, and even celebrate female desire, offering early examples of queer literature in the Victorian era. By doing so, they subverted the dominant patriarchal ideologies of their time, imagining new ways in which women could connect and love each other, even within the confines of a repressive society. Ultimately, their portrayals of sisterhood, marriage, and same-sex desire suggest that these relationships, though constrained by societal norms, could transcend the boundaries of the Victorian gender order and offer a glimpse into a more fluid and liberated understanding of love between women.
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