In their poetry, both Alfred Tennyson and Christina Rossetti are interested in the image of the female ghost and her association with madness. Tennyson’s “Maud” incorporates the trope of the female specter through the image of the titular heroine herself, who haunts the speaker in his flight after he kills her brother in a duel. Attached to this ghostly vision of “Maud” is the growing sense of the male speaker’s madness, which eventually lands him in an asylum where he believes himself to be buried alive. Rossetti, too, is interested in the female ghost, though she situates her in a different context. While Tennyson’s female ghost falls into line with the Victorian imagination’s stereotypes related to what they considered diseased and abnormal minds, to be buried away from sight in madhouses, Rossetti normalizes the female specter – in her comparatively shorter lyrical works, she lyrically illustrates how her presence is enmeshed in the quotidian workings of everyday life. In normalizing the female ghost, Rossetti normalizes madness and even reintroduces into the daily domestic space the sense of feeling dead before death made grotesque in the madhouse of “Maud.”
Falling in line with a long tradition of gothic ghosts, the male speaker in Tennyson’s “Maud” applies decidedly supernatural, illusory language to the titular heroine’s haunting image, describing her as “flitting to and fro” (81) and like a “ghost” (Tennyson 2.2.5.82). Wrapped up in these ghostly images of the supernatural is, of course, also a sense of ephemerality and incorporality, a lack of humanity. In the short span of these two lines, speaker additionally uses in reference to Maud’s specter the language of sickness and infection – she is “Plagued”(80) and “A disease,” a malicious nonhuman entity, from the speaker’s perspective, that tortures and diseases both his physical and mental wellness, tearing him apart from the inside out (Tennyson 2.2.5.82). As though heightening the ghostly image’s lack of humanness, the speaker additionally refers to it as “hard” and “mechanic,” suggesting its association with a harsh and unfeeling sense of scientific and technological progress that is unwholesome to the individual human psyche (Tennyson 2.2.5.82). As a whole, the speaker’s conception of this female specter is intensely dehumanized and even uncanny – he rhetorically inquires, “Why should it look like Maud?” (Tennyson 2.2.5.86). This question simultaneously acknowledges the familiarity of the ghostly image, how it is “like Maude,” but also how her ghostly apparition is just off enough for the speaker to be unable to declare, with certainty, that she is Maud. Thus, Maud has been stripped of the abundant liveliness and beauty and inner vitality emanating outwards as “the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall, / … the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all” (1.1.18.70,73-74) to become merely a fiend that that, from the perspective of the speaker’s male gaze, simply traumatizes men’s minds as “a juggle born of the brain” (Tennyson 2.2.5.90).
While the speaker’s image of the female specter in “Maud” is supernaturally and gothically horrifying in its dehumanized and depersonalized uncanniness, worth noting is how the hauntings of her ghostly presence are contained away from the shores of England and Victorian domesticity. Maud’s haunting, incorporeal image only first appears to the speaker when he is in “Breton, not Briton; here / Like a shipwrecked man” (Tennyson 2.2.5.78-79). In addition to containing the terrors of these ghostly feminine visitations to a land that is geographically distant, “Maud” also goes to great lengths to emphasize the grotesqueness of the mind that is susceptible to haunting female specters. The madness implied by the self diagnosed “juggle born of the brain,” the condition that allows for the intrusion of female ghosts on the plagued mind in the first place, is only intensified by the fact that the haunted speaker ends up in a madhouse believing that he has been buried alive (Tennyson 2.5.1.244n1). In this context, the speaker most explicitly labels himself as mad and, therefore, from the perspective of the Victorians, psychologically abnormal and unsound – he describes how in his hallucinated state of being buried alive, “Ever about me the dead men go; / And then to hear a dead man chatter / Is enough to drive one mad,” explicitly implying that he is the “one” that has been “[driven] … mad” (Tennyson 2.5.1.256-258). As such, in Tennyson’s poem “Maud” emerges the assumption that the unfeeling malice and psychological violence of the female ghost, as represented by the speaker’s ghostly image of Maud, is banished to faraway foreign lands of shipwreck and erased into the margins of the social world, such as the rarefied space of the Victorian madhouse, with its raving madmen, as embodied by the speaker of Tennyson’s poem – those operating within the familiar domesticity of the Victorian household or the socially regulated English social world outside of madhouses ostensibly need not worry about the gothic hauntings of women like Maud.
Like Tennyson, Rossetti is interested in the image of the female haunting specter but she challenges the notion that it is necessarily an abnormal phenomena that must be evacuated to foreign shores or the madhouse. While Tennyson in “Maud” presents the female ghost as a dehumanized and uncanny agent of infection that causes the alienation of the male speaker from the rest of his social world, Rossetti’s feminized speaker in her “At Home,” rather than seeing ghosts as supernatural fiends of gothic destruction instead lyrically identifies with the female ghost. She actively embodies and takes on the perspective of the female specter and relates the events of the poem from a first person perspective right from the start of the poem: “When I was dead, my spirit turned / To seek the much frequented house” (Rosetti, “At Home” 1-2). In addition to the speaker’s first self identification with the ghost which subtly emphasizes her persistent inner life despite being a ghost, Rossetti’s poem also gives hints of the ghostly speaker’s subjective experience – she suggests her own sense of melancholy towards being temporally separated from her friends, how “‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried” (23), while “I was of yesterday” (Rossetti, “At Home” 24). Nonetheless, unlike the terrifying maliciousness that Tennyson’s speaker attaches to the ghostly Maud that plagues his masculine psyche, Rossetti’s self embodied feminized ghost strives to minimize any psychological stress it may cause to her friends: “I shivered comfortless, but cast / No chill across the tablecloth” (Rossetti, “At Home” 25-26). Rather than haunting a man to juggle his brains and driving him insane with what “Maud” suggests is the infection of madness, Rossetti’s speaker, as a ghost readily resigns herself to pass silently but wistfully out of the room, without performatively disturbing the comforts of domesticity – “I passed from the familiar room, / I who from love had passed away, / Like the remembrance of a guest / That tarriest but a day” (Rosetti, “At Home” 29-32). Rosetti’s lyrical ghost is a mere “guest” that claims no ownership over anyone else. This self sacrifice and self minimization for the comfort of her friends intensely humanizes the embodied, first person ghost in Rossetti’s “At Home” – while like Maud’s ghost she is no longer strictly corporeal with a beating heart, Rossetti’s spectral speaker emphasizes a sense of shared humanity rather than difference. Unlike the unfeeling unfamiliarity of Tennyson’s female ghost, Rossetti’s vision of the female ghost maintains a highly human sense of compassion carried over into death as emphasized by the speaker’s continued self-appellation of “I” – Rossetti’s first person ghost decidedly lacks monstrosity in all its lyricism.
In fact, Rossetti takes the trope of the spectral female harbinger of madness and reintegrates it back into the everyday space of domesticity – she normalizes the female ghost, takes it from the forgotten marginality of the madhouse, and resituates it as an invisible and nearly unfelt presence of everyday life within the home. Rather than being a site of grotesque theatrics, Rossetti’s speaker, though she goes unnoticed by the living, quietly seeks out scenes of fellowship as a watcher from the sidelines:
I passed the door, and saw my friends
Feasting beneath the green orange boughs;
From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;
They sang, they jested, and they laughed,
For each was loved of each (Rosetti, “At Home” 3-8).
Note the joyful communality of this festivity in which “My friends … They sang, they jested, and they laughed, / For each was loved of each” as well as the plentitude of the feast – “They pushed the wine, / They sucked the pulp of plum and peach.” In a way, this scene is not completely unlike the Biblical Cana of Galilee in which Jesus, at His mother Mary’s behest, miraculously turns water into wine – Rossetti essentially performs a reversal and associates the ghost with the holy and common celebratory rituals of daily life. As such, the female ghost’s spectatorship in Rosetti, rather than be alienated to, what to the Victorian imagination is, the faraway domains of a madhouse, is still undercurrent in the common joy of everyday life.
Rosetti even goes so far as to normalize the supposed state of being dead while still alive, a state that from the perspective of Tennyson’s male speaker is encapsulated by the suffocating and hallucinated experience of being buried alive in the madhouse. After all, the very title of Rossetti’s “Dead Before Death” suggests that the poem will be interested in this somewhat paradoxical state of being consigned to a death-like state before one has actually ceased to breathe. However, Rossetti, unlike Tennyson, does not present being dead before death in a grotesque light, associated, from the perspective of male Victorian imaginations, with men set aside in the madhouse away from the rest of the social world to be plagued by spectral visitations from their dehumanized former lovers. Rather, “Dead Before Death,” like “At Home,” engages in the act of normalization – a psychological mindset exorcized from the rest of society from the masculine perspective of “Maud” is once again reintroduced as thoroughly enmeshed in the domestic through the popular and well established form of the “Sonnet.” Rossetti’s speaker, the one who is dead before death, is not made figure of madness but a relatable figure of heartbreak, suffering through the emotionally devastating but not uncommon experience of seeing her lover “changed and cold, how changed and very cold, / With stiffened smiling lips and cold calm eyes: / Changed, yet the same; much knowing, little wise” (“Dead Before Death” 1-3). In addition, the speaker acknowledges the passage of time and the accompanying changes that are inherent and natural to its flow: “We hoped for better things as years would rise, / But it is over as a tale once told. / All fallen the blossom that no fruitage bore” (Rossetti, “Dead Before Death” 7-9). There is a sad regretfulness to the speaker’s tone as she contemplates the the unfulfilled “[hopes]” that “no fruitage bore” but, at the same time, an acceptance of the lovers’ parting “as a tale once told.” Note the naturalized imagery of the “fruitage” as perhaps a reference to the natural cyclicality of the Seasons as well as the speaker’s adoption of a Biblical resignation towards these natural forces and changes in others’ feelings that are beyond her control. She exhibits none of the frenzied panic, frustration, and frantic desire to be out of the situation of being dead before death that in the mind of Tennyson’s speaker in “Maud:”
For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;
To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?
But up and down and to and fro,
Every about me the dead men go;
And then to hear a dead man chatter
Is enough to drive one mad (253-258).
What in Rosetti is accepted as part of the experience of being human and subjected to the natural change of time through the Seasons is once again consigned to the seemingly abnormal psychology of being “mad” in Tennyson. In fact, the measured response of Rossetti’s feminized speaker could perhaps be interpreted as some of what Maud herself would say to Tennyson’s speaker, were she allowed to speak to him as a fully-formed human from the environment of her everyday, domestic life rather than in the objectified form of a haunting tormenting ghost blamed for infecting men’s brains and shutting them away in madhouses.
Thus, Rossetti subtly pushes back against the paradigm of madness in association with female ghosts as established by male poets like Tennyson. While Tennyson presents female specters as dehumanized, supernatural creatures that disturb the reason of men and consigns them to madhouses, Rossetti presents them as almost quotidian – in reality, the haunting female presence is deeply, nearly imperceptibly enmeshed in the daily going ons of everyday life, whether in the context of festivity or the parting between two lovers. In having her speakers, in lyrical fashion, embody the subjectivities of these female ghosts from an intimate, first person perspective operating within the domesticity of everyday life, Rossetti spins masculine tropes of feminized gothic hauntings and madness on their heads. She challenges the culturally constructed association between a dehumanized, spectral femininity and madness, instead suggesting that these constructs do not operate in the margins, seemingly contained out of sight in foreign lands or asylums – rather, to be mad and to be woman are the very marrow of life, the hidden undercurrents operating at the heart of the processes of daily life.
Works Cited
Rossetti, Christina. “At Home.” Goblin Market and Other Poems, edited by Staneley Applebaum, Candace Ward,, et al., Dover Publications, 1994, pp.17-18.
Rossetti, Christina. “Dead Before Death.” Infoplease, 23 September 2019, https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/poetry/christina-rossetti/christina-rossetti-dead-death. Accessed 15 April 2023.
Tennyson, Alfred. “Maud.” Tennyson: Selected Poetry: a Broadview Anthology of British Literature, edited by Erik Gray, et al., Broadview Press, 2014, pp.207-261.
Isabella Zhou 
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