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‘Gothic Poetry: The Corpse’s [a] Text’

Michael Franklin, Caroline Franklin

The Victorian Gothic: an Edinburgh Companion

Swansea University Author: Michael Franklin

Abstract

Opening with the unscrewing of a Highgate coffin, Caroline Franklin and Michael Franklin’s ‘Victorian Gothic Poetry: The Corpse’s [a] Text’ considers the Gothic light thrown upon the production of Elizabeth Siddal’s body, its textualization and death-in-life representation in Dante Gabriel’s Rossett...

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Published in: The Victorian Gothic: an Edinburgh Companion
Published: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2012
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa12077
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Abstract: Opening with the unscrewing of a Highgate coffin, Caroline Franklin and Michael Franklin’s ‘Victorian Gothic Poetry: The Corpse’s [a] Text’ considers the Gothic light thrown upon the production of Elizabeth Siddal’s body, its textualization and death-in-life representation in Dante Gabriel’s Rossetti’s poems and paintings, re-mirrored in the virtual-corpse reflections of some of Siddal’s own influential oneiric texts. Rossetti’s retrieval of his wife’s corpse’s text, the fair-copy of ‘Jenny’, is refracted in Pound’s elision of Lizzie with ‘poor Jenny’s case’/text/body/casket. The year of Siddal’s death – 1862 – is linked firstly with the publication of her sister-in-law’s ‘After Death’, a text proceeding from a body inscribed by rejection; and secondly with the likely date of the binding of Emily Dickinson’s Fascicle 16 and the various corpse-texts that issue from her personae’s ‘granite lips’. Dickinson famously asked Thomas Higginson: ‘Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? […] Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude’. (Johnson and Ward, 1986: 260) Arguing that nothing is so fully alive as her corpses, the authors suggest these posthumous speakers breathe an ‘arch and original Breath’ into the ‘body of lovely Death’. What exactly ‘crash Paul’ meant in 1 Corinthians 15 is also approached via the neglected poetry of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose consolatory postbellum Gothic was simultaneously intensified and compromised by the dread inability of the resurrected corpse to communicate with the living loved.
Item Description: Caroline Franklin 50% Michael J. Franklin 50%
College: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences