In her remarkable essay detailing Christina Rossetti's involvement with the Church Penitentiary Movement and its connection to the representation of the fallen woman in her poetry, Diane D'Amico rightly tells us that "we should . . . add to the list of sources for 'Goblin Market' the literature of the Church Penitentiary Movement,"1thus calling for further investigation of this rich and complex area of Rossetti studies. But "Goblin Market" is not the only poem that merits further inquiry in light of Rossetti's involvement with the Church Penitentiary Movement. Rossetti worked at Highgate Penitentiary on and off from the summer of 1859 until 1870, and it is something of an irony that a poet who has in the past thirty years been under such intense scrutiny by largely feminist critical studies should have had such remarkably little attention paid to her involvement with communities of women both in her poetry and her real life.

Our awareness of Rossetti's volunteer work at Highgate is not new; her work there has been documented in her biographies for nearly a century. But, until recently, few studies have thoroughly investigated the ways her time working in this community of women influenced relationships between women in her poetry. This is an unfortunate gap in Rossetti studies, since attention to the relationship between Rossetti's poetry and her work at Highgate allows us to trace Rossetti's engagement of significant sociopolitical and moral questions about the nature and capabilities of women's communal activities in the mid-nineteenth century.[End Page 859]

In "Goblin Market" (composed in April 1859), Rossetti seems to advocate women's collective activity and friendship, insisting that women's communities are not only viable, but also that the instabilities that emerge within them are the direct result of male forces working outside the female community. But according to documentation currently available, "Goblin Market" was composed a few monthsbeforeRossetti began working at Highgate.2This suggests that, although Rossetti had known of the work at Highgate for some time, it is probable that her understanding of the realities of Penitentiary work was limited only to what could be found in advertisements designed to gain the support of women in Rossetti's parish. The poems that Rossetti composed after she began working at Highgate (such as the two sister poems of 1860, "Noble Sisters" and "Sister Maude") offer treatments of sister relationships that differ markedly from that found in "Goblin Market."3These two poems, their sister relationships characterized by antagonism and competitiveness, form a stark contrast to the utopian possibilities that "Goblin Market" envisions for female communities, thus raising a series of questions about current estimations of Rossetti's attitude toward sororal relationships and women's communities.

What little critical attention "Noble Sisters" and "Sister Maude" have drawn has been preoccupied with the antagonism between the sisters. Joseph Bristow explains how poems such as "Noble Sisters" explore "the competing demands placed upon her sisters to support one another, to marry, and to pledge one's heart to God"; similarly, Helena Michie argues that poetic treatments of this antagonism carve out "a place for sisterhood in Victorian literary tropology that allows for the expression of hostility among women."4In addition to Bristow's and Michie's readings of these poems, I would like to suggest another: that the radically different treatment of sister relationships Rossetti offers in "Noble Sisters" and "Sister Maude" suggests that her attitude toward communities of women changed dramatically following her experience at Highgate. It is with these "post-Penitentiary" poems and their dystopic sister relationships that this study is primarily concerned.

"Noble Sisters" describes two nameless sisters who, as in "Goblin Market," live in a community apparently devoid of men. The poem concerns itself with the conflict between the two sisters, one of whom wishes to leave the community with her lover while the other attempts to intercept the lover's advances. Any discussion of "Noble Sisters" is immediately hampered by the poem's[End Page 860]lack of proper names for its two speakers.5While my terms—"protector sister" and "protected sister"—are as problematic as any other, they echo the unequal distribution of authority within the sister community while also reflecting the ways the sisters are defined both in terms of their relationship with one another and to the male figure from whom "protection" may be required.

In "Noble Sisters," the protector sister's actions attempt to exclude the lover's advances. As in Rossetti's treatment of the goblin men outside the female community in "Goblin Market," the lover and the protected sister play out the conventional themes of seduction and profligacy: the falcon wears "jingling bells about her neck" (line 5), and either a ribbon or a ring "beneath her wing" (lines 6-8); similarly, the "ruddy hound" (line 13) wears a "silken leash about his neck; / But in his mouth may be / A chain of gold and silver links" (lines 17-9).6The lover's messengers carry objects that might ultimately lure the sisters away from the community. Rossetti offers a traditional treatment of the profligate attempting to lure young maidens away from home with the promise of a life of luxury—a common theme in Victorian literature. Indeed, one letter to theTimesadvocating Penitentiary work notes that the "story so common in works of fiction occurs over and over and over again in real life. The country girl accompanies some heartless villain up to London, is maintained in splendour for months, weeks, or days, is then deserted."7The parallels (at least superficially) between the profligate enticing the young maiden away from home and the lover sending presents to the protected sister in "Noble Sisters" are obvious. This is essentially the same model of seduction Rossetti had employed in "Goblin Market," where the goblin merchant men tempt the maidens in the community with their exotic fruits. But in "Goblin Market," when women succumb to the temptations of the goblin merchants, they return (even if only to waste away and die) to the sister community. It is in this way that Rossetti champions communities of women: even when members are lured away, the community is stable enough to reclaim them—provided, of course, that they return at all.8

What Rossetti elides in "Goblin Market" is the degree to which dissatisfaction with the sister community (or the home, in the case of both "Noble Sisters" and "Sister Maude") can be a component part of the temptation to leave it. In "Goblin Market," the temptation to leave the community stems from the luxuriance of the goblins' fruit, and thus thelackof luxury in the sister community—the sisters' labor apparently providing only staples—becomes a source of dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, "Goblin Market"[End Page 861]manifests a tremendous faith in the sister community: Lizzie, for example, is able to leave Laura alone by the brook, certain that she will return to the safety of their home.

Home is not so ideal a place in "Noble Sisters," and, as the protected sister's unflagging attention to what is outside its walls indicates, neither is it a place wherebothsisters desire to remain. But while "Goblin Market" evinces a considerable faith in the sisters' fidelity to the sister community, in this later poem we find that this is not the case. In "Noble Sisters," the home has been transformed into a prison whose walls, gates, doors, and windows are under constant guard. Moreover, the protected sister's constant attention to what is outside the sister community suggests a failure within the sister community. Whether that failure is sexual, economic, or imaginative is unclear; but, the tensions within the dialogue between the two sisters—one searching desperately for a highly romanticized lover, the other struggling to subvert his attempts at contact—suggests that the failures of the sister community at least touch on all of these. "Goblin Market" registers some of these concerns about potential shortcomings of the sister community in its treatment of Laura's temptation. Nevertheless, Rossetti's faith in the potential of the sister community to withstand the outside world, her belief in the redemptive power of sisterhood, and her utopian vision of relations within women's communities never seem to waver.

Belief in the power and viability of the sister community is common in the literature surrounding the Church Penitentiary Movement. Thomas Thellusson Carter, founder and first warden of the Penitentiary at Clewer, believed that penitents ought to meet with as little temptation from the outside world—and their old ways of life—as possible; as a result, the Penitentiary system often took on an almost xenophobic and prison-like attitude, restricting the inmates' movements to within the Penitentiary walls.9Such protectiveness and isolation are characteristic of the Church Penitentiary Movement. In her 1865 diatribe against the Penitentiary system,Penitentiaries and Reformatories, Felicia Skene describes how "[o]ne of the cruelest parts of the system is their rigorous confinement to the house, and total want of exercise in the open air . . . it is a fact that not one breath of fresh air is allowed to these poor prisoners through the day; not one half hour is granted them in which to look on the blue sky and the sunshine, and to meet the cool breeze with its invigorating power."10But it was not only confinement with which the inmates had to contend. It was also believed that penitents should at all[End Page 862]times be kept under strict observation, and so "penitents were never left without a 'sister present,'" and each inmate's sleeping chamber was placed in such a way that it could be watched by a Sister "whose sleeping chamber [was] so arranged to command it."11This close surveillance carried with it sinister undertones of imprisonment, which, to a certain extent, is not surprising. The Penitentiary was, after all, an institution based on transgression; because the nature of the penitents' transgressions was simultaneously sexual, spiritual, and moral, it was believed that, in order for a woman to commit such a break with contemporary standards of conduct, she must be "totally dead to all sense of right."12

The Penitentiary's methods struck a dissonant chord with many Victorians, who saw them as "a system of conventual rule and severe religious observance, which the best-disposed novice that ever sought to be trained as a nun would find hard to bear."13The confluence here of penitentiaries and convents points to an interesting phenomenon: even though thenatureof these two types of female communities was entirely different—one based on transgression, the other on piety and devotion—because Church Penitentiaries were often closely associated with religious sisterhoods (such as the Reverend Carter's at Clewer), they were subject to many of the same arguments leveled against religious communities. Many of these arguments were anti-Catholic in nature and were connected to a tremendous anxiety surrounding the reinstitution of religious communities in the Church of England that began at midcentury.14In response, what Pauline Nestor has called a "thriving anti-conventual fiction" emerged, which either demonized nuns or associated the conventual life with a kind of kidnapping.15Indeed, the preface to one of the novels Nestor mentions—Sister Agnes; or the Captive Nun: A Picture of Conventual Life(1854)—alludes to the profusion of "narratives of escaped nuns, and converted priests, and ex-confessors [which] are widely known,"16and claims to expose
the real character of that state of seclusion over whose deformities the golden veil of romance has been too successfully drawn; and have awakened a strong feeling of compassion for the victims of a delusion so terrible as that which is systematically practised by the decoys of Rome, upon hundreds of the youthful and unsuspecting.
It is in the desire of inducing some to pause before they enter a prison—of all prisons the most hopeless—that[End Page 863]this little work is sent forth; and in the further desire of adding impetus to the movement now happily begun, for obtaining an efficient inspection and control of British nunneries.17

Sister Agnesappeals to both anti-feminist and anti-Catholic sentiments in its attempt to expose the "dark underbelly" of religious sisterhoods. While many of these charges may have been purely fictitious, the "scandals"—whether real or imagined—surrounding religious communities,18combined with attacks on the rigidity of life within the Penitentiary, fed a popular belief concerning the inherent instability of female communities and aggravated an already polarized debate about women's potential for communal activity.

Opposition to women's communal activities was not always based on gender. Writers such as Margaret Goodman, Penelope Holland, and Skene focused on the methods and organizational structures organizing these communities in their discussions of the "problems" in women's communities. InExperiences of an English Sister of Mercy(1862), Goodman, a former member of the Sisters of Mercy at Devonport, remembers how she, "led chiefly by the wish to minister to untended suffering, in the summer of 1852 . . . joined the Sisters of Mercy at Devonport. As time went on, Miss Sellon thought fit to develop such conventual rules as pressed too heavily upon many of us; and, therefore, after a sojourn of six years . . . returned to [her] former occupation."19Holland offers a similar complaint against the conventual life. In an article inMacmillan's Magazine, April 1869, she asks "whether it be right for women who have attained the full maturity of their intellects to submit themselves to a system by which they are treated as we should scarcely treat an infant in these days, when fools' caps have gone out of fashion."20Similarly, Skene describes the Penitentiary's "wretched little stringent rules . . . arranged to goad and torment the unreasoning victims into utter disgust with the very idea of repentance or reform."21Many of the objections to the "conventual rules" leveled at Houses of Mercy and Penitentiaries focused on the rigorous daily regimen prescribed to those involved with these institutions. Many penitents and refuge seekers did find the rigor of such "conventual rules" difficult to bear; as Goodman's departure from Miss Sellon's sisterhood indicates, just as there were forces outside the female community that might threaten the women within it, there were also forces and structureswithinthese communities that drove womenawayfrom them.[End Page 864]

It is in this context that we can perhaps best understand the forces informing Rossetti's treatment of the sister relationship in these poems from 1860. By this date, Rossetti had gained sufficient experience to recognize that the work of reclamation was not always as successful as she had imagined in "Goblin Market." More importantly, by 1860 she had gained insight into the ways that the literature and rhetoric of the Church Penitentiary Movement, with its imagery of middle-class women working together in a convent setting to save their fallen yet willing-to-be-rescued sisters, had elided the internal struggles within these communities of women.

The Reverend Thomas Carter describes a difficulty inherent in mythologizing Penitentiary work. He notes that there existed a "common idea that the women who are admitted within the walls of a penitentiary are penitents, as they are called," although those with "any practical experience of this work know that this is a fallacy."22Carter's insistence that "practical experience" in the Penitentiary would demystify any notions of a harmonious community of women living within it is particularly important to Rossetti studies, since, undoubtedly, the reality Rossetti encountered was decidedly different from what she had imagined in "Goblin Market," and her treatment of the internal structures organizing women's communities in her post-Penitentiary poems indicates a change in her beliefs about communities of women. These poems posit sister communities wherein sisters are hardly "friends" at all, and are often openly hostile to one another.

We can see the source of this tension in the poem's sister phrases—the pairings of the formal address "sister" with adjectives such as "dear" or "fair and tall"—which demarcate the system of value organizing the sisters' relationship, thus revealing the degree to which the women possess autonomy within this community. In the poem's first stanza, the protected sister's reference to the protector sister as "sister dear, sister dear" (line 2) suggests fondness, but on another level also indicates a hierarchical system of valuation within the sister community. This system becomes more apparent in the protector sister's reference to the protected sister as "my sister dove" (line 11), which, like "sister dear" before it, suggests a fondness between the two women, while also insisting upon the innocence and naiveté of the protected sister. When taken together, the two references to "sister" re-inscribe the class distinctions that separate the two women: the difference between "sister dear" and "sister dove" posits one sister in a position of authority over the other, thus indicating[End Page 865]the degree to which the two women possess authority within the community. Furthermore, the phrase "sister dove" contrasts the imagined innocence of the dove with the predatory falcon sent by the lover from outside the community; this insistence upon the innocence of the sister and the dangerousness of the lover's messenger in turn suggests the danger of the extrasororal world and the safety of the sororal world. Their relationship becomes a "battle" over perceptions of the relationship between the sister community and the world outside it.23

As Michie argues in "The Battle for Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti's Strategies for Control in Her Sister Poems," one of the sites of conflict in the poem is the direction and control of conversation. Since the dialogue between the sisters revolves almost entirely around the perception of the extrasororal world, we can see this conflict played out in each of the protected sister's inquiries in which she couches her description of the extrasororal world in the imagery of chivalric romance and luxury. The protector sister's responses do not echo this imagery, consistently removing the luxury that the protected sister associates with the extrasororal and replacing it with the banal. She claims, for instance, to have seen only a falcon and a hound, in contrast to the richly adorned creatures for whom the protected sister searched. She also makes no mention of the page's "eaglets broidered on his cap, / And eaglets on his glove" (lines 29-30), and describes the lover as merely "a nameless man . . . Who loitered round our door" (lines 45-6) rather than as
A young man tall and strong,
Swift-footed to uphold the right
And to uproot the wrong,
Come home across the desolate sea
To woo
(lines 38-42)
the protected sister. This tension between a highly romanticized description of the extrasororal world and the suggestion that any departure from the community is implicitly a sexual fall (to leave the sister community is to bring shame to the "father's name" [line 59]) is the most salient feature of the poem, and indicates that the perception of the extrasororal world is also at stake in the dialogue.

The preoccupation with the politics of the sister community—how the sister community perceives the world outside it, and[End Page 866]how the sister community's structure and behavior are affected by it—is a significant feature of the poem, most clearly visible in the aftermath of the protector sister's telling the lover that the protected sister already has a husband who "loves her much, / And yet she loves him more" (lines 47-8). By cavalierly relating this encounter to the protected sister, the protector sister commits what Michie calls an "overt act of aggression,"24becoming not unlike the "tyrannical woman" Eliza Lynn Linton predicted would emerge if women were granted excessive authority. In her 1898 essay "Nearing the Rapids," Linton prophesized that "[w]hen we have added the perilous arm of political power to the restless love of interference . . . we shall pass under a despotism greater than any the world has ever seen since old Egypt gave the reins to women . . . For how tyrannical women are we can see for ourselves any day in the week."25This attitude about the potential problems resulting from women with power was not exclusive to anti-feminists.26It would seem that Rossetti, too, reached a similar conclusion after working at Highgate; unlike in "Goblin Market," where the primary threat to the sister community lies in the seductiveness of the extrasororal world, in "Noble Sisters" tension stems from within the sister community.

For the protector sister, the extrasororal world is a consistent source of disruption to the sister community: each of the lover's messengers is ostensibly sent away for fear it will disturb the protected sister. The protector sister's attempts to control the conversation parallel the Penitentiary Movement's insistence that "[f]allen women 'need some such sisters to be ever at their side, watching them in weak moments, encouraging them in seasons of overwhelming gloom, checking outbreaks of temper and light words, directing and controlling their conversations.'"27This direction was largely put in place to prevent the unfallen Sisters working in the Penitentiary from being corrupted by stories told by inmates, but it also served to reorient the penitents' perceptions of the world outside the community.

"Noble Sisters" echoes this revision of the extrasororal world in the protector sister's inversion of the protected sister's chivalric descriptions of the lover's attempts at communication.28For the protector sister, each masculine advance is a potential source of disruption: the falcon is a "thief" (line 12), the hound might "wake" the protected sister "too soon" (line 24), and the page is turned away "Lest the creaking gate should anger" (line 36) the protected sister. For the protector sister, the lover's attempts to gain entry into the sister community parallel what V. I. Propp describes as[End Page 867]the folktale villain's "attempt at reconnaissance" with its "aim of finding out the location of children, or sometimes of precious objects."29This information usually leads to some type of abduction; for the protector sister, then, the lover's intention to woo one sister away from the community constitutes an overt attempt to disrupt the sister community. The protector sister, then, becomes the community's protector and, in a sense, its hero.30Paradoxically, as the protector sister challenges the protected sister's assumptions about the relationship between the sororal and extrasororal worlds, and as she insists upon the disruptiveness of the lover, she also becomes a kind of villain who imprisons the protected sister within the community. Thus, when Rossetti engages the traditional features of the folktale—the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress—none of these staples of the folktale seems to have any currency. Instead, each figure becomes embroiled in a complex series of redefinitions wherein the hero may be the villain, the villain the hero, and the damsel in distress hardly distressed at all.