maude clare

MAUDE CLARE

BY

Christina Rossetti

·         Around the time of writing this poem Rossetti was friendly with a group called the Langham Place Group.

·         This group sought to improve the rights of women. All married women were not entitled to keep their earnings and unmarried women were marginalised still further.

·         They started their campaign by attempting to push a law that allowed married women some kind of independence where earnings were concerned. It was called the married women’s property act. 1856.

·         There was such an outcry that they ended up abandoning this cause and focusing in on making divorce easier for women trapped in bad marriages, allowing women to become economically independent. That act was passed in 1858.

·         Several poems of Rossetti’s around this time reflect her relationship with this group. The general themes of these poems are anti-marriage and anti romance.

·         She could also be making a point that marriage and romance often ended in limiting the economic possibilities and opportunities of women, curtailing their free spirit, free choice and self-reliance.

·         The poem “Maude Clare” deals with the issue of male agents being responsible for the abuses of Rossetti’s heroines. The poem came out in exactly the same year as the Langham Group had started to meet in their London headquarters.

·         In this poem the speaker is an outspoken “other woman” who has been abandoned by her promiscuous lover, Thomas, who has chosen to marry money over love.

·         Risking public censure as a fallen women Maude Clare appears at the wedding to expose her lover’s disloyalty.

·         This exposure of Thomas’s disloyalty is significant but so too is the exposure of what appears to be a marriage of convenience. It is critical of the commercialisation of marriage.

·         Moreover "Maude Clare," deals differently with the common Pre-Raphaelite theme of tragic love than do contemporary members of the PRB.

·         While Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems infuse love with elements of tragedy through the introduction of death, Christina Rossetti's work, 'Maude Clare" deals with a more complex form of tragic love.

·         As Lord Thomas's previous love, Maude Clare's presence sullies the nuptials between Nell and him, adding conflict to the wedding day occasion.

·         Neither bride nor groom experience pure joy during the occasion because of Maude Clare's conspicuous attendance:

My lord was pale with inward strife,
And Nell was pale with pride;

• Rather than using flowery description or hard-edged realism, like her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti primarily composes her narrative poem of dialogue.
•  Her unusual preponderance of dialogue with little attention to description of the environment gives the reader a sense of watching a scene in a play, rather than reading a poem.
• Instead of stealing the focus of the wedding day, as one would traditionally expect, the bride forfeits all the attention to Maude Clare.
• A former lover (perhaps a very recent lover) of Lord Thomas, Maude usurps the reader's attention as the focal point of the narrative at the outset of the first stanza:

Out of the church she followed them

With a lofty step and mien

His bride was like a village maid

Maude Clare was like a queen.

                       

• Rossetti continues to contrast Maude Clare and the bride throughout the poem.
• Nell serves as a secondary character, speaking only in retaliation to Maude Clare's non-too-well masked jabs, and pales, literally and figuratively, in comparison to Maude Clare's stature and personage.
• As an ironic wedding gift, Maude Clare offers Thomas and Nell both physical amulets of love like 'half of the golden chain" that Thomas wore, as well as a more biting gift of her “share of a fickle heart."
• Though Rossetti doesn't specifically delineate the exact circumstances that lead to this uncomfortably awkward and emotionally charged wedding scene, she highlights the profound tension between Maude Clare and Nell.
• Furthermore, Lord Thomas struggles to reconcile his marital vows and obligations to Nell with Maude Clare, the 'More wise, and much more fair" other woman.
• Maude Clare claims that she has washed her hands of Thomas and that Nell can have his heart, which lacks 'bloom" or 'dew", implying that it has somehow lost its sparkle.
• The tone of her words and her conspicuous domination of the scene reveal her true, somewhat bitter attachments, however.
• In the end when, in a curt exchange of dialogue, the two women shoot venom-charged words at one another, Nell's retaliation concludes the poem.
• The interchange reminds us of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream when, while fighting over Lysander's affections, Helena attacks Hermia by calling her a puppet, prompting the deterioration of the argument into a clawing, biting, physical confrontation:

Yea, tho’ you’re taller by the head,

More wise and much more fair,

I’ll love him till he loves me best-

Me best of all Maude Clare.

• Though not the blushing, bubbling bride that one might stereotypically expect, Nell gets the last word, but not the last thought.
• Rossetti's choice to emphasize Maude Clare's name in the finale leaves the reader to ponder the impending doom of Thomas and Nell's marriage.
• With the looming presence of Maude Clare at their wedding, acting as a bad omen for the marriage in general, it's unlikely that Thomas will ever love Nell the best, as she hopes.
•  The tragedy lies not in a spiritual love lost by means of mortality, but instead in the interplay of a love triangle that leaves all parties unsatisfied, confused, and still longing for an ill-manifested vision of love.