Exploring the Parallels between Christina Rossetti's Literary and Somatic Expressions of Graves' Disease

Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was frequently troubled by poor health, and her mid-life
episode of life-threatening illness (1870–1872) when she suffered from Graves’ disease provides an
illuminating case study of the ways that illness can be reflected in poetry and prose. Rossetti, her
family, and her doctors understood Graves’ disease as a heart condition; however, Rossetti’s writing
reflects a different paradigm, presenting themes of self-attack and a divided self that uncannily parallel
the modern understanding of Graves’ disease as autoimmune in nature. Interestingly, these creative
representations reflect an understanding of this disease process that Rossetti family documents and
the history of Victorian medicine demonstrate Rossetti could not have been aware of. When the crisis
had passed, Rossetti’s writing began to include new rhetoric and imagery of self-acceptance and of
suffering as a means of spiritual improvement. This essay explores the parallels between literary and
somatic metaphors: Rossetti’s body and art are often simultaneously “saying” the same thing, the
physical symptoms expressing somatically the same dynamic that is expressed in metaphor and
narrative in Rossetti’s creative writing. Such a well-documented case history raises questions about
how writing may be shaped by paradigms of illness that are not accessible to the conscious mind. We
currently recognize that the unconscious mind can be an important source of artistic creativity: Is it
possible that the body’s unconscious physical operations might also be a source of metaphor in a
creative individual? This complex topic is genuinely interdisciplinary, raising questions in fields ranging
from medicine and cognitive psychology to philosophy, language theory, literary criticism, and
aesthetics as we seek to better understand ways of communicating illness.