The mythological figure Echo is important for the nineteenth-century poets to embody the relationship between image and voice along with their gender connotations. In this talk, I would like to explore Christina Rossetti’s use of echo both as an image and as a technique in two Petrarchan sonnets: “After Death” and “An Echo from the Willow-wood”. Through parodic allusions to male writers, deliberate misuse of words, and formal changes of the sonnet, Rossetti unsettles, or rather, slants the gendered divisions between sight and sound, between originals and copies, and most importantly between the male eye (“I”) and the female body.
