nstrate what was radical and conservative about both writers' views and how, despite differing means, they were largely in agreement about the necessity of recognizing women as varying in essential respects from each other and from the limitations of the popular, conventional view of them.
Both writers used the contrasting sisters to demonstrate the range of potential and the waste of potential in women in general. But they employed very different strategies to do this. On the one hand, Jewsbury devised an elaborate scheme of contrasts that play out over the years of the novel's narrative and touch on the impact of differences in class and wealth, nationality, dependence and independence. Jewsbury also shows how the range of conservative action and reaction--including those of both men and women--reinforced convention and helped shape the destinies of Bianca and her half-sister Alice. Jewsbury develops, as it were, a 'test-case' in the comparative examination of the lives of her two sisters as she subjects them to an array of social forces in order to develop her conception of women's variety and potential. Rossetti, on the other hand, simply eliminated all these factors and, in the much more limited sphere of action in her poem, created a pair of archetypes whose mythical domain admits little of the real world and abrogates considerations of class, wealth, or nationality in favor of the parable form. Unlike Jewsbury, who situates her characters firmly in the circumstantial web of life, Rossetti's sisters live in an elemental world in which the social interest has been reduced to the example of "Jeanie in her grave" (35) and the existence of ordinary men and parents is merely implied. Laura and Lizzie live in a world in which they must, therefore, depend on their own resources in deciding on any course of action.
In Rossetti's poem the motivations and the situation of the sisters are reduced to broadly symbolic terms. Th...