rossetti AO5

Alice Kirby : "Rossetti lived…

an often unconventional life within the confines of Victorian mores"

Eve West: "a woman who we cannot…

reduce to an easily categorised emotional state"

Goblin Market) "an allegory for a woman trying to transcend the boundaries placed upon her by society"

Alice Kirby 2

Alice Kirby: (Proto-Feminist elements) "her characters are given…

the agency to make their own decisions

(Thomas' Silence in Maude Clare) "a clear critique of dominant masculinity"

Simon Avery 1

(Round tower shows) "The limits of Rossetti's Social Conscience… a product of her era and culture"

Suzanne Williams 1

(Rosetti's) "god is a harsh god"

Virginia Woolf 1

"not a pure saint by any means"

Virginia Woolf 2

"She does not preach; she prays"

Symons 1

(Virtue of Self Postponement) "waiting thus becomes a positive action"

Eve West 2

"tension between control and chaos… only resolution… is death"

Brad Sullivan 1

("over scrupulosity" in religion) "became a fountain sealed"

William Rossetti (Memoir) 1

A poet not of thought or ideas but of emotions

Michael Schmidt 1

(Religion for Rossetti) "more a matter of adjustment than of fundamental struggle"

Michael Schmidt 2

"The thought of death had a constant fascination for her"

Symons 2

"she uses deflection, denial and constraint as the very things which give her power to speak"

Eve West 3

(Maude Clare) "it is Nell's determination and defiance which strike home in the end"

Simon Avery 3

(Goblin Market) "a conventional parable"

Barbara Morden 2

(Similarity between unfilled and fallen women) "an apparent lack of sexual pleasure"

Krista Lysack 1

"Rossetti's speakers often own their desries, rather than rejecting it"

Charlotte Unsworth 1

(End of Goblin Market is) "a return to conventional Victorian values, a very ordinary ending to an otherwise, arguably, subversive text"

Alice Kirby 4

Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve… more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin"

Lynda Palazzo 1

(Budding of the lilies in Maude Clare) "could hint at an illegitimate pregnancy"

Alice Kirby 5

(Goblin Market) "half apprehended impulses towards… sensual indulgence"

Barbara Morden 3

(Goblin Market) "rite of passage from childish self-gratification into responsible adulthood"

Barbara Morden 4

'All of Rosetti's poems are full of the spirit, though not the technicality, of devotion'

George Landow 1

(A Birthday) 'In Rossetti's poetry, God is always present, is always there---sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background'

Joshua Bocher 1

(A Birthday) 'Rossetti predominantly expresses an emotional love—and not a sexualised love'

Joshua Bocher 2

Christina Rossetti was 'well ahead of her time'

Dr Alfie Brown 2

(Echo) 'use of fine details, clear images, and of symbolism is characteristic of Rossetti'

Andy Haley 1

(Echo) 'tensions between earthly love and heavenly love'

Andy Haley 2

(Echo) 'The closing stanza envisages sexual union, albeit as an act of the imagination, an echo of actual erotic love.'

Andy Haley 3

(Good Friday) 'religion comforted her and enriched her…it wasn't just something that boxed her in'

Emma Major 1

(In the Round Tower) 'The poem is imbued with an entirely non-critical view of Empire'

Suzanne Williams 2

(In the Round Tower) 'Her understanding of female suffering and exploitation in particular was ahead of her time and even, at points, almost proto-feminist'-

Suzanne Williams 3

(In the Round Tower) 'She [the wife] is left without a name; her only significance is as an appendage of her husband'?

Josephine Pearce 1

(From the Antique) 'The poem is an insight into a character with no spiritual belief. Does it suggest that life without Christianity is 'blank''

Josephine Pearce 2

(From the Antique) 'has a sense of rage'

Emma Major 2

(Maude Clare) 'The poem dwells on the idea that marriage is not an ideal or fulfilled love'

Josephine Pearce 3

(Maude Clare) 'Her [Nell's] restraint is typical of the good Victorian wife'

Josephine Pearce 4

'Maude Clare … emphasizes the insidious effects of female relationships of women's powerlessness in the competitive marriage market'

Elizabeth K. Helsinger 1

(Maude Clare) 'Rossetti's poems implicitly criticise a male-dominated economy in which women are consumed'

Elizabeth K. Helsinger 2

(No Thank you, John) 'Whilst this poem is, at one level, playful and amusing'

M. O'Donnell and N. Cahill 1

(No Thank you, John) 'Strong-minded female characters'

M. O'Donnell and N. Cahill 2

(No Thank you, John) 'downbeat view of romance'

M. O'Donnell and N. Cahill 3

(No Thank you, John) 'she sounds as if she really does see (friendship) as being much more desirable than romance, be that with John or anyone else'

M. O'Donnell and N. Cahill 4

'A #MeToo poem'…'it's got a spike to it…she's not a saint'

Emma Major 3

(Remember) 'language which responds to unconscious thought'

Dr Alfie Brown 3

(Remember) 'Rossetti's brilliant rewriting' of this 'Shakespearean poem'

Dr Alfie Brown 4

(Remember) 'Power tension'

Dr Alfie Brown 5

'[Remember is a] work that may have arisen out of her health problems'

Andy Haley 4

(Shut Out) 'her writing is full of religious reference'

Riana Williams 1

(Shut Out)'Rossetti's work focuses on secrets and mysteries to be revealed'

Riana Williams 2

(Shut Out) 'the loss of childhood'

Andy Haley 5

(Shut Out) 'The use of green at the end of the first stanza indicates the freshness of youth'

Andy Haley 6

(Shut Out) 'control on the basis of religious belief a 'prominent theme' for Rossetti'

Andy Haley 7

(Shut Out) 'feelings of unworthiness a part of Tractarianism'

Andy Haley 8

Shut Out explores 'exclusion from the beauties of nature and the joys of childhood'

Andy Haley 9

(When I am dead) 'comes up again in her poems and her letters, that she feels worthless'

Emma Major4

(When I am dead) 'poetry reveals what even poets themselves don't know'

Dr Alfie Brown 6

(When I am dead) '[this is a] work that may have arisen out of her health problems'

Andy Haley 10

'The two dialogues of Twice contrast eros and agape…the love of God is far stronger and gives empowerment'

Andy Haley 11

'The poem suggests that men are often blamed for relational difficulties even though traditionally much is blamed on women'

Josephine Pearce 5

'Her bravery and restraint is almost stereotypically masculine'

Josephine Pearce 6

'Even of God….she will not expect too much'

Josephine Pearce 7

Up-Hill is a 'Christian allegory in miniature'

Michael O'Donell 1

Up-hill is a 'conversational poem' in 'a tight structure'

Elizabeth Ludlow 1

'the questioner is concerned with themself' at the beginning but then 'there's a broadening out' later on where concern is shown for others

Elizabeth Ludlow 2

Up-hill is 'centered around questions'

Elizabeth Ludlow 3

Christina Rossetti's poetry predominantly concerns her longing for Heaven, both as an end in itself and as an escape from the Earth that she denigrates. Quite clearly, she does not share her brother's enthusiasm for sensuality and materiality, but at the same time, she describes human experience as limited to the domain of materiality.

Brian Esrich 1

(female suffering) there is a difference between the patience of Christ and the patience of woman, because in Christ inheres his own eventual glory, whereas the woman must wait for grace to come to her.

Kathleen Blake 1

Her "desire for Christ, the ideal lover" and "visions of fulfillment in all-embracing love . . in Paradise"

Anthony Harrison 1

For too long Rossetti's twentieth-century critics and biographers neglected paying critical attention to her poetry because all they cared about, in the manner of cheesy romance novels, was identifying her "lost loves." Doesn't paying attention to Rossetti only as a presentative of victimization both condescend to her poetry and silence her as poet and woman?

George P Ludlow 2

Seeking solace in religion was Christina Rossetti's solution to her unfulfilled longing for a child. She could not find a partner in real life. Therefore, she turned her hopes towards life after death. There, she hoped to find an end to what she describes as her 'infertility', as well as a husband, Jesus Christ, who would give her the sensuality and sexuality she was longing for throughout her life

Julia Touche 1

Rossetti did not rebel against the limitations of masculine ideologies of domestic harmony or religious transcendence but instead appropriated them to dramatize her interior religious struggles and to pursue sublime projects of the self

Suzanne Wadderman 1

despite Rossetti's devout religious tendencies, her depiction of the afterlife, seems less religiously than emotionally focused: she is concerned with the women's connections or lack thereof to the world and people around them, and how death and awareness of sound affect these connections.

Abigail Newman 1

(Remember) 'None of the poems to Collinson reflect joy or hope. On the contrary, at the height of her love for him she wrote some of her most poignant lines on the imminence and pathos of death'

CM Bowra 1

'In a patriarchal culture woman inevitably experiences herself as an object and other. The problem is especially acute during adolescence when woman must make herself into or pretend to be an alluring object' - [possible link to Rossetti’s adolescence and the fact she had to stay at home and look after her father]

Dolores Rosenblum 1

[The former title of Shut Out] '"What Happened To Me?" confirms that this poem is indeed reflecting on a personal experience' -

Lars Wallner 1

[Souer Louise, Shut Out] “the cloister is the adult counterpart of the childhood garden - in Soeur Louise, both are destroyed by female desire, reduced to barrenness”

Dolores Rosenblum 2

“Goblin Market suggests that female erotic pleasure cannot be imagined without pain, yet the poem not only affirms the female body and its apetites but constructs ‘sisterhood’ as a saving female homoerotic bond,”

Mary Wilson Carpenter 1

The extraordinary homoerotic energies of Goblin Market seem particularly unaccountable in relation to the familiar assessment of Christina Rossetti as a devout Anglo-Catholic spinster.”

Mary Wilson Carpenter 2

On the whole, Rossetti steers away from equating female sexuality with sinfulness, which in itself is a radical move: sexual pleasure was forbidden to Victorian women, for as the passionless angels in the house, they were seen as "too pure and sacred to share in the disgusting lusts that afflicted men" (Karen Armstrong). At the same time, they were not to be given the same education as men because it was believed that too much intellectual activity would cause their reproductive organs to malfunction, securing the double bondage of sexuality and the intellect on women.

Lesa Scholl 1

Karen Armstrong addresses the "angel" myth of woman being "an island of perfection in a dark world" by looking at the way Petrarch's Laura was affiliated with the Virgin Mary, contrasted with the negative connotations associated with Eve

Karen Armstrong 1

Lorna Packer percieves a parallel between Goblin Market and Augustine's Confessions, a work she acknowledges as "one of Christina's early favorites" . In it, as in Goblin Market, "fruit ... appears as the symbolic inducement to sin.... The plucking of the forbidden fruit is dramatized and symbolized in the famous pear tree incident. As a young lad, Augustine with his comrades steals the ripe pears from the farmer's tree. For Augustine, this irresponsible act of a mischievous boy represents the first free choice of the evil will". In one commonplace view, then, Goblin Market can be looked upon as a poetic drama that, through the use of symbols bearing much weight of Christian tradition, instructs readers in the dangers of succumbing to temptation.

Lorna Packer 1

(Good Friday) “a passionate outcry against the easy indifference with which man can think of Christ who bore our shame in agony”

Myra Reynolds - 1898