Ibsen and Rossetti critics

Kathryn Hughes

• in the Victorian period, gender roles were most ‘sharply defined’.

• Victorian society was ‘bifurcated along gender lines.’

Mona Caird

marriage was ‘most hypocritical form of woman-purchase’

Simon Avery

• ‘her views may not always be ‘radical’ as such, but they were usually far from conservative and often questioning, challenging and potentially subversive.’

• Rossetti ‘considers the position of women in society through criticising the institution of marriage’.

Eleanor Marx

she read the play with ‘great delight’ as she believed she had found the perfect relationship.

1879 review of the premiere in Denmark

‘there is not a single point which justifies her action’. - about Nora.

Sophie Duncan

‘This lexis of illness and disease reflects the attempts of Victorian society to pathologise female liberation’

Mary Wollstonecraft

• wrote the ‘Vindication for the Rights of Women’

• argued that women were ‘caged like the feathered race’

Simon Stephens

found Nora’s actions ‘pretty questionable’.

An African Doll’s House

Nora takes her children with her.

Frankl

• ‘Whilst Nora’s departure at the end of A Doll’s House is a megaphone announcement that helped usher in the Suffragettes, Rossetti’s interrogative marginal whispers suggest more demurely that the system isn’t quite working’ 

Currence

• Rossetti’s poems ‘discuss and criticise the oppressive, sexist society in which Victorian women lived and worked’.