Rossetti A05

critical interpretations

1877 Saturday review

“There is not much thinking in them, not much high or deep feeling, no passion and no sense of the vast blank space which a great poet always finds encompassing the ideas of life and nature and human circumstance. But they are melodious and sweet… there is a certain quaint originality both in the versification and the concrete style in which the writer delights to treat all her fancies.”

Virginia Woolf

“your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo-Catholic… the ressure of a tremendous faith circles and clamps together these little songs. Perhaps they owe it to their solidity.”

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar

“Rossetti loses herself in the aesthetics of renunciation, experiencing an almost extreme self-pity and self-congratulation at her self denial.”

Lynda Palazzo

“Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse on women which she sees around her and includes more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin”

Anthony H. Harrison

“the only true and permanent fulfillment of love is to be found in the art it gives birth to”

Dolores Rosenblum

“in a patriarchal culture woman inevitably experiences herself as object and other. The problem is especially acute during adolescence when a woman must make herself into or pretend to be an alluring object. Then ‘the very face itself becomes a mask’” — links to soeur louise, winter, my secret

Simon Avery

“Rossetti’s speakers demonstrate both an awareness of and resistance to, those social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women and which potentially leave them powerless”

Andrew Stewart and Alexandra Russel

“Christina Rossetti’s ‘Maude Clare’ engages in a discourse on hegemonic definitions of Victorian femininity. This issue is dealt with on mulitple layers which in turn either reinforce or challenge these gendered ideals in their reflections on the position of women… however as the demographics in the population made it impossible for all women to accomplish the goals set for them by society, placing them in an ambiguous position indeed.”

Gaynell Galt

“Rossetti effortlessly and sharply convinces her audience that she is a woman whom the conventions of society could not shake in area; that she had her own agenda in life.”

Bowra, C.M

“In Christina love released a melancholy desire for death, and for a kind of death not closely connected with her usual ideas of the afterworld. It is an intermediate condition between sleeping and waking, a half-conscious state in which memories are dim and even the strongest affections fade into the shadows” — concept of soul sleep, song, remember

Anthony H. Harrison

“in all Christina Rossetti’s poems whose focus is not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love, or upon betrayal in love, but rather upon the apparently inevitable culmination of all compulsive amatory passions— renunciation.” — links to Twice,

Dolores Rosenblum

“Her poetry has been valued… for its affirmations of female piety, passivity and submission…”

Dolores Rosenblum

“Her poems… often describe double or transitional states of being and are typically built on paradox, including the central paradox of her career: that she became famous for speaking of silence and oblivion.”