Rossetti Critical Quotations

1877 Saturday Review (on publication of poems)

‘not much thinking in them’, ‘no passion’ but ‘they are melodious and sweet’ = not much else other than the fact they’re nice to listen to

Woolf - I am Christina Rossetti

‘No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes’ - beauty of R using Naturalism - nothing is permanent

Palazzo - CR feminist theology

‘R has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees around her and includes more than a hint that male gender oppression can be interpreted as the original sin’ - feminist idea, men blame women for the fall of society

Rosenblum on Beauvoir

‘women inevitably experiences herself as object and other.’ ‘the very face itself becomes a mask.’ = women can only be a character and have to save face - commodity.

Avery

‘R 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’ - link to MC

‘female figure is depicted as entrapped or confined - physically, psychologically or both’

Galt - opinion on Goblin Market

‘R effortlessly and sharply convinces her audience that she is a woman whom the conventions of society could not shake in any area; that she had her own agenda in life’ - R rather subverts then reverts so is still dictated by society

Bowra - romantic imagination

‘ In Christina love released a melancholy desire for death’

Nietzsche and views on the self

• famously said ‘God is dead ‘ and foes against traditional values as he says they lead to nihilism (seen in R work but also he would criticise her speakers often not being able to overcome the self

• self-mastery and the will to power (overcoming limitations and embracing challenge)

Flowers view on women’s socialisation

‘explore what she saw as the great danger that the Victorian cult of marriage posed to souls of women’ - seen as the only end goal (Nora nihilistic emptiness)

Another quote by Avery

‘at times she used the Biblical idea of woman’s subordination to man as the reason for maintaining the status quo’ = R desires for tradition

Morden on Goblin Market

‘an allegory of sexual transgression’ = moral teaching and condemning of immoral acts

Gilbery and Gubar ref to Beauvoir

‘woman inevitably experiences herself as object or other’

Brown - about Rossetti as a poet in Vic society?

‘C R seems to us to be the most valuable poet that the Victorian Age produced’