Rossetti Critics and Context

Woolf

Christina’s life radiated from the knot of agony and intensity in the centre

Bowra

All she asks is that he himself should be happy (Remember)

Harrison

Focus is not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love… but renunciation

Gilbert and Gubar (1)

Rossetti willingly accepts the state of destitution she is cast into

Gilbert and Gubar

She was not the powerful female she had the potential to become

Avery (1)

The female figure is depicted as entrapped or confined - physically, psychologically, or both (From the Antique)

Mermin

Rossetti stopped trying to rebel

Flowers

Many of her poems explore what she saw as the great danger that the Victorian cult of love and marriage posed to the souls of women

Phillips

Her motifs derive from rural and biblical symbols

Williams

Rossetti creates a very conventional pairing. The husband is the protector, the wife is infantilised. (In the Round Tower)

Taft

Model how self transforms to Christian virtues

Mold

Rossetti wrote poems which give a vibrant voice to the female experience

Avery (2)

Rossetti is often questioning, challenging, and potentially subversive

D’Amico

She must have believed a fallen woman need not be forever a social outcast

Avery (3)

She is not to be bullied, she claims agency for herself

Shrove

Rossetti had a passionate sense of the responsibility of life

Palazzo

Rossetti has radically re-written the fall of Eve

Avery (4)

Rossetti’s way of the cross is never easy

Mole

Mediation of turning away from desire

Mary Magdalene House

Helped prostitutes gain domestic skills to keep them off the streets

Husbands

Rossetti turned down 2 potential husbands on the grounds of religious incompatibility

Soul Sleep

As a Tractarian, she believed that people’s souls sleep until the final resurrection

Attitudes towards women

Rossetti believed women should be respected but not politically equal, they should be prized for their feminine qualities, and refused to help in women’s suffrage.

Victorian attitudes to love and marriage

Marriage was very important because it created stability and upheld biblical ideals, and was the accepted way of raising a family.

During her teenage years…

…Rossetti became very religious and had many psychological breakdowns

Her affluent situation

Allowed her a degree of independence to turn down marriage proposals