Rossetti critics (year12)

Rossetti's poetry does not submit easily to masculine interference

Connell

Within the macho environment of the PRB, her poetry provides a counterbalance to the objectification and idealisation of women.

Connell

Rossetti gives the woman the speaking role and allows her to break free of the cliches of youth, purity and beauty

Connell

'In all these Pre-Raphaelite images, women are defined in relation to their male counterparts, as husband or lover, protector or seducer'

Barringer

claims that 'Goblin Market 'undoubtedly remains an exploration of women's sexual fantasy which includes suggestions of masochism, homoeroticism, rape or incest

Kaplan

narrative of female resistance to male authority

Bristow

Rossetti's support for Anglican sisterhoods was a feminist act

Harrison

Rossetti resisted, even rejected, aspects of Tractarian doctrine that can be seen as male and patriarchal,

Lynda Palazzo

'Her treatment of erotic love consistently demonstrates its illusory nature its transitoriness, or its inability to fulfill the needs of the 'craving heart'

Harrison

'her obsession with death results from her impassioned anticipation of the afterlife'

Harrison

For Rossetti, genuine joy, as well as amatory and spiritual fulfillment, can be found exclusively in union with Christ and the resurrected hosts in Paradise'

Harrison

'One Keatsian truth Rossetti does embrace is that 'youth and beauty die'.

Harrison

'Something dark and hard, like a kernel, had already formed in the centre of Christina Rossetti's being'-religion

Virginia Woolf

a dark God, a harsh God-a God who decreed that all the pleasures of the world were hateful to Him'

Virginia Woolf

'Lizzie rehabilitates Laura, changing her back from a lost witch to a virginal bride’

Gilbert and Gubar

Goblins represent 'beastly and exploitative male sexuality'

Gilbert and Gubar

'That genius and sexuality are diseases in women, diseases akin to madness, is implied in "Goblin Market"'

Gilbert and Gubar

Rossetti must learn to suffer and renounce the self gratifications of art and sensuality'

Gilbert and Gubar

Rossetti, banqueting on bitterness must bury herself alive in a coffin of renunciation'

Gilbert and Gubar

'Feminist readings of the poem centre on the sisterhood theme in an attempt to argue that Rossetti has created a world which deliberately excludes men'

Janet Galligani Casey

'Christina Rossetti has created a world in which women embody both the "strong", male side of life as well as the "weak", female side'

Janet Galligani Casey

'Suffering and metaphorical death are integral to Laura's redemption and rebirth'

Janet Galligani Casey