from the antique

quotes

• “Doubly blank in a woman’s lot”

• “I wish and I wish I were a man”

• “Still the world would wag on the same”

• “None would miss me in all the world”

• “Would wake and weary and fall asleep”

AO2

• Metrical changes at the beginning of the stanza emphasise the phrase “doubly blank” to highlight the emptiness of the female world

• Unsure of whether the single speaker speaks for herself or is “she” representing all women

• Personal pronoun “she said” distances Rossetti from the speaker, allowing her the ability to speak more freely while hiding behind the attribution

AO3

• Working class women often possessed more freedom in some respects because their financial circumstances dictated they go into the world and work - is the ‘weariness’ a symbol of their domestic entrapment?

• Rossetti was very involved with working class women through her work with ‘unfortunates’ and single mothers - e.g. her work at St Mary Magdalene House for ‘fallen women’

• Much of Rossetti’s poetic focus on women revolves around exploring the Victorian distinctions between the archetypes of the ‘angelic maid’ vs. the ‘wicked temptress’ - links to Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Angel in the House’

• Rossetti wrote it in 1854, but was never published in her lifetime

• Rossetti often used the figure of Mary Magdalene to highlight the fact that women who have once been prostitutes can undergo a complete change

• The poet Augusta Webster wrote to Rossetti in the late 1870s asking for her support in a campaign she was involved with, which aimed to give women the right to vote. However, Rossetti refused, stating: “Does it not appear as if the Bible was based upon an understood unalterable distinction between men and women, their position, duties, privileges?”

  • Rossetti believed that God created men and women fundamentally different

• 1851 census shows that only 7% of middle-class women were listed with an occupation

• Women’s suffrage movements formed in the late 1860s - the first women’s suffrage bill came before parliament in 1832

AO4

• womanhood as inherently restrictive

• masculinity as a symbol of freedom and privilege

• domestic life as a source of confinement

• female resistance and the possibility of autonomy

AO5

• “Composed in 1854 but never published in Rossetti’s lifetime - possibly because of its unmistakeable critique - the poem opens with an unflinching expression of despair…. So ‘weary[ing]’ is the position of women that annihilation is preferable, since this would enable escape from gender expectations and imposed identities” - Simon Avery

• “As Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out, in a patriarchal culture woman inevitably experiences herself as object and other. The problem is especially acute during adolescence when woman must make herself into or pretend to be an alluring object. Then “they very face itself becomes a mask”. - Dolores Rosenblum