A Daughter of Eve

Question 1

Title: A Daughter of Eve

Answer 1

biblical allusion - ref. original sin - cyclical fate of the fallen woman?

• Reflects the lapsarian cultural frame of the Victorian era in which women were depicted as slaves to their sexuality, unable to escape their fates of social stasis as a consequence.

Question 1

ADOE: structure/form

Answer 1

quintain - rigid structure - ironic as this contrasts w/ narrator’s lack of control over their fate
ABAAB - out of sync = she is an outlier in society

Question 2

ADOE: The cold, uncaring nature of society which rejects the female for her transgressions & the stasis & solitary nature of the fallen woman
1. ‘Comfortless c m’
2. ‘It was summer when I s…w n I w…T w y p o f S’
3. ‘Stripped b o h’
4. ‘N m t l, n m t s, i s a i s’

Answer 2

1. ‘comfortless cold moon’: harsh & brisk qualities of the moon act as a symbol for the harshness of social attitudes towards transgressive females
2. ‘It was summer when I slept…winter now I waken….Talk what you please of future Spring’: transitional seasonal metaphor represents the complete disarray of this woman’s social status = winter is suggestive of a harsh environment with a lack of potential for crop growth => inferred lack of prosperity for this persona perhaps indicative of her loss of marriage prospects due to eth loss of a respectable status.
3. ‘Stripped bare of hope…’: complete revocation of all opportunities & joy, polysemic quality of ‘stripped bare’ suggests a state of extreme vulnerability as evocative of a sense of nakedness, revealing society’s vicious depiction of women as inherently sexualised beings.
4. ‘No more to laugh, no more to sing, I sit alone in sorrow’: Her physical inability to participate in any sort of social interaction or display of unity & harmony reflects the utter ostracization ‘fallen women’ experienced within Victorian social circles. The hugely static ‘I sit alone’ crafts an utterly morose image of the suffering solitary female, completely unable to form meaningful social connections and unable to achieve social mobility.

A03/5: As Rossetti worked at the Highgate penitentiary, aiding the reforming of ‘fallen women’, like D’amico argues, she ‘must have believed that the fallen woman need not forever be a fallen woman’.

Question 3

ADOE: Examples of transgressive female behaviour

1. ‘A f’
2. ‘to pluck m r, a f t s m l’
3. ‘My g p I h n k’

Answer 3

1. Repetition of ‘a fool’: Constant repetition gives this poem a hugely didactic quality as CR instructs the readers (likely young women themselves) to learn from her speaker’s mistakes or else face the wrath of society for disobeying social norms of virginity.
   Perhaps acts as a mouthpiece for general Victorian society
2. ‘…to pluck my rose too soon/a fool to snap my lily’: in Victorian flower language roses represented love whilst lilies were closely associated with virginal pureness so, by deliberately uprooting these attributes through perceivably engaging in pre-marital sex, the persona has completely destroyed her ‘feminine virtues’, downgrading her marketability in the Victorian Marriage Market.

-Plosive ‘pluck’ & ‘snap’ reflect the speakers careless acts which have engendered irreversible damage. Perhaps also reflect the harshness of societal reactions to transgressive female figures.

3. ‘My garden plot I have not kept’: The agricultural metaphor coupled with the possessive pronoun ‘I’ suggests an ownership of the devolution of this metaphorical garden which symbolically represents the speaker’s social status.
   AO3: Blame of social disgrace was constantly laid at the feet of the woman i.e. the Contagious Diseases act which blamed women as the transmitters of sexual diseases.