ADH and CR Critics

Question 1

The Social Democrat

Answer 1

‘We have not, in dramatic or poetic form, seen a better, more powerful contribution to the question of female emancipation!’ - 1879

Question 2

Original Critic - Disliked the ending

Answer 2

‘we do want to ask the honourable audience members, if they impression they received were of the kind they are used to getting from genuinely poetical work of art’ - 1879

Question 3

M. W. Brun

Answer 3

Any real wife would ‘throw herself into her husband’s arms’ - 1879

Question 4

Fredrik Petersen

Answer 4

Called it ‘ugly’ and ‘distressing’ - 1880

Question 5

The Spectator

Answer 5

Ibsen presented a “useful lesson” that treating women like children lead to “distorted relations” - 1889

Question 6

Clement Scott

Answer 6

“the man becomes the hysterical woman, and the woman becomes the silent, sullen and determined man” - 1897

Question 7

Virginia Wolf

Answer 7

“the paraphernalia of reality have at certain times to become the veil through which we see infinity” - 1942

Question 8

Raymond Williams

Answer 8

it merely provides a reversal within the romantic framework; it is simply anti-romantic - 1952

Question 9

Micheal Meyer

Answer 9

“He knew what Freud and Jung were later to assert, that liberation can only come from within” - 1965

Question 10

Michael Billington

Answer 10

in the near-half-century I’ve been reviewing theatre, his plays have hardly ever been off the British stage
“Ibsen is both old and new at the same time” - 2012

Question 11

Mold

Answer 11

“Rossetti wrote poems that give a vibrant voice to the female experience despite Rossetti living the life of a Victorian lady, who were denied the social and economic freedoms enjoyed by men.” — Mold

Question 12

Simon Avery on NTYJ

Answer 12

“We ‘hear’ some of his thoughts but the suitor isn’t given a voice showing the power dynamic as she turns his argument against him with un-flawed logic.” — Simon Avery

Question 13

Simon Avery on Rosetti’s views

Answer 13

“but they are usually far from conservative and often questioning, challenging and potentially subversive.”

Question 14

Lynda Palazzo on ‘Goblin Market’

Answer 14

“Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women”

Question 15

Mermin on CR

Answer 15

“Christina Rossetti stopped trying to rebel: in her devotional writings she finds an appropriate place for a conventional woman’s voice”

Question 16

Betty Flowers (CR’s rejection of partners)

Answer 16

“disappointments experienced in those earthly relationships are ostensibly set up as ‘opposites’ to the heavenly ones.”

Question 17

Virginia Wolf - CR’s life

Answer 17

“A God that decreed all pleasures were hateful to him…Everything in Christina’s life radiated from that knot of agony and intensity in the centre.”

Question 18

Anthony Harrison

Answer 18

“Focus is not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love, or upon betrayal in love, but rather renunciation.” — (Great for ‘Song’, ‘Remember’ and ‘Twice’)

Question 19

Betty Flowers

Answer 19

Many of her poems “explore what she saw as the great danger that the Victorian cult of love and marriage posed to the soul” - Marriage and Love

Question 20

Bocher on CR love

Answer 20

“Rossetti predominately expresses an emotional love — and not a sexualized love.”

Question 21

Bocher on CR masculinity

Answer 21

“Rossetti, as a woman, certainly does not objectify women by any means, and more impressively, she does not objectify men either”