Christina Rossetti - Gender Flashcards
No, Thank You John
“Why will you tease me day by day”
“Use your common sense”
“Let us strike hands as hearty friends”
Maude Clare
“My lord was pale with inward strife”
“Maude Clare,” - and hid his face”
“I’ll love him till he loves me best”
Goblin Market
“You should not peep at goblin men”
“Laura turn’d cold as stone / To find her sister heard that cry alone”
“Fell sick and died / In her gay prime”
Simon Avery (Critic)
“Rossetti’s speakers demonstrate both an awareness of, and resistance to, those social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women”
Andrew Stewart (Critic)
“Christina Rossetti’s Maude Clare’ engages in a discourse on hegemonic definitions of Victorian femininity. This issue is dealt with on multiple layers which in turn either reinforce or challenge these gendered ideals”
Lynda Palazzo (Critic)
“Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees around her and includes more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin”
Work at Highgate Penitentiary (Context)
- Volunteered for 11 years to help fallen women that had been outcast and labelled as sinners.
- Her work allowed a better understanding of the idea of a ‘fallen woman’
- Rossetti managed to help the passing of a bill to raise the age of consent to 16, as she was seeing that a lot of little girls were starting to fall into prostitution, therefore causing destitution for life.
Repeated Marriage Proposals (Context)
- Believed the poem ‘No, Thank You John’ was based off of a real suitor who would not take Rossetti’s no for an answer.
- Many scholars believe she is referencing the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Brett.
Rossetti’s Views (Context)
Rossetti had written to the poet Augusta Webster in 1878 that because she believed that “the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes”, she could not sign a petition for women’s suffrage.
