Christina Rossetti Themes

Question 1

quote on power and ambition

Answer 1

‘Rossetti’s poems establish strategies for defying expectations and conventions’ (Simon Avery)

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‘Rossetti’s speakers demonstrate both an awareness of, and resistance to, those social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women’ (Simon Avery)

Question 2

quotes on love

Answer 2

‘In Christina, love released a melancholy desire for death (…) an intermediate condition between sleeping and waking’ (Bowra)

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‘God is always present, always there – sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background.’ (Joshua Bocher)

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‘Rossetti’s love for God always trumps the love of another human, but this does not by any means stop the narrators of her poems from having abundant love for other people’ (Joshua Bocher)

Question 3

quote on politics and corruption

Answer 3

Rossetti wrote that England is ‘full of luxuries but thronged by stinted poor’

Question 4

quote on natural vs artificial

Answer 4

Rossetti ‘warns her readers to not depend on worldly comforts such as financial security but to instead trust in God’ (Dr Elizabeth Ludlow)

Question 5

quote on trivial vs serious

Answer 5

‘Rossetti conveys the spiritual lesson (…) that ‘all is vanity’ apart from God who is stable and permanent’ (Dr Elizabeth Ludlow)

Question 6

quotes on aestheticism

Answer 6

‘the division of her works into traditional “secular” and “devotional” categories (…) are reconciled in a holistic aesthetic that comes out of her grounding in medieval poetry and medieval theology’

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‘the simultaneously aesthetic and mystical effects of much Pre-Raphaelite poetry result largely from the poets’ use of phenomenal reality as a vehicle for their quest after the ideal’ (Anthony Harrison)

Question 7

quote on women in society

Answer 7

‘in Rossetti’s poems, the female figure is depicted as entrapped or confined - physically, psychologically, or both’ (Simon Avery)