Critical viewpoints on Rossetti's Poetry Anthology Flashcards
Unknown, Saturday Review, June 1866
“There is not much thinking in them, not much high or deep feeling, no passion and no sense of the vast blank space which a great poet always finds encompassing the ideas of life and nature and human circumstance. But they are meoldious and sweet … there is a certain quaint originality […] in which the writer delights to treat her fancies.”
William Michael, 1896 edited edition of Rossetti’s poetry
“Instead of this, something impelled her feelings or ‘came into her head and her hand obeyed the dictation’.”
Algernon Charles Swinburne
“the Jael [powerful female leader in the Old Testament Book of Judges] who led their hosts to victory”
Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 1919
“poetry subserient to the Christian doctrines”
“[Rossetti] starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift which she only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form”
C.M. Bowra, ‘Love as an Influence on Christina Rossetti’ in The Romantic Imagination, 1949
“in her the idea of love turned inexorably to the idea of death, and in this association we can surely see her instinctive shrinking from the surrender which love demands.”
George P. Landow, ‘The Dead Woman Talks Back: Christina Rossetti’s Ironic Intonation of the Dead Fair Maiden’, 2002 (When I am dead, my dearest)
“These lines [And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget] apparently embody a stereotypical view of female selflessness”
“a new female voice reconfigures the poetic tradition”
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979 (Goblin Market)
“Instead they [the goblins] are - were all along - the desirous little creatures so many women writers have recorded encountering in the haunted glens of their own minds […] its or ids, inescapable incubi”
Lynda Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology, 2002 (Goblin Market)
“Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of omen which she sees around her”
Lesa Scholl, ‘Fallen or Forbidden: Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” ‘, 2003 (Goblin Market)
“It is more a picture of the hope deferred, to which she often refers in her poetry, as becoming a hope lost - women are allowed a portion of knowledge, whether it relates to their sexuality or intelligence, but with that revelation they must realise that regardless of their innate gifts or abilities, society will not allow them to reach their potential. […] Thus it is possible that Laura’s need for “salvation” is not a result of sinfulness, but of dissatisfaction with her society”
Lesa Scholl, ‘Fallen or Forbidden: Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” ‘, 2003 (Goblin Maket)
“She [Rossetti] promotes social acceptance, for Laura is able to live a “normal” life in the end, becoming a respectable wife and mother, whereas in Rossetti’s society, a woman once “fallen” could not regain respectability. Rossetti seems to be saying that if a perfect God can accept these women, society, which is itself imperfect and corruptible, should also accept them”
Breanna Byecroft, ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”: Feminist Poem or Religious Allegory?’, 2005 (Goblin Market)
“Although the poem ends on a feminist note, calling for female bonds and sisterhood, Lizzie cannot be simply characterised as a strong female heroine, because she passively endures the goblin brothers’ transgressions of her body”
