Critical Views (Rossetti)

Question 1

Phillip Larkin

Answer 1

Rossetti has a “steely stoicism”

Question 2

Kathrine Hinkson

Answer 2

Rossetti’s “imagination” is “full of joy”

Question 3

1877 Saturday Review

Answer 3

“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 and nature and human circumstance. But they are melodious and sweet.” (this encapsulates the Victorian views on women)

Question 4

Virginia Woolf

Answer 4

“the pressure of a tremendous faith circles and clamps together these little songs”

Question 5

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Answer 5

“Rossetti loses herself in the aesthetics of renunciation, experiencing an almost extreme self-pity and self-congratulation at her self-denial.”

Question 6

Lynda Palazzo

Answer 6

“Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees all around her and includes more than hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin”

Question 7

Simone de Beauvoir

Answer 7

“in a patriarchal culture women inevitably experiences herself as object and other”

Question 8

Simon Avery

Answer 8

“Rossetti’s speakers demonstrate both an awareness of, and resistance to, those social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women and which potentially leave them powerless.”

Question 9

Bowra C.M

Answer 9

“in Christina love released a melancholy desire for death.”

Question 10

Dolores Rosenblum

Answer 10

“Her poetry has been valued…for its affirmations of female piety, passivity, and submission”