Critics Reversed Flashcards
Rossetti…
“Had complicated views on female suffrage and equality”
SIMON AVERY
Rossetti…
“Should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like”
- Public were against Rossetti
- Traditonal viewpoint
John Ruskin
“Willingly accepts the poor state of society into which she was cast”
Gagnier
“escape from the self-destructive cycles of worldly existence.”
Sullivan
“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
“By rejecting a potential suitor, the speaker asserts the right to say ‘no’.”
John Ruskin on the suitor that Rossetti rejected in real life… also called John
“Her views may not always be ‘radical’”
Simon Avery on Rossetti’s side?
“Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women […] male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin.”
Lynda Palazzo on ‘Goblin Market’
“Ungodly and unfeminine discontent.”
Barbara Modern
For him, the poem is designed to convey “the need for an alternative social order.”
McGann (on Goblin Market)
“she must have believed a fallen woman need not forever be a social outcast”
D’Amico
“Christina Rossetti stopped trying to rebel: in her devotional writings she finds an appropriate place for a conventional woman’s voice” (disagree with this)
Mermin
Afraid somebody “could come between a woman and her love of God.”
Betty Flowers
“Everything in Christina’s life radiated from that knot of agony and intensity in the centre.”
Virginia Woolf
“All Miss Rossetti’s poems are full of the spirit, though not the technicality, of devotion.”
George Landow
“In Rossetti’s poetry, God is always present, is always there — sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background.”
Bocher
Rossetti’s “desire for Christ, the ideal lover” and “visions of fulfillment in all-embracing love in Paradise” helped her to find a new sense of purpose in her life and inspired her to ‘new’ poetry.
Harrison
“explore what she saw as the great danger that the Victorian cult of love”
Betty Flowers (on Danger)
“Longings and cravings are ever present in Christina Rossetti’s poetry”
Touché
“reconstruct the Christian idea of redemption.”
Scholl (on redemption)
“The forbidden fruit undoubtedly refers to female sexuality, as many critics have stated, yet it can also relate to female education and knowledge.”
Scholl (on the “forbidden fruits”)
“Laura’s fruit of knowledge and her fruit of life are derived from the same source, obscuring the definition between purity and sin […] society will not allow them to reach their potential.”
Scholl (Laura’s obscurity)
“Rossetti, as a woman, certainly does not objectify women by any means, and more impressively, she does not objectify men either.”
Bocher (on Objectification)
Rossetti regarded herself as a “nameless rhymester” and “unknown and unpublished”
Rossetti
