Rossetti Flashcards
“the poetry of Christina Rossetti shows that her works do not merely reflect the conditions of the era, but similarly discuss and criticise the oppressive, sexist society in which Victorian women lived and worked”
Cindy Currence
“Rossetti’s work is a way of voicing her concern regarding the role of women in Victorian society. Her poetry reveals her dissatisfaction with marital, educational and employment limitations of the time.”
Simon Avery
“ Rossetti’s poems encourage women to claim independence and agency”
Simon Avery
“Rossetti effortlessly and sharply convinces her audience that she is a woman whom the conventions of society could not shake in any area; that she had her own agenda in life.”
Gaynell Galt
Christina Rossetti waged “a life long struggle with feminist desires” by constantly attempting to reconcile her own often conflicting ideals towards religion, ambition, familial obligation with the Victorian model of womanhood.
Jan Marsh
‘Rossetti creates a rudimentary framework of behaviour in which a heroine might operate’
Christi Phillips
Rossetti’s poems were “uncompromising in their analysis of woman’s place in society.”
Simon Avery
“Anyone’’ who did not understand that Christina was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid, seeing at times the countenance of Death very close to her own, would form an extremely incorrect notion of her corporeal, and thus in some sense her spiritual, condition.”
William Micheal Rossetti (brother)
“Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life.”
O.J Yang
On ‘A Triad’ - Rossetti did not see ‘much difference between the woman who sells herself in marriage, who does not marry for a genuine love, and the woman who has sexual experience before marriage because she is fooled by the promises of human love. Both are guilty of placing the things of earth before God’
Diane D’Amico
‘Christina Rossetti stopped trying to rebel: in her devotional writings she finds an appropriate place for a conventional woman’s voice.’
Dorothy Merimin
On Highgate: ‘true success in the mission of the home was found in the fulfilment of a twofold purpose: to reform penitent women into reliable domestic servants and to make them into active members of the church of England’.
Jan Marsh
“Rossetti’s poetic commentary on the spiritual damage women suffer in a sexist, repressive society. Particular attention is given to her use of Christian metaphors in discussing these issues.“
Cindy Currence
“all her work, even that which seems to deal with more secular concerns, has a resonating religious or spiritual drive”
Simon Avery
Rossetti’s “hope for meaning and clarity and completeness must be ‘deferred’ until she can escape from the self-destructive cycles of worldly existence’.
K.E Sullivan
