Rossetti AO5 Flashcards
Avery
Rossetti’s relationship with gender is complicated.
At times she used the Biblical idea of women’s subordination to man as reason for maintaining the status quo.
Bowra
Christina is obsessed by thoughts of death. She has a melancholy desire for death.
Curran
Just a simple pious woman.
Galt
Rossetti effortlessly and sharply convinces her audience that she is a woman whom the conventions of society could not shake.
Kim
WIAD: Invokes feelings of indifference.
Landow
WIAD: An attempt to embody the Victorian view of female selflessness.
Leighton
Rossetti argues that fallen women are not only streetwalkers and sinners but also loving sisters.
Mendoza
GM: Critical yet ambivalent assessment of the overlapping spheres of Victorian economics and sexual politics despite its deceptively simple form.
Roe
Modern view of GM: Rossetti experiments with language, form, and imagery to create a world of temptation and mystery. The poem has since become a parable of female resistance and solidarity.
Rosenblum
The central paradox of her career: that she became famous for speaking of silence and oblivion.
Her poetry has been valued, that is, for its affirmations of female piety, passivity, and submission, while her strength and independence of thought and art have hardly been recognised at all.
A woman inevitably experiences herself as object and other.
Her poetry was devotional, moral, and spoke of frustrated affection.
Ruskin
1861 GM: Rossetti’s irregular measures were the calamity of modern poetry.
Scholl
Rossetti attempts to reconstruct the Christian idea of redemption.
Goblin Market: the issue for Rossetti is not wholly sexual or intellectual; rather the poem addresses all forms of female desire.
The moral of the story is not a warning against approaching strange men or sampling forbidden fruits; but a valorisation of female solidarity.
The Spectator
1862 GM: It hovers in that region of lively fable, verging on allegory, yet clear of it, which at once gives full play to fancy and yet compels it to a certain unity of outwards theme and subject. This is true poetry of its own fanciful and unambitious kind. A true children’s poem.
Williams
Rossetti does not preach, she prays.
