Rossetti: Critical Views Flashcards
1877 Saturday Review (negative)
‘There is not much thinking in them, not much high or deep feeling, no passion’
1877 Saturday Review (positive)
‘They are melodious and sweet’
Lynda Palazzo: ‘Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology’
‘Rossetti has radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees around her’
Simon Avery (roles of women)
‘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.’
Dolores Rosenblum: ‘Christina Rossetti - The Poetry of Endurance’
‘Her poetry has been valued… for its affirmations of female piety, passivity and submission’
Simon Avery (religion in her work)
‘The speakers of Rossetti’s poems repeatedly struggle with religious doubt’
Ray Cluley (describing Lizzie in ‘Goblin Market’)
‘She is a regendered Christ figure in suffering for her sister’
Ray Cluley (describing Lizzie and Laura from ‘Goblin Market’)
‘Despite these differences, the two are bound together’
Ford Madox Brown
‘Christina Rossetti seems to us to be the most valuable poet that the Victorian Age produced.’
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’
‘Rossetti loses herself in the aesthetics of renunciation, experiencing an almost extreme self-pity and self- congratulation at her self-denial. “Rossetti, banqueting on bitterness, must bury herself alive in a coffin of renunciation.”’
Andrew Stewart and Alexandra Russel: ‘Victorian Femininity in “Maude Clare”’
‘Christina Rossetti’s “Maude Clare” engages in a discourse on hegemonic definitions of Victorian femininity.’
Gaynell Galt (‘No, Thank You, John’)
‘For Rossetti to assert herself in such a way as she does in this poem adds to her character a sense of strength and profound assertiveness.’
Gaynell Galt (on the character of Rossetti)
‘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.’
