Rossetti AO5 Flashcards
Bowra (1898–1971) “The Romantic Imagination”
“Christina is obsessed by thoughts of death”
Dolores Rosenblum ‘Shakespeare’s sisters’ (1981)
As Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out,(( in a patriarchal culture woman inevitably experiences herself as object and other.)) The problem is especially acute during adolescence when woman must make herself into or pretend to be an alluring object. ((Then “the very face itself becomes a mask”.))
Stuart Curran (1971) (2)
“Just a simple pious woman”
“her poetry is largely devoid of sharp observation, whether intellectual or imaginative”
Dolores Rosenblum: “Christina Rossetti - The Poetry of Endurance” (2)
Her poetry has been valued… for its affirmations of female piety, passivity and submission.
Her poems… often describe double or transitional states of being and are typically built on ((paradox)), including the central paradox of her career: that ((she became famous for speaking of silence and oblivion)).
1877 Saturday Review (on publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems)
((There is 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 of life and nature and human circumstance.)) But they are melodious and sweet … there is a certain quaint originality both in the versification and the concrete style in which the writer delights to treat all her fancies.
Virginia Woolf: “I am Christina Rossetti”
Your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo-Catholic… The pressure of a tremendous faith circles and clamps together these little songs. Perhaps they owe to it their solidity. Certainly they owe to it their sadness — ((your God was a harsh God, your heavenly crown was set with thorns. No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.))
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar: “The Madwoman in
the Attic” (2)
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.”))
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 and includes more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin
Anthony H. Harrison: “Love and the Ideal in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti”
the only true and permanent fulfilment of love is to be found in the art it gives birth to
Simon Avery: British Library
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.
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. This issue is dealt with on multiple layers which in turn either reinforce or challenge these gendered ideals in their reflections on the position of women… ((however as the demographics in the population made it impossible for all women to accomplish the goals set for them by society, placing them in an ambiguous position indeed.))
Gaynell Galt: “ The Possibilities of Interpretation in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”
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.
Anthony H. Harrison: “Love and Betrayal in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti”
in all of Christina Rossetti’s poems whose focus is not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love, or upon betrayal in love, but rather upon the ((apparently inevitable culmination of all compulsive amatory passions — renunciation.))
