Rossetti's Poetry AO5 Quotes

• Simon Avery - maude clare


  [maude clare is] a clear critique of dominant masculinity
• Barbara Morden - allegory


  an allegory of sexual transgression
• Simon Avery - female independence


  [rossetti's poetry encourages women] to claim independence and agency
• simon avery - position in marriage


  Rossetti examines women's position in society through consideration of the institution of marriage
• Escobar - fallen women


  if a woman fell she fell utterly
• Simon Avery - religious doubt


  Rossetti's poems repeatedly struggle with religious doubt, frustration and fear
• Sarah Philips - struggle


  struggle of female piety against corruption
• Simon Avery - religious justification of patriarchy


  at times she used the Biblical idea of woman's subordination to man as reason for maintaining the status quo
• Bocher - religious influence


  religious view affect everything she wrote, regardless of topic
• Bocher - love of god


  Rossetti's love for god always trumps the love of another human
• Scholl - forbidden fruit


  Rossetti alludes to the traditional discourse of forbidden fruit and the biblical account of the Fall. She does so both to challenge the decidedly patriarchal perception of women within Victorian culture ... and also to reconstruct the Christian idea of redemption
• Touché - longings


  longings and cravings are ever present in Christina Rossetti's poetry, especially in poems such as 'Goblin Market', whose deeper root was sexual frustration
• Bocher - love


  Rossetti predominately expresses an emotional love - and not a sexualised love
• Kathleen Blake - woman in love


  Rossetti makes the woman in love the emblem of radical insufficiency and dependence upon external dispensation
• Betty Flowers - danger of marriage


  explore what she saw as the great danger that the Victorian cult of love and marriage posed to the souls of women
• Bocher - presence of god


  God is always present, is always there - sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background
• Anthony Harrison - earthly love


  focus is not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love, or upon betrayal in love, but rather renunciation
• Virginia Woolf - rossetti's god

  a god who decreed that all pleasures of the world were hateful to him
• Mermin - rebellion


  Rossetti stopped trying to rebel: in her devotional writings she finds an appropriate place for a conventional woman's voice
• D'Amico - magdelene


  we can assume that since Rossetti was involved in a cause that sought to reform these women, even return them to the family structure, she must have believed a fallen woman need not forever be a social outcast
• Barbara Morden - covering herself


  Rossetti is covering herself against the charges of ungodly and unfeminine discontent
• Lynda Palazzo - fall of eve


  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
• Simon Avery - radical

  her views may not be 'radical' as such, but they are usually far from conservative and often question, challenging and potentially subversive
• Simon Avery - no thank you john


  by rejecting a potential suitor, the speaker asserts the right to say 'no'. ... the suitor isn't given a voice, showing the power dynamic as she turns his argument against him
• Sullivan - worldly existence


  [rossetti's] hope for meaning and clarity and completeness must be deferred until she can escape from the self-destructive cycles of worldly existence