Bowra, C.M
About Rossetti’s response to love. ‘In Christina, love released a…
melancholy desire for death.’
Anthony H. Harrsion
About Rossetti’s rejection of love and sex.
Her poems focus on ‘the apparently inevitable culmination…
of all compulsive amatory passions—renunciation.’
Anthony H. Harrsion
About love being futile if not for the art it inspires (in Rossetti)
‘the only true and permanent…
fulfilment of love is to be found in the art it gives birth to.’
Dolores Rosenblum
About the objectification of women and the dangers of women loosing their sense of identity. (Rossetti)
‘a woman inevitably experiences herself…
as object and other’ ‘a woman must make herself into or pretend to be an alluring object.’
Simone de Beauvoir “the very face itself becomes a mask”
Simon Avery
About Rossetti’s women being aware and resistant to oppressive patriarchy
Rossetti’s speakers demonstrate…
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
About Rossetti’s speakers being traditional and passive
Her poetry has been valued… for…
its affirmations of female piety, passivity and submission’
Dolores Rosenblum
About transition in Rossetti’s poems
Her poems… often describe double…
or transitional states of being
Virginia Woolfe
Comments on her faith as a binding source of sadness in her poetry. (Rossetti)
The pressure of a tremendous faith…
circles and clamps together these little songs….they owe to it their sadness
Virginia Woolfe
The pain caused by her loyalty to God (Rossetti)
your God was a…
harsh God, your heavenly crown was set with thorns.
Virginia Woolfe
About passing beauty and the sin of vanity (Rossetti)
No sooner have you feasted on…
beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.
For Eleanor Marx Nora’s predicament was a metaphor for the exploitation and oppression of labour where “Women are the creatures…
of an organised tyranny of men” 1886
August Strindberg said that thanks to A Doll’s House, “marriage was revealed…
as being far from a divine institution…and divorce between incompatible parties came at last to be accepted as conceivably justifiable.”
Stephen Unwin on the misconceptions regarding Mrs Linde as a ‘New Woman’
“It’s a mistake to see Mrs Linde…
as a fully formed ‘New Woman’, free of ties and content with a room of her own.”
What did Ibsen famously say about his writing?
“I have never written any play to further a social purpose”
What did Ibsen say about women in contemporary society?
“A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society; it is an exclusively male society… with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view.”
Review in Social Demokraten 1879 about Nora’s duty to leave Torvald
“It is this young woman’s duty to leave this husband, who slowly sacrifices her on the altar of his egotism, and who fails to understand her value as a human being”
Michael Meyer about finding personal identity in A Doll’s House
‘The theme of A Doll’s House was the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is, and to strive to become that person.’
