Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
The subversion of love in Christina Rossetti's poetry: "For there is no friend like a sister"
Abstract
Christina Rossetti's love poetry traditionally has been interpreted from a biographical perspective. Critics have related the melancholy and morbid tone in her poetry about love and marriage to her own broken engagements to James Collinson in 1850 and Charles Bagot Cayley in 1865. A textual/contextual examination of the specifics of Rossetti's love poems and a comparison of their dates of composition with the dates of her involvement with both men iilustrate that her skeptical outlook on male/female relations is not a poeticized diary of her love and loss of these two men, but a challenge to the plight of Victorian women whose lives were limited to love and marriage. In her poetry, Rossetti subverts the Victorian norms that governed the emotional, sexual, and spiritual lives of nineteenth-century women. Chapter 1 surveys the Rossetti criticism and shows how feminist critics have begun to re-shape the traditional image of Rossetti as the religious spinster-recluse. Chapter 2 and 3 illustrate Rossetti's skepticism about traditional romantic relations by tracing the pattern of the abandoned woman and the dead wife. Chapter 4 discusses Rossetti's choice of human love over divine love in a number of her poems. Chapter 5 analyzes Rossetti's subversion of the characteristic patterns found in nineteenth-century literature about the "fallen woman." Chapter 6 explores Rossetti's displacement of male/female relations with women's friendships in her poetry, and chapter 7 explores the themes of female lives and female relations in her prose and her personal correspondence.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Hakel-Taylor, Sharon Kay, "The subversion of love in Christina Rossetti's poetry: "For there is no friend like a sister"" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9538631.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9538631