{"id":1353,"date":"2018-11-26T20:20:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T01:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2018-11-26T20:20:27","modified_gmt":"2018-11-27T01:20:27","slug":"desire-for-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/2018\/11\/26\/desire-for-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Desire for Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Christina Rossetti\u2019s poem \u201cNo, Thank you, John\u201d, the speaker, who is most likely a woman, has a tremendous amount of agency for a woman in Victorian society.\u00a0 When the speaker says, \u201cI have no heart? Perhaps I have not;\/ But then you\u2019re mad to take offence\/ That I don\u2019t give you what I have not got,\u201d she is getting angry with John because he is asking something of her that she cannot give.\u00a0 He is saying that she has no heart, but then is also getting angry because she won\u2019t give her heart to him.\u00a0 This is extremely important to the poem because this idea of love in marriage is stressed over and over at the beginning of the first two stanzas.\u00a0 The speaker wants to be in love when she marries and that is a very unorthodox idea in this society because women often married for economic stability instead of love.\u00a0 Rossetti, in this poem, may be giving power back to women by demonstrating that women have the power to say no and can marry whoever they want.\u00a0 We see other examples of women going against societal norms of marriage in Lady Audley\u2019s Secret<\/em> when Lucy decided to change her identity and remarry despite the fact that her first husband was still alive.\u00a0 This showed that a woman could have two husbands.\u00a0 The difference between these two texts mentioned is that the speaker in \u201cNo, Thank You, John\u201d is not punished for her agency, while Lucy in Lady Audley\u2019s Secret <\/em>is later taken to an insane asylum as punishment.\u00a0 This poem could potentially prove that women can have agency and choose their own lifestyle, whether to marry or not, without being punished for stepping outside of societal bounds.\u00a0 We can also see a contrast in many works, such as Rebecca<\/em>, where the women are mainly seen as wives who perform more traditional roles, such as maintaining the household, and initially choose to marry wealthy men for economic security, instead of seeking out their own desires for love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Christina Rossetti\u2019s poem \u201cNo, Thank you, John\u201d, the speaker, who is most likely a woman, has a tremendous amount of agency for a woman in Victorian society.\u00a0 When the speaker says, \u201cI have no heart? Perhaps I have not;\/ But then you\u2019re mad to take offence\/ That I don\u2019t give you what I have … Continue reading Desire for Love<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}