{"id":1366,"date":"2018-11-28T09:10:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T14:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/?p=1366"},"modified":"2018-11-28T09:10:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T14:10:23","slug":"rosetti-questioning-women-and-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/2018\/11\/28\/rosetti-questioning-women-and-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosetti Questioning women and marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christina Rossetti, like many other Victoria writers, seems to have complex and conflicting thoughts on the role of women. Many of her poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems<\/em> center around women, or feature a female speaker. In one poem in particular, “A Triad”,<\/em> Rosetti writes of three women, 2 of whom are not fit to be wives, and a third who is but dies. This poem ends with the line, \u201cAll on the threshold, yet all short of life\u201d (Rosetti, 18). The word life stands out as a potential comparison for love and marriage. Without marrying this man, without him falling in love with each of these three women, they all fall short of having a life. It is so interesting that Rosetti writes about these women needing a man to have a true life, yet only a few pages later she published “No, Thank You John”.<\/em> This poem is about a headstrong, independent who would, \u201crather answer \u201cNo\u201d to fifty Johns Than answer \u201cYes\u201d to you\u201d (Rosetti, 31). In this poem Rosetti gives the women power in allowing her to say no to a mans proposal of marriage. Only a few pages before she was saying there was no life without marriage, yet now she is countering that argument. Without marrying a man in the Victorian era, a woman would have no income, no way to support herself, and would not be fulfilling her duty to reproduce and start a family. It truly was unheard of for women to reject a proposal, because they in general would have an easier life if married. The woman speaker in “No, Thank You, John” <\/em>is clearly breaking the societal rules for women, as is Rosetti for writing about this. These two poems show two conflicting views that Rosetti has written about and may be thinking. We have seen time and time again that the views on women in the Victorian era are complex, and the intelligent men and women who write the novels and poems question the rules through their writings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christina Rossetti, like many other Victoria writers, seems to have complex and conflicting thoughts on the role of women. Many of her poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems center around women, or feature a female speaker. In one poem in particular, “A Triad”, Rosetti writes of three women, 2 of whom are not fit … Continue reading Rosetti Questioning women and marriage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3566,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1366","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\/1366","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\/3566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}