\u201cA Triad\u201d could be perceived as Rosetti\u2019s effort to illustrate the difficulties with love and romantic relationships that Victorian women encountered due to strict norms imposed by the patriarchal society. Although described separately as three different individuals, the three women in this poem serve as the symbolic representations of limited options that women in this era have when it comes to love, yet regardless of their choice, they would always end up being the ones to suffer.
\nThe women in this poem were painted with three different colors that signified their symbolic nature as well as their attitude towards their life and love. The first woman was assigned to the color ‘Crimson’, a color that was often associated with sexual desires and sin in the Victorian era. From this depiction, we could infer the story of a woman choosing to go for the man she loved, and worse, she gave in to lust and gave herself to him without the blessing of matrimony. This reflects the era\u2019s prejudice for women and the shame that they impose on them. As women at this time were not allowed to be sexual or to express her desire for lust, by doing so, she lost her dignity for not preserving her purity. The second woman was portrayed with the color white, which suggested the idealized image of woman\u2019s purity and virginity, the traditional women in the society. The vivid depiction of \u201cgrew gross in soulless love\u201d painted a picture of a loveless marriage that the woman complies with. Compare to the first story, she followed the norms, and yet, she still ended up being the \u201csluggish wife\u201d, stuck in the illusion of a happy ending that society convinced her to obey. Lastly, the color blue, a rarely seen color, was associated with the third woman. When described with the word ‘famine’, the portrayal of this woman appeared to be lifeless, suggesting illness or even death. Like a harpstring that had worn out, the woman had grown tired of looking for love as she chose death over the life of an unmarried woman.
\nThese stories might be a bit of an exaggeration, yet they emphasized how women in those days were restricted to beings with the sole purpose in life was to get married and be wives. Thus, not abiding by those norms would cause them to be shamed and undignified. The poem’s final phrase, however, suggests that regardless of the choices, not each, but all “are short of life.” The ambiguous description does not only characterize a woman in vain pursuit of love but also insists that even “after love” \u2014 a supposedly satisfactory experience \u2014 the woman remains unfulfilled and unhappy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cA Triad\u201d could be perceived as Rosetti\u2019s effort to illustrate the difficulties with love and romantic relationships that Victorian women encountered due to strict norms imposed by the patriarchal society. Although described separately as three different individuals, the three women in this poem serve as the symbolic representations of limited options that women in this … Continue reading Red, White & “Femine” Blue<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4749,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094","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\/4749"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}