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Vicotorian Models in the Poetry of Christina Rosseti

 

Most aptly epitomised in the telling title of Coventry Patmore's immensely popular verse novel The Angel in the House (1854), the Victorian concept of womanhood stressed woman's purity and selflessness. The ideal woman he envisioned - submissive, decorous and ethereal - became a standard against which every Victorian woman's conduct was measured. She was valued for qualities considered particularly characteristic of her sex: tenderness, domestic affection and submissiveness. This disembodied ideal of the Victorian society, objectified women as nothing but sex objects, reinvigorating the image of the classic virgin and limiting them to predominantly domestic roles. In the poem A Triad, the second woman Rossetti presents, tries to conform herself to the structure that define her feminity and make her eligible in this arrangement as she compares her with a 'tinted hyacinth at a show'. But what she becomes engrossed in is a soulless love as a sluggish wife, as her marriage lacked all intensity and passion she had desired. .
             "One temperately.
             Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife".
             On the other hand in the poem Goblin Market, goblins may symbolize the male suitors who bombard Laura and Lizzie with offers of fruit just as Victorian women were subjected with offers of marriage. Laura falls under this trap, when she had eaten their fruits before marriage and was unable to hear their call again. This may be construed as she lost her innocence and virginity before marriage, Laura was no longer considered a suitable prospect for marriage. .
             Women were regarded to be inferior to men and hence, the Victorian society seemed steeping in conservatism with regards to women's sexual choice. So far as poetry of Christina Rossetti is concerned, the sexual repression upon women has been highlighted in her poems including "Goblin Market" and "A Triad". In Victorian society women were looked as being devoid of passions or desires.


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