Christina Rossetti

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Christina Rossetti undermines patriarchal cultures by representing the female voice for women in the Victorian period. Rossetti is the youngest child in the gifted Rossetti family and she grew up rather close with her brother Dante Rossetti, who is also an extraordinary Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter. Her poetry highlights the oppressed female voice that is shadowed during the male-controlled time period. Breanna Byecroft discusses the same message in “Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry,” wherein she states that the female figure or the voice of the female figure in most male works “is often represented or repressed in a way that reduces her to a fixed meaning.” However, Byecroft also says that female poets like Christina…show more content…
Rossetti writes her poem in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. Sonnets are traditionally well-known for being about love and romance. However, Rossetti uses the sonnet form, of which is mostly written in iambic pentameter, to uncover her allegation against Pre-Raphaelite male poets like her brother Dante. Dante Rossetti tends to use the Petrarchan form to create false “conceptions of love and constructed moods rather than situations where people are actually making contact” (Byecroft). On the other hand, Christina Rossetti’s poem, including multiple works of art, challenges the traditional sonnet form by highlighting female obsession and oppression instead of love and romance. Her focal argument rests on men and how women represent their “goals, needs, and desires” (Tyson, 142). Breanna Byecroft also attempts to work through these interpretations of woman in art, and how they represent an objectifying purpose to the male subjects who create them. Byecroft takes poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Rossetti, and analyzes how their poems show how male poets “ventriloquize women and endow them with certain preferred qualities, while a female poet such as Christina Rossetti acts against this tradition” (Byecroft). Particular to Christina Rossetti’s poem, “In an Artist’s Studio,” the woman in the canvas portrays identical depictions of women idealized by Pre-Raphaelite men, and is given a voice from Rossetti who speaks as a third person witness against the convictions of
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