A Doll's House and Rossetti critical quotes

Rossetti:

• "focuses not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love... rather upon the apparently inevitable culmination of all compulsive amatory passions - renunciation" - Harrison
• "the flimsiness and inconstancy of romantic love is a recurring theme"

A Doll's House:

• "marriage was revealed as being far from divine institution" - Strindberg
• "Nora puts love before legality" - Duncan

Rossetti:

• "Rossetti's personas often identify with, and feel ensnared by, the fruitless cycles and frustrating self-contradictions of the natural world" - Sullivan
• "A powerful tension between control and chaos, between self-assertion and self-destruction, creates much of the intensity of her poetry" - Sullivan
• "Rossestti's speakers demonstate an awareness of...social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women" - Avery
• "Goblin Market can be understood as a conventional parable of temptation, sacrifice and salvation" - Morden

A Doll's House:

• "The play shows a critical scrutiny of the lives and values of the bourgeois classes" - Ledger
• "Ibsen is critically dissecting modern life and all its problems" - Ledger
• "Nora finds herself in opposition to the demands of a hostile society" - Ledger
• "Convention caged her within a child's toy structure" - Milett

Rossetti:

• "demonstrates both an awareness of, and resistance to those political and social expectations which define acceptable roles for women and potentially leave them powerless" - Avery
• "affirmations of female piety, passivity and submission" - Rosenblum
• "radically rewritten the Fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees around her and includes more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin" - Palazzo
• "Rossetti's poems encourage women to claim indepdence and agency" - Avery
• "Maude Clare is a clear critique of dominant masculinity" - Avery

A Doll's House:

• "Nora confronted every convention and chivalrous masculine prejudice that caged her within a child's toy structure, hoping to ensure that she would remain a housepet and an infant there forever" - Millett
• "Nora is not just a woman arguing for female liberation: she is much more. She embodied the comedy as well as the tragedy of modern life" - Templeton
• "Her flirtation with Rank is another indication of the more spirited woman beneath the convention-respecting surface" - Gray
• "Her departure announced a great awakening of European drama as well as in women's egalitarianism" - Gray

A Doll's House:

• "Christine Linde acts as a catalyst for Nora's rebellion" - Ledger
• "Nora's actions are a way of reinforcing an individual's right - regardless of gender - to protect themselves" - Cron
• "I have never written a play to further a social purpose" - Ibsen