Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

No description available.

No description available.

Throughout her life Christina Rossetti was pursued by the thought of death. Many of her poems, especially her later poems, display her concerns about death. Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life. Her death wish is sometimes associated with her thwarted desire for absolute love in the world. Her religious poems describe death as the gate to heaven or to hell, the final resting place from the pains of her life. Either as her religious yearning for a better place of Resurrection or as her way of expressing her unfulfilled desire in the world, her persistent theme of death is an expression of the conflict between a sometimes skeptical, sometimes religious view.

Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both suffered from ambivalent feelings concerning the role female sexuality plays in the salvation of the soul. These ambivalent feelings ranged from seeing female sexuality as leading men to salvation, to seeing it as a trap for the destruction of women's souls as well as men's. The contradictory feelings of the Rossettis' typifies the Victorian people's experience and was caused by the nature of the times. Using the analysis of the period by Walter E. Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870, this paper describes the affect the Victorians' religious zeal, their "moral earnestness," and their "woman-worship" had on the two Rossetti poets.