# data[].attributes.body
A contemporary film noir based on the epic 19th century poem by Christina Rossetti.
Directed by Katherine Wyeth.
Written and Produced by Katherine Wyeth and Stephanie Sinclaire.

# data[].attributes.body
- Christina Georgina Rossetti was born on December 5th 1830 in London.

- Born into a well educated middle class English-Italian family and was the youngest child of four.

- Her siblings were Maria Francesca (author and nun at St. Mary Magdalene Home for the Fallen Women), Dante Gabriele (famous poet and painter) and William Michael (writer and critic).

- Her father, Gabriele, was a poet and a professor of Italian at Kings College London after being exiled from Italy.

- Her mother, Frances Polidori, was a scholar and a model for some of Dante's paintings and homeschooled Rossetti.

- She is very religious and she had a breakdown when she was 14 and it was labelled as religious mania.

- She was engaged to a man called James Collinson in 1848 when she was 18, however, in 1850 they broke off the engagement because he converted to Roman Catholicism.

- In 1866, Rossetti's friend, Charles Cayley proposed to her but she rejected him as he was agnostic.

- James Brett also proposed to her but she rejected him as well.

- She released her first collection of novels in 1862 when she was 33 called 'Goblin Market and Other Poems'.

- Rossetti grew up surrounded by illness:
- Her father had bronchitis which       triggered him to have depression causing the family to suffer financially as he was the main source of income.
- Due to her siblings working or going to school, Rossetti felt isolated and lonely growing up.
- Both Dante and Lizzie Siddall, his wife, were drug addicts and she died of an overdose.
- Rossetti suffered from Graves Disease for almost 20 years and developed brain cancer which she died from.

- Rossetti died in 1894 in London.

# data[].attributes.body
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kOuFocD10hU

# data[].attributes.body
-Both Ibsen and Rossetti's literary works explore the theme of sacrifice and compromise.

-Undoubtedly, Nora is forced into a state of sacrifice when she leaves her family for freedom. The necessity to compromise her security and comfort in order to liberate herself highlights the limited options that women were presented with during the Victorian period. This can be equally identified in Christina Rossetti's 'Shut Out'. Her decision not to marry in order to maintain her, already limited, social and economic freedom therefore excludes her from Victorian society as a woman's primary purpose in life was matrimony and childbearing.

-Kristine is forced to sacrifice her relationship and love with Krogstad in order to pursue a comfortable life because of her lack of rights as a woman in the Victorian period.

# data[].attributes.body
Power of reputation: When Torvald thinks that Nora has ruined his reputation he has a plan to keep the children away from her to save them from being tainted (belief in bad actions being hereditary) and he wants to preserve the appearance of his marriage for the sake of respectability. However, respectability in the play is shown to be a façade. Although Torvald sneers at Nora’s father, he was happy to accept the money that he believed had been left to Nora in her father’s will. Further, when he finds out the truth of Nora’s deception his chief objective is in how he can cover it up to save himself. His relief when he reads Krogstad’s note which says he won’t expose Nora, is to think of himself: “I am saved!”, he says, as if this is all that is important. In the eyes of society, it is important and Torvald’s reaction perpetuates the myth.

# data[].attributes.body
-word spread reasonably slowly about the play. It was two years before the play was performed outside Scandinavia and Germany, and ten years before a recognizably faithful version was seen in England or America. France did not see the play until 1894. By the time it took its place in the European theatre annals, Ibsen was over sixty.

-The first German production notoriously altered the ending so that Nora did not leave home, when leading woman Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to act the part as written, an amendment Ibsen later described as "a barbaric outrage".

- it premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. It instantly sparked controversy as it criticised the role of women.

-1880 first performance in London- 1911 a dolls house receives its asian premier in Japan - 1945 premier in india

-1922 a first (now lost) silent film version of A Dolls House stars All Nazimova

-1923 Silent German film version directed by Berthold Viertle, Nora was played by Olga Chekhova

-1993 Sara, Dariush Mehrjui's film, relocates the story to Tehran (city in Iran)

-A dolls house production, captured by Digital Theatre live at London’s Young Vic Theatre, was directed by Carrie Cracknell. It starred Hattie Morahan as Nora and Dominic Rowan as Torvald, and was met with widespread critical and public acclaim. (revolving stage)

- Hattie Morahan, again played Nora in a Young Vic production of Ibsen's powerful classic about a woman taking control of her own destiny, stars in writer Nick Payne and director Carrie Cracknell's short film imagining what a modern-day Nora might look like, 130 years on from the original.

- In his 1989 Royal Dramatic Theatre production of A Doll's House, for which playwright Klas Östergren created a new Swedish translation, Bergman followed Ibsen's text very closely but made dramaturgical and scenographic changes. In a combined rehearsal-press conference interview, Bergman stressed the importance of the child (Hilde) as a tragic figure in a collapsing marriage. (He had received criticism for omitting the children in his own film Scenes from a marriage.On Hilde's chair sat a doll when she herself was not present on stage. Furthermore, Nora was the only one who never left the acting area.

- One of the most unusual modern productions was a fascinating 2007 production by Lee Breur, which played at the Edinburgh Festival and which cast dwarves in the male roles in order to play with the gender bias in Nora’s society. This version rendered comic Torvald's insistence on patronising his "poor little Nora," especially since he was small enough to be (at one point, actually) picked up by his wife.

- "Zinnie Harris sets Ibsen's most famous domestic drama in 1909 London. The result is not as dumb as the National's Mrs Affleck and at least gets Gillian Anderson back on the stage. But it still feels like a diluted version of a great play."-Michael Billington

# data[].attributes.body
A feminist perspective on A Dolls House

is that the character of Nora is very empowering in rejecting Torvald and her old life to find her new path, one she decides.

A feminist perspective of

Soeur Louise de la Misericorde Is that it shows Women being used for others' desires and not theirs. "I have desired and I have been desired".

From the Antique: "I wish and I wish I were a man", from a Feminist perspective you could say this shows that Rossetti was tired of oppression as a woman.

A marxism perspective of A dolls house

Is that prove the point made by Karl Marx that the less fortunate get exploited by the more fortunate and wealthier people., as Nora is shown to rely on financially Torvald and when she takes a loan from Krogstad of £250, she gets exploited by him through blackmail even though she was trying to save Torvald life. Also, Krogstad is shown to be exploited by the bank as he is threatened to lose his job due to his reputation.

A marxism perspective in Rossetti's poetry

In a Goblin Market, Laura is shown to "longing" for the fruit which could show the idea of addiction in consumer consumption in the economy as a whole.

A psychological perspective on A dolls house

As Nora is an example of Sigmund Freud's theory, that she regresses to her child-like habits of happiness with a voiceless marriage, which affects Nora's mental developmental growth massively because she is fixated in an adolescent state. For Nora to find her true self, she must break the illusion of happiness.

A psychological perspective on Rossetti's poetry,

# data[].attributes.body
-Nora forges her fathers signature to save Helmer’s life.
-In goblin market Laura eats the Goblin Men’s fruit and becomes a fallen woman to save her sisters life lizzie sacrifices herself.

- Nora believes she has to keep looking young or she will be replaced.
-In soeur Louise , the speaker ‘loses value’ with her appearance and is replaced by a younger woman. ‘My rose life gone all to prickles’

- Nora’s love masks how controlling Torvald is towards her, as long as she thinks he loves her she is happy to love him.
-Rossetti is happy with the comfort of God’s Love.

-‘it’s incredible what an expensive pet she is for a man to keep.’ We explicitly see how Torvald sees Nora as a pet rather than a wife. He is possessive and controlling in their marriage, Nora is his ‘property’
-In Rossetti’s ‘when I am dead my dearest’ the speaker tells her lover to move on after her death. Opposite of possession.

# data[].attributes.body
Gender and class:
- it was organised hierarchically, including a  sexual double standard, gender was purely biological and there were set roles that assigned with either gender
- gender ideology was premised on the “doctrine of separate spheres” , meaning men and women were meant for separate purposes
-men belonged in the public sphere whereas women belonged in the private sphere, playing a more domestic role of reproduction and household duties compared to the societal role a man would play
Religion:
- most victorian were christian, with the anglican churches of england, wales and ireland were the state churches
- the only substantial non- christian faith was judaism
- change was instituted when the 1851 census revealed that only 5.2 million out of 18 million attended church of England services with 4.9 million attending other christian places of worship, this caused large upset, linking to how Rossetti’s ex fiancé changed to roman catholicism instead of following the church of England’s regimes
Culture and art:
-theatre thrived in the victorian era, featuring melodrama with evil villains , virtuous heroins and intricate plots (much like a dolls house)
- often regarded as history of theatre ruled by queen Elizabeth from 1847 to 2001
- Ibsen's “a dolls house” was considered to the first feminist play challenging victorian ideals of a woman’s role in marriage, when it was written in 1879 it was banned from being printed or performed in Britain soon after as it criticised the society that it was performed to and the lack of justice and humanity in the treatment of women in victorian society
Emily Davies:
she edited the ‘english woman’s journal’, founding member of a woman’s discussion group that pushed parliament for woman’s voting rights, involving herself in the suffragette movement, finally opening Britain’s  first women college “Girton college”
Contagious diseases acts;
-passed by parliament in 1864
-legislation allowed police officers to arrest women suspected of being prostitutes, to then be subjected to compulsory checks for venereal disease, if found they had it they would be confined to a “lock hospital” until recovered or finished sentence
-shaming women for this lifestyle and involuntarily sentencing them to confinement, similarly to female hysteria
-they could be locked up for 3 months gradually extending to a year in 1869
-created significant controversy and sparking the debate between men and womens rights, Josephine butler began a campaign against this

# data[].attributes.headline
Flowchart of Rosetti's power, gender and control

# data[].attributes.subject
Flowchart of Rosetti's power, gender and control

# data[].attributes.headline
Love and Betrayal in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti - by Anthony H. Harrison

# data[].attributes.subject
Love and Betrayal in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti - by Anthony H. Harrison

# data[].attributes.body
https://victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/harrison2/4.6.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
uch poems as "A Bride Song" and "A Birthday" explore comparatively sanguine possibilities for attaining an ideal, wholly fulfilling love relationship in the real world. But close analysis of the poems exposes the ways in which all such possibilities ultimately prove suspect. Even so, these poems exemplify the most optimistic, albeit the smallest, group of Christina Rossetti's love poems. More dominant in her collected Complete Poems are ballads and lyrics that depict disillusionment and betrayal in love. I have already presented a full discussion of the various possible readings of "Maude Clare," a central poem in this context. But we can also classify as works in this category - at least in their obtrusive aspects - Rossetti's two major narrative poems, Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress, the titular showpieces of her first two volumes. Along with these can be included many minor lyrics such as "Light Love," "An Apple-Gathering," and "Grown and Flown." The women in love who appear in these poems are betrayed - at a number of levels and with varying effects - by false [112/113] ideals, by false lovers, or, more simply, by what is in the background of betrayal by false ideals and false lovers: innocence, that is, innocence as a delusive obliviousness to mutability.

The effects of disappointed expectations and heightened consciousness upon Rossetti's victims of love vary a good deal. Some, like the lover in "Sister Maude" become vituperative. Some, like the bride and the would-be bride in The Prince's Progress and "Light Love" die or expect to die. Others are left bewildered by what amounts to the rape of their illusions, as in "An Apple-Gathering" and "Grown and Flown." Yet others, like Laura in Goblin Market and the speaker of "Twice," ultimately benefit from their experience and from their renunciation of illusions and earthly ideals. Much like the speaker in the Monna Innominata, they are led toward higher, more spiritual ideals of love (in one reading of Goblin Market, Lizzie is a Christ figure). By means of their suffering in love and their martyrdom to false ideals of love or pleasure, they are saved from the world.

Goblin Market and The Princes Progress, confront the issue of betrayed expectations in love from different perspectives. As an anonymous reviewer commented in the Athenaecum in 1866: "'The Prince's Progress," like the 'Goblin Market' . . . is an allegory, and an allegory, moreover, illustrating a similar idea. In both works the argument is the power of temptation to beguile man from the worthy and earnest work of life. In 'Goblin Market' the temptations are resisted and overcome, - in 'The Prince's Progress' they triumph" (Review of The Prince's Progress, 824). Moreover, in the case of Goblin Market the central temptations are sensory and come to be equated with sexual pleasures; in The Prince's Progress only one of the two central temptations that prevent the realization of an implied ideal of married bliss is sexual; the other is, ironically, a potion that promises the perpetuation of an ideal married life, an "Elixir of Life." Underlying both these poems that depict betrayal and expose illusions about love, however, is Christina Rossetti's highly aesthetic consciousness, which, like the voice in the second stanza of "A Birthday," is concerned with surmounting the inevitable betrayal of love's transient pleasures or our exalted expectations of love by memorializing such pleasures and expectations in art.

Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress, moreover, constitute formal and thematic assaults upon the androcentric tradition of the romantic lyric; see Margaret Homans, "'Syllables of Velvet'." Not only do these narrative poems eschew the lyric form in which love ideals are typically presented by male speakers who aspire to fulfillment through union with their beloveds, but they also expose the corrupt (commercial and hypocritically materialist or socially prescribed) founda-[113/114]tions upon which such false ideals are erected. Further, they palpably demonstrate the ways in which women are perceived as objects or mere ciphers by the patriarchal ideologies of romantic love that pretend to idolize women and desire union with them. These poems are, therefore, powerful social critiques of a system of romantic values that began in medieval France and had reached its institutionalized apogee in Victorian England with its apotheosis of middle-class women as Angels in the House. (For backgrounds to the evolution of this ideology, see Rougement, L'Amour et L'Occident, and Rabine, Reading the Romantic Heroine.)

Presented in Goblin Market is an exemplary instance of betrayed expectations that the sensual delights of this world can be enjoyed with impunity. In fact, indulgence in them is shown to be dangerous and sometimes fatal. Such delights are insistently associated in the poem with love (or at least lust) by means of its much-discussed use of sexually charged metaphors and by the fatal effect of these transient pleasures on Laura and on Lizzie's friend, Jeanie, who "should have been a bride." Jeanie died from her craving for the once-sampled Goblin fruits - premature surrogates for the delights of the marriage bed ( critical approaches to the poem). "For joys brides hope to have" Jeanie "Fell sick and died / In her gay prime" (Poems, 1:19; "Gay" was a familiar Victorian term applied to prostitutes). Following this pattern, Laura succumbs to the attractions of the Goblin fruit ("'You cannot think what figs / My teeth have met in'") and afterwards languishes "in a passionate yearning." She "gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept / As if her heart would break." However, unlike Jeanie, Laura is saved by Lizzie's painful resistance to the temptations of passion symbolized by the fruit. Lizzie appears to be intuitively aware that exalted expectations of passionate pleasure are undermined by real experience, and she has renounced such pleasure. Her knowledge is reinforced by the fate of Jeanie and her sister, and she is almost martyred by her own refusal to succumb. When she seeks medicinal Goblin fruit for Laura, the Goblin men

. . .trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat. [Poems, 1:21; 114/115]

With the residue of resistance "syrup[ping] all her face," Lizzie returns to Laura as a Christ figure, symbolically introducing Laura to a new spiritual direction for her passionate impulses, one that will in all senses save her from the betrayal that inevitably follows upon false expectations of fulfillment through sensual pleasures:

The moral tag at the end of this poem - "there is no friend like a sister" reminds us of Coleridge's similarly understated and ironic conclusion to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem that parallels Rossetti's in its narrative treatment of the experience of fall and redemption, but also in its creation of a fantasy world that focuses the reader's attention more powerfully on the aesthetic and psychological experience the poem generates than on the moral precepts it is intended to convey." Such resemblances between Goblin Market and Coleridge's Rime were observed by early readers. For instance, Mrs. Charles Eliot Norton, in her review of Rossetti's first volume of poems, asserts that Goblin Market may "vie with Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner', ... for the vivid and wonderful power by which things unreal and mystic are made to blend and link themselves with the everyday images and events of common life" ("'The Goblin Market,'" 404). In both poems such precepts seem, at best, anticlimactic. One anonymous reviewer, despite the moralizing conclusion, pronounced Goblin Market to be "purely and completely a work of art." (Review of Goblin Market, 230). It is one whose voluptuous imagery, rather than its moral tag, remains permanently fixed in the reader's mind.

s Prince's Progress, a long narrative poem that introduces Christina Rossetti's second volume of verse, is a sequel to Goblin Market, and it, too, concerns false expectations of love. These expectations belong not only to the characters involved, but also, to an extent, to the reader of this quest romance whose events undercut the tradition from which it emerges. Rather than focusing, as Goblin Market does, on its characters' betrayed expectations of sensual delight, The Prince's Progress deals primarily with more philosophical issues related to betrayal in love, which here is depicted as an inevitable result of fate and human nature. On its surface this poem appears to depict a deserving Princess bride who is betrayed by an inadequately devoted lover. Yet, as in the majority of Christina Rossetti's love poems, mutability appears insistently as the culprit in the background of this narrative. It is the force that impels the characters' reactions to their circumstances and prevents fulfillment of love.

Typicallyin quest romances both lovers are idealized, but in Rossetti's poem only one of the central characters is admirable. The Princess dies languishing as she awaits her bridegroom's delayed arrival. As we learn in the last 60 of the poem's 540 lines, she is entirely passive, like Tennyson's [115/116] Mariana and most of the dream-poem heroines from Morris's Defence volume. She is beautiful, "Meet queen for any kingly king, / With gold-dust on her hair." And her temperament complements her beauty. The veiled figures who are carrying away her body when the Prince finally appears first admonish him:

And then they eulogize their dead Princess:

"We never saw her with a smile
Or with a frown;
Her bed seemed never soft to her, Tho' tossed of down;
She little heeded what she wore, Kittle, or wreath, or gown;
We think her white brows often ached Beneath her crown,
Till silvery hairs showed in her locks That used to be so brown."

Significantly, these and the rest of the last 60 lines in The Prince's Progress were written in 1861, four years before the bulk of the narrative was composed, and clear differences in focus and technique distinguish the two parts of the poem. The lines from 1861-in a way typical of Christina Rossetti's poems of betrayed love - emphasize the character of the betrayed lover and the pathos of her fate. The 480 lines that precede the Prince's arrival carefully characterize the Prince, but they are far more[116/117]philosophical in tone than the poem's final stanzas, and they make far more obtrusive use of symbolism in order to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere. The tone and atmosphere in combination produce a narrative that, in its echoes of other relevant poetic texts, once again suggests a highly self-conscious poet appropriating the work of her precursors in revisionist ways. As in the Monna Innominata, Rossetti manages to sustain a tension on the reader's part between sympathetic involvement with the characters and events of her poem on the one hand and intellectual detachment on the other. Such detachment is compelled by an awareness, repeatedly elicited by her text, of specific literary precedents and traditions that have helped to generate the poem.

In the course of the dilatory Prince's "progress" toward his bride, he encounters obstacles that remind us variously of man's susceptibility to sexual enchantment as it is portrayed in Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," of the futility that characterizes most of Tennyson's questers; in "The Holy Grail" and of the landscape traversed by Browning's Childe Roland. Like Tennyson's Tristram, Rossetti's Prince is "Strong of limb if of purpose weak" (Poems, 1:96) and, also like Tristram, he is easily waylaid during the first mile of his journey by "A wave-haired milkmaid, rosy and white." After the Prince quaffs the maiden's milk, she becomes Latmia-like and Keatsian: "Was she a maid, or an evil dream?" And she compels him to remain "a day and a night fast laid / In her subtle toils." Under the "apple-tree" (which becomes an icon of fall and betrayal in Rossetti's poetry), he

After moving from her lair, the Prince is further delayed by a landscape as barren and hostile as that which discourages Brownings Childe Roland through most of his quest:

We are made aware of the derivative, literary quality of Rossetti's narrative not only by its conspicuous echoes of these familiar Romantic and Victorian poems, but also by its dreamlike, often nightmarish atmosphere, which recalls Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" and "Mariana" as well as dream Poems by Morris such as "The Blue Closet," "The Tune of the Seven Towers," "Golden Wings" and "Spell-bound." Most of these poems by Morris, like Tennyson's "Mariana" and "The Lady of Shalott," emphasize the dreamlike atmosphere surrounding a woman vainly waiting for a lover. As Margaret Lourie has quite correctly observed, reading such poems

allows us to isolate a strain in Victorian Romanticism which perhaps began with early Tennyson poems ... and certainly culminated ... in the early work of ... Yeats. It is a strain which rejects Arnold's "powerful application of ideas to life" in favor of a movement downward out of life and into primeval levels of consciousness. It is a strain which ran from Tennyson through Morris and the other Pre-Raphaelites to Walter Pater and from there, to Yeats's friends in the Rhymers' Club, whose movement out of life was all too often literal. ["Embodiment of Dreams," 202-3]

This strain of Victorian Romanticism, specifically as it dominates Pre-Raphaelite poetry, is wholly compatible with some of Christina Rossetti's favorite religious texts. Its solipsism might be seen, in the case of Rossetti, as a literalization of the New Testament insistence (Luke 17:21) that "The kingdom of God is within you," a doctrine also taken literally and developed at length in Rossetti's much-loved Imitatio Christi. In that work, Thomas à Kempis admonishes: "Learn to despise outward things and to give thyself to things inward, and thou shalt perceive the kingdom of God to be come in thee.... All His glory and beauty is from within." (Imitation of Christ 2.1). Clearly, in The Prince's Progress, in many of Christina Rossetti's other poems of vain love, and even in her children's poetry, she makes a significant, if often derivative, contribution to the genealogy of Victorian literature of "life-defying interiority," which, in its effects upon the reader, is predominantly aesthetic. Ultimately however, as Jerome McGann has suggested, such aestheticism, through its insistence upon the inadequacies and corruption of the world, serves as a social and ideological critique of Rossetti's culture (NER, 253-54).

Very early in The Princes Progress the futility and "the doom" inevitable in love affairs on earth are emphasized by means of rich, even voluptuous imagery that we usually associate with the aesthetic temperament, from [118/119] Keats and early Tennyson to Swinburne and Pater. Before beginning his journey, the Prince requires the mysterious "voice of my doom" to tell him "Of my veiled bride in her maiden bloom." That voice describes her, significantly, as "Spell-bound," watching "in one white room," where

"By her head lilies and rosebuds grow;
The lilies droop, will the rosebuds blow?
The silver slim lilies hang the head low;
Their stream is scanty, their sunshine rare;
Let the sun blaze out, and let the stream flow,
They will blossom and wax fair.

The voice concludes with repeated instructions to seize the day, and these are echoed by a chorus of voices, half sad and half glad:

Two years after the publication of The Prince's Progress, this carpe diem motif found its most eloquent Victorian spokesman in Walter Pater, who, in reviewing Morris's poetry, emphasized the "awful brevity" of human experience: "A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic fife. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?" (Sambrook, 115). In The Prince's Progress Christina Rossetti seems, in response to life's transience, almost to sanction an Epicurean quest for love, while at the same time pronouncing upon the inevitability of its failure. Almost drowned during his last adventure before arriving at the Princess's palace, the Prince desperately "clutched in one drowning hand" the phial containing the "Elixir of Life" distilled by an ancient sorcerer who had detained him. The Prince hopes, as he nears[119/120]the palace, that despite his tardiness, the potion's promise of prolonged life in love "May go far to woo him a wife" (Poems, 1:107). Ironically, however, he is unable to outrun mutability; the Princess is dead.

Slip past, slip fast,
Uncounted hours from first to last,
Many hours till the last is past,
Many hours dwindling to one -
One hour whose die is cast,
One last hour gone.

The final note of this poem is pathos, a sequel to the complacent happiness recorded by the sisters in Goblin Market who attain happiness precisely because they renounce the kind of pleasures that seduce the Prince during his journey. Though eminently desirable in The Prince's Progress, the beauty and joy of fulfilled love are fated to be unattainable. They constitute a temptation the pursuit of which is futile because the simple fact of mutability is insuperable. Patriarchal society's refusal to acknowledge this futility is a cruel deception that, in both poems, victimizes women. Moreover, the deception is perpetuated precisely in the fairy-tale traditions of romantic poetry that Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress parody, both formally and thematically. From these works we infer that the carpe diem impulse, especially in its connection with romantic ideals, must inevitably be quelled by true knowledge of vanitas mundi, except insofar as the impulse, its momentary fulfillment, or its disappointment can be preserved in art along with implied or explicit monitions to renounce desires for fulfillment in this world. In this way Christina Rossetti paradoxically preserves literary tradition - by appropriating and transvaluing it in parody - while she presents a critique of the ideology underlying that tradition.

Rossetti wrote many poems that seem designed less to warn the woman desiring to fill "love's capacity" against sensory temptation than to [120/121] warn her against the false men who embody such temptation. By the last stanzas of "Maude Clare," for instance, Maude has painfully learned about the dangers of love and can readily renounce Thomas, who has betrayed her. She charges his bride, Nell, to

The gesture of renunciation is more difficult and equivocal for the victimized heroine of "Light Love" (1856) who, during dialogue with her treacherous lover, "strained his baby in her arms, / His baby to her heart" (Poems, 1:137). Like Rossetti's "The Sins of the Fathers" this poignant, sentimental poem, with illicit passion and a bastard child in the foreground, is daringly un-Victorian. But the woman in "Light Love" is unlike the speaker in "The Sins of the Fathers" who renounces marriage while veiling her illegitimacy to protect her mother. The persona in "Light Love" is concerned exclusively with her own pathetic situation and is bewildered at her betrayal. She does agree, finally, to "Even let it go, the love that harms," but to her child - the issue of her "light" love who weightily perpetuates it - she entones, "We twain will never part; / Mine own, his own, how dear thou art" (Poems, 1:137). That child's perfidious father is about to abandon the mother for more tempting pleasures of the flesh:

But the child's mother sympathetically warns this callous voluptuary against infidelity and mutability, two subjects of her own recent schooling in love:[121/122]

Oblivious to her plea, her lover abandons her and she is at the end embittered: "She raised her eyes, not wet / But hard, to Heaven / And asked / 'Does God forget?'" (Poems, 1:138). Like Ford Madox Brown's unfinished painting, "Take your son, Sir"(began in 1852), the victimized woman in this poem is in dialogue not only with her (significantly unnamed) lover, but with the entire corrupt and corrupting society he represents. Unlike the materialistic Thomas in "Maude Clare" however, this man is ironically in search of a "ripe-blooming" carnal ideal. His example exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian mythologies that portrayed women as saintly spiritual beings. These myths proliferated in conduct books of the day - most of them written by men - as well as in literature. (For a full discussion of this literature, see Gorham, Victorian Girl.)

The speaker in "An Apple-Gathering" is more perplexed than embittered by her rather abstractly represented experience of betrayal by a false lover. Here again, images of the harvest predominate, suggesting that one reaps what one sows. As the speaker views her female friends returning from the orchards with baskets full of apples, some with help from "a stronger hand," she reminisces:

Like Laura in Goblin Market, this speaker prematurely enjoys sensual pleasures associated with love, thus betraying her own best potential, and is subsequently deserted by her lover, forfeiting the sustained fulfillment she expects. Dismayed and bewildered, she asks plaintively,

Realizing how imprudently she has "counted," she loiters at the poems conclusion while neighbors pass her by and while the dews, suggestive of her tears, "fell fast" as she herself had in her amorous innocence before her betrayal.

As in "An Apple-Gathering" at issue in almost all of Rossetti's poems about betrayed lovers or betrayed expectations of love is the unattainability of fulfillment. As we have seen, Rossetti often stresses ideal love's distance from reality by describing the experience of love with images of mutability. Seasonal images, images of planting and harvesting, images of ripeness and unripeness, all appear as natural analogues to naturally impelled passions, whether these are clearly erotic or more vague and ethereal. Her characters' predictable failures enduringly to fulfill passion often result in the renunciation not only of specific disappointed love relationships but also of any belief at all in attainable earthly ideals of love. We find her speakers turning away from nature and toward an internal space that can be filled with attainable spiritual ideals of love. This complete movement is the subject of her lyric, "Twice," a poem that exemplifies the transition, common to many of Rossetti's poems, from the pursuit of eros to its renunciation in favor of agapè.

"Twice" is spoken by a courageous woman who, with some reluctance, has made overtures to the man she loves. Her lover's response has shattered her faith in the value of erotic love:

She cannot, however, wait till harvest time. Indeed, this experience has altogether destroyed her capacity to pursue earthly passion. Her lover "set [her heart] down" and "it broke." As a result,

... I have not often smiled
Since then, nor questioned since,
Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.[123/124]

"Twice" operates at a level of cultural criticism different from that of "Light Love" and "An Apple-Gathering." The attack implicit in its four brief stanzas is upon the powerlessness of women in a rigid patriarchal society. The man's words are spoken with absolute and final authority. But the poem subverts the premises underlying that authority by appealing to a higher one who can be imaginatively idealized as a worthy judge and lover. He can be constructed in the image of a genuinely sympathetic and receptive - that is, an ironically nonsexist - being. Along with the sanctions of love in approved social forms and contexts, the speaker here indignantly and impatiently renounces the natural world, and, now penitent for her presumptuous erotic quest, she approaches God:

I take my heart in my hand,
O my God, O my God,
My broken heart in my hand:
Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God;
Now let Thy judgment stand -
Yea, judge me now.

She thus acknowledges the uncertainty of eros, but also, aware that her quest for earthly love was misguided, she acknowledges her need to be chastened and "purged" in order to become worthy of Gods superior love. Alienated from the arbitrary and insensitive values of her patriarchal society, the speaker in "Twice," like the persona of "A Birthday" and the lover in "Dream-Love," finds herself to be an alien in the natural world as well. Like Yeats's persona in "Sailing to Byzantium," she perceives her heart, finally, as an artifact that can be "refined" and perfected only when it is "once out of nature," projected wholly either into the world of art or [124/125] the realm of the ideal. Such is the case in all of Christina Rossetti's poems whose focus is not on the possibility of fulfilling earthly love, or upon betrayal in love, but rather upon the apparently inevitable culmination of all compulsive amatory passions - renunciation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Love and Betrayal in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
uch poems as "A Bride Song" and "A Birthday" explore comparatively sanguine possibilities for attaining an ideal, wholly fulfilling love relationship in the real world. But close analysis of the poems exposes the ways in which all such possibilities ultimately prove suspect.

# data[].attributes.headline
Critical quotes - Ibsen's 'A Doll's House'

# data[].attributes.subject
Critical quotes - Ibsen's 'A Doll's House'

# data[].attributes.body
Toril Moi (2008)- 'a play that asks what it will take for two modern individuals to build a relationship based on freedom, equality and love'

Toril Moi (2008) calls Helmer's discovery of the letter  'a moment of high melodrama'

Toril Moi (2008) - Nora and Torvald stared in 'idealistic scenarios of female sacrifice and male rescue'

Erik Boegh (reviewing the world premier in Copenhagen) - 'a play so simple in its action and so everyday in its dress made such an impression' + 'never for a moment was the dagger of tragedy raised'

Chris Megson (2010) - 'the best-known play in the Naturalist pantheon'

Ibsen wrote in a letter to Swedish actor-director August Lindberg that the play depended 'to a large degree, on the audience members thinking that they sit [...] and watch something which is happening out there in real life' and 'demand for full ruthless truth to life'

Review in the Danish newpaper 'Social Demokraten' - 'We have never in dramatic or poetic form seen a better, more powerful intervention in the question of women's liberation!'

Otten (1998) - 'the play is elementally about prostitution, about the wilful selling of oneself to gain some advantage'

Times reviewer (1889) - Ibsen used theatre as a vehicle for 'these concerning the education and the rights of women, heredity and other subjects that may be classed under the comprehensive term of social sciences'

Moi (2008) - Ibsen wanted us to 'think about the way we theatricalize ourselves and others in everyday life'

Johnson (1989) - parallels between Nora and the Christmas tree, the latter 'prevented from full growth, cut or transplanted, then prettified and decorated in a domestic environment, like Nora herself'

Tornqvist (1995) - 'I did so want to see Nora in her costume'

Halvdan Koht - the play 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life'

(1891) Ibsen told his French translator, Moritz Prozor, that 'I was for the sake of the last scene that the whole play was written'

Fokelts Avis, 24th December 1879 - 'is there a mother among thousands of mothers, a wife among thousands od wives, who would act as Nora acts, who would leave husband and children and home so she herself foremost can become "a human being"? [...] absolutely not!'

In 'The Telegraph', Clement Scott doubted that 'those theories as expressed in "The Doll's House" would ever find favour with the great body of English playgoers'

'Breaking a Butterfly' was a German ending of the play which saw the equivalent of Torvald forgiving Nora's forgery - this alternative was praised by 'The Times' and grateful that it allowed 'happiness to be restored to the troubled home' (Christian, 2019)

Toril Moi (2008) calls the play the 'first fully modernist play'

The Danish People's Paper argued that 'There is not [...] a single point which justifies her action'

The Guardian writer, A. S. Byatt - 'every time I read the play I find myself judging Nora with less and less sympathy'

Haydon (2013) called Nora's departure 'pretty questionable'

Toril Moi - the two men in the play treat Nora like a doll

# data[].attributes.body
-The 19th Century was dominated by strict Victorian social codes and laws that severely restricted the right of all women, and married women in particular
-Governments throughout Europe used the Napoleonic code, which prevented women from engaging in any financial transaction
-women were not allowed to borrow money without their husbands’ consent, or were allowed to vote

# data[].attributes.headline
Power and Control in 'No thank you, John' (Rosetti)

# data[].attributes.subject
Power and Control in 'No thank you, John' (Rosetti)

# data[].attributes.body
'No thank you, John'
Direct adress = asserting dominance (unconventiional for women); for example - "I never said I loved you".
Ending lines on harsh consonants -> emphasiszes bluntness.
Cyclical structure of "No, thank you, John" = echos the beginnings direct adress and reminds the reader of her determination and not changer her stance.

# data[].attributes.body
-Both Ibsen and Rossetti's literature shares an inequality of female and male gender roles:
-Nora is restricted to the confides of her gender as she is unable to administer a bank loan without the permission of a male figure. Equally, Rosetti is restricted to a "woman's lot" which prevents her from possessing any authority and she is consistently undermined as an intellectual. This was not uncommon in the Victorian period as displayed by Torvald consistently referring to Nora in an overtly derogatory and infantilising manner - "Squirrel", "Spendthrift" etc.

-Torvald is authoritative and dominates Nora's ability to make decisions. He adopts this role willingly, telling Nora "I would not be a true man if your feminine helplessness did not make you doubly attractive in my eyes". This is mirrored in 'In the Round Tower at Jhansi' as Captain Skene says "I wish I could bear the pang for both". The male fantasy of protection and female helplessness roots from their roles in the traditional Victorian home, with men working to protect their wives and children.

-The intensity of Rossetti's desire to be a man, "I wish and I wish I were a man" is not at all tentative and prevents her from possessing any pride or empowerment in her own gender because of the intensity of her desire to cease from being oppressed. Undoubtedly, this sacrifice for freedom is mirrored when Nora leaves her family in order to be freed from Torvald's control and possession. This non maternal act does not comply with traditional Victorian gender roles and portrays Nora in a negative light to the audience.

# data[].attributes.body
Lecture series on A Doll's House

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About this Course

In this course, Dr Sophie Duncan (University of Oxford) explores Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, which premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in December 1879. The course begins by introducing Ibsen's life and times, his inspiration for the plot of the play, and the story of how the play transitioned from the Scandinavian to the British stage. After that, we think about A Doll's House as a work of Victorian drama, focusing in particular on the continuities and discontinuities with other plays of the period. In the third module, we explore the theme of marriage in the play, including the political and journalistic debates surrounding marriage in the 1880s and 90s, before moving on in the fourth module to consider the play's treatment of masculinity. In the fifth module, we think about the influence of Darwin's Origin of Species on the play, focusing in particular on the themes of criminality and inheritance, before moving on in the sixth and final module to consider the theatrical, critical and philosophical readings of the play's stunning and sensational ending.

About the Lecturer

Dr Sophie Duncan is Fellow in English at Christ Church, University of Oxford. She is an expert on Shakespeare in performance, and in the broader fields of theatre history and the performance of gender and race. Her books include SHAKESPEARE'S WOMEN AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE (Oxford University Press, 2016), described as "extraordinary .... a welcome antidote to prevailing assumptions" (Times Literary Supplement), and SHAKESPEARE'S PROPS (Routledge, 2019).

She has also published extensively on Victorian theatre and culture, from Jack the Ripper to the suffragettes, via Oscar Wilde and Ira Aldridge (the first African American actor to perform in Europe). With Rachael Lennon, she co-wrote WOMEN AND POWER: THE STRUGGLE FOR SUFFRAGE (National Trust Books: 2018). Her new edition of Henrik Ibsen's A DOLL'S HOUSE will be published by Methuen early in 2020.

Sophie read English at Oriel College, Oxford, and received her doctorate from Brasenose, Oxford in 2013. In 2018, she was the National Trust's advisor on their national programme marking the first hundred years of women's suffrage in Britain. She has worked extensively in theatre, radio and television as a historical advisor, including the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company, the Kiln, the New Vic, BBC Studios and Radio 4. She presented an episode of The Essay for BBC Radio 3 and has appeared on Woman's Hour as well as numerous podcasts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About this Course In this course, Dr Sophie Duncan (University of Oxford) explores Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, which premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in December 1879. The course begins by introducing Ibsen's life and times, his inspiration for the plot of the play, and the story of how the play transitioned from the Scandinavian to the British stage.

# data[].attributes.body
- By the end of the 19th century 'A Dolls House' had been performed in Germany, France, Britain ad the USA, although most performances modified the ending and censored it because it was so shocking

- 'There is something timeless about it ... The things Ibsen writes means it ceases to be about a particular milieu' - Susannah Ruskin

- In Germany, actress Hedwig Nieman-Raabe refused to perform Ibsen's original ending, saying she would never leave her own children. Immediately after the play was published, Ibsen was forced to create an alternate ending for German audiences. In the alternate ending, Torvald forces Nora into their children's nursery doorway, where she sinks brokenly to the floor, overcome by maternal guilt. Ibsen declared that producing an alternate version was a  'barbaric act of violence' against the play.

- There were many sequels that followed 'A Doll's House', mainly anti Nora. For example Marie Itzerott's 'Nora' (1903) punished Nora with a terminal nervous disease, whilst Esther Vilar's 'Helmer'  (1981), saw Toravld becoming a brilliant, selfless single father who refuses Nora access to her children. However Ernst Brunn's 'Where did Nora go when she went out' (1968), is more positive, in which Nora becomes a revolutionary anti-capitalist.

- The Danish people's paper reviewed in the play's 1879 premiere that 'there is not (...) a single point that justifies her (Nora's) action'

- Several recent adaptations of 'A Dolls House', such as 'Sara' (1992) and 'Nneora: An African Doll's House' (2005) both see Nora take the children with her

# data[].attributes.body
Within the time Rosetti was writing the 1800's it was uncommon for women to be so expressive through paper, Her first two poems published were "Death's Chill Between" and "Heart's Chill Between", in the Athenaeum magazine in 1848. She then went on to write for the Germ, from January to April 1850 and it was edited by her brother William.

When she was 31 she published Goblin Market which was highly regarded at the time, and critics described her as the "foremost female poet" of the time

Towards the end of her career as a poet she published "Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book" that was published in 1872, although  the public were reported to be more pleased by the illustrations by Arthur Hughes.

# data[].attributes.body
- In both Rosetti and Ibsen's work characters find pleasure in prohibited things due to the fact they know they cannot have them - Nora finds pleasure in eating the macaroons because she knows Torvald has forbidden them , which is similar to Laura in Goblins market as she knows she is not supposed to be tempted by the Goblins but she wants to explore and seeks pleasure in it.
- Both Ibsen and Rosetti suggest how women find pleasure in wanting to be like men. Nora enjoyed working and trying to pay off her debt because it made her feel "almost like being a man"and she felt like she was in the real world for the first time. In "From the Antique" it is suggested the pleasure the narrator would get out of being a man in society during this period, "I wish and I wish I were a man". This suggests the pleasure women get from doing things like men do and feeling the sense of freedom and control that the men have.

# data[].attributes.headline
Cristina Rossetti's Goblin Market: Finding the Middle Ground - by Jasmine Yeh

# data[].attributes.subject
Cristina Rossetti's Goblin Market: Finding the Middle Ground - by Jasmine Yeh

# data[].attributes.body
https://depts.washington.edu/egonline/2010/04/2008-09-winner-christina-rossetti%e2%80%99s-goblin-market-finding-the-middle-ground-by-jasmine-yeh/#more-41

- Goblin Market interpretation

# data[].attributes.headline
Power and Control in Winter My Secret (Rosetti)

# data[].attributes.subject
Power and Control in Winter My Secret (Rosetti)

# data[].attributes.body
'Winter: My secret' - control over her secret "I tell my secret? No indeed, not I" = personal pronouns indicates her possesive nature over her secret.

Draft title: 'Nonsense' was there ever a secret or did the 'secret' create an illusion which the speaker was able to galvernise and gain power/control.

'Winter' - season has connotations of something cold and bitter - a refusal to tell.

# data[].attributes.body
A Doll's house - Nora is treated like a doll and a possession of Torvald.

- “Nora confronted every convention and the chivalrous masculine prejudice that caged her within a child’s toy structure, hoping to ensure that she would remain a housepet and infant there forever.” Kate Millett (Sexual Politics) 1971.

Krogstad’s power comes from the £250 he loaned to Nora and it gives him the power to blackmail her: “If I get thrown into the gutter for a second time, I shall take you with me.

# data[].attributes.body
-A revised version of A Doll’s House with an alternate ending premiered in Flensburg, Germany in 1880. The actress playing Nora, Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, was outraged at the notion that a mother would leave her children and refused to perform the play as written. Ibsen created an alternate ending where Nora did not leave, but this was unpopular and later abandoned

-the original script of A Doll's House was forbidden to be performed in Germany and London due to its highly controversial nature

-A Doll's House sold out in the two and a half weeks between its first publication and performance and was considered scandalous by those in authority, both in its treatment of marriage and for the fact that the heroine stands up for herself

# data[].attributes.headline
Rossetti - critical interpretations for each poem:

# data[].attributes.subject
Rossetti - critical interpretations for each poem:

# data[].attributes.body
- Goblin Market [link attached separately] - Jasmine Yeh - "middle ground between the pure and impure due to that bond of sisterhood" - "Rossetti acknowledges two extreme perceptions of women as passionless angels and whores"
- Twice - link attached separately
- Shut Out - Kathleen Jones - speaker represents Eve, spirit God / an angel. No earthly garden can live up to the Paradise that is Eden.
- Round Tower at Jhansi - poem can be read with a post colonialism perspective
- No, thank you, John - Woolf - Rossetti heard someone talking about her and responded "I am Christina Rossetti" - poem = symbolic of Rossetti's personal determination and forcefulness in choosing her own path in life and not adhering to the social norm of marriage.
- Winter: My Secret - Dinah Roe - called entire poem a "verbal striptease" e.g. last stanza ends with 'guess'.
- Good Friday - Myra Reynolds, 1898 - “Good Friday is a passionate outcry against the easy indifference with which man can think of the Christ who bore our shame in agony”.
- Soeur Louise de la Miséricorde - is Rossetti writing in the mindset of Soeur Louise or herself - overlap in experiences e.g. forced decisions.

# data[].attributes.headline
Massolit series of lectures on Rossetti:

# data[].attributes.subject
Massolit series of lectures on Rossetti:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this course, Dr Ross Wilson (University of Cambridge) explores the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Having begun with a summary of Rossetti's critical reception, both in her own lifetime and then after her death, we then explore Rossetti's poetry through five key themes: repetition, repetition, expectation, ambiguity and uncertainty, and the speaker.

# data[].attributes.headline
Massolit series of lectures on Rossetti (including all OCR poems):

# data[].attributes.subject
Massolit series of lectures on Rossetti (including all OCR poems):

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About this Course

In this course, Professor Tom Mole (University of Edinburgh) explores the poetry of Christina Rossetti, focusing in particular on the fourteen poems listed for study for OCR English Literature A Level (excluding 'Goblin Market'). A detailed commentary is provided for each of the poems, including comments on historical context, language and style, rhyme and repetition, relationships with other texts - especially the Bible - and much more.

The poems covered in this course are:
1. Song ('When I am dead, my dearest')
2. Remember
3. From the Antique
4. Echo
5. Shut Out
6. In the Round Tower at Jhansi
7. A Birthday
8. Winter, My Secret
9. Maude Clare
10. Up-Hill
11. 'No, Thank You, John'
12. Good Friday
13. Twice
14. Soeur Louise de la Miséricorde

About the Lecturer

Tom Mole is Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book. He has previously held appointments at the University of Glasgow, the University of Bristol and, most recently, as Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he was Principal Investigator of the Interacting with Print Research Group.

Mole's interests include literature of the Romantic period in Britain, especially Lord Byron. His monograph, Byron's Romantic Celebrity (Palgrave, 2007), argues that our modern celebrity culture began in the Romantic period, and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. He edited Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and a volume of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About this Course In this course, Professor Tom Mole (University of Edinburgh) explores the poetry of Christina Rossetti, focusing in particular on the fourteen poems listed for study for OCR English Literature A Level (excluding 'Goblin Market').

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/oct/17/nora-dolls-house-film-modern-world
Carrie Cracknell's short film 'Nora' and accompanying article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hattie Morahan, who played Nora in the Young Vic production of Ibsen's classic, stars in this short film imagining what a modern-day Nora might look like guardian.co.uk

Earlier this year, I directed a production of Ibsen's A Doll's House for the Young Vic in London, starring Hattie Morahan in the role of Nora. Nora is a woman conditioned and formed by the patriarchal society of 1870s Norway, in which her main roles are to look beautiful, keep a comfortable home and satisfy the needs of her husband. But she has a dark, beating heart, and the play charts her attempts to understand and articulate her own desires and needs. The final, heartbreaking scene sees her leaving her husband and three children. Nora's slamming of the door to their apartment marks a pivotal moment in drama.

It is tempting, now, to look at the play's sexual politics as dated and dusty, tensions from an era that bears little or no resemblance to the modern world. But as I worked on the play, I kept having nagging doubts. Of course the landscape of women's rights has changed irrevocably in the last 100 years; but there are also complex dilemmas for many women which are no closer to being resolved. In a moment of serendipity, my friend, the playwright Nick Payne, gave me Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion. I inhaled the book over two days, hanging from the straps of a packed Northern Line train on my commute back and forth from the rehearsal studio.

For me, it was a paradigm-shifting text. Banyard systematically unravels the idea that we have "arrived" at gender equality and points out the many areas in which we are rapidly slipping backwards. Despite many gains, she writes, British women still earn 22.7% less than men per hour, and are more sexualised and objectified than ever. The normalisation of the sex industry has led to an explosion in the consumption of pornography: during the 1990s, Banyard reports, the number of men paying for sex acts in the UK doubled. The inexorable forces of capitalism have intensified gender stereotyping, with girls beseiged by glittery-pink role models, something that continues to have a negative impact on the scope of their ambitions: in a recent UK study reported in the book, it was found that just 4% of girls betweeen 13 and 18 want to pursue a career in engineering, while 12% would like to be a housewife, and 32% a model. Female power remains intrinsically linked to looks: "In 2009," Banyard writes, "it emerged that the Bank of England had held a seminar for its female employees called Dress for Success, at which they were advised to 'always wear a heel of some sort - maximum two inches; always wear some sort of makeup, even if it's just lipstick.'"

Banyard's findings echoed many of my own concerns, both as a director and a mother, and I was fired up to try and articulate some of these big, thorny themes through my own work. Some were explored in my production of A Doll's House, which returns to the Young Vic next year. Another was the film Nick and I made in response, entitled Nora. In some respects, this is a contemporary take on the play, albeit in miniature (the whole film is slightly more than eight minutes long): our Nora, again played by Morahan, is a modern-day woman living in London, struggling to amalgamate a series of roles and identities.

Unlike Ibsen's Nora, she has a paid job - at an ad agency - and financial independence. But she is battling to juggle this with her roles as a wife and as a mother to two small children. In the film's opening scenes, we see the chaos of her trying to unblock her husband's bank card on the phone while dressing for work, making packed lunches and giving her children breakfast; then there is the frantic race with pram and toddler to nursery, the hurried changing into heels and makeup in the office toilets, before walking into a boardroom of men to make a presentation.

As many women know, it is near-impossible to get this multiple role-playing right. Our generation of women sprinted towards the promised land of true parity between men and women, but too few have partners who are interested in a role as co-parent; too many work in organisations with a total lack of flexibility, or who fail to support them in managing dual roles; and too many face casual sexism, day in, day out. In some small way, our film is an attempt to capture that experience - the unremarked yet complex reality of countless women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nora, now: A Doll's House film for the modern world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do the sexual politics of Ibsen's A Doll's House belong to a bygone era? Hardly, says Carrie Cracknell , director of a new film that recasts the play's heroine as an ad exec and mother longing to escape

# data[].attributes.body
Relationships  ​

Gender roles ​

Sacrifice /goodness ​

Ethics and morality​

Power and control​

Pleasure /enjoyment​

Individual vs. society​

Reputation​

Love