Analysis Of Christina Rossetti's An Apple Gathering And Cousin Kate

Sexual Dalliance and its Outcomes in Victorian Society: Christina Rossetti’s “An Apple Gathering” and “Cousin Kate”

In her poems Christina Rossetti references the loss of innocence stemming from premarital sexual encounters. In both the poems “An Apple Gathering” and “Cousin Kate”, Rossetti tells stories of women who lost their sexual purity before marriage, and therefore deemed outcasts in society. These acts of dalliance Rossetti speaks of in her poems exhibit how the loss of innocence via sex before marriage can effect a Victorian woman’s life. Rossetti conveys this unfair treatment of women being compared to whores simply for indulging their sexual desires as men do through the storyline of the poems. Each poem begins with the introduction

She asks him if she was unworthy of having him as a husband, or if she was not mother material. The speaker is disagreeing with modern society’s idea of innocence equalling beauty, as she “counted rosiest apples on the earth / Of far less worth than love” (19-20), meaning that she had met other women that we less equipped to become wives and mothers than she, disagreeing with the fact that simply because she was impure does not mean she could be a bad mother. Again, in “Cousin Kate”, the speaker is ridiculed by society but the man she was once romantically involved with is not. Since she is wooed by him, her master, she indulges in her sexual desires and engages in premarital sex. Due to this, the man deemed the woman a whore as the rest of society did, and cast her aside. Instead of seeking love in this now “unclean thing” (15), he goes to her cousin, who is “good and pure” (25) and “bounds [her] with his ring” (26). The speaker suggests that her “love was true” and cousin Kate’s love “was writ in sand”, implying that her love could be washed away as easily as sand on a beach, therefore it was illegitimate. According to society and the lord, a woman who pretends to love a man is better than a woman who lacks sexual