Compare the different attitudes towards love and seduction in the poems
“Cousin Kate” by Christina Rossetti and “The Seduction” by Eileen McCauley
I will be analysing the poems “Cousin Kate and “The Seduction”. They were written
roughly around 150 years apart. Cousin Kate is about a maiden, who's Cousin (Kate)
stole her boyfriend for his money, it turns out the maiden has a boy and Kate cannot
produce children. The poem “The Seduction” is about a girl who was misled by
magazines about meeting the boy next door, in the end, she ends up pregnant. But,
in Cousin Kate she ends up having a baby boy, “The Seduction” is left on a cliff
hanger, it is left up to the reader to imagine what would happen and leave it up to our
minds, also we decide whether she gives birth to the baby and is proud or rejects it.
The seduction was in the 1980s and is set in the poverty in Liverpool. The older
poem Cousin Kate was written in the 1850s, in a time of repression and when the
lower classes were treated as inferior.
The young lady in "Cousin Kate" lived in the 19th Century, she was in her
early twenties, she was frowned upon because she had a child out of wedlock,
"My fair-haired son, my shame."
Also, she had sex out of her own sober free will and was not intoxicated or
influenced by anything. While the girl in ‘The Seduction’ lived in the later part of the
eighties, she was only sixteen, society frowned upon her because she has had a
teenage pregnancy not because she wasn't married.
The audience for both Cousin Kate and the seduction, in my opinion is very
different. Cousin Kate’s audience is for all ages but targeted at middle aged women,
however the Seductions audience is aimed at teenage girls, and girls who have gone
through the same thing. This is shown when Rossetti uses words that today's
younger generation would not understand but the older generation are more likely to
be able to, “O Lady Kate, my cousin Kate”
No one speaks like this in today’s world, although in the seduction
“He’d told her about football; Sammy Lee and Ian Rush”
Not many of the younger generation would know about those football players in
today's world, therefore they can both be classed for the older generation who were
around in the eighties and knew who they were.
Furthermore, the pace is also different but more similar than their audience.
The seductions pace moves quickly including the images and environment. Although
in cousin Kate the pace is not quite as fast and the images and environment doesn’t
change at all!
“He lured me to his palace home” and “He saw you at your father's gate”
In the poem Cousin Kate the image and environment of it is of a village, how the
Lord has a Palace and how he sees Kate when he passes by.
“He led her to the quiet bricks of the Birkenhead docks” and “She sobbed in the cool,
locked darkness of her room”
Were as, in the seduction, the images and environment are changing. First the
scene is of a party, then of a river were the boy takes the girl and then of her
bedroom, were she is too ashamed to come out from. In Cousin Kate the images
mostly are of the same setting throughout the poem, but the setting in the seduction
is constantly changing.
Plus the structures in both poems are very different. In the seduction their is a
build up, the writer talks about how the girl is getting ready to go to a party then
meeting a boy they end up having sex and she’s left pregnant. Were as in Cousin
Kate the maiden and the lord have already had sex and she already had the baby so
the poet writes about what happened, so there’s no build up.
This in shown when, the girl meets the boy at a party and later leads them to having
sex
“She had met him at the party, and he’d danced with her all night”
In contrast to Cousin Kate, were the poet tells us within the few paragraphs that Kate
has stolen the lord from her,
“He saw you at your father's gate, Chose you, and cast me by”
Explaining that she was dating the Lord, but when he looked at Kate, he threw the
maiden aside.
The moral message of cousin Kate is money doesn’t buy you everything, also
the poor are morally as good as the rich. Love should be true, it’s not all about the
money. Girls should remain virgins until marriage (the Victorian readers would have
believed). The moral message in the seduction, is that girls magazines are good to
read, but it doesn’t happen in the real world and if you do believe the lies, you will
end up like the girl who is pregnant and is afraid of what people might say and think
about her!
Analysis by Jack Bradshaw
10 Maple