Florence Nightingale Research Paper

Known as the mother of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale was also a statistician and an acclaimed English social reformer. Her life, which spanned from 1820 to 1910, defied the Victorian social expectation of being a wife and mother. She illustrates this defiance in “Cassandra” as she argues that “Passion, intellect,” and “moral activity” were never satisfied under the “cold and oppressive conventional [Victorian] atmosphere” (Nightingale 1586). Written immediately prior to her involvement in the Crimean War in 1852, “Cassandra” viciously attacked the structure of the Victorian family. This bitter critique came from her own experiences as the daughter of an upper middle class Victorian family. She mirrored these personal frustrations in other women of the same class and predicament during 19th century Britain. As a result, “Cassandra” reflects two narratives—one of Nightingale’s own struggle and one of women at large during the 19th century.

Blessed with the gift of prophecy, she was cursed upon rejecting Apollo’s romantic interest. Her plight was that no one would listen to her prophetic advice (Gilbert 1337). According to the myth, Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, then kills Cassandra. The fact that Cassandra was killed by a woman became “reflective of the situation that Nightingale felt herself to be in because she felt that she was being destroyed by the prominent women in her life,” these women being her mother and sister (Selanders 74). Often “thought to be autobiographical,” Nightingale describes the futility of the lives of Victorian women (Selanders