Christina Rossetti

Goblin Market

• 1862
• emerging from a world in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning has tried to kick down the door of great verse
• a response to the response to the most ambitious poem by a woman in Elizabeth Barrett Browning#Aurora Leigh
• what is gained is lack - the thirst for more, this hunger
• Lizzie's self-sacrifice which slakes it and redeems her
• fabulously sensual
• is it an allegory and if so of what?
  • You can go to town because the scale is small and the symbolic resonances go out
• invested in C19 religious issues but dealing in sensuality and small things
  • rebirth at 522
• the object-ness of this world and of bodies (125-8):

"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red.

• "sugar-baited words" (234)
• 478-484:

"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine doing,
And ruined in my ruin,
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"

• From Victorian Web: "The implications of eating forbidden fruit are ambiguous in "Goblin Market," just as Rossetti's view is ambiguous concerning the role and status of women in her society. She addresses the restrictions placed on women, using biblical examples to reveal that these restrictions are incongruous with the will of God. In "Goblin Market" in particular, she pulls down the ideological boundaries of femininity, allowing women to escape from the extremes of classification: an angelic Virgin Mary, devoid of sexuality, or an Eve, punished for seeking knowledge. Rossetti puts her unswerving hope in Christ and heaven for the restoration of her society; a hope perhaps exemplified by the unconditional love Lizzie shows in both "saving" and accepting her sister."