Gender, Desire, and Repression in "Goblin Market"

Paper Summary:

This paper performs a close reading of Christina Rossetti's poem, "Goblin Market," arguing that the the two central characters of the poem, sisters Lizzie and Laura, represent the dichotomy of Victorian female sexuality. Ultimately, the poem is deeply ambivalent about the demands of society upon expressions of gender and sexuality.

From the Paper:

"Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is ostensibly a poem about two sisters who are nightly tempted to buy fruits from the goblin-merchants; it is on one level a simple moralistic tale about the near-deadly consequences of yielding to temptation and the virtues of resisting it, and, in the end, about the importance of loving one's sister. Yet reading the poem it is impossible not to be struck not only by the obvious and jolting sexual imagery but by the overwhelming sense of sensuality merged with horror that pervades the entire work. Laura and Lizzie come to be not just two sisters with different reactions to the "Come buy" cries of the goblins, but representatives of the two prevailing models of Victorian femininity. Lizzie is the "proper" feminine ideal: modest, domestic, and possessing enormous amounts of self-restraint. Laura is the illicit woman: lustful, rebellious, and wantonly unrestrained. But though Rossetti does ultimately advocate Lizzie's model, she does not condemn Laura so much as sympathize with her, and her dichotomy is not as clear-cut as it might appear at first. Rossetti probes deeply into the nature of desire in a repressive Victorian context, in a society where female desire is both hidden and exploited. It is a system which forces conformity and sublimation of desire in order to ensure survival and enable some kind of contentment; by the end of the poem Laura has essentially become Lizzie. However, in examining this repression of desire and the constructed sexuality and gender roles that necessitate it, the poem questions these institutions and concludes that they are ultimately destructive for all involved."

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