Is Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market a Marian Poem? - pt. 1

I have taught Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market several times-mostly in the context of my Introduction to Literature course focused on fantasy, but most recently in my Survey of British Lit II. Through teaching the poem, and including selections from C. Rossetti when I teach Children's Lit, I have come to an appreciation of her as an author that I otherwise would not possess. Goblin Market in particular is a strange poem--one of the "long" poems that were popular among poets of the Victorian Period, sharing this designation with E. B. Browning's Aurora Leigh (another I have come to appreciate through teaching), Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, In Memoriam and Idylls of the King by Tennyson. Unlike the others, which are about British, poetic, or personal identity, and unlike In Memoriam, which is about the conflict between religious belief and, well, just about every aspect of contemporary life in the event of a loved one's death, Goblin Market is about temptation, sin, and redemption. I am not at this point terribly well acquainted with what critics have said about this poem, as I like to teach literary works from an understanding of the author, time period, and navigate meaning via student responses and my own interpretive instincts rather than relying on what the standard opinion happens to be. When my students have written papers about Goblin Market, we have had difficulty locating sources on the poem. One interpretive difficulty, however, is the ending of the poem, and how to interpret the relationship between sisters Lizzie and Laura.

The poem tells the story of Laura and Lizzie, who are subjected to temptation by goblin men, who offer them choice fruits for their pleasure. While Lizzie takes a "see no evil, hear no evil" approach (l. 50-51), Laura succumbs to the temptation, buying the goblins' goods with a lock of hair, and begins to be consumed with desire for the forbidden fruits--a desire which causes her to waste away and lose interest in ordinary sustenance and "modest" activities and pleasures, and which can not be fulfilled because the goblin men are no longer visible or audible to her (l. 242-259). The eroticism of the poem is striking, and has been captured in many illustrations, including illustrations published in Playboy. When Laura buys the fruit, for example, for which she pays with her body-- "a precious golden lock" and "a tear more rare than pearl"--she "suck'd their fruit globes fair or red" ((l. 126-128). The description of the experience of eating the fruits and the fruit itself fairly oozes with sexuality (no pun intended):


Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow'd that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck'd and suck'd and suck'd the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck'd until her lips were sore. . . .

That the poem's subject is sexual temptation is very thinly veiled, and presents no interpretive difficulty.

However, the poem does the unexpected: it redeems the sinner. Laura's sister Lizzie opts to communicate with the goblin men in an attempt to save her sister--she offers to pay with money, but the goblins are unwilling to have her take the fruit rather than consuming it. The sexual allegory here may be seen to fail or to remain consistent, as sexual experience is not something that can be carried away, or taken for another, and certainly two sexual sins do not produce redemption. Lizzie does not, however, consume the fruit, though she is subjected to physical abuse and though the goblins smash the fruits on her lips in their attempts to make her eat. These juices, licked and sucked off of Lizzie, make Laura well.

The nature of the sisterly relationship and the nature of the redemption are points open for analysis, as both are provocative. Any Christian allegory would have to place Lizzie as a Christ figure who sacrifices herself--albeit only partially--to redeem her sister but it seems unlikely that Rossetti, a strict, traditional, and increasingly High Church Anglican, would have created a female allegory for Christ.A facile answer is that it is not meant to be strict allegory, but merely an allegorical tale of Christian self-sacrifice. Even accepting it as such, it is difficult to see how, in the Victorian period, a fallen woman could be redeemed, in spite of the prevalence of paintings that treat the theme of redemption after sexual sin. In the paintings, the woman is sometimes taken from the streets by a male relative or simply has her conscience awaken from within as she bestirs herself to leave the lover who "keeps"her. In Goblin Market, the fallen woman is redeemed by a woman in a scene that is almost as erotic as Laura's original sexual encounter with goblin fruits.

The redemption of woman by woman is not necessarily a surprise given Rossetti's own work with reforming prostitutes--testimony to her own belief in female solidarity in the face of men's sexual use and abuse.The poem's moral focuses on the nature of sisterhood rather than sexual temptation, downgrading what has previously seemed to be the focal point of the poem:

"For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands."

The final lines of the poem provide both a puzzle and a somehow unsatisfying resolution. "There is no friend like a sister" seems a weak close to a poem that seems to portray allegorically both male-female and female same-sex eroticism.The relationship between the sisters is described in sensual terms early in the poem, as

Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings,
They lay down in their curtain'd bed:

The sisters sleep entwined, "Cheek to cheek and breast to breast/Lock'd together in one nest" (197-198).When Lizzie returns with the juices, the sensual descriptions begin to seem sexually charged, as Lizzie tells Laura,

"Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez'd from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.(467-474)

And Laura does:

She clung about her sister,
Kiss'd and kiss'd and kiss'd her:
Tears once again
Refresh'd her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kiss'd and kiss'd her with a hungry mouth.(485-492)

This seemingly sexually charged encounter with her sister causes Laura, in essence, to die to self and sexual desire, to suffer and emerge reborn.

Critics have discussed whether this is, indeed, a homoerotic encounter, thinly veiled by the invocation of biological sisterhood that is reinforced by the somewhat forced moral at the end. It seems that the relationship between the two women is either homoerotic, with "sisterhood" as a metaphor, or a literal "sisterly" relationship in which sensuality spills into sexual imagery. On the other hand, existing within the sisterly relationship (however defined) is a sub-text of woman-for-woman Christian self-sacrifice that can redeem (hetero)sexual sin. The nature of this Christian self-sacrifice is somewhat vague, as it can not be linked allegorically to what Tolkien would later call "the true myth" of Christianity, which means that this kind of redemption must only have personal and perhaps social significance rather than pointing, as Christian allegory is wont to do, to religious Truth--unless it points directly to the role of woman in the "true myth" of Christianity, and so reveals a religious Truth that directly impacts the sisterhood of all women. There is much in Goblin Market that points to Mary, the new Eve, as intercessor who reveals Christ to women, or leads women to Christ. In fact, Goblin Market might be said to recommend Mary as an intercessor to women whose experiences of men make them unable to accept God in the person of a man.

To Be Continued. . .