Split Sisters and Split Personalities of Goblin Market

Split Sisters and Split Personalities of Goblin Market

"I have 50 different personalities, and still I’m lonely" (Amos). Perhaps everyone is truly composed of multiple personalities embodied within one whole. Whether these split personalities are actual or purely metaphorical, no one human being has a single sided mind, and a single sided position on everything. Within the brain many battles are raged between opposing sides of issues, between the personalities. "Goblin Market" is one of Christina Rosetti’s "sister" poems, a form in which she used sisters to "represent different aspects of the split personality that was caused by conflicting attitudes and mixed emotions towards love" (Bellas 66). The two opposing young sides of a single person’s brain are separated into two different beings, two sisters. During the poem, the two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, contrast and become contrasting opinions and factions on love, femininity, and sensuality, eventually maturing and reconciling their conflicting beliefs into a mutual ground.

"Laura’s love of the fruit is insatiable" (Mayberry 90). Lizzie is a more Victorian image of love "cautious, timid, and tedious" (Mayberry 43). In the Victorian days respectable women were expected to be good Christian women. Rossetti is a demonstration of these expectations. In reference to the awkward moral at the end of the poem Martine Brownley says.

"Undoubtedly that was the only way that the quiet devoted recluse could tolerate what she had procured in the poem. The woman who pasted pieces of paper over the more explicit lines in Swinburne’s poetry could never have faced the actual implications of the stunningly effective parable… which somehow welled up from her unconscious self" ...

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...look" for the first time in her life. The Victorian element of the 1800s has been brought down to a more reasonable level through Lizzie. The wild feminist in Laura has been tamed by the life threatening experience and the overpowering devotion of her sister.

Works Cited

Amos, Tori. "Tori Amos in Conversation." Baktabak Recordings 1997.

Bellas, Ralph A. Christina Rossetti . Illinois State University, Twayne Publishers Boston, 1977.

Harrison, Anthongy H. Christina Rossetti in Context. University of NC Press, Chapel Hill and London: 1988.

Mayberry, Katherine J. Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London. 1989.

Brownley, Martine Watson, "Love and Sensuality in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market." Essays in Literature 1979 Western Illinois University Vol. No. 2 Rpt in TCLC.