The Goblin Market By Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti tackles multiple taboos of the Victorian era in her poem “The Goblin Market”. Introducing a sense of supply and demand with the physical body as a form of commerce. With a demon infested marketplace setting Rossetti tests her characters Lizzie and Laura sense of worth when it comes down to a tempestuous trade the goblin market men. Like any other Victorian maiden they cherish their virtue and value their religion. Struggling to fight the human urges of desire and sexuality to uphold a holy lifestyle and refrain from allowing their bodies to become nothing more than any other commodity at the market.

Goblin Market is in essence, an analogy drawn between the commodity/bodily exchange, which the sisters apply thoroughly to their experience in the goblin market, and the grand narratives of Christianity and sexuality; told through the story of Lizzie and Laura’s venture into goblin territory, or rather, male-dominated economic territory. Sexuality, Christianity and economics each in its own right very demanding issues especially mid 18th century.

Rossetti’s subject matter is erotic, with very visible sensual undertones. The language Rossetti uses insinuates sexual temptation, repression and desire, and it manages to be situated slightly between children’s folklore and adult prose fiction. Such as “Plump unpeck’d cherries,” “Pluck them, suck them,” and “juice that syrupp’d all her face”. Sisters, Lizzie and Laura, represent women’s double quandary in the Victorian sexual economy: either risk becoming a commodity yourself, or risk never tasting desire, never letting yourself in a sense be free and a whim to your natural physical urges. Rossetti’s repressed protagonists assume an inferior position in the presence of the...

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...nts a specifically female experience of Victorian political economy and religious morals. Rossetti’s tale of female consumption is fundamentally doubtful of a world of unrestricted buying and selling associated primarily with men. But Rossetti assumes that women are already implicated as both consumers and that which is consumed. Rossetti’s poetic fable challenges the usual ideology of production and consumption by rearranging human value in female sexuality and sisterhood. Goblin Market is in essence, a comparison drawn between the bodily mercantile exchanges, which the sisters apply delicately to their experience, and the grand narratives of Christianity and sexuality. The natural desires of women are seen as the theatrics of competitive buying and selling; in which women are always at risk as objects to be purchased yet also implicated as beings of consumption.