Some Quick Notes on Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

So much to discuss with this poem, but so little time.

Here are some notes I sketched out simply by starting with a simple observation and then asking a few questions. (There are probably hundreds of simple observations a reader could begin with and hundreds of questions that could follow.) The simple observation is that the poem cannot possibly be what it appears to be--i.e. a story about two sisters' encounters with goblin men selling fruit. That's what the story the poem tells, but that can't possibly be what the poem's "about." If that's so, then each aspect of the poem (characters, plot, etc.) must represent something else, either as allegory (a one-to-one mapping) or as symbol (a one-to-many mapping). (I prefer symbol to allegory; very few texts are explicitly allegorical.)

1. What do the goblin men represent?
2. Cautionary tale, unruly sexual appetites
3. Religious allegory of sin and redemption
4. Struggle between temptation and desire (Lizzie stops her ears, Laura eats)
1. Victorian angel
2. female (hetero)sexuality
3. homoerotic imagery
4. Jeanie, the “fallen” woman
5. Lizzie as a female hero—who triumphs through submission and renunciation (?); Christ-like self-sacrifice
5. What does the goblins’ fruit represent?
1. sexual desire
2. prostitution
3. economic power
4. imperial capitalism
5. masculinity
6. original sin
7. Eucharistic redemption
8. Or maybe the fruit is just fruit and the poem is about shopping?
6. Who is the poem meant for?
1. the ending attempts to control the poem’s reception
2. Laura relates the story and the moral to her daughters

                                                              i.      tidies up energies released with trite moral

1.      vulnerable young misses must resist the dangers of desire and strange men with tempting fruits

2.      the need for sisterly solidarity

Key Issues

1. Separate Spheres
1. poem supports middle-class Victorian views of ideal women as self-sacrificing and nurturing (Lizzie)
2. but Lizzie’s heroism blurs traditional boundaries between public and private (she moves freely between them, regenerating one through manipulating the other)
2. Marketplace
1. economic language that equates female sexual exchange with mercantile exchange
2. buying and selling fruit in goblin market

                                                              i.      Laura’s “golden lock” = gold coin

                                                            ii.      her hair (sign of female sexuality) is a form of cash