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Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

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My first thoughts on “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti was “This is a children's poem?” I was baffled that anyone would let their child read this. Granted, a child without experience in the world might not exactly know what the piece truly meant. It was clear to me, without having known my critical lens, that this work was an allegory. The writing was so geared toward a commentary on women that it seemed blatantly obvious that I picked up on it by the end of the first page. Yet, as I read more into the poem, I found that maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. Different viewpoints came into focus. Displaying different attributes of humans, I saw that Lizzie and Laura could be the same person in actuality. The biblical references as Laura ate …show more content…

I gained a new understanding for the female experience in general. Through research I was able to see that women are harassed daily for just having female sex characteristics. Breasts and other parts of their bodies are objectified to a maximum, making it easy to forget that they’re women in general. Rather, they’re items for men to gawk at. However, feminism doesn’t just comment on women. It also comments on men. The point of feminism as a whole is to bring women to the equality of men, but in some cases men need to be brought up too. Men are also materialized in this poem, only in a different way. Instead of being seen as simply goblins, these goblin men are given characteristics of animals. “Cat-like and rat-like,/ Ratel- and wombat-like,/ Snail-paced in a hurry, /Parrot-voiced and whistler,” (340-343). The men are equated to animals, none of them having natural qualities. Not all men in real life are horrible either. So the work may not be perfect in the sense that Rossetti doesn’t advocate for men at all. Despite this, the poem does a magnificent job at showing the different aspect of rape-culture and how it can destroy a woman in general. The cat calling “Come buy, come buy” (4), and the use of fruit as symbols of sex are all apparent in the poem. Because Rossetti includes these scenarios the reader can sympathize with woman, even though they might not be

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The texts Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, explore the tensions between individual desires and social or institutional regulations. All three of the texts suggest that societies use regulations to protect individuals, from their own desires that may be harmful to them. The first example of this can be seen in the Goblin Market, with the character Laura. Laura’s desire to eat the goblin fruit, although forbidden, endangers her life and well being. Laura’s sister tries to prevent her from eating the fruit, yet Laura does not head this advice and eats the fruit anyway.

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