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Sacred Orality And The Christian Grotesque In Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

532 Words3 Pages

Option One: Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” on the topic of SISTERHOOD
Reference
Mcalpine, Heather. "Would Not Open Lip from Lip" Sacred Orality and the Christian Grotesque in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market". Victorian Review 36, no. 1 (2010): 114-28.

Description
This essay, entitled ‘Would Not Open Lip from Lip’ (2010) is a journal article which appears as a book chapter in the thirty-sixth volume of the Victorian Review. It was written by Canadian Victorian and Romanticism literary critic Heather Mcalpine, who is also an English Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley. This chapter features as a small part of a much wider study concerning nineteenth century Victorian Literature. The Victorian Review currently has forty-two …show more content…

She suggests that Rossetti’s Christian grotesque oral imagery in the poem demonstrates her elaborate portrayal of the mouth as a dangerous and ‘powerful site of sensation, connection, and transcendence’ (p.126). Mcalpine’s essay begins by exploring how fellow critic Marylum Hill examines Rossetti’s interpretation of the body as having a connection through which humans understand God, here she highlights the possibility that Rossetti represents the mouth as a holy and sacred threshold. Mcalpine affirms that the two most significant scenes of consumption of sin, greed and the other of sacrifice and saving in Goblin Market, demonstrate that ‘orality is the sight of both fall and redemption’ (p.115).
Mcalpine explores Rossetti’s belief that not everything which passes through the mouth is considered corrupting and deceitful in particular, the Eucharist as it symbolises a relationship with the divine which ‘safeguards the self against dangerous and illegitimate’ merging with the world (124). Mcalpine affirms that Lizzie presents herself as ‘a kind of Eucharist’ to Laura as an act of self-sacrificing redemption. Mcalpine goes on to argue that, this final act of consumption between Lizzie and Laura redeems all temptation as a result of Laura’s eagerness to relinquish temptations of the physical

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