It is often noted by critics that the goblins’ bounty of fruits, whose names occupy forty-six (5-29, 170-179, 289, 352-362) of the poem’s lines and range from apples to dates to “bright fire-like barberries,” are all impossibly ripe at the same time. The goblins’ status as men, however, allots them a certain familiarity, allowing the text to refuse commitment to reality or the supernatural. Alongside her choice to omit any reference to Laura and Lizzie’s age, this detail allows Rossetti to immediately destabilize any assumption of the spatial and temporal location of Goblin Market. The men themselves seem to travel locally, but their animal qualities do not naturally coexist outside the realm of the text. Lines 71-76 describe a “cat’s face,” a whisking “tail,” a movement of a “rat’s pace,” a “snail’s crawl.” Many of the resembled animals hail from disparate lands: the wombat is from Australia, while the ratel is commonly found in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa. Though explicitly referred to as “men” (42), or “brothers” (92), Rossetti defines them according to the creatures they resemble. “Morning and evening,” they hear goblins beckoning: “Come buy our orchard fruits / Come buy, come buy” (1-4). There is no rest for the ears of maidens in Goblin Market. This expropriation and the tension it causes mimics the treatment of female embodiment in the Victorian imagination at large, in which feminine symbols are forced into instability and cause chaos for those ensnared-particularly women.ĭante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866-68, altered 1872-73). However, when operating symbolically in a male-generated signifying system, her assertive acts are expropriated in the interest of male power and control. Many readings of Goblin Market focus on Laura as a guilty victim of her own willingness to be seduced, but Laura’s actions may also represent self-assertion of her own embodiment.

The fruit itself is bought with a snip from the very body upon which it wreaks havoc. Her hair grays, her eyes sink, the color fades from her mouth, and Lizzie is left to tend to the domestic and agricultural tasks alone. When Laura snips a curl from the “gold upon her head” (123) in exchange for the fruits sold by the eponymous goblins, we see this doubling cease. This twindom, however, is dependent on their health. “Golden head by golden head” is how they rest together, “Like two wands of ivory / Tipp’d with gold for awful kings” (189-190).

A pair of sisters in Christina Rossetti’s 1862 poem Goblin Market, the two girls presumably live alone on a homestead and are depicted as near-identical and of indeterminate age. The story of Laura and Lizzie begins with a lock of hair.

Christina rossetti poem goblin market