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LILY STEVENS unpeels the provocative and explicit 1862 poem by Christina Rossetti and explains why it is still ripe for modern audiences.
Lesbians, goblins, incest and drugs.
Not exactly what comes to mind when someone asks, ‘What do you associate with Victorian poetry?’.
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) is a homoerotic, sensual, incestual and Freudian (very long) poem which proves that the Victorians were not exactly as conventional and boring as we all thought.
“Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you” (line 468) is perhaps one of my favourite lines amongst all the Victorian literature I’ve read. The unexpected and peculiar nature of the poem is what brought Herbert Tucker (2003, p117) to describe the literary piece as “a poem about communal sorority and also about patriarchal dominion; about the Christian Eucharist and also free self-actualization; about diffusive jouissance and also the therapeutic consolidation of a split soul; about anorexia nervosa, vampirism, the adulteration of foodstuffs, absinthe addiction, and the pros and cons of masturbation. [...] [I]t is a work instinct with sex, drugs, rock and roll, or their Victorian equivalents.”
Dickens not living up to his name.....?
When I first read the poem in my University of Chester Victorian Literature module, I was fascinated by the explicit nature of the poem, compared to Dickens' and Gaskell’s rather conventional, and dare I say, slightly boring works?
The poem centres around two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, tame and conventional until they visit the ‘Goblin men’ of the town and buy their fruits. The fruits are used as a metaphor for sexual pleasure / intercourse throughout the poem and once consumed, hold addictive, sensual properties.
One of the sisters – Laura - experiences drug-like withdrawal symptoms and is unable to survive without the delicious goblin fruit, meaning her loving sister puts herself at great risk to purchase more fruit for her. However, the twist, is that her method of giving this ‘fruit’ to her sister is an outburst of homoerotic, sensual and raw experience between the two girls.
The poem is packed with rich, sensory descriptions: “Plump unpacked cherries” (l.7); “Bloom-down-cheek’d-peaches” (l.9); “Figs to fill your mouth” (l.28). The girls are continuously tempted by the goblins and the products they offer, as Laura trades “A golden curl” (l.125), receiving the mysterious fruit in exchange. Laura’s golden curls insinuate there is an aspect of her femininity that can be used as a method of currency. This may be symbolic of prostitution and virginity, as Laura gives her hair to gain the taste of that ever-so delicious fruit, no matter what the consequences may be.
Transgressive Victorian women
Rossetti was an interesting character who struggled with prolonged mental health issues. She lived a quiet life in which she wrote mostly religious and devotional poems, volunteering at a shelter for ‘fallen women’ who were typically women who had sex outside of marriage, of a lower socioeconomic class or had been raped. Nicola Onyett – in her ‘Fallen Angels’ article for the English Review (2010, Vol 21, Issue 1) – explains how “[w]omen who had been seduced or were living a life of sin had broken the dominant mores of the age so thoroughly that morally and socially they had passed the point of no return. So final was their banishment from respectable society that it took some time before the fallen woman was considered an appropriate subject for either art or literature.”
Ironically, Rosetti’s poem was originally intended for a children’s audience. Yet it regained popularity in the 1980s as feminist readings took place, whilst Playboy magazine published erotic, colourful and very odd pictures of the girls in the poem.
The sisters in the poem have a complex relationship and are described as “Like two blossoms on one stem” (l.188) highlighting the close, inseparable and compassionate bond between the pair.
However, Once Laura eats the fruit, she becomes psychotic: “She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more” (l.134); “She suck’d until her lips were sore” (l.136). She has such a pleasurable experience whilst eating the fruit, perhaps even a metaphor for sexual climax, that after she has finished eating, she struggles to survive without it. She becomes so unwell without the pleasure derived from the fruit - which could be a metaphor for sex, drugs or food - that she is unable to work, eat or sleep. Laura’s outburst of sexuality and pleasure causes her to fall into a deep depression, which may be a depiction of the harsh consequences contextually for Victorian women who enjoyed and indulged in homoerotic sexual intercourse. This is discussed by Jonathan Hay (2018) who claims that “Goblin Market being secretive about its queer agenda is not merely a method of escaping censorship, but also of expressing its agenda in a way that is free of linguistic enslavement to patriarchy”.
Disordered eating?
Now we move onto the more (if possible) peculiar part.
Out of love for her sister, Lizzie visits the goblins to retrieve their “fruits” for Laura as she struggles with her cravings. The goblins refuse her money and want her body as an exchange which leads to an insinuated sexual attack as the goblins “Claw’d with their nails […] / Squeez’d their fruits against her mouth to make her eat” (ls.406ff). This method of force-feeding may be insinuating the sisters hold traits of disordered eating, in particular bulimia. On two occasions, the girls have purged on fruit causing them to become very ill, unable to think about anything else other than the food they have eaten. Lizzie returns after her sacrifice and tells Laura (her sister!) to “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices” (l.468). The word “suck” seems to be one of Rosetti’s favourites, first used to depict Laura eating the fruit, and now used to insinuate a sexual encounter between the pair. It develops from here, as Lizzie asks Laura to “Eat me, drink me, love me” (l.471) and in response, Laura “Kiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d her” and (l.486) “Kiss’d her with a hungry mouth” (l.492).
A taboo masterpiece
‘Goblin Market’ is the opposite of what anyone expects Victorian poetry to be. The beautiful poetry mixed in with unconventional, taboo themes (even by today’s standards) are what drew me to this poem from the moment I started reading it.
Regardless of whether we focus on the homoerotic nature of the poem, the addiction or the incest, this mystical, goblin-riddled and erotic poem is a masterpiece to me.
Written by LILY STEVENS (BA Creative Writing and English Literature student, University of Chester, UK)