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Introduction

In this thesis, I will explore the dual nature of female sexuality and embodiment in

Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a Pre-Raphaelite narrative poem that, I argue, teaches the reformation of female desire and provides a path towards purification and spiritual wholeness for Victorian women that relies on sisterhood. Rossetti’s work reinforces many elements of the Victorian social script that called for the containment of the female body through the representation of the dichotomy between the pure woman and the fallen woman. Goblin

Market also challenges the rigidity of Victorian discourses around the purity of the body.

Though purity is emphasized as an attainable, righteous state of wholeness, Rossetti grants even the sinful the possibility of full redemption. Many scholars have read Goblin Market through feminist critical lenses. The poem, however, is not simply an endorsement of female liberation. At her most progressive, Rossetti grants salvation to the fallen and permits female ministry. The work marries spiritual teaching and Victorian social thought to teach women to turn away from wicked temptation and to orient their desire towards goodness and modesty.

First, I examine the ways in which Rossetti confirms the Victorian social script and

Christian teaching. She emphasizes the importance of bodily and spiritual purity through the representation of the heroine of the poem, Lizzie. Even when the goblins force themselves on her, Lizzie resists temptation like a Christian martyr and holds the power to redeem the fallen as Christ did. Rossetti consistently warns against fallen womanhood, manifested in Goblin

Market as unregulated chaos and female madness. Laura is easily seduced by the goblin’s pleas. She becomes addicted to the goblins’ sweet fruit and becomes sexually ravenous, painting a vivid and ominous picture of the dangers Victorian culture constructed around unbridled female sexuality. Rossetti relies on the socially sanctioned dichotomy between 2 modest womanhood and fallen womanhood, a psychic split embedded in Biblical teaching, in the Western literary tradition upon which Rossetti’s work is founded, and in broader Victorian social discourses. I will examine these foundations by employing Mary Douglas’ social theory of purity taboos, the Victorian medical texts of Dr. William Acton, and an analysis of the archetypal split between the female Christ figure (represented by Lizzie) and the fallen woman (represented by Laura).

The second half of my discussion will focus on the progressive elements of Rossetti’s work, primarily the ways in which Rossetti challenges the permanence of a fallen nature.

Through a Christian pastoral lens, I will argue that Rossetti’s attitude towards the wayward woman is both forward thinking for her time and expresses the virtues of forgiveness in two significant ways. Firstly, Rossetti grants Laura complete social and religious absolution for her sins, demonstrating that even the fallen can achieve stability. By the end of the text, the sisters are mothers with “mother-hearts” who have learned the danger of their ways and chosen modesty happily as their righteous path (Rossetti 546). Secondly, Rossetti acknowledges the presence of female sexual desire. While she argues for the reformation and containment of sexuality, she demonstrates through vivid allegory that women can embody sexuality, a judgment rebuffed by many Victorian medical and moral experts. Modern critics and artists have often interpreted the sexual allusions too liberally, either making arguments for Rossetti’s masochistic repressed desire or creating graphic illustrations of the two sisters in obscene sexual positions. My analysis, in contrast, meets Goblin Market in the social waters in which it is steeped. Indeed, the poem uses two expressions of womanhood—two sisters who make vastly different choices with their bodies—to foster a social dialogue that engages a more liberal interpretation of discovery and redemption, a reading that closely 3 aligns with principles of the Oxford Movement. Through sisterly love, a progressive religious notion and social statement, Lizzie gains the power to minister unto and heal her sister, and

Laura can move on with her life without a permanent mark of indiscretion.

Lizzie, the custodian of Victorian reason in the text, teaches the importance of containing her sexuality. She states, “Twilight is not good for maidens/ Should not loiter in the glen / In the haunts of goblin men” (Rossetti 144-146). Victorian culture, to those less acquainted with the intricacies of its social discourses, is commonly conceived of as a sexless society. Michel Foucault provides insight to the contrary. In his first volume of the History of

Sexuality, he discusses the “repressive hypothesis,” which stipulates that through avoiding overt discussion of sex, Victorian culture invented a multiplicity of euphemistic discourses that alluded to topics around sex. As he argues, “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression,” (Foucault 6). He continues, “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret”

(Foucault 35). Many Victorian scholars, doctors, and reverends treated sex (and related topics such as prostitution and the functions of the female body) as taboo and took efforts to repress these discourses. However, while taking great lengths to reform female desire, Victorian culture explored sex and the body in an unprecedented way. As discussed in this thesis,

Victorian literature and art explored the multiplicities of female sexuality and the female body within and perhaps in response to an anxious social culture.

Christina Rossetti was born and raised in London to an intellectual bilingual family with Italian and English roots (Marsh 5-7). The family’s values clearly impacted Christina’s 4 poetry. Religious and social emphases can be traced through Goblin Market that reflect

Rossetti’s upbringing. For instance, William, one of the Rossettis’s four children, remembers his mother, Frances, in words that paint a telling image of Victorian family values. He describes Frances in family letters as “‘the most womanly of women,’ full of commonsense and modesty, with no ambitions beyond the home, church and family. ‘Day and night she attended to the household, doing needlework, teaching her girls, keeping things in order, etc.’” (Marsh 20). Lizzie’s upright, careful action demonstrates that ideal modesty and conveys it as a valid prescription for all women. Though several prospects and propositions came her way, Rossetti never married, remaining a spinster to her death, but that did not prevent her from meditating on the female body and enacting parameters around dimensions of womanhood (Marsh 225).

Rossetti’s family was highly educated, greatly accomplished, and “unpretentiously religious” (Marsh 20). Rossetti practiced Christianity devoutly in church and Christian ethics in her daily life. From 1859 to 1872, Rossetti was an integral volunteer at St. Mary

Magdalene’s House of Charity, also referred to as Highgate Penitentiary, a home dedicated to rehabilitating fallen women (Marsh 235). At Highgate Penitentiary, “it was believed that young girls ‘fell’ from virtue into prostitution not from innate wickedness, but from weakness and vanity… [prostitutes] were coaxed and bullied into unsanctioned sex by smooth-tongued seducers, who sounded ‘full of loves’” like Rossetti’s goblins (Marsh 235). Rossetti’s tenure as a volunteer at Highgate, which overlapped with the writing and publication of Goblin

Market, is crucially important to a lucid reading of the work. At Highgate, female ministry and Christian service were lauded. This insight provides a window into the poem’s female 5 voicing, its emphasis on sisterhood, and its critique of female sexuality in service of creating a good society and in service of keeping young women safe.

Goblin Market negotiates a tenuous liminal space between cultural prescriptions for the female body and expressing a forgiving understanding of burgeoning female desire.

Rossetti employs a Christian framework, tied to what Foucault terms as the “the Christian pastoral, which affects desire by the mere fact of transforming [it]—fully and deliberately— into discourse: effects of mastery and detachment, to be sure, but also [encouraged] spiritual reconversion, of turning back to God, a physical effect of blissful suffering from feeling in one’s body the pangs of temptation and the love that resists it” (Foucault 23). Laura demonstrates activated sexual desire that pulls her away from the good, away from God.

Demonstrating cupiditas, she craves worldly goods to satiate her desire. Lizzie, on the other hand, resists worldly embodiment, closing her physical body to temptation, demonstrating caritas. Lizzie turns toward God to suppress and overcome any stirring of bodily desire.

“Like a Lily in a Flood”: Preoccupations with Bodily Purity

To understand Goblin Market’s treatment of the female body, one must understand

Victorian conceptions of the good body as a pure body, which Rossetti highlights in the poem.

Conventions of bodily purity are evidenced by Lizzie’s preoccupation with regulating what she consumes. From the beginning of the work, Lizzie demonstrates an aversion to and strength against seduction. While Laura “bowed her head” to better hear the goblins’ cries,

Lizzie “veiled her blushes” (Rossetti 34-35). Lizzie’s resistance is calculated to protect her bodily integrity. She states: “We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits… Their offers should not charm us, / Their evil gifts would harm us” (Rossetti 42-66). 6

Though the goblin’s fruit offerings are abundant and seductive, Lizzie sagely closes her body to prevent contamination through any bodily orifice. Lizzie, “thrust[s] a dimpled finger / In each ear,” “shut[s her] eyes,” and runs away to preserve her purity (Rossetti 67-68). Mary

Douglas in Purity and Danger, an anthropological analysis of pollution taboos, describes the complexity of regulating female purity:

Both male and female physiology lend them[selves] to the analogy with the vessel

which must not pour away or dilute its vital fluids. Females are correctly seen as,

literally, the entry by which pure content may be adulterated. Males are treated as

pores through which the precious stuff may ooze out and be lost. (156)

This paradigm positions the female body simultaneously as a receptacle for men’s fluid and as

“pure content that may be adulterated” (Douglas 156). Thus, impure substances—sexual fluids, dirt, and unclean food—threaten to permanently corrupt the imagined state of purity of the female body.

Lizzie takes every measure to ensure impure substances do not cross her bodily threshold. The mouth is complex locus of exchange between the divine and the earthly. In

Christian practice, the mouth is involved in both sanctification (Holy Communion) and gluttony (unregulated consumption.) Heather McAlpine, in “Would Not Open Lip from Lip:

Sacred Orality and the Christian Grotesque in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’,” explores the complexity of the mouth “as the primary site of union with God through the consumption of his body in the Eucharist meal” and as “the introduction of the world into the body”

(McAlpine 117). Eating, fundamentally, is an act of union. Either the body is unified with food (worldly goods) or the body is unified with the Holy Spirit through Communion. Eating, 7

McAlpine contends, thus symbolically and physically, is “an act simultaneously sacred and grotesque” (117).

McAlpine continues that the mouth becomes “the boundary between self and non- self… an ambiguous site of interchange” (118). The mouth itself distinguishes between the characterizations of the two women and ultimately what those characterizations represent.

Lizzie demonstrates mature self-restraint by carefully regulating the food she eats to preserve both physical and spiritual purity; she only consumes food that reflects her virginal purity.

Lizzie drinks white milk and cream, eats poultry, and “[kneads] cakes of whitest wheat, /

Cakes for dainty mouths to eat” (Rossetti 205-206). Eating anything dirty, sexual or impure would pollute her body and spirit. Laura, in contrast, portrays unregulated oral desire. By the end of the poem, “Laura’s mouth [is] an all-consuming hole [that] recalls the ‘hell-mouth’ motif of medieval demonology, which… literalized the ‘consumption’ of the sinner by sin”

(McAlpine 123). The speaker describes her longing: “[Laura] sat up in a passionate yearning,

/ And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire” (Rossetti 266-267). Laura’s hunger begins as an exploration of sexual love and ends as a grotesque display of painful frenzy.

Douglas describes the “ritual protection of bodily orifices as a social preoccupation around entrances and exits” (156). Victorian England was greatly concerned with the social regulation of physical purity. Liza Picard on the Online British Library discusses that the greater awareness around cures to contagious illnesses including, Cholera, Tuberculosis,

Smallpox and Sexually Transmitted Diseases; additionally, there were larger social efforts to manage public waste, purify air and encourage hygienic habits such as regular bathing and hand washing during the nineteenth century. In 1864, three years after Goblin Market’s publication, the British Government passed a series of laws known as the Contagious 8

Diseases Acts. Margaret Hamilton describes the waves of “bitter opposition” to the stringent restrictions that concerned the social management of venereal disease, including giving authorities the right to detain any woman suspected of prostitution (15). Though certain activists like Josephine Butler, protested the acts’ sexist and “unconstitutional” foundations, the Contagious Diseases Acts demonstrated a wider social occupation with practices around purity and pollution (Hamilton 17). The Victorians, bolstered with new medical ideologies, expanded the regulation of the body into the scientific realm, which when employed in reference to women, repeatedly emphasized bodily purity: freedom from illness or contamination that could corrupt her and her offspring.

The fascination with medical cures seems contradictory to beliefs in higher laws and the purity of the soul that occupied the Christian imagination. However, some scholars and religious leaders described illness as a punishment for waywardness, which will be addressed later in the discussion on prostitution. This discourse demonstrates how Victorian social thought was a compilation of both religious ideology and medical discourse. Medical conceptions of sanitation were intertwined with spiritual ideology. Douglas asserts, “Our idea of dirt [impurity] is compounded of two things, care for hygiene and respect for conventions”

(8). For Victorian culture, “convention” prescribed both religious and social observation.

Purity, as a social convention, is inherently contradictory. On the one hand, it is a tenuous, nearly unattainable state for mortal human beings. As Douglas states, “fears around sexual pollution” encourage the invention of the body as “an imperfect container which will only be perfect if it can be made impermeable” (195). Purity, on the other hand, prescribes the personal quest towards perfect wholeness in spite of human imperfection. Religious thought in Victorian culture, was shaped by this dominant ideology represented in, for example, the 9

Evangelical movement of the nineteenth century. Mark Knight and Emma Mason Nineteenth-

Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction state: “One of the major forces within

Evangelicalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Keswick

Movement, a movement dedicated to the pursuit of individual holiness and the ongoing work of sanctification” (125). Douglas describes more broadly the Christian interpretation of “holy as wholeness or completeness” (63). She continues, “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection, of the individual and of the kind” (Douglas 67). Goblin

Market explores the pursuit towards wholeness, towards unity for each sister individually and for the work as a whole thematically. Unity, in Goblin Market, is expressed by the two sisters’ purity and piety together. Rossetti describes the two women sleeping:

Golden head by golden head,

Like two pieces in one nest

Folded in each other’s wings,

They lay down in their curtain’d bed,

Like two blossoms on one stem,

Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,

Like two wands of ivory…

Cheek to cheek and breast to breast

Lock’d together in one nest. (184-198)

This is an expression on harmony and purity. Tucked in together, they present simple beauty, like “two blossoms” or two snowflakes (Rossetti 188-189). In and of themselves, they are natural creations of the divine and as such, are ultimate representations of purity. The peace this image evokes demonstrates that Rossetti positions this state –together, asleep, and wholly 10 pure, with the “wind [singing] them a lullaby” —as their natural state (Rossetti 193). As I will discuss in this thesis, Goblin Market demonstrates the duality of womanhood with this

Christian framework. It explores grotesque impurity as Laura becomes increasingly unhinged as her sexual hunger becomes more intense. It also presents the highest ideal of spiritual and bodily purity as Lizzie resists tempting fruit and works to save her sister’s soul. Lizzie is fully engaged in the pursuit of holiness, and through this example, Rossetti leaves the reader with a tangible image of the “ongoing work of sanctification,” a lofty yet perhaps attainable, religious ideal (Knight et al. 125). Further, achieving purity or holiness in Goblin Market prescribes that both sisters return to their natural, God-intended state of purity, harmony, and unity.

Goblin Market confesses the need for ongoing work towards goodness. Lizzie does goodly tasks, “as modest maidens should” (Rossetti 209). She performs daily chores that reflect her physical and mental state:

Early in the morning…

fetc’d honey, milk’d the cows,

Air’d and set to rights the house,

Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,

Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,

Next churn’d butter, whipp’d up cream,

Fed their poultry, sat and sew’d. (Rossetti 199-209)

Lizzie whips butter and cream, kneads white cake, which represent her essential state of purity. She, as pure as a snowflake or a lily, performs tasks that protect bodily integrity and are socially acceptable for women. Rossetti tells the reader that Lizzie performs her duties 11 with “an open heart,” while Laura performs the tasks as if “in an absent dream” (Rossetti 210-

211). The harmony expressed in the image of two birds peacefully in a nest is immediately disrupted by Laura’s decision to taste the goblin fruit, which results in bodily and spiritual corruption. Rossetti expresses this jarring disunity, stating, “One content, one sick in part;/

One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight / One longing for the night” (212-214). These lines not only demonstrate the dichotomy between the pure and fallen (now sick) woman, they also demonstrate how Laura’s fall corrupts the purity and innocence of the poem. These lines introduce a tension that courses throughout the poem between Lizzie’s righteousness and

Laura’s waywardness that must be resolved before the end of the work to restore the social stability upon which Goblin Market is founded.

“White and Golden Lizzie Stood”: The Female Christ Figure

The qualities Lizzie possesses and expresses present the strongest evidence of

Rossetti’s confirmation of Victorian social norms. Lizzie actively demonstrates the highest standard of physical preservation. Lizzie also embodies the highest honor for Christian womanhood as a female Christ figure: she who can participate in the world and not be corrupted by worldly desire. She both redeems the sinful and models modest behavior. As the only Christ figure in the text, Lizzie evokes essential purity. Through nurturance, Lizzie saves her fallen sister Laura, restoring her to modesty and stability. The poem demonstrates that women must actively preserve virginal bodily integrity that reflects the purity of their souls in the face of temptation. McAlpine writes, “Lizzie’s closed and proper body, which both figures and guards a ‘steadied and ennobled’ soul, thus provides a model for the reader… she correctly interprets the goblin men as evil and their fruit as harmful and seals the cracks in her 12 physical façade accordingly” (120). Lizzie clearly understands the evil of which the goblins are capable, and due to her sage practice in closing her bodily orifices, she can return from their grips unscathed. In the midst of Lizzie’s caring for her sister, the goblins act violently towards her. The speaker describes Lizzie’s metaphorical rape:

They trod and hustled her,

Elbowed and jostled her,

Clawed with their nails,

Barking, mewing, hissing mocking,

Tore her gown and soiled her stocking….” (Rossetti 399-403)

Even under immense stress, Lizzie evokes purity and femininity, described in this scene “Like a lily in a flood” (Rossetti 409). Lizzie’s purity, as is the nature of the purity construct, only remains as long as pollution does not cross the physical threshold. Thus, in the face of chaos and temptation, Lizzie closes her mouth to the goblins’ fruits as a strong act of resistance. The speaker states, “Lizzie uttered not a word;/ Would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in” (Rossetti 430-432). The “juice that syruped all her face… streaked her neck,” a representation of the goblins’ ejaculate, threatens to corrupt her body and soul

(Rossetti 434-436). Because it never penetrates her body, Lizzie remains a virgin, like Mother

Mary, pure enough to give herself to God.

Lizzie represents embodiment and transcendence, mirroring Christ’s multiplicities.

Marsh writes, “Like Jesus in the Christian gospels, the redeeming figure participates in the sinful world but remains undefiled; through this agency the fallen soul can regain grace and blossom again” (Marsh 229). When Lizzie returns from the goblins’ grips, she states to Laura,

“suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, / Goblin pulp and goblin dew,” 13 offering her body to her sister (Rossetti 468-470). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar provide a convincing allegorical interpretation of Lizzie’s self-sacrifice. They write, in their The

Madwoman in the Attic, “Just as Christ intervened to save mankind by offering his body and blood as bread and wine for general spiritual consumption, so Laura’s ‘good’ sister lizzie, like a female Saviour, negotiates with the goblins (as Christ did with Satan) and offers herself to be eaten and drunk in a womanly holy communion” (566). As the host and the redeemer,

Lizzie can facilitate Laura’s “life out of death” resurrection (Rossetti 524). Thus, Lizzie’s embodiment, in stark contrast with Laura’s ravenous sexuality, is saintly and represents ultimate spiritual wholeness. She serves as an extension of Christ’s divine love and healing.

Janet Gallingani Casey explores “The concept of a ‘female Christ’ figure in Goblin Market,” describing the “woman as moral regenerator… not uncommon among Victorian female writers, especially insofar as they perceived their maternal role as endowing them with the power to teach—and hence morally guide” humanity (64). Lizzie is an allegorical mother figure to all Christian women who knows and yet also transcends worldly indulgences.

Lizzie’s womanhood—like all of womankind—is haunted by the legacy of Eve, the archetypal fallen woman. However, Lizzie uses this legacy to inform and strengthen her quest towards spiritual wholeness, which proves to be socially and spiritually successful.

Another prominent Christian female figure that marks womankind is the Virgin Mary,

Jesus’ mother and the second Eve—the woman who comes to redeem the fallen nature of all women. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina’s brother and artist, depicts the moment Angel

Gabriel visited Mary to tell her she with birth and mother the child of God in his work, Ecce

Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation), or translated in English, “Behold the Handmaiden of the

Lord.” See fig. 1. 14

Fig. 1. Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation), Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Tate Britain. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.

Mary and the angel are dressed in white, which evokes purity and Mary’s virginity. Rossetti employs the color blue on a curtain behind her bed, a color commonly included in representations of Mother Mary. Abigail Newman on Victorian Web writes, “Most striking in this scene and the most drastic of Rossetti's innovations, the figure of Mary sits on her bed and slouches against the wall. She is markedly adolescent with her beautiful young features, uncombed straight hair, childishly skinny body, and the hesitance, fear and melancholy with which she responds to the angel Gabriel's glorious pronouncement.” Newman’s observations illuminate important qualities associated with female virginity represented in Victorian literature and culture: innocence and childlikeness. Worldliness, on the other hand, implies some knowledge or experience with sexuality. Goblin Market represents both wise and naïve approaches to female chastity. Lizzie’s self-restraint is informed. She knows the goblins’ gifts are evil and harmful, so she refrains from consumption. However, the poem has been categorized as a children’s nursery rhyme, just as Laura and Lizzie tells their children of her ordeal with the goblins, almost as commonly as it has been depicted as a sexually explicit tale for adults only. 15

Though the poem contains erotic allegory, Rossetti treats women as children in need of spiritual guidance. She conveys that modest, upright womanhood—like Lizzie represents both as a woman and Christ figure—prescribes innocence and rebuffs worldliness. This is an idea steeped in Victorian social discourse and is in line with the notion that women should remain pure in body and spirit. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra describes “Goblin Market as a

Cross-Audienced Poem” that “Although Goblin Market's internal audience is indeed ‘the little ones’ to whom Laura tells her story, it is important to remember that the poem's first known public audience was not children but adults. In October 1861, publisher Alexander Macmillan read Rossetti's manuscript to a workingmen's society in Cambridge. The workers' reception suggests that they recognized that Goblin Market's simple style was actually a vehicle for its mature content” (Kooistra, “Goblin Market” 183). In many ways, the conflation of the child and adult, of the innocent and erotic, simply reflects the “overlap” of cultural “boundaries,” including age and gender in Victorian culture (Kooistra, “Goblin Market” 199). The liminal space between child and adult in relation to female sexuality highlights the centrality of innocence in the poem, demonstrating that Rossetti’s work teaches the reformation of desire in socially acceptable terms, treating women gingerly and guiding them towards goodness.

“In an Absent Dream”: The State of Fallen Womanhood

Rossetti relies on a culturally intelligible duality of womanhood to construct her narrative. She represents two expressions of Victorian womanhood: the modest, holy woman and the fallen, disorderly woman. Lizzie represents a Christ figure, and her sister, Laura, represents the epitome of the fallen woman. Goblin Market does not aim to transform our notion of the fallen woman. Rather, it draws on a consistent history of socially scripted 16 expressions of the fallen woman as a woman with sexual indiscretion and therefore doomed to social and spiritual ruin. Rossetti calls Laura, from her very first fall, “sick in part” (Rossetti

212). Rossetti draws upon the literary trope of female madness that evokes the spiritual lineage of fallen womanhood drawing from Eve. As Foucault discusses at length, Victorian culture was occupied with the repression of desire as a way to maintain social control over the female body. The anxious occupation of containing the female body aligns with the Christian tradition’s representation of Eve as the original, essential fallen woman. Casey argues,

“Females are relegated to the supporting role (Mary) or the role of the person in need of salvation (Eve)… As Eve, the female is the archetypal ‘fallen woman’ who, contrasted to savior, the embodiment of spiritual love, is traditionally associated with carnal love” (63).

Laura’s narrative arch resembles Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden. Marsh reiterates,

“Lizzie’s redemption of Laura thus…enacts the moral aspects of the Highgate training…makes explicit the high Anglican typology of the Virgin Mary who redeems the error of sinful Eve” (236). Laura is drawn to the goblins’ sweet, sly tongues. Rossetti writes of the goblins, “They sounded kind and full of loves / In the pleasant weather” (79-80). Before

Laura’s fall, the scene is idyllic, like an image of a pre-lapsarian world where fruit is abundant, the weather is temperate, and all creatures exist in harmony. The goblins, to Laura, sound compelling and “kind,” like the serpent in the Garden sounded to Eve (Rossetti 79).

While Lizzie is wise enough to be wary of their offerings, Laura is intrigued and once she

“bow’d her head to hear,” the language depicts Laura as an offering to be preyed upon and for the goblins’ consumption. Rossetti states:

Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck

Like a rush-imbedded swan 17

Like a lily from the beck

Like a moonlight poplar branch

Like a vessel at the launch

When last restraint is gone. (81-86)

In this passage, Laura transitions from one part of a sisterly pair to prey for goblin men. She is compared to a graceful swan, a delicate lily, and a “moonlit poplar branch” (Rossetti 84).

However, quickly these comparisons dissipate as she continues to stretch her neck and moves closer to succumbing to temptation. She becomes like a “vessel at the launch / When last restraint is gone” (Rossetti 85-86). Rossetti repeatedly employs “Like” to draw comparisons, which by nature simultaneously marks what she is and what she is not. She is “Like a lily from the beck,” yet is also becoming “like a vessel at the launch,” (Rossetti 83-85). Neither image evokes her natural state. The liminal state she occupies is the liminal space all women occupy, the space between essential goodness—the ideal as expressed by the Virgin Mary— and worldly womanhood—a state that cannot remain unsullied forever.

Rossetti’s endorsement of Victorian social anxiety in relation to the female body is further evident when Laura decides to consume the goblins’ fruit. She has no money to offer the goblin men, so instead she cuts “a precious golden lock… [and drops] a tear more rare than pearl” (Rossetti 126-127). Laura’s offering of a “golden curl” is representative of her offering her body to the goblins. Her hair is a symbol of her fertility, femininity, and sexuality and a lock of hair could be read as a gift a woman may give to her lover. Offering the goblins access to her body corrupts its integrity and destroys any symbolic notion of wholeness or purity. As discussed previously, once the state of the body changes—tends more towards entropy, disorder, and pollution—the body cannot recover a state of purity: the state of closed 18 perfection. The way in which Laura falls, under the tempting spell of unsavory men, however, cements her position in the narrative as the fallen woman—the abject alternative to her pure sister, Lizzie.

The dichotomy between the pure and the fallen woman represents a common conceptual split throughout British literature and culture. In Victorian artwork, representations of fallen women were common, as they reflected the social messaging around containing the female body and educating desire towards modesty. George Frederic Watts’s Found Drowned depicts a fallen woman on the edge of the River Thames. See fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Found Drowned, George Frederic Watts. Watts Gallery. Web. 1 May 2016.

The woman’s body is splayed on the shore with her legs dangling dead in the dark water.

Watts’s painting evokes tragedy and alludes to the fact she may have tried to kill herself. In one hand, the woman holds a locket or a necklace, perhaps a symbol of disappointed love or empty promises that led ultimately to a sexual fall. Her arms are outstretched, mirroring the image of Jesus’ body on the cross during his crucifixion. Sally King writes of Watts’s work:

The year the piece was painted [circa 1850] marked a time in London's history when

the Thames served as a passageway between empire and metropolis, but also a threat 19

to the citizen's health and the city's livability… suggests not only the filth of the

physical setting, but the threat of urban living for a woman. This drowned girl, likely

impregnated and likely suicidal, exemplifies the Victorian trope of the fallen woman,

and the inevitability of corruption of the female urban dweller.

Another work of the same time, circa 1851, John Everett Millais’s Ophelia depicts William

Shakespeare’s female lead in Hamlet. See Millais’s painting below, fig. 3.

Fig. 3. Ophelia, John Everett Millais. Tate Britain. Web. 21 Apr. 2016

Ophelia is a literary archetype of female madness—a common trope in Victorian Literature.

In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason represents the undoing of the female mind. Though she is

Rochester’s wife, she embodies the abject female. She has ambiguous ties to the West Indies that suggest an innate tendency towards pollution, impurity or corruption. She often acts violently, irrationally, and with disorderliness, attacking her husband and Jane, demonstrating her mental instability. In Goblin Market, Lizzie’s decline thematically mirrors Bertha Mason 20 and Ophelia’s chaotic despair. In Act IV, Scene 5 of Hamlet, Ophelia alludes to the loss of a woman’s maidenhood, stating quite scandalously:

Pray let's have no words of this; but when they ask, you what

it means, say you this:

(Sings) To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,

All in the morning bedtime,

And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose and donn'd his clo'es

And dupp'd the chamber door,

Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more. (2908-2917)

Ophelia’s waywardness ultimately leads to her death: she falls into a river and drowns. In

Millais’s painting, the woman looks listless. Her limp body flows down a river, yet she holds a bunch of flowers in one hand, like the flowers Ophelia gives out in the play as symbolic offerings of her virginity. The natural scene around the river in the painting is abundant: green bushes, lively plants, white flowers, verdant wood in vibrant colors. The water in both

“Ophelia” and “Found Drowned” is symbolic of baptism, yet instead of being born again, these women are punished for their sins, as if to suggest that baptism (sanctification) is not sufficient to redeem their sexual sins.

Rossetti warns against the disorder that results from unregulated desire. Lizzie takes care to ensure whatever crosses the bodily threshold is pure. Laura, on the other hand, eats the 21 fruit with abandon. Rossetti describes Laura’s first taste of the sweet fruit “fair or red” (an allusion to Eve’s apple) through the sensual experience of eating it:

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flow’d that juice…

She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She suck’d until her lips were sore. (128-136)

In Victorian literature and culture at large, the trope of the fallen woman was tied to improper sexual behavior. Rossetti’s images contain a distinctly sexual overtone. Eating—an act of consumption of flesh—alludes to sexual acts. The image of sucking sweet juices also conveys elements of sexual acts. Rossetti’s images do not serve to express the pleasure in falling from grace. Rather, Laura’s fall from grace tells a warning tale of the potential dangers of succumbing to temptation. From even the first taste, Laura’s unmanageable desire leads her to become so ravenous, her “lips were sore” (Rossetti 136). Laura’s hunger for sexual fulfillment becomes increasingly uncontrollable over the course of the poem to the point of great suffering. Laura does indeed “suffer the spiritual effects of wrongdoing” (Marsh 229). The speaker describes these consequences, as “if her heart would break,” as waiting with

“exceeding pain” (Rossetti 268-271).

Laura’s pain, the suffering that comes with insatiable desire, is punishment for her waywardness. Punishment is an interesting consideration in examining the trope of the fallen woman in literature and culture. The mother of all fallen women is Eve from the Garden of

Eden. As is written in Genesis, Eve is tempted to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge 22 of good and evil. Adam and Eve are the original sinners, and while Eve is attracted to obtaining knowledge akin to that which God possesses rather than sexual indiscretion, Eve is punished with restrictions containing her body and sexual desire. In the King James Bible,

God speaks to Eve, “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Gen. 3.16). The story in Genesis, the Judeo-Christian foundational myth, lays the groundwork for the control over the female body in extreme ways and the assumption that sexual desire for women should be contained by marriage.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost encapsulates patriarchal conceptions of Eve’s innate waywardness. Milton’s Eve is the mother of all literary archetypes of fallen women. Milton’s

Eve is marked by vanity and vapidity that presage her fall. This is discussed in Book IX: Eve our credulous mother, [was led] to the tree /Of prohibition, root of all our woe (Milton 643-

645). The speaker describes the ease and quickness of Eve’s fall. There are many parallels between Eve’s temptation in Paradise Lost and Laura’s fall in Goblin Market. Carnal impulse that contains undertones from Paradise Lost drives Laura to consume the goblins’ fruit.

Though Laura has never previously experienced sexual pleasure, as one of Eve’s allegorical descendants, her fall seems inevitable. The flesh of the juicy “fruit globes” is a symbolic replacement for human flesh; eating the fruit facilitates the progression from innocence towards carnal knowledge (Rossetti 128). After Eve’s fall, all women—both figuratively and practically—in Christian society bear the burden of fallibility and likely instability. Cora

Kaplan writes of Goblin Market, “[it] is not a recapitulation of Eve’s fall. The difference, she says, is that ‘while the snake’s apple produces sensations of shame in the Edenic couple, the goblins’ fruit gives Laura knowledge of desire but not shame” (Charles 133). While there is a 23 marked difference between the outcome of the Laura’s fated female fall and the outcome of

Eve’s transgression, in order to be freed from continuous cycles of pain, Laura must be redeemed. While she may not feel shame in the throes of her lust, Laura suffers from her addiction to the fruit. The disorder Rossetti constructs in the world of the poem brings palpable tension to the text. Every woman in Judeo-Christian society is born from the myth of the fated female fall. Sexual shame is implied, yet Rossetti further entrenches this idea by demonstrating that desire can only bring dissatisfaction and disruption. Rossetti’s innovation is demonstrated in the decision not to punish Laura for her wickedness: a choice some scholars have read as a feminist impulse. I will return to this notion later in the piece. First and foremost, though, Rossetti’s creation in Laura is confirmation of the Judeo-Christian lineage that has birthed innumerable discourses around the need to contain the female body and female sexuality. Sexual fulfillment is not an attractive path in Goblin Market; seeking sexual fulfillment outside of marriage is socially reprehensible and sinful.

While Rossetti does not portray sexuality as an enticing expression of identity or will, the discussion of female sexuality in Victorian culture was complicated. Foucault postulates that despite the Victorians’ excessive façade of prudishness, the society and culture revolved around sex. By creating illicit desire, they engendered heightened sexuality everywhere;

Foucault states: “Never more attention manifested and verbalized [around sex]; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread everywhere” (49). This seems true of Laura’s attraction to forbidden fruit. She becomes more ravenous for fulfillment the more dangerous and taboo her actions become, but ultimately, as a reader, disorder is not appealing; it is objectionable and can bear harsher consequences than even Laura experiences. In one 24 instance, both sisters reflect on a fallen woman they know, Jeanie. The speaker states,

“[Lizzie] thought of Jeanie in her grave, / Who should have been a bride; / But who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died” (312-315). The “joys” reserved for brides – sexual acts —hold dangerous consequences: illness, death, and social ruin. The goblins’ sweet fruit threaten a woman’s body and life.

The stakes for Laura’s loss of purity are profound within a society preoccupied with the protection of the vulnerable young women’s virginity. In medical discourses, the open female body is defined as a social threat. McAlpine aptly describes, “[Rossetti’s] unease with the ethical ambiguities of the ‘open’ body is clear,” and as house of physical experience, the female body becomes and remains a “powerful site of sensation, connection and transcendence” (126). Female vitality and virginity were threatened by fears of social and moral degeneracy that could result from sexual deviance. At the same time Rossetti was writing Goblin Market, Britain was addressing the moral dilemma of high prevalence of prostitution. William Acton, in his Prostitution: Its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, describes the varied definitions of “prostitution”: “Many forcible divines and moralists have maintained that all illicit intercourse is prostitution, and that this word is as justly applicable as those of ‘fornication’ and ‘whoredom’ to the female who, whether for hire or not voluntarily surrenders her virtue” (7). This social debate seems particularly relevant to understanding Rossetti’s work, as it questions the tenuous nature of female sexuality and the forces that affected and constructed it. There was some debate about the nature of and resistance to rehabilitative programs for wayward women. Acton states, “Those who ameliorate the physical condition of the prostitute on behalf of society are at once met by the objection—‘Disease is punishment for sin;’ ‘syphilis the penalty paid by society for 25 fornication” (Prostitution 9). The dominant belief that feminine sexual urges were deviant and worthy of severe chastisement courses throughout cultural texts such as Acton’s writings and are evident in Rossetti’s work, as well.

Laura experiences physical pain after eating the fruit and needs more to satiate her hunger. Laura’s desire becomes an addiction. Like an addict, without the fruit, she suffers more. Rossetti states:

Gone deaf and blind?

Her tree of life droop’d from the root:

She said not one word in her heart’s sore ache. (259-261)

Her body and beauty unravel to mark her misdirected desire that cannot be fulfilled. Further, the experience of lacking satisfaction appears wretched: “[She] sat up in a passionate yearning, / And gnash’d her teeth for baulk’d desire” (266-267). Laura loses her vitality as she physically declines:

Her hair grew thin and grey;

She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn

To swift decay and burn

Her fire away. (Rossetti 277-280)

Laura also looses her enthusiasm for her daily chores. Rossetti writes, “[She] sat down listless in the chimney-nook / And would not eat” (297-298). Laura appears as though she is ill and dying, a sign of the Victorian ideology of punishment for sexual sins, in line with Acton’s description of sexual disease and degeneracy as punishment for indiscretion. These lines convey a sense that longing for something, sexual or otherwise, can cause discomfort, 26 restlessness, and immense difficulty. The desire itself for fulfillment threatens to “burn” and consume her body and spirit (Rossetti 279).

The language Rossetti employs in Goblin Market is vivid. The images of Laura’s mental and physical decline are striking, yet they serve to construct her argument for the reformation of female desire from one oriented towards worldly goods to one oriented towards the good. For Rossetti, higher good involves both religious devotion and social compliance. Victorian culture relied on the image of the harmonious Christian family structure as a social ideal, and unregulated sexuality or prostitution endangered the ethical underpinnings of this ideal. Matus states, “One might argue that the Victorian preoccupation with domesticity and the nature of female function and sexuality among the laboring classes was a way of not dealing with problematic economic issues by writing them as sexual issues”

(58). The social anxiety around the working classes (particularly prostitutes) presented a reproductive threat to the culture. Economic stagnation, tied directly to the toxic affects of poverty—sickness, malnutrition, birth defects, bastard children, and less refined appearance – could corrupt the high morality of the superior British classes. Gilbert and Gubar point out of

Jeanie and Laura’s circumstances: “Jeanie and Laura are both cursed with physical barrenness, unlike most Victorian fallen women, who almost always (like Eliot’s Hetty Sorel or Barrett Browning’s Marian Erle) bear bastard children to denote shame” (570). Bearing a child out of wedlock would have been an undeniable mark of disgrace. However, prolonged barrenness is also disgraceful, as it marks the loss of vitality. Laura, in her storm of disordered addiction, does not embody feminine qualities, which is part of her temporary punishment.

She becomes less of a woman and thereby becomes less desirable. Laura’s barren state is both 27 a signal of kind permission and is a warning of how desire can disrupt the natural, vital state of the female body.

Prostitution or sex before marriage for the Victorians signaled a spiritual and moral decline presented a social threat to the culture that prided itself on Christian values and contained categories. However, social discourse around fallen women was complex in the

Victorian age: a compilation of medical, religious and political texts. The biology of female desire stipulated that women’s sexual urges were much weaker. Thus it followed that women’s temperaments should be more compliant and submissive, both qualities amenable to the domestic sphere and the traditional Victorian family structure. Acton continues:

I am ready to maintain that there are females who never feel any sexual excitement

whatever… Many of the best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little

of or are careless about sexual indulgences. Loves of home, of children, and of

domestic duties are the only passions they feel… as a general rule, a modest woman

seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s

embraces, but principally to gratify him. (Functions and Disorders 213)

The language that describes a woman’s duty to her husband evokes the passage in Genesis in which God commands Eve to submissiveness. Jill Matus, in Unstable Bodies on the subject, states, “In Acton’s view, nature and culture have combined to make the female stance of repugnance/willingness just the right one for ensuring the continuity of the species, yet saving men from depleting themselves by dangerous indulgences” (47). Goblin Market presents

Lizzie—she who can deny all sexual expression—and Laura—she who easily succumbs to and later embodies unbridled sexuality. Laura, who becomes “most like a leaping flame,” cannot find fulfillment or stability from longing for external fulfillment (Rossetti 218). The 28 work endorses traditional Victorian and Christian social hierarchy. The poem is not a celebration of female sexuality because sexual desire for women is conveyed as messy and painful. Rossetti conveys that only through modesty, which prescribes containment of desires and the body, can a woman achieve social, bodily, and emotional stability.

Goblin Men with “Evil Gifts”

Rossetti’s social commentary does not deviate from mainstream Victorian discourses in three fundamental ways: firstly, in its celebration of pure womanhood; secondly, in its construction of fallen womanhood and messy sexual desire; and thirdly in its discussion of male sexual behavior. Rossetti also comments on the nature of male sexuality in analogous ways to Victorian medical discourses that painted male sexual appetite as robust and largely uncontrollable. The men, as goblins, express unbridled sexual desire. However, they are not blamed for their actions. Their morality is not reprehensible or inferior. The poem simply expresses the threat the men pose to the vulnerable and impressionable young women.

It must be noted that the poem contains a clear double voicing. On the one hand, the goblins are animals and not humans. It may be suggested that their animal qualities mark inferiority. Indeed, these men are not characterized as well-bred, well-educated gentlemen, and they are not portrayed as inviting or attractive. There is something sinister about them and the fruit they offer. The speaker states:

When they reach’d where Laura was

They stood stock still upon the moss,

Leering at each other,

Brother with queer brother; 29

Signaling with each other,

Brother with sly brother; (Rossetti 91-96)

The goblin men present as a gang, communicating with one another with coordinated motion, conspiring to corrupt the young, naïve Laura. Though these men bear “evil gifts,” they are never strongly condemned as abject men (Rossetti 66). Rossetti does not voice notions of fallen men. Further, the goblins are not condemned, perhaps, because men were thought to be naturally—both socially and medically—in need of sexual expression and fulfillment. Dr.

James Ashton’s The Book of Nature, a medical manual published in 1861 on the biology of puberty, orgasm, marital sex, childbearing and birth control, expresses a culturally dominant idea that women were less capable of sexual desire than their male counterparts. He states:

Most men are of an amative disposition [and] have frequent desires to indulge in

sexual intercourse. Some feel this desire so overpoweringly that everything else is

forgone, all risks are run, and consequences madly braved merely for the gratification

of a momentary passion. Females, on the contrary, are seldom troubled with sexual

desires; and among those whose reputation and social existence in the gratification of

illicit love, few are prompted to the act by the amative feeling. (33)

Despite the goblins’ representation as creature figures, they read ultimately as “merchant” men and are not described as bestial or less evolved even though they are technically animal

(Rossetti 70). Rossetti does not challenge the dominant discourse in the Victorian era that men possessed a strong need for sexual gratification. The goblins, thus, are symbolic replacements for all men with either dishonorable intentions or healthy sexual appetites. As such, they are culturally intelligible symbols and their animalism lends a mythic quality to the story with a pertinent social message. Rossetti’s warning against men’s advances is strengthened by the 30 thought that temptation could come in any male form. Women must remain sagely wary, as

Lizzie does, of improper offers, even those that come with sweet fruit.

Questions of Female Liberation

Before I move on to the half of the thesis which examines the culturally subversive elements of Rossetti’s work, I must address assessments of Goblin Market that are too imaginative or grotesque, readings that go too far. A great deal of the criticism written on

Goblin Market presents the work as a feminist expression of female liberation. In the one hundred and fifty years following its publication, many scholars have interpreted the work as a subversive demonstration of female sexuality better suited for contemporary media than for

Victorian poetry. I argue that these readings are overly simplistic. For instance, in 1973,

Kinuko Craft’s illustrations of Goblin Market were featured in Playboy Magazine (Kooistra,

“Modern Markets” 260). The illustrations are hypersexual, depicting women engaged in sexual activity. One features Laura clothed in a white nightdress, exposing part of her bosom.

The goblin men climb out from the dark forest, bearing fruit and reaching their outstretched arms towards her mouth. The second illustration portrays Laura in sexual ecstasy. Her body is splayed open. Her red hair is tangled. She is holding an apple. Rossetti draws heavily upon the myth of the Garden of Eden, for the goblin men are seedy creatures that make offers that allude to the snake’s attempts to provoke Eve. Laura, here, is portrayed as a naked, which represents Laura’s body in a state that Rossetti did not write for her character. The work as a whole is obscene. The goblin creatures crawl over Laura’s body, some with their mouths near her genitals, as if performing oral sex. This image corrupts the female form in a manner far too grotesque for the Bible or for the Victorians. The third and final illustration is the most 31 overtly sexual. Lizzie’s legs are splayed apart, and Laura, her sister, is bent over her performing oral sex, grasping one of her sister’s breasts in her hand. All three images are a gross departure from the text. Though some scholars may disagree, like Steven Marcus in his

The Other Victorians, which depicts the culture as fundamentally hypocritical around norms of sexuality, a close reading of Goblin Market does not produce a conclusion of unbridled female desire that includes incest and lesbian affairs. Furthermore, the relationship between

Lizzie and Laura, the lynchpin of the work’s message, is not one of lesbian sexual repression, but rather, one of sisterly love. It is the shared experience of womanhood and asexual love that provides a fallen woman with the possibility for social and spiritual redemption.

Craft’s illustrations seem obscene in contrast to the original illustrations, drawn by

Christina Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Dante Rossetti’s works capture the complexity of Goblin Market with greater restraint. See fig. 3 and fig 4.

Fig. 4 Buy From Us with a Golden Curl, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Victorian Web. Web. 21 Feb 2016. Fig. 5 Golden Head by Golden Head, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Victorian Web. Web. 21. Feb. 2016

The first illustration, entitled Buy From Us with a Golden Curl, depicts the goblins wrapped sensuously in Laura’s golden locks of hair, as she leans nearer to the goblins and their fruit with a pacific, innocent expression. The illustration conveys the attraction of the pure female 32 body and simultaneously conveys the notion that she fell, innocently, into temptation. Dante

Rossetti’s second illustration, Golden Head by Golden Head, depicts the two sisters in each others’ arms, while Lizzie dreams of the goblins and their fruits. This image positions sisterly love at the heart of the poem. To read Goblin Market simply as an expression of liberated female erotic desire glosses over the nuanced intersection of societal expectations, the

Christian Pastoral, and spiritual fulfillment.

Reading Goblin Market solely as an expression of sexual desire fails to access the poem’s depth. Jan Marsh states: “erotic readings of Goblin Market are our creations, not

Christina’s. Goblin fruit [can be interpreted as]…‘forbidden fruit’ as pleasures and self- indulgences of various kinds” (Marsh 232). I contest that Goblin Market does not contain sexual undertones, for it is a metaphor for the fall and redemption of women with a distinctly

Victorian social message. However, there is a finer integration to be made between the imagery of carnal knowledge and the notions of spiritual redemption that reveals the poems complex exploration of the reformation of female desire. To read Goblin Market as a work fit for pornographic consumption would be to misread the work as a whole, as those arguments do not read the Victorian social temperature correctly and do not address the aspects of female desire in the poem holistically.

“Golden Head by Golden Head”: Theological Reading and the Oxford Movement

As I examined in the first section of this thesis, Goblin Market is primarily an education in appropriate religious and Victorian social practice. However, certain progressive religious ideals are embedded in this traditional social discourse. When addressing theoretical and analytical questions, one must remember to cautiously apply frameworks to texts that do 33 not explicitly articulate their agendas. Nancy Cott warns of the retroactive application of feminist theory and language to nineteenth century sources and history in The Grounding of

Modern Feminism, stating, “People in the nineteenth century did not use the word feminism…

The vocabulary of feminism has been grafted onto the history of women’s rights (Cott 1-3).

Goblin Market is, though not a strong expression of female liberation, “enacting an affirmation of intellectual (or poetic) as well as sexual selfhood” (Charles 130). Goblin

Market is a struggle for clarity of the mind and purity of the body, which is mapped through a literary (symbolic) and a sexual (physical) quest for truth. With this in mind, I will now present a theological reading of Goblin Market that incorporates ideology from the Oxford

Movement, which adopts a symbolic reading of the world. From the position of understanding

Goblin Market in progressive spiritual terms, I will then apply an understanding of the progressive social elements of her discourse around female sexuality, expectations for modest womanhood, and challenges to the rigid state of fallen womanhood.

Goblin Market’s spiritual—one could argue devotional—underpinnings are more complex when examined. Rossetti’s works, as Edna Kotin Charles writes in Christina

Rossetti: Critical Perspectives, are often “renunciation[s] of human love” (Charles 19). Yet, she continues, “Rossetti’s expressions of piety contain the intensity, devoutness, and sometimes liturgical quality of many spiritual poems of the ages; yet unlike them, her poems are never didactic, never seek to instruct” (Charles 27). Literary evaluation over time, from the years Charles assesses, “1862 to 1982,” has shifted along social lines. Christina’s contemporaries, too, were occupied by religious allegory and the connection between belief and social theory (Charles 27). Acton, for example, expresses many religious beliefs that are echoed in literary reviews of the time. Charles states, “Where the critics area concerned, the 34 response [to Goblin Market] is mixed. Rossetti’s fusing of the real and the unreal, and the imagery and rhythms employed for this task, has created a new world that critics in the liberal secular and religious press delight in, if not fully understand” (Charles 31).

Stephen Prickett, who Charles cites, presents the most compelling integration of the idea of a symbolic dichotomy: “the poem is a fantasy of a ‘divided mind’ of a ‘divided society’ as well, each too frightened ‘to come to terms with its own deepest needs and desires.’ The fairy men are ‘goblins of the mind,’ offering ‘a surrogate language of sexuality’”

(Charles 131). Prickett’s framework incorporates Foucault’s repressive hypothesis. It illuminates the notion that while on the surface Victorian culture was occupied by regulating sexual activity, the culture was simultaneously developing new and varied discourses to analyze sexuality. Prickett’s framework is steeped in psychoanalysis, and while employing theory of the alter ego is a compelling path of inquiry for Goblin Market, I believe the paradigm of the “divided self” is most aptly discussed in religious terms, which is in line

Rossetti’s upbringing and her personal practices.

The Oxford Movement, the beginnings of Anglo-Catholicism at the University of

Oxford, greatly shaped Christina’s religious beliefs and devotional poetry, as Mary Arseneau explores in her “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and

‘Goblin Market.”’ She examines the Movement’s emphasis on a “symbolic” reading of the natural world and life events as the foundation for deep spiritual practice (81). She states,

“According to [John] Keble, [a leading thinker in the Oxford Movement,] God had originally created human beings as belonging once both to the natural and supernatural worlds.

However, as a result of original sin, the direct link between the human and the supernatural world was severed; the world ceased to be an image of the supernatural and became instead a 35 mere shadow of it” (Arseneau 81). Goblin Market explores the interplay between supernatural elements and earthly consequences. The poem teaches a young woman to correctly read the signs of the supernatural world, which requires the ability to distinguish between God’s divine guidance and the sinister shadows that only tempt her with dark desires.

The Oxford Movement’s emphasis on the reading of signs is relevant to literary study, particularly to Rossetti’s narrative which teaches women to navigate a world where there desires can be manipulated by restrictive cultural values. Arseneau continues, “Through

God’s gift of grace, the moral sense, which has been clouded by sin, is restored. This moral sense is inseparable from the ‘symbolic sense’ in Keble’s philosophy… [which] enables him or her to see the symbolic representations of the supernatural world within the physical world

God created” (81). Rossetti’s work was originally titled “A Peep at the Goblins,” which seems to suggest Laura’s attempt to read the world’s signs as integrations of the human and divine

(Marsh 258). The little goblin creatures evoke the supernatural steeped in folklore, rather than in God’s divine grace. Goblin Market addresses the split between holiness and worldliness. It suggests that one must possess a firm “moral sense” to correctly read symbols and signs

(Arseneau 81). Laura does not possess a grounded moral sense. She instead displays cupiditas, which leads her to be tempted by the goblins. Lizzie, on the other hand, can maintain her purity throughout the text because she possesses wisdom that can delineate between what is moral and what is immoral. Lizzie states to her sister:

O Laura, come;

I hear the fruit-call but I dare not look;

You should not loiter longer at this brook:

Come with me home. 36

The stars rise, the moon bends her arc…

Let us get home before the night grows dark:

For clouds may gather

Though this is summer weather. (Rossetti 242-250)

Lizzie can correctly read the world’s signs. She hears the goblin’s cries, but does not pay them attention. She instead pays attention to the natural signs (the “moon,” the “clouds,” the

“weather”) that God expresses in the world (Rossetti 244-250). Lizzie knows intuitively that these signs can change; it may grow dark or the clouds may gather. She protects herself with a cautious moral reading of signs and signals.

This is a progressive theological discourse because it grants the women the opportunity to achieve spiritual wholeness. Rossetti provides her pair of sisters and any female reader with a guide to navigate a world that was not built for them socially, where seemingly well-intentioned men can offer false promises and not suffer consequences.

Further, Rossetti positions women at the center of her spiritual and social world. In my analysis of the role of the female Christ, I argued that Lizzie occupies the intermediary role between the divine realm and the earthly world. She expresses holiness as deep and pure as the Virgin Mary or Christ himself, yet she acts in the world, bringing healing and divine grace to the sinful. Arseneau’s analysis closely aligns. She states, “Rossetti conceives of the incarnation as working on many levels to bridge the gap between the material and a higher, spiritual one: in the person of Christ, divinity and humanity coexist; in the sacramental system instituted by Christ and in particular in the Eucharist, divine grace becomes available through a physical form” (82). 37

The female body in the poem is the site of suffering and disorder, which conveys another interesting theological innovation. Laura’s “baulk’d desire” is a painful image

(Rossetti 267). However, Rossetti also makes the female body the site of regeneration in two ways. First, Lizzie offers her body to her sister and becomes a “Eucharistic offering”

(Arseneau 91). Lizzie embodies Christ himself. This is a deeply progressive notion, as it positions women as powerful spiritual actors. In Victorian discourses, the female body is treated with trepidation. For instance, Dr. Acton’s writings evoke an anxiety around the mystery and instability of the female body. Though Rossetti confirms this larger social conception of the female body, she also demonstrates belief in the female body’s potential to give life in a spiritual sense, analogous to the transformative degree that Christ’s body did and continues to do as part of the sacrament of Eucharist.

Lizzie’s “offering… restores her sister’s moral sense and interpretative faculties”

(Arseneau 90). Through merging with her sister by sucking her juices, Laura is redeemed. The second demonstration of the regenerative power of the female body comes through Laura’s resurrection. Though Laura appears as though she was “knocking at Death’s door,” Laura recovers her vitality by the end of the poem (Rossetti 321). Laura’s resurrection first comes with greater pain:

Her lips began to scorch,

That juice was wormwood to her tongue,

She loath’d the feast:

Writhing as one possess’d she leap’d and sung,

Rent all her robe, and wrung

Her hands in a lamentable haste, 38

And beat her breast…. (Rossetti 493-499)

Laura is sent into a state of great agitation, not satisfaction, when she sucks her sister “with a hungry mouth” (Rossetti 492). Many may interpret this scene as commentary on homoerotic love. It is more important to read this scene as a moment of psychic transformation for Laura and a powerful moment for Lizzie. Laura, before her frenzy, learns that her sister “tasted / For

[her] sake the fruit forbidden” (Rossetti 478-479). The power of sisterly love and Christian sacrifice saves and transforms Laura. She only “fell at last” because her sister was strong enough to save her (Rossetti 521).

One could read the sisters as an expression of a divided self: the part that is in and of the world and the part that is called to a higher good. The Oxford Movement thinkers discussed the difficult spiritual quest to remedy the tension between the humanness and holiness in world of fallen people. This means, in a sense, Lizzie and Laura are alter egos for one another. If two facets of the same self, the moral sense (represented by Lizzie) becomes strong enough to overcome the inherent fallen nature (represented by Laura). Within this paradigm, Rossetti thus conveys that every individual—even those with scary, unstable female bodies—has the power to cultivate inner resilience and walk a better path. Arseneau states, “[T]he world of Goblin Market is a postlapsarian and post-incarnational world in which the person who is not blinded by sin, who is not tempted by the empty promise of material things, and who attempts to look behind physical surfaces for some moral and spiritual significance can interpret the world in a meaningful and Christian way” (91). Laura and Lizzie achieve the capacity to discern between the wicked and the holy, which demonstrates what is required of the “Christian way” (Arseneau 91). Rossetti models the importance of this discerning faculty for her readers, as well. 39

“Pleasure Past”: Female Sexuality and the Reformation of Desire

Goblin Market guides a Christian path towards wholeness. The Oxford Movement placed great emphasis on the individual’s spiritual quest. Arseneau states, “We learn about

God through His creation, and we work toward our own salvation according to how we think and act in this world” (82). Finding spiritual wholeness, however, comes from moving through bodily desire to find greater peace. Rossetti raises an important question about the nature of desire when she states, “Pleasure past and anguish past, / Is it death or is it life?”

(522-523). Laura’s recovery brings measured contentment. By leaving behind her pain, Laura must also leave behind the felt sense of “pleasure” Rossetti describes (522). Rossetti answers her own question in the following line, stating simply, “Life out of death” (524). Harmony, vitality, peace are restored to the sisters and in the world of the poem through leaving bodily desire and sensation behind.

Though Rossetti resolves the chaos and the problem of female madness in Goblin

Market by asking her characters to leave bodily stirrings behind, her sexual allegory is potent enough to challenge the Victorian notion that women did not possess “amative feeling” of any kind (Ashton 33). Laura is evidently overcome with insatiable desire: it inhabits her body and enthralls her spirit. Rossetti’s language is not as graphic as the modern imagination may expect, yet her language clearly evokes sexual enjoyment. For instance, she employs symbolism that alludes to orgasm. For instance, Rossetti describes the “swift fire [that] spread through her veins, knock’d at her heart” as she longs for the fruit (507). Laura’s desire is captured by images of powerful destruction of shaking earth – the body—and bursting water—the fluid of sexual arousal:

Like the watchtower of a town 40

Which an earthquake shatters down,

Like a lightning- stricken mast,

Like a wind-uprooted tree

Spun about,

Like a foam-topped waterspout

Casting down headlong in the sea

She fell at last. (Rossetti 514-521)

The image, for instance, of a “foam-topped waterspout,” contains a phallic overtone, while the image of “the sea” evokes the fluid of the female body. The imagery, though veiled in metaphor speaks to the powerful hold sexual desire can exert on both men and women, which conveys a greater degree of empathy for the fallen woman.

This empathy is visible in Rossetti’s unique redemption of the fallen woman in Goblin

Market. Knight and Mason describe the dominant Victorian ideology on this topic, stating, “A woman who falls from her purity can never return to ordinary society, and a woman’s soul is so refined that it has, ironically, grown too thin and fragile to protect her: a woman is in greater danger than a man” (127). Acton’s medical discussion of prostitution illuminates the social reluctance to forgive the fallen woman. He states, “never a one of them but may herself when the shadow is past become the wife of an Englishman and the mother of his offspring,” stating that any woman who has participated in the “evil career” is permanently marked by sin

(Acton, Prostitution 73). As I have discussed in this work, Victorian culture largely conceived of the fallen woman as a blemish on the English cultural body and a threat to the English bloodline. Rossetti adopts a much more forgiving perspective, which gives Goblin Market a culturally subversive dimension. 41

Original sin presages human waywardness and often religious work prescribes the reformation of desire that may guide an individual towards sinful indulgence. Rossetti’s economy of female desire gives fallen women renewed opportunity to turn towards goodness.

Rossetti’s Laura is not permanently marked by indiscretion. This lack of condemnation in the conclusion of Rossetti’s narrative is significant, as it both grants fallen women social pardon is culturally subversive for its time. Rossetti describes Laura’s recovery:

Laura awoke as from a dream,

Laugh’d in the innocent old way,

Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice;

Her gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey,

Her breath was sweet as May

And light danced in her eyes. (537-542)

Laura wakes without any physical mark of her sexually deviant past. She wakes with new life.

Granted, as Paula Bartley states in Prostitution, Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-

1914, “Not everyone blamed women for the sins of prostitution and argued that prostitutes should not be seen as a class apart. Ellice Hopkins [a reformer] believed that ‘men divide us women into two classes: us pure women, from whom nothing is too good, and those others for whom nothing is too bad. But let us prove by our actions that our womanhood is ONE’” (46).

Hopkins demonstrates there were individual arguments that contested the permanence of fallenness as Rossetti did, although Rossetti relies heavily on the dichotomy between the pure and fallen woman as a useful framework. She does not call for a unified vision of womanhood, as Hopkins does. Nevertheless, Goblin Market was born out of a nuanced, perhaps what modern minds might conceive of as a feminist perspective that challenged the 42 strong condemnation of the fallen woman even though she recognized prostitutes’ lapsed nature. Bartley continues:

“Prostitution was still considered to be a sin but prostitutes were viewed less as

sinners and more as victims of social injustice, with the result that the emphasis was

placed on forgiveness rather than on punishment. To a large extent women were

considered to be the perennial prey of wicked, debauched men who led them astray

and who abandoned them when they had lost their first flush of youth. As a

consequence, women were regarded as feeble, passive and pathetic and, like children,

incapable of exercising moral judgment” (Bartley 47-48).

During the mid to late nineteenth century, Christian social outreach became more prominently established in England as a response to the practices Bartley describes. New social norms around duty, Christianity, and modest and fallen womanhood were developing along with

Christian ministerial agendas. Rossetti’s tenure as a volunteer at Highgate Penitentiary expanded her view of the circumstances fallen woman may have faced, as she worked to help reform and redeem prostitutes. William Holman Hunt, a Pre-Raphaelite artist, depicts the redemption of the fallen woman in his “The Awakening Conscience” that evokes Rossetti’s imagery of Laura awakening from a dream, a trance that manipulated her desires and behavior. See fig. 5. 43

Fig. 5. “The Awakening Conscience,” William Holman Hunt. Tate Britain. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.

In this work, a woman sits on a man’s lap. The man’s gaze falls on the female body, near her posterior. He is reclined, as though sexually excited and in anticipation. His desire is directed towards her body, towards worldly pleasure. The two are in an ornate parlor, which further denotes worldly pursuits and goods. The woman is painted in simple white clothes, perhaps signs of her fundamental goodness, and with a thick, embellished red rug wrapped around her hips, as if to mark her previous indiscretion. Interestingly, she is rising from the man’s lap and looking towards the light. As is demonstrated in a mirror behind her, the woman looks towards beautifully lit trees out of the window. The woman seems mesmerized by the light— representative of hope—and signs of nature—God’s handiwork. As Holt’s title indicates, this moment is the woman’s “awakening conscience,” when she feels called to leave worldly desire behind to move towards holiness. This depiction is generous, as it grants her the possibility of redemption.

It should be noted, again, that Rossetti’s rhetoric does not endorse female liberation.

She does not adopt rhetoric that grants social and spiritual redemption without the awakening of the fallen woman. Diane D’Amico, in her Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time 44 states, “[W]hile Rossetti certainly viewed the [Highgate] women sympathetically, she did nevertheless see them as sinners who first needed to repent in order to be forgiven. Only by accepting Christ’s love could their story be changed” (87). Rebirth and redemption required change in behavior and reorientation of desire. In Goblin Market, Lizzie acts as an extension of Jesus Christ’s redemption and healing love. Lizzie provides ministry to her fallen sister, much like Rossetti provided for the prostitutes with whom she worked. Highgate was a part of

Church Penitentiary Movement, a larger social effort towards redeeming (instead of rejecting) the fallen woman to more closely emulate God. Bartley describes the “Christian ‘archipelago’ of reform, which stretched all over England,” that sought to reform wayward desire by promoting Christian ethics and practices (39). Rossetti did extensive work to promote reformation of desire through Christian sisterhood at Highgate, which is mirrored in the description of Lizzie caring for Laura as she recovers spiritually and physically:

That night long Lizzie watch’d by her,

Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,

Felt for her breath,

Held water to her lips, and cool’d her face

With tears and fanning leaves. (525- 529)

These lines form a romantic image of reformative care. Nevertheless, they demonstrate the power of female ministry and lay the groundwork for a deeper conversation about social responsibility to rehabilitate the fallen. Figures like Catherine Booth, a prominent Christian activist and influential member of the Salvation Army, or Florence Nightingale “exemplified a new model of Christian womanhood, articulating a new approach to female ministry and creating an influential career as an evangelist” (Knight et al. 127). Rossetti endorses the 45 importance of female ministry through sisterly love could redeem and reform any fallen woman, no matter the degree of madness or disorder. From a place of empathy for the female experience Just as Rossetti served as a redeemer with the job of “fetching one if one goes astray,” Lizzie ennobles womanhood to restore proper social order in the text (Rossetti 565).

Fallibility, in Goblin Market however, is neither condemned nor reprehensible. The poem repudiates the notion that a fallen nature precludes the individual’s quest for spiritual fulfillment. Rather, it inspires change through service and humility. While some women may fall from grace eternally and turn away from God because they continue to choose the darker path of bodily desire, Rossetti provides Laura with a path towards spiritual wholeness that is bolstered by eternal gratitude for the love her sister demonstrated to redeem her.

Conclusion

In Goblin Market, spiritual wholeness is restored at the same time social order is restored. Despite their brushes with goblin fruits, both sisters are restored to modest, upright womanhood. In the final stanza, Rossetti writes:

Afterwards…both were wives

With children of their own;

Their mother-hearts beset with fears,

Their lives bound up in tender lives. (544-547)

As William Rossetti described in reference to his mother, proper women oriented their attention and ambitions towards children and the home in Victorian England (Marsh 20).

Knight and Mason illuminate the religious aspects of this call as well, “Central to

[Evangelical] ideology was a belief that the home was the most appropriate sphere for 46 women…it followed that women who ventured outside the secure environment of the home were at particular risk of falling into sin” (Knight et al. 125). The domestic space, however, is the safe space in which the reader leaves Lizzie and Laura. This conclusion is the strongest sign of Laura’s fully reformed desire and also a sign of how Rossetti has granted her complete redemption. With her fertility and modesty restored, she becomes a proper wife and mother.

This is a harmonious image that is both progressive in its forgiveness of the fallen woman and strongly traditional in its affirmation of the domestic realm as appropriate for all women.

Laura tells “the little ones /… of her early prime” (Rossetti 548-549). She warns them of the dangers of temptation. Rossetti’s message here is two-fold. Firstly, she articulates the dangers of falling in with “wicked” men (Rossetti 553). She states:

The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,

Their fruits like honey to the throat

But poison in the blood. (Rossetti 553-555)

Rossetti acknowledges the power of the sweet “fruits” of temptation, another allusion to the power of sexual desire (554). However, she states in certain terms the damaging effect they have on the “blood” of women like Laura (Rossetti 555). Laura felt wretched physical and emotional pain from her tangle with the goblins. These lines confirm Rossetti’s endorsement of regulating what crosses the bodily threshold to maintain physical and spiritual purity by emphasizing the power substance has to disrupt the mind, body, and soul. Reiterating this theme again in the final stanza demonstrates that the poem serves as a warning to all women to avoid men in dark places. Secondly, the final stanza conveys Goblin Market essential message: the importance of sisterly love. Rossetti writes, Laura “Would tell [her children] how her sister stood / In deadly peril to do her good” (557-558). Laura has learned the gift of 47 a sister’s selfless love from her ghastly experience and carries the message forward by teaching her children Christian values as if part of her penance. Rossetti continues:

‘For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.’ (562-567)

These lines speak to the redemptive power of forgiveness and female nurturance. They convey the gift of a sister who will look out for stand in truth to redeem the fallen other throughout the storms of life. Goblin Market conveys a woman who must navigate a society that was steeped in Christian myth and highly regulated social customs does not have to walk the spiritual path alone. Rossetti acknowledges that life often presents difficulty and that it is not the individual woman’s job to correctly read the world’s signs without counsel. However, she does convey that it is the work of the faithful to learn to live life with a “moral sense”

(Arseneau 81). The poem thus reveals a nuanced integration of discourses around fallen womanhood. It is a poem that teaches with love and empathy how to walk a path towards spiritual wholeness.

Victorian society was indeed a chaste culture, and Rossetti’s work reflects the principle that chastity is holy, while simultaneously conjuring erotic imagery. While modern feminists would like to hold on to the poem as a light in the darkness of sexual repression,

Rossetti does not promote female liberation, which is clearly evident in her descriptions of

Laura’s decline and painful despair. Rossetti constructs two characters that represent the 48 tension between holy womanhood and fallen womanhood. One cannot exist without knowledge of the other. Rossetti teaches principles of Christian ethics and sisterly love by relying on this trope of the duality of female embodiment. In Goblin Market, a work that inspires wild fascination, a woman’s body becomes the site of sexual pleasure, decimating pain, and healing. This composite, though confusing and often contradictory, constructs a tale of the mystery, peril, beauty, and resilience of the female human body. Moreover, Lizzie, who walks through fire for her sister, can teach, heal and redeem the fallen, which expresses the power women possess to repair society and resurrect holiness when they are so called.

49

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