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Goblin Market

Goblin Market is one of Christina Rossetti’s major narrative poems. Rossetti tells the story of two women and their betrayal that arrives in a vast number of levels each with varying effects. These betrayals are background by false ideals spawned from the innocence of these women. Their innocence is the delusive obviousness to their mutability. As a woman, writing of the weakness of women, Rossetti certainly was one up on her fellow male poets of her time, and it could be said that Christina Rossetti carried the dawning of female poetic freedoms. She transgressed many nineteenth century views on the role of the woman poet, both in her poetic style and the issues she tackles. On the other hand, Rossetti can be seen as being complicit by these same ideas. She had a strong Anglo-Catholicism background; this imposed tight constraints upon how far she would investigate a self-sufficient femininity. Rossetti challenged the accepted notion of female creativity and in some extent can be considered a feminist poet.

In many respects Goblin Market is directly contradictory to many nineteenth century views about the role of the woman poet. Mary Ann Stoddart, 1842, defines the sphere of the poetess as:

Like a Japanese work of art, one perceives the general intention, and one is satisfied with the beauty of all the detail, without comprehending, or wishing to comprehend every part of the execution.

The poetic form of Goblin Market is irrevocably bound up with the content, suggesting that Rossetti, “like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, defies her heritage of metrical correctness and womanly propriety and, instead, suggestively connects the goblins’ hobbling, laughing energy with the missed steps of metre”. (Leighton, 12) This metrical indulgence, gives Goblin Market a sensual art for art’s sake, which is usually reserved for male poets, making this offering to the public by a poetess incompatible with Victorian notions of female poetic beauty.

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

Some topics in this essay:
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