Goblin Market

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1862

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Goblins

As discussed in Contextual Analysis, Rossetti structures her poem around fairy folklore’s tropes and story beats. Additionally, the various origins of the Fair Folk support many of Rossetti’s possible messages throughout “Goblin Market.”

Following Christianity’s spread throughout Europe, fairies became demoted gods, fallen angels, or Eve’s children whom God made invisible. All of these interpretations place the Fair Folk as opponents of God. The fallen angels and Eve’s children evoke arrogance and defiance against God’s will (Sigmundsdóttir, Alda. The Little Book of the Hidden People. Little Books Publishing, 2015).

Rossetti was a devout Christian. The goblins stand in for the Devil within Rossetti’s religious beliefs framework. The Devil, also a fallen angel, tempts people to sin. Despite hearing warnings, Laura succumbs to the goblin’s offers of food. She then arguably engages in the sins of gluttony, lust, greed, and sloth. Laura longs for the fruit’s pleasures even as the fruit harms her.

As discussed in the Themes section, Laura’s illness and Jeanie’s death also frame the poem as one about confronting illness and mortality. Both Laura and Jeanie’s diseases come after consuming the goblins’ food. The goblins function like the grim reaper. The connection between fairies and death has long existed. Many people assumed fairies were the deceased returned. Previous servants returned to their workplace as household fairies in some stories (Briggs, Katharine. The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. Routledge Classic, 2002, pp. 13).

The Celtic Sluagh were flocks of restless human souls searching for victims to carry off. Rossetti’s goblins exhibit Sluagh-like behavior when they tempt women with food that will kill them. With these origins as a guide, the goblins in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” represent the natural force of death that can strike anyone at any time. Once Lizzie saves her sister, Rossetti represents renewed life and death’s defeat through the sisters’ children.

Hair

For Victorians, hair was a woman’s prized body part. They wanted their hair shiny and balanced. When Laura has no money to pay the goblins for their fruit, they ask for a lock of her golden hair instead.

The goblin’s price is especially horrifying for the hair-obsessed Victorians. The English made elaborate jewelry and ornaments from loved ones’ hair. The “hair work” provided a tangible connection that could outlast death. By giving away her hair, Laura symbolically gives herself away as payment. It also foreshadows Laura’s brush with death and her family getting tangled up in the goblin’s schemes.

Rossetti emphasizes Laura’s value through the choice of hair color. While blonde is an easily substituted adjective, the adjective golden turns Laura into a sought-after commodity. The goblins force Laura to give up something of herself to taste the fruit. While she appears to get a better deal, the fruit and her withdrawal slowly kill her while the goblins continue their scheme.

The hair also is a metaphor for sex work. The Victorians had strict expectations for what a woman could do with her body. Women who had premarital or extramarital sex were looked down upon. Along with virginity, hair was one of a woman’s most prized features. People expected upper-class women to wear their long hair up in braids or bonnets when in public.

Female sex workers challenged these expectations. They went against the Victorian norm as they “gave away” their chastity outside of marriage. Consequentially, they faced discrimination and had little to no legal protections. Sex workers also shouldered more of the brunt from possible negative repercussions than their male clients. Scholars have noted that Laura’s systems mirror symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease.

Looking through these contexts, Laura’s hair represents her innocence and virginity. In Rossetti’s view, sex workers and Laura exchanged parts of their bodies, believing they would benefit (Weiss). Only, both discover their clients have harmed them in the long run.

Fruit

It is telling that goblins list apples first from their offerings. For pious Rossetti and many of her readers, apples represented temptation and the first sin. Western artists have generally depicted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil as an apple. After eating the fruit, God exiles Adam and Eve from Eden. Likewise, Laura faces negative processions from eating the fruit. She also symbolically cannot return to where she got the forbidden fruit. The apple makes the goblins stand-in for the Devil as Christian folklore portrays him: as Eve’s tempter.

Many of the other fruits have religious meanings as well. For example, blackberries mean spiritual neglect and oranges sin. Not all of the religious connotations are negative, however. Lemons, figs, and peaches all represent salvation. The pomegranate is often paired with the Virgin Mary (Wilson 137-38, 145, 180). Because the goblins bring people in through promises of sweetness, the fruits’ cultural connotations add another layer of deception. They give people a false sense of safety. The idiom, “even the Devil can quote scripture,” is very apt.

The fruits also subtly prepare the reader for the poem’s sexual subtext. Out of the 29 fruits listed, almost half represent concepts related to sex, love, fertility, or marriage. The apple and pomegranate especially stand out. Both pomegranates and apples are associated with Aphrodite/Venus, the Greco-Roman goddess of love and beauty. Pomegranates also represented Hera/Juno, the Greco-Roman goddess of marriage (Wilson 145). However, the Greek God of the dead, Hades, trapped his bride Persephone in the underworld for half the year using pomegranate seeds. The use of apples shows sex as a possible method of exploitation, danger, and entrapment.