Victorian Poetry:A Paper Collection by Cordelia Clark (e reader txt) 📖

to The Goblin Market: “Rackham goes to all lengths to blur boundaries between animal and human. Some goblins are mostly animal with subtle human nuances” (72).
The sexual corruption of the goblin men brought out the “unconscious” and therefore more natural lesbian tendencies of Lizzie and Laura. This is supported by Atzmon’s observation about Victorian psychologists:
Victorian psychologists were fascinated by the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, which they compared to the border between the conscious, rational mind and the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind, considered an out of control beast which could come out under the right circumstances, took on a sinister quality. The emergence of the hidden beast within was a familiar theme in Victorian culture. In the image “The Kensington Gardens Are In London, Where the King Lives” Rackham places a host of imaginary creatures behind the king and the underground. That these beings emerge from the dark world “behind” and “underground” is suggestive of the emergence of the beast from the unconscious mind. Their physical appearance, which combines plant, animal, and human features, gives a clue to their phrenology. Animalistic or base character could be ascertained, many Victorians believed, from the face (Atzmon,66).

Lizzie and Laura have an alluded to sexual relationship when they are described as sleeping together as “two pigeons in one nest” (185). The sexual nature of their relationship does not become graphic until after the sexual corruption of Lizzie by the goblin men (471-472): “Eat me, drink me, love me/Laura make much of me.” Here Lizzie becomes the sexually dominant and her role of the dominant that has been suppressed is made free by the goblin men. Bonnie Zare supports this in her assertion that Lizzie becomes sexually aggressive while in the safe company of a woman:
Lizzie, who has steadfastly refused the temptation of the fruit’s sexual passion, is firey now that she is in the safe company of a woman. In fact, Lizzie’s plea has the same feverish rhythm enunciated by the goblins. Unlike the bicotiran physician Dr. William Acton, who famously stated that virtuous women are nearly incapable of arousal, [Christina Rosetti] hints that even so called virtuous women (the Lizzie’s of the world) are capable of enjoying sexual pleasure. Indeed, as Mary Wilson Carpenter’s essay, “Eat me, Drink Me, Love Me: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rosetti’s The Goblin Market” (1991) proves, the narrative subtly confirms that her sister’s mistake is a fortunate one, for without it Lizzie would never have known desire or fulfillment (Zare,36).
The theme of sisterhood is used as a narrative vehicle for the construction and the psychological working through of the issue of lesbianism. In her article, “There Is No Friend Like a Sister,” Helen Michie discusses sisterhood as a method for working through identity issues:
Sisterhood, in Victorian culture, depends on differences between women, and provides a safe. Familiar, and familial space for its articulation. Victorian melodrama abounds with pairs of sisters who work out issues of identity and difference with relation to each other. Difference between sisters is often visually and dramatically rendered; dark and light, blind and seeing, healthy and sick sister compose themselves for the audience in a tableaux of physical contrast (Michie, 404).
This is seen because Laura becomes blind and Lizzie becomes seeing when Laura is sexually corrupted by the goblin men, becomes their creature, and can no longer hear or see the goblin men selling their wares.
Laura is sexually corrupted and therefore insane and cannot hear the goblin men, even though she searched for them. This is exemplified in lines 269-280:
Day after day, night after night
Laura kept watch in vain
In silence of exceeding pain
She never caught again the goblin cry
Come buy come buy
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen
But when the moon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and grey
She dwindled as the fair moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away.
Insanity was often associated with sexual corruption.
Issues of morality were central for Victorians. With regard to morality, the Victorians believed that sex in mankind was unnatural and repression was necessary. With the strong social enforcement of these beliefs, many Victorians lived with great shame, guilt, and fear of damnation. Passion was deviant, and thoughts of sexuality would cause insanity (www.nouveaunet.com).
Tucker, in his article, “Rosetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye,”discusses Laura’s insanity and explains it as Laura’s becoming the goblin’s creature because she has bought into the seduction.
By paying with a piece of her body—the negotiation enacts, incidentally, the cut rate etymology behing the shop terms coupon and retail, she affirms in form the substance of what is already a done deal, the goblin marketers’ capture of her very imagination, and thereby of her purchase of reality. This may explain one of the abiding enigmas of Rosetti’s canny fable: why henceforth Laura can no longer hear or see the goblin vendors. Having entered the market headlong and been saturated by it, she has become its creature and can therefore no longer perceive what is in distinction to what she is, or rather what it has made of her(Tucker, 125).
Thus, Laura is sexually corrupted because she has paid with a part of her body. Perhaps a link to sexual corruption is that Jeannie died as a result of dealings with the goblin men, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti wrote a poem about a mistress named Jenny. This may be an allusion to the poem because Jeannie is a French derivative of Jennifer (www.behindthename.com). Sexual corruption is seen in lines 46-50 of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poem Jenny:
Why Jenny as I watch you there
With all your wealth of loosened hair
Your silk ungirded and unlaced
With warm sweets open to the waist
All golden in the lamplight’s gleam.
Lizzie is sexually corrupted in an attempt to save her sister:
Their tones waxed loud
Their looks were evil
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her
Elbowed and jostled her
Clawed with their nails
Barking, hissing, mewing
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking
Twitched her hair out by the roots
Stamped upon her tender feet
Held her hands and sqeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat (396-407).
Joseph Bristow discusses the overtly sexual nature of the poem in his article, “The Culture of Christina Rosetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts” when he addresses the appearance of illustrations of “The Goblin Market” in a 1972 issues of Playboy (501). Helen Michie’s article on sexual difference is useful again finding sexual corruption in Rosettis’ poem:
Differences between sisters, in this adaptation as well as other Victorian texts, is also reproduced explicitly as sexual difference; that is, the difference between the fallen and unfallen, the sexual and the pure woman. Sexual difference, in this formation of the term, can be powerfully translated from a heterosexual lexicon to describe the space between women; if we can rewrite sexual difference to include the differences between women, we can also begin to reframe Simone de Bovouir’s influential notion of the “other” and begin to do work of looking at what “otherness” might mean if it were applied to women’s relations with each other. In Victorian culture, sexual difference between women is expressed and contained within the capacious trope of sisterhood, which allows for the possibility of sexual fall and for the reinstatement of the fallen woman within the family. Fallen sisters, as we shall see in later discussions of works by Christina Rosetti and Wilkie Collins, are frequently recoupable throughout their sisters’ efforts in a way forbidden to other Victorian women. Sisterhood acts as a protecting framework within which women can fall and recover in their way, a literary convention within which female sexuality can be explored and reabsorbed within the teleology of family (Michie, 404).
This relates to “The Goblin Market” because Laura exemplifies the fallen women in the beginning of the poem and Lizzie the unfallen. Despite sexual corruption, the fallen woman is able to recover in her way, which in this case is overt lesbianism, which purifies her back to the pure form at which she began. In a sense, Lizzie and Laura are sexually corrupted at the end as well as the beginning because they become wives, which denies their true and what was originally their unconscious identity as homosexuals. Essentially Lizzie and Laura are taking preventative measures to keep their children from sexual corruption by binding them together and teaching them that “there is no friend like a sister.” This also implies that all the children referred to are little girls, and thus they are passing on lesbian ideals.
Interaction with the goblin men provides escape in that it releases and reveals what is Lizzie and Laura’s true sexual identity: homosexuality. Simultaneously it entraps them because they are both sexually corrupted. However through sexual corruption comes purifying awareness of true identity, and a more balanced sexual relationship, as both Laura and Lizzie take turns with sexual dominance.

Works Cited

Atzmon, Leslie. “Arthur Rackham’s Phrenological Landscape: In-betweens, Goblins, and Femme Fetales.” Design Issues. 2002. 64-84.

Bell, Mackenzie. Christina Rosetti: A Biographical and Critical Study. Ams Press.1930.

Bristow, Joseph. Reivew of “The Culture of Christina Rosetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts.” Victorian Studies. 2002. 501-503.

Drake, David B. “Rosetti’s Goblin Market.” Explicator. 1992. 22-25.

Harrison, Fraser. The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality. New York: Universe Books, 1997.

Marson, Michael. The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford, New York: University Press. 1994.

Michie, Helen. “There Is No Friend Like A Sister: Sisterhood As Sexual Difference. ELH. 1989. 401-421.

Sternlieb, Lisa. Review of “Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 2001. 151-152.

Tucker, Herbert F. “Rosetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye.” Representations. 2003. 117-133.

Referenced but not cited from: Wright, Andrew. Storytelling with Children. Oxford University Press. 1995.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Stolen Child.” The Literature Nework. http://www.online-literature/yeats/816

Zare, Bonnie. “Build a Dream World: Using Three Divergent Gynotopias Students Imagine Change.” Transformations. 2003. 35-45.

“Behind The Name: The Etymology And History of First Names: Names That Are Related to Jeannie.” http://www.behindthename.com/php/extra.php?extra=r&terms=jeannie 9 July 2010


Analysis of Adelaide Anne Procter’s “The Cradle Song of the Poor” and “Homeless”
By Cordelia Clark
Victorian Poetry

Adelaide Anne Procter weaves the theme of incompleteness, injustice, and cosmic irony throughout her works, “The Cradle Song of the Poor” and “Homeless.” She shows these themes not only in the content of each poem, but in their poetic structure as well. Further examination will show that these themes become more evident upon the dissection of meaning and rhyme.
In “The Cradle Song of the Poor,” the speaker expresses the joy and sorrow of motherhood in poverty stricken Victorian England. She expresses joy at the birth of her child in the lines 5-6: “When God sent thee first to bless me/Proud and thankful too was I.” Yet in the very next line she reveals that due to her child’s suffering she would almost wish death upon her baby. “Now, my darling, I thy mother/Almost long to see thee die” (7-8). All this is a result of the speaker’s lack of nourishment for her child. “Dear I have no bread to give thee/Nothing child, to ease thy pain” (3-4). She then speaks of her baby’s beauty fading in line 11, and alludes to the loss of her own beauty in line 31: “ I have wasted, dear, with hunger.” Incompleteness is present because the mother feels that she is incomplete because she cannot help her child and because she sees herself as living in vain. This is seen in lines 33-34 when the speaker admits that she does not