Heroic Sisterhood In Goblin Market by Dorothy Mermin
Notes:
- By reading the sisters as two separate people, a message of sisterly
solidarity is restored to the poem, and it can be set in its Victorian social
world.
- The author relates the poem to the positions available to women in the
Pre-Raphaelite movement, to the Anglican sisterhoods, and to Christina
Rossetti's work with 'fallen women'.
- The goblins represent the temptations of sexual desire, but of a highly
imaginative kind. 'Sister', 'vessels', and 'goblin' all suggest Goblin Market.
For Rossetti, however, sin does not necessarily cancel sisterhood, and she
thought like Barrett Browning that women should know and write about
such things.
- As in Goblin Market, Rossetti sometimes imagines some alternatives than
soft domesticity, resentful loneliness, and 'falsetto muscularity'.
- Laura sounds, in fact, like Lizzie Siddal, with her long neck and fabulously
luxuriant red-gold hair - Laura’s hair “streamed” like a “torch” even though
it had turned “thin and grey”.
- The sexualised imaginative world is infinitely attractive but sterile and
destructive, and those who commit themselves to longing for it waste
away in gloom and frustration, cut off from natural human life.
- In narrative terms the story is a transformation of a traditional fairy tale.
Their sleep is protected by enchantment and the verbal ambiguity makes
them seem imprisoned with each other.
- Laura’s heated imagination inhabits the erotic world of Pre-Raphaelite art,
while Lizzie’s imagination leads her towards - if not actually into - a
realistic, socially responsible moral world like Barret Browning’s.
Notes:
- By reading the sisters as two separate people, a message of sisterly
solidarity is restored to the poem, and it can be set in its Victorian social
world.
- The author relates the poem to the positions available to women in the
Pre-Raphaelite movement, to the Anglican sisterhoods, and to Christina
Rossetti's work with 'fallen women'.
- The goblins represent the temptations of sexual desire, but of a highly
imaginative kind. 'Sister', 'vessels', and 'goblin' all suggest Goblin Market.
For Rossetti, however, sin does not necessarily cancel sisterhood, and she
thought like Barrett Browning that women should know and write about
such things.
- As in Goblin Market, Rossetti sometimes imagines some alternatives than
soft domesticity, resentful loneliness, and 'falsetto muscularity'.
- Laura sounds, in fact, like Lizzie Siddal, with her long neck and fabulously
luxuriant red-gold hair - Laura’s hair “streamed” like a “torch” even though
it had turned “thin and grey”.
- The sexualised imaginative world is infinitely attractive but sterile and
destructive, and those who commit themselves to longing for it waste
away in gloom and frustration, cut off from natural human life.
- In narrative terms the story is a transformation of a traditional fairy tale.
Their sleep is protected by enchantment and the verbal ambiguity makes
them seem imprisoned with each other.
- Laura’s heated imagination inhabits the erotic world of Pre-Raphaelite art,
while Lizzie’s imagination leads her towards - if not actually into - a
realistic, socially responsible moral world like Barret Browning’s.
