Title: Goblin Market
Author: Christina Rossetti
Date of First Publication: 1862
Place of Publication: Goblin Market and Other Poems (London: Macmillan)
Bibliographic Reference: isfdb
Type: Short story
Keywords: WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS; QUEER
Critical Summary: Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem begins with goblins crying out to young women to buy their fruit wares. Two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, hear their calls and give different responses—Laura with curiosity and Lizzie with fearful caution. Lizzie runs away Laura looks. The goblins are significantly and specifically monstrous men, “goblin men.”
The goblins come to Laura as whimsically animal-like shapes and features (amalgamations of whiskers, tails, and such—a mix of parts like Frankenstein’s Creature). Laura longs to taste the goblins’ fruits, but admits she lacks money—to which the goblins reply that she can pay with a lock of her golden hair. She sheds a tear for her lost hair, but then ravenously sucks to their rinds the fruits the goblins gave her.
Upon Laura’s return, Lizzie chides her soberly, reminding her of their friend Jeanie’s rapid physical decline and untimely death from the goblin fruit. Laura, however, silences her sister, insisting on the fruits’ delightfulness. Kissing her sister, Laura says she will bring more fruit for Lizzie the next day, and they go to sleep together.
The next day as they go about their tasks, Lizzie works with delight while Laura works absentmindedly, pining for the evening when she thinks she will buy more goblin fruit. As the sun sets, Lizzie urges Laura to return home with her but Laura lingers, hoping to hear the goblins’ calls again. Lizzie says she can hear them herself, and dares not dally. Laura is frozen; she is deaf to the goblins’ appeals. That night she lays quiet until Lizzie falls asleep—then Laura gnashes her teeth and weeps in frustrated desire.
Laura unnaturally begins to decline, her hair fading to gray. She stops working with Lizzie and even stops eating. Lizzie, remembering how Jeanie died not long before, resolves to buy fruit for Laura in an effort to save her life. She brings money with her to the goblins, who greet her with hungry fawning. Lizzie politely asks to buy fruit from them to carry in her apron, but the goblins insist on her staying to eat with them. When she politely refuses, the goblins start to change: where before they fawned enticingly, they start to attack Lizzie, trying to force their fruits into her mouth. Despite their assault, Lizzie stands stalwart, unmoving under their blows and laughing inside as the fruits’ juices seep over her.
When the goblins give up and vanish, Lizzie rushes home. Embracing Laura, she begs her to drink the juices staining her skin. Laura mourns, thinking Lizzie has been poisoned by the fruits like she was, but kisses Lizzie anyway. The remnants of the fruits burn on Laura’s lips and insides. She falls deathly faint, but Lizzie stays by her side all night. In the morning, Laura wakes up as innocent and lively as ever, her hair back to its bright gold. The poem closes with a jump forward to when the sisters have children, and Laura tells their children of the time when her sister braved the goblins to heal her.
“Goblin Market” seems to bears no overt connections to Frankenstein beyond the fact that little monsters (ones fairly unlike Victor’s Creature) populate its verses. Some potential connections are tenuous—the life-sucking goblins as vampiric and Lizzie as a kind of (redemptive) double for her sister. The primary connecting threads are as follows: the fact of Rossetti, a woman, writes about male monsters, and considerations of unnaturalness also found in Frankenstein. A feminist critique using monsters runs through both texts. Like Victor and the Creature, the masculine goblins bring ruin to women. Further, Laura comes to share in the goblins’ monstrous unnaturalness by eating their fruits. Unlike Shelley’s novel, however, Rossetti’s two protagonists are women, and the women ultimately—by one’s sacrificial love for the other—triumph over the monsters.
Administrative Notes: Ian Heisler, CSUF