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These are not necessarily mutually exclusive readings. The for in the line is ambiguous: She may have received sickness and death instead of the joys brides hope to have (and this is the obvious reading) or it may be that she experienced the sexuality that brides hope to experience as joy as sickness and death instead. Their friend Jeanie has done this before them, with the result that she “who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died / In her gay prime” (ll. Laura succumbs to their offerings, giving up (as in a ghost story) a curl of her hair for the forbidden fruits they offer. The goblin men who offer Lizzie and Laura their wares offer a panoply of fruits from the tree of knowledge. Rossetti is interested in all these stages and sees their persistence even as they develop. As with Freud, the stages of sexual desire go from a generalized friendship to intense and intensely singular sexual self-discovery to its opening out into samesex, half-individual sexual interplay between the sisters who are not one person but not quite two, either to a more “mature” sexuality which can lead to the venerated states of marriage and motherhood. The poem is about as daring as can be imagined, and it is protoFreudian in its evocation of dread, loss, anxiety, and sin in a context where two sisters (Lizzie and Laura) are sharing an experience of the awakening of desire. Indeed if any single romantic poem can be said to be behind Goblin Market, it is William Wordsworth’s Nutting, also a sexualized coming-of-age poem in which intensity of feeling for nature climaxes in an unexpected sexuality which reverses into a sense of guilt and loss.Ĭlearly, the poem is about the experience of sexuality, and it also seems clear that the sexuality in the poem centers on same-sex eroticism. She also called it a children’s poem, and for her it probably was since, like her romantic antecedents, she saw childhood as a time of unparalleled intensity and experience. Analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Marketīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on FebruĬhristina Rossetti claimed that Goblin Market was extemporized in a single day.