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... Consequently, ‘Goblin Market’ contains the artist’s Pre-Raphaelite-influenced understanding of sensuality, concurrent with Victorian models of womanhood, without ever really conforming neatly to either. ...
‘Goblin Market’ conforms to the stereotypical image the sexually repressed Victorian-era’s preoccupation with gender roles and relations between the sexes, layered though it is beneath religious allegory and child-like affectation. ... Meanwhile, her stern religious grounding stymies the sensuous impulses compulsively returning to depictions of the goblin’s harvest, examined in exquisite detail and with the typically sharp gaze of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting. ... However, subversive undercurrents surface in its culturally coded imagery – eg: “purse”, familiar slang term of the era - which communicates to the poem’s adult audiences an entirely separate layer of meaning, enabling ‘Goblin Market’ to be read as anything from a simple, naďve children’s fable, to an exploration of notions of domestic, familial and moral obligation. ... The consequences are potentially fatal, the girls fall both physically spiritually into decline, alienated from their “old innocent way[s]” and also from the goblin-men, who having tricked the girls into tasting their fruits, immediately lose interest in them and move on, to lure other young maidens into disrepute, sickness, death. ... Although, later she makes no qualms about simply naming them “goblin-men”, though by sheer weight of numbers overcomes this concept with repetition of their animal qualities.
Approximate Word count = 2434
Approximate Pages = 9.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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