Christina Rossetti\u2019s \u201cGoblin Market\u201d brought to surface many ideas and expectations that surrounded women in Victorian culture. Laura specifically resembles women who too easily give in to their sexual desires and take the fruit of these different men. Lizzie represents women who wait to have sex until marriage and who maintain their purity. Both sisters are \u00a0tempted by the calling of the goblin men but only one gives in too quickly and engages in sexual activities with the goblin men. This market represents the marriage market that Victorian women were prepared for in order to marry a prosperous suitor. Laura is no longer able to hear the calls from the goblin market because she engages inappropriately with the marriage market by having sex with multiple men. This implies that being promiscuous and having multiple partners calls for a woman to lose access to the marriage market and good suitors. After Laura can no longer hear the goblin men and their calls from the market she becomes incredibly ill, \u201csullen\u201d, in \u201cexceeding pain\u201d, and \u201cdwindled\u201d. Laura also feels \u201cas if her heart would break\u201d (line 268) and it appears that \u201cher hair grew thin and grey\u201d (line 277). The inability to have access to the marriage market means Laura cannot have a husband and so this leads to her astonishing decay. This implies that women without husbands are infertile, ugly, and physically decayed. Without eligible bachelors then Laura might as well be dying because she has no future of husband and kids, which is what Victorian society expected from women. This poem exemplifies how women\u2019s sexual desires were suppressed in Victorian society through the fear of imaging never finding a husband or having kids and slowly dying. Victorian society made the marriage market selective because it was only meant to be open to women who had followed the strict and constraining rules of society. Thus, promiscuous women, with no apparent chance of a husband, \u00a0were made to believe that they would receive life with pain and heartbreak since men were seen as the source to a woman\u2019s happy future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christina Rossetti\u2019s \u201cGoblin Market\u201d brought to surface many ideas and expectations that surrounded women in Victorian culture. Laura specifically resembles women who too easily give in to their sexual desires and take the fruit of these different men. Lizzie represents women who wait to have sex until marriage and who maintain their purity. Both sisters … Continue reading The Marriage Market in Victorian Society<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3309,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3309"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}