The sisterly bond in Christina G. Rossetti’s Goblin Market evokes, in many ways, Laura and Marian’s tie in Collin’s The Woman in White.
Many similarities seem to suggest such an association. First of all, in Goblin Market Laura and Lizzie are described as opposite but at the same time as complementary characters. If Laura is not afraid of the goblin men and “bowed her head to hear”(34), Lizzie, on the other hand, “veiled her blushes”(35) and hurries her sister to go back home. Furthermore, if Lizzie urges Laura to “get home before the night grows dark”(248), her sister “most like a leaping flame”(218) waits for the night to come in order to go to listen to the fruit-merchant men. In reading these lines, how not to recall Collins’ wise and judicious Marian and the weak and sensitive Laura? Such an association becomes even clearer when C. Rossetti writes: “Golden head by golden head,/ like two pigeons in one nest,/ folded in each other’s wings,/ They lay down in their curtained bed:/ Like two blossoms on one stem,/ Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,/ like two wands of ivory/ Tipped with gold for awful kings”(185-192). Almost the same image is presented in “The Woman in White” when one night Marian, with a tender and innocent glimpse, observes her sister lying on the bed. The difference between the novel and the poem is in how the sibling bond is described. While Collins does not explicitly unveil the sisterly love between Marian and Laura but he only gives some hints, in C. Rossetti such a bond is depicted instead with a powerful sexual connotation. Lizzie and Laura’s bond is much more physical, till the point that they’re “folded in each other’s wings”(186).
As for Collins, for C.Rossetti too, the main assumption underlying this new type of sisterly love is that it is the only true bond which can stand and win over the conventions of the Victorian society, with same-sex marriage being one of those. In a society where same-sex marriage was inspired by economic interests rather than by true love, sibling love seems the preferable alternative to escape such a conventionality, “For there is no friend like a sister/In calm or stormy weather”(563-564). The poem appears to follow this leitmotif, by insisting on Laura and Lizzie’s necessity to be together to overcome the difficulties of life, first of all the physical dejection caused by love, which almost reduces Laura to a dead state. The conclusion, however, is pretty ambiguous. Despite praising the authenticity of sisterly love, it seems that C. Rossetti finally surrenders and conforms to the norms of her time. At the end of the poem, in fact, she says that :”Both were wives/With children of their own”(545-546). A similar conclusion happens in Collins’ novel, which ends with Laura marrying Walter and having a child. Why praising the unconventionality of sisterly love against the conventionality of the same-sex marriage all throughout their work, and then, ultimately, choosing a clashing conclusion?