Class Blog

I looked at the collection of essays Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction: with Some Account of the judicial “congress” as practised in France during the seventeenth century by John Davenport. As Steven Marcus writes in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, the book Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs treats “gossip” as “a form of erudition” (Marcus, 72). Marcus also mentions that while “at the bottom of the title page is printed ‘London” Privately Printed 1869[,]’ the work was in fact printed in 1873” (72).

The book discusses multiple past and present ways of inciting sexual desire in both men and women, but all first-person accounts of anything too scandalous is printed in French, “the disgusting obscenity of which is such we cannot venture upon translating” them (Davenport, 111). The aristocracy being perfectly fluent in French, this “disguising” of the more scandalous material was paper-thin and completely useless.

My section in particular described the appeal of erotic spanking and then includes examples, such as Rosseau’s interest in being spanked by an elder woman. The details are in French, but a rough translation (many thanks to my patient and kind translator!) is:

“For a long time,” he says, “Madame Lambercier stuck to the threat of a new punishment, one that seemed very dreadful. But after the execution of the punishment, I found it less dreadful than the thinking about it beforehand, the waiting for it. The strangest part was that I liked the punishment, better than I liked her imposing the punishment on me. The truth of this affection is there was a battle between my sweet nature and my desire to be punished, because in pain and even in shame I have found a mix of sensuality that have given me more desire than fear of feeling immediately from that same hand. Without a doubt it was true, as I was flirting with a precocious sexual instinct, the same punishment given by my brother did not feel as pleasant.” (111)

Rosseau is describing not only a fetish for being spanked and a predilection for BDSM (both already very outside of the Victorian norm), but also his enjoyment in being submissive to a woman, thereby reversing the expected Victorian gender roles and further subverting the Victorian norm of heterosexual sex being about reproduction rather than pleasure. Based on Eva Sedgwick’s list of elements of sexual identity in her book Tendencies, Rosseau is subverting the gender binaries of “preferred sexual act(s) (supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you are female or feminine),” “most eroticized sexual organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative abilities of your sex, and to your insertive/receptive organs),” and “enjoyment of power in sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high if male or masculine)” (Sedgwick, 7). Rosseau leans more toward the feminine side of the binary on all of the above categories, despite being male. Thus, his proclivities subvert the Victorian gender binary – but despite being in French to “disguise” anything too obscene, Rosseau’s description is perfectly understandable to most of the Victorian aristocracy (who were fluent in French) and is on display for the Victorians to enjoy.

The full excerpt can be found at: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/essay/aphrodisiacs-and-anti-aphrodisiacs-three-essays-powers-reproduction-some-account-judicial

Works Cited:

Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” Tendencies. Durham: Duke University, 1993. 1-22. Print.

Dear class,

In a comment below, please type the title of your text and any other information (author, year, publication history, etc) that you currently have.  This will simply serve as a running list for us in class tomorrow.

cheers!

SK

Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market was originally published as a children’s poem. It tells the story of two sisters whose curiosity gets the the best of one of them. “Sweet-tooth Laura” (4) was enticed by the goblin’s “apples and quinces/lemons and oranges,/Plump unpecked cherries,/Melons and raspberries”, and exchanged a lock of her golden hair in order to, literally, taste the forbidden fruit (1). Laura falls dreadfully ill due to tasting the fruit, and it is up to her sister Lizzie to come to her rescue. While the story does have a neatly packaged moral at the end common in most children’s stories, this poem contains multiple sexually explicit descriptions that, upon further examination, make it much less suitable for children.

In the scene where Laura gives way to her temptation and tastes the exotic goblin fruit, one would think that the emphasis would be placed on how the fruit tastes. Instead, the action of Laura sucking the juice out of each fruit is described in great detail: “she sucked and sucked and sucked the more/Fruit which that unknown orchard bore;/She sucked until her lips were sore”(4). Perhaps my reading of this is tainted from my 21st century reading, but this description seems extremely sexually charged. If one accepts this description as sexual, the moral at the end of the story becomes even more disturbing. When looked at as the story of a woman who follows her sexual desires, the consequences she faces are rather drastic. After eating the fruit, the narrator implies that she had possibly “gone deaf and blind” and that “her tree of life drooped from the root”(8). The fact that she is a woman following her sexual impulses and is severally punished for doing so perpetuates the Victorian ideals and norms regarding female sexuality: that it should be be acknowledged or acted upon. Similarly, the idea that this poem was something that was made for children reiterates how early these sexual stereotypes were ingrained in Victorian youth, even if they were unaware of the poem’s sexual innuendos. The poem’s ending moral can have many different interpretations, but one of them is undeniably this: women should not follow their desires, or there will be dire consequences.

Perhaps the last thing that comes to mind when reading Christina Rossetti’s poem The Goblin Market is the concept of the femme fatale. However, there are a few instances in the poem where Lizzie, the older sister, seems to possess some femme fatale-like qualities. In this post, I’ll examine how Rossetti’s definition of the femme fatale in her poem In an Artist’s Studio can be applied to Lizzie in The Goblin Market.

The term “femme fatale” was shaped by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid 19th century. Members of the group included artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who depicted a self-absorbed and beautiful femme fatale in his painting Lady Lilith, among others. And although Christina, Dante’s sister, was never officially a member of the Brotherhood, she played a crucial role within the group. Her poem In an Artist’s Studio was written in 1856. The poem references Dante’s art stuido and the many portraits of Elizabeth Siddal, the model for most of Dante’s work at the time.

In the poem, Rossetti notes how “one face looks out from all [Dante’s] canvases,” referring to the many portraits of Elizabeth Siddal. Through Dante’s paintings, Rossetti explains, Elizabeth can be depicted as anything, from “a queen in opal or ruby dress” to “a saint [or] an angel.” Now, the femme fatale, as defined on Merriam-Webster, is an attractive woman who causes trouble for the men who become involved with her. Dante spends all of his time and energy painting this one woman with “all her loveliness,” so Elizabeth must be at least somewhat attractive. Another line from Rossetti’s poem also hints that Dante is obsessed with Elizabeth: “he feeds upon her face by day and night.” The word ‘feed’ suggests that Elizabeth is Dante’s sustenance, in which case he physically cannot live without her and her beauty. At the end of the poem, Rossetti adds: “Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; / Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” Rossetti explicitly states that “she” never waits for the man sorrowfully, but she did when he had hope, when she was in the man’s dream. This description precisely defines a female fatale, a beautiful woman who appears in a man’s dream but not in reality–at least, not for long periods of time.

Now, what if I told you Elizabeth Siddal’s nickname was Lizzie? Because it was. In fact, many articles refer to her as Lizzie, not Elizabeth.

In The Goblin Market, Lizzie isn’t the traditional femme fatale. The poem states that her sister has golden curls, so presumably Lizzie does too, an attractive feature for a young woman. Similar to the face in the paintings, though, she doesn’t seek to cause trouble. However, when the goblins attack Lizzie, tearing her gown, soiling her stockings, stomping on her feet and trying to make her eat the fruit, she resists, ultimately annoying the goblins and causing them to give up instead of submitting to them like another more submissive woman might.

Are both of Rossetti’s characters modeled after Elizabeth Siddal? Perhaps, but more importantly, her definition of the femme fatale in her poem In an Artist’s Studio can also be applied to Lizzie in The Goblin Market, connecting the two poems.

In this post I would like to address the vivid descriptions and usages of hair in Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti. I contend that hair is used in this piece as a symbol of sexual consent and female sexuality, and that Laura’s giving away of her hair is reinforcing gender norms and a form of self-subordination. I would also like to discuss the sexualization of blonde women in particular, not only as a Victorian trend, but in general.

The obsession with hair in the Victorian era is not only evident in Dante Rosetti’s many paintings that we viewed in class, but can also be found in the abundance of hair jewelry (mostly mourning jewelry) Victorians were so fond of. Laura and Lizzie in the poem are described as being blonde “Golden head by golden head” (6). In order to purchase the goblins’ fruits (aka to partake in their sexual orgy essentially) she had to ” “Buy from us with a golden curl” ” (4). Elisabeth Gitter points out in her book The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination that in primitive societies giving up a lock of one’s hair or shaving it was a customary practice brides were forced to undertake, linking this practice inherently with sex or virginity loss (Gitter 938). By giving the goblins her hair to purchase their fruit or partake in the sexual deviancy, she is tricked into giving away her sexual purity as well as simply subordinating herself to the male goblins by giving her intrinsic treasure or currency that is her rare, beautiful hair. This physical selling of the self to men of a different race or breed also reinforces Victorian gender roles not only of men as predators/ “more dominant” but also of women being easily tricked into giving into sexual desires (even to men of a lower class or minority race) which can have major consequences on their class status or reputation, or in Laura’s case, her health (possibly a moral suggestion that being this easily persuaded, giving up oneself in the premarital circumstance may lead to venereal disease).

It is also important to note that in the Victorian era it was typical for women to have long flowing hair as it was a symbol of youth, fertility, and beauty. Women’s hair was usually only cut in times when the woman was ill or committed to a mental asylum or prison. While this was done for ‘cleanliness’ cutting a woman’s hair was also the quickest way to take away a woman’s confidence, making her docile and compliant to the prison or asylum’s discipline. In this way Laura was docile and compliant to the goblins, unable to let them go even after they left her presence, she was constantly thirsting for their fruits and under their persuasion.

I find it additionally interesting that both women are blonde. The fiery red or blonde hair is a common trope throughout Victorian literature. Gitter also cites Medusa, Philomena, and Saint Agnes as literary figures that have been depicted with golden hair, in their cases the unique hair acts as a “prosthetic tongue” to their inner persona, displaying how unique, rare, and valuable they are as women not only in physical beauty but in their intrinsic worth (Gitter 939). I found this reading interesting and important when speaking about Laura in that “Her hair grew thin and grey” (8) after she had given herself up to the goblins. This suggests that by giving consent to the taking of her sexual purity by relinquishing her hair she has lost not only her physical appeal but even her intrinsic worth in that her beautiful hair can no longer speak to the good of her character’s well-being. In this way the text suggests that by giving up your virginity either/and before marriage or to a lower class/minority race, a woman is not only physically devaluing herself but giving up her moral/spiritual worth as a person.

Blonde bombshells still thrive past the Victorian era as well which is certainly an area for further research and how blonde-ness seems to tie in with overt sexuality over time (for example, sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe) and how many women seek to be blonde in order to channel this because “blondes have more fun”. (Just an interesting side note I have no direct thoughts nor more words to get into this, but it could be suggesting that both Laura and Lizzie were already either overtly sexual women or that they were simply extremely attractive in a sexually pleasing way)

Throughout Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll seems to be attempting to force Alice into womanhood. The most obvious example of this is that Alice is in a constantly growing. She never has control over her growing; she just blindly drinks and eats and grows uncontrollably.

Another example of this involves the baby that turns into a pig. The Duchess just throws the baby at Alice to “nurse”. Not only is the baby literally thrown at Alice, leaving her little choice but to catch it, but also Carroll’s use of the word “nurse” brings up some red flags. As discussed in class, nurse can mean to hold or to feed. Breast feeding is associated with motherhood and therefor womanhood because they were basically synonymous in the Victorian era, so by placing Alice in a position where she is expected take care of a baby, Carroll is essentially forcing Alice in to a more mature role then she is probably not ready for.

This seems to be a type of trend for Carroll. He is also a noted photographer of little girls. Through our studies of images so far, it has become apparent that muses for his works are generally women. By having girls be his muse, Carroll has depicted them in a role for woman once again.

This is an interesting concept to investigate considering our classes’ contemplation of Carroll’s desire to photograph children. I have not done enough research to see how deep Carroll’s desire runs.

I think it is easy to say that Alice in Wonderland is simply a coming of age story and that Alice being placed in adult situations has less to do with Carroll’s desire to mature little girls and more to do with Alice’s natural progression in to womanhood. It’s hard for me to see the novel this way though considering Carroll’s other hobby. I know a new criticism critic would disagree with me, but that’s okay. I just can’t get over Carroll’s photography and the implications that would have on his writing.