Tag: goblins

This Poem is Not for Babies

When I first read Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, I took it to be a poem about the dangers of female sexuality, pre-marital sex, race, and emotional entanglement, with a sexual assault (or, quite possibly, rape) scene thrown in for kicks and giggles. So hearing that this poem is for children kind of blew my mind. I mean, look at the scene on page 12:

 

“One may lead a horse to water,

Twenty cannot make him drink.

Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,

Coaxed and fought her,

Bullied and besought her,

Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,

Kicked and knocked her,

Mauled and mocked her,

Lizzie uttered not a word;

Would not open lip from lip

Lest they should cram a mouthful in:

But laughed in heart to feel the drip

Of juice that syrupped all her face,

And lodged in dimples of her chin,

And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.

At last the evil people,

Worn out by her resistance,

Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit

Along whichever road they took,” (12)

 

Well. That’s not disturbing at all. If there wasn’t a word limit on this prompt, I’d quote the preceding pair of stanzas, but I think the above gets my point across quite well. This poem uses the good sister, Lizzie, to suggest that nice young women don’t have sex. In fact, nice young women are so against pre-marital sex that it is impossible to rape them, because they just won’t “open lip from lip.” Great. It’s always encouraging to hear the suggestion that if women just resist hard enough, they cannot be raped (although the poem does suggest they can still be brutalized, and have “juice” sprayed all over their faces, which is does not sound pleasant in the least).

 

This stanza is more than just victim blaming, though. If Lizzie were to “open lip from lip,” like her younger sister did, she would become addicted to something she can never have again. In this case, that something is goblin fruit, although the juicy, juicy fruit is a thinly veiled representation of sex. That relationship between fruit (sex) and addiction is a clear warning to young women that if they start having sex before marriage, they will be unable to resist the temptation to do it again. In the poem, this addiction leads them to waste away, but it suggests a slightly less fatal outcome for actual Victorian women who give in to temptation. Victorian men wanted to marry virgins, so if a woman was found to be having sex, it probably wouldn’t have be good for her marriage prospects. In a society where marriage and procreation make up a woman’s entire purpose in life, losing the chance for those things to happen would mean an end to her future. The loss of a future is strikingly similar to the loss of a life, so suddenly, a deadly addiction to fruit makes a lot more sense in the context of Victorian sexuality.

Girls and Goblins: Gendered Tensions

Maurice Sendak’s 1981 illustrated children’s book, Outside Over There, tells the story of a young girl named Ida who must rescue her baby sister from goblins who have kidnapped her in order to marry her off to one (or more) of their kind. The title page of Outside Over There alone picks up the themes of foreign anxiety, the otherworldly realm of sexual danger, gender divisions, and sisterly care—all of which we’ve discussed in the context of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.”

The title page to Maurice Sendak's 1981 Outside Over There
The title page to Maurice Sendak’s 1981 Outside Over There

The title itself evokes the foreign world of the goblins: it is not only outside, while the girls often remain inside the house, but it is also over there, in a space not normally inhabited by the baby or by Ida (one is kidnapped and taken there, the other must “climb backwards out” of her window and fly around for some time to find it). The dangerous otherness of this world is emphasized by the goblins’ mysterious grey cloaks and hunched, low-to-the-ground posture, as well as the black, absent spaces where their faces should be. These features contrast greatly with the pastel colors worn by the girls, Ida’s upright posture and the baby’s distance from the ground, and the anxiety obvious on both of the girls’ faces. Elsewhere in the text, it is made clear that the goblins are all male, so the physical space between the goblins and the sisters on the title page can be read not only as an anxiety-bred othering, but also as an intentionally enforced gender divide. Ida’s anxious, serious sideways glance, the tightness of her grip around her sister, and the tension in her feet and shoulders all convey her instinct to protect her sister from the parade of otherworldly goblins. I read this as a sexual anxiety because later in the text, Ida’s first thought upon realizing that the goblins have taken her sister is that they have “stole[n] [her] sister away […] To be a nasty goblin’s bride!” Before she actually discovers them in the middle of a wedding, her explicit goal is to interrupt their “goblin honeymoon”—with its distinct connotation of sexual activity.

It is interesting to put Outside Over There in conversation with Rossetti’s text, not only because of the obvious content-based and underlying thematic similarities, but also because both claim a role as children’s literature. Why do these texts that sensually entrance the young reader (either through imagery or illustration) encompass so much sexual danger for young girls? Why is it the girls’ job to save their sisters, with their parents providing mere oral/anecdotal guidance rather than practical support only after a kidnapping or fruit-buying-encounter has already occurred (Ida’s father sings a song on the sea that guides her to the goblin lair; Lizzie and Laura tells her children and Lizzie’s about the dangers of goblin men—but Ida’s mother dreams absentmindedly of her husband and leaves Ida to take care of the baby, and Lizzie and Laura’s parents never appear in the text)?