{"id":1233,"date":"2016-10-29T01:45:13","date_gmt":"2016-10-29T01:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=1233"},"modified":"2016-10-29T01:45:13","modified_gmt":"2016-10-29T01:45:13","slug":"fairies-freud-and-prostitution-the-body-as-a-commodity-in-goblin-market-and-supernatural","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2016\/10\/29\/fairies-freud-and-prostitution-the-body-as-a-commodity-in-goblin-market-and-supernatural\/","title":{"rendered":"Fairies, Freud, and Prostitution: The Body as a Commodity in \u201cGoblin Market\u201d and Supernatural"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first glance, the poem \u201cGoblin Market\u201d by Christina Rossetti and the Supernatural <\/em>episode S6E9 \u201cClap Your Hands If You Believe\u201d (hereafter CYHIYB) tell very different stories. \u201cGoblin Market\u201d describes the tale of a woman tempted by goblins to buy their (sexual) fruit, and her sister\u2019s heroic (and virginal) act of resisting the goblins\u2019 advances while obtaining the fruit juice her sister needs to survive. In CYHIYB, brothers Sam and Dean are trying to solve multiple disappearances in a town that are attributed to UFOs, but the boys discover fairies are responsible after Dean is abducted.<\/p>\n

Digging deeper, both Laura and Dean are changed by their experiences: Laura \u201cdwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn\/To swift decay\u201d (Rossetti, 8) and Dean returns from his abduction able to see fairies while others can\u2019t (see strongly-PG-13-rated scene below):<\/p>\n

[youtube_sc url=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vS3mH5d8SNQ”]<\/p>\n

Both characters were involved in the selling\/trading of bodies. Laura buys fruit for a \u201cclipped\u2026golden lock\u201d (Rossetti, 4) of hair, selling a piece of her body in exchange for the magical fruit, and Dean is taken by the fairies as part of the deal they made with a local shopkeeper, a tithe in exchange for their working for him:<\/p>\n

MR. BRENNAN:\u00a0I asked him just to cure my hands, but he said he would do even better. He would make me more successful than I had ever been. He told me he\u2019d bring a crew of workers, that I could save my business, save my name.
\nSAM:\u00a0In exchange for?
\nBRENNAN:\u00a0He just wanted a place for them to rest, to take of the fruit and fat of the land. I said yes. I wasn\u2019t thinking.
\nSAM:\u00a0And the fruit and the fat was?
\nBRENNAN:\u00a0My firstborn. Not just mine. There\u2019s been others. They\u2019re not stopping. They\u2019re not going to stop. (source<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Both stories involve fairies dealing in the trading of bodies, whether seducing the person into willingly participating, like Laura, or unwillingly \u201ctaken to service Oberon, the King of the Faery\u201d as Dean is (source<\/a>).\u00a0In both cases the trading of bodies is incredibly sexualized \u2013 Laura\u2019s very sexual pleasure in eating the fruit (Rosetti, 4) and Dean describing \u201cbeing pulled to a sort of table,\u201d and Sam interrupts with \u201cProbing table!\u201d This is followed by the already-mentioned theory of Dean being taken to sexually service King Oberon.<\/p>\n

The fairies are intertwined with selling sexual pleasure and bodies \u2013 in other words, fairies are involved in prostitution. As we\u2019ve seen in the “Prostitution<\/a>” article\u00a0we read for class, for a sexually repressed society there were a multitude of prostitutes able to make a living, estimates ranging from 20,000-80,000 within the article. Assumed prostitutes were treated to \u201clewd suggestions\u201d based on appearance, according to the article. So if these prostitutes were so disgusting, yet often managed to make a tidy sum, where does that leave the terrifying, dangerous, seductive fairies? What makes them so much more dangerous than the others involved in the trading and selling of bodies?<\/p>\n

Thinking about it from a Freudian perspective, fairies unashamedly take what they want, seduce who they want and suffer no repercussions: they are able to act on these deep, dark desires that Victorians would have but be unable to act upon; the Victorians could displace their dark desires onto these \u201cother\u201d creatures. Thus, the fairies are terrifying, not only for their actions of kidnapping and seducing, but also for what they represent: shamelessly indulging in one\u2019s dark and sexual fantasies.<\/p>\n

Works Cited: Rosetti, Christina. Goblin Market and Other Poems.<\/em> Dover Thrift Editions. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first glance, the poem \u201cGoblin Market\u201d by Christina Rossetti and the Supernatural episode S6E9 \u201cClap Your Hands If You Believe\u201d (hereafter CYHIYB) tell very different stories. \u201cGoblin Market\u201d describes the tale of a woman tempted by goblins to buy their (sexual) fruit, and her sister\u2019s heroic (and virginal) act of resisting the goblins\u2019 advances … Continue reading Fairies, Freud, and Prostitution: The Body as a Commodity in \u201cGoblin Market\u201d and Supernatural<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}