🌿If you are here, reading this, you have probably read Christina Rossetti's remarkable poem, The Goblin Market. I first read it as a bored teenager in high school, though it was not officially on the curriculum at that time, and I happily passed it over for the more exotic tale, Christabel (Coleridge), which still haunts me to this day. I was, after all, a teenager deeply influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. There was something gorgeous and gothically weird about Poe and all those dead brides that spilled over into Christabel, but with a much more feminist nature. I must have been born "feminist" in personality because certainly no teacher mentioned feminism to me in Mississippi. It wasn't like feminism didn’t exist, it just wasn't discussed in any straightforward fashion. There was no internet. Just libraries for outside information. I rarely saw any TV. I saw it in my neighborhood though, previously as a very small child, the struggle of mothers, particularly, in the labor of handling their laundry.
Yes, laundry, tall piles of laundry sitting in chairs or stacked in the corners of back bedrooms, almost like the omniscient dust in Peake's Gormenghast. Laundry was piled and stacked everywhere. The washing of clothes, the hanging of clothes on the backyard line, the ever present ironing board. Even low middle class working mothers could pay black maids to come help them do the laundry. For me, laundry appeared as ceaseless drudgery to both white and black women, but it was somehow entrenched in their lives and totally necessary. Linens were processed just as stubbornly as the husband's button-up shirts, pressed and lightly starched. I can still smell the starch. I was standing in chairs ironing cloth napkins before I was ten years old. By the time I graduated from high school and moved out of my parents' home, I had made a pact with myself never to iron a thing. It was as if ironing represented the whole marriage dynamic of the bourgeoisie home that I was taught to aspire to and work towards, and I just couldn't bear to look at those piles and stacks of clothes. The ironing board resembled an iron maiden in my mind. Poe again.
It also reminded me of slavery and inequality because the black women who came to help my mother were so poor they did enormous amounts of work for meals and a sack of clothes or a loaf of bread to take home, working long hours, sometimes taking care of white children while their own children rambled around their small shotgun houses, going without food all day long. Christabel, for me, didn't have to be about lesbianism or feminism really. It was about mysticism and subversion and power. A woman with power. A witch of a woman with power. I wanted to be that woman.
A couple of years later, I was reading The Goblin Market again, and here were two lovely sisters. I had sisters, my mother had sisters, and I could identify. The two characters, Laura and Lizzie loved each other, but soon, they are entering into a woods where they were "shopping" for "fruit" nurtured by goblin men. I supposed this action was because they were tired of laundry and other tiring chores. I didn't pass it over this time. I took a long, hard look. Part fairy tale, part morality tale, The Goblin Market possessed a sense of urgency for me. I felt it in the language, how the words moved, a sort of desperation. And it was terribly erotic. I had never read anything quite like it and I wondered incessantly how a woman in the middle of Victorian London could write such a thing. It was as if there were two or more forces at work in the poem. How could I read it? How could a young woman, reading on her own make any sense of it? Still heavily influenced by Christabel and dead brides, I came to look at The Goblin Market as some kind of warning, what all young girls and women face, prior to owning a house with piles and stacks of laundry. The fact that "shopping" now worked as an element, as well as possible "marriage markets" gave me the shivers. And yet, it was so beautiful and so delicious to the senses, I felt sort of swoony reading it. It was like the poem had power to seduce, the same kind of seduction the goblin men possessed, the power born and bred on some "hungry, thirsty roots." I was sexualized. I was mystified. The poem crossed all kinds of borders for me. I was a young woman now, reading something that was speaking to me like some religious people speak in tongues.
Many years went by, and I worked on the poems of P.B. Shelley, wrote college papers on Shelley and Hawthorne, moved on to Modern European Literature because I craved Existentialism over my lapsed Catholicism, but nothing really touched me like The Goblin Market did. Pablo Neruda could write a hundred love poems but never quite seduce me like Christina Rossetti’s The Goblin Market did when I was a young girl. All that fruit, sweet and delicious, the renunciation of ego and self in the longing and withering away which ends in the sick bed where constant daydreams exist, that idle bubble of comfort, not aging, not moving forward, stuck in the woods and liminal spaces of goblin magic and desire. The mind becomes a haven.
Today, it's much more coldly understood than in my innocent days. It’s rattled off like a large street sign: Women, beware. Women, watch out for shopping. Women, embrace your own sex and avoid the pitfalls of patriarchy. It might even be a good, religious allegory, ironically Christian in nature despite all the goblins and magic. Strangely, I remember it as I did as a young girl and hold on to that memory. The feeling of it still lives in the fact that it is a "gorgeously gothic weird" fairy tale that crosses all borders and is open to a dozen interpretations, but make no mistake that the poem is about girls being tempted by goblins of some kind, a long, long laundry list of them. It is clear to me all interpretations are valid. Girls and women are afraid and with good reason. This is a poem about change and danger and exploration. All sorts of fears exist for young girls and women. Fears about their bodies. Fears about sex. Fears about boys and then men. Fears about being desired and even loved. Fears about domestication which sometimes runs against the desire to create art of any kind. Fears about money and self-determination. Fears about agency. Fears about pregnancy in a country where the female body is not given autonomy. Fears about aging and annihilation. Maybe even fears about their own soul.
Girls and goblins, sleeping beauties, snow whites, glass coffins. Absent mothers, dead or overly loving fathers, stepmothers, babies born and lost, lovers of all kinds. This is what I want to read about and write about. I don’t need girls with superpowers, really. I want girls with failures and temptations, who use their own agency to face forces that are working against their self-determinations. The success is in the living, dealing with these forces. With action.
🌿🍃Finally, we live in a time where cult of personality is idealized, where quantity is valued over quality, where loud is often seen as superior, a kind of social Darwinism where only the strong and beautiful and perfect are admired. Failures or doubts or confusion over morality is seen as weak. Binary oppositional structures are so rigid for young people on social networking that we have created tribes, and complexity is lost as well as context. But the goblins are gray and ambiguous and shadowy. They are stronger than ever. Our lives are moving so fast, technology is moving so fast, science is moving so fast, that we are not allowed time to pause, absorb, and negotiate. I’ve never seen a time where I thought fairy tales and poems like The Goblin Market were more important. I ask you to consider that the woods are both dark and deep and our temptations may be no more than a happy, pretty face in the mirror of our phones.
