Goblin Market

Christina Rossetti's narrative poem Goblin Market explores temptation, desire, female identity, and the expectations placed on Victorian women. The poem follows two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who encounter goblin merchants selling irresistible fruit. After Laura gives in to temptation, she becomes consumed by her desire and begins to suffer. Lizzie risks her own safety to save her sister, emphasizing the importance of female loyalty and sisterhood. Rossetti uses sensual imagery, symbolic fruit, and unconventional representations of female desire to complicate Victorian ideas about morality and femininity. Although published before the height of the Decadent Movement, the poem anticipates several of its central concerns, particularly the relationship between beauty, temptation, and desire. Within this exhibition, Goblin Market demonstrates that challenges to Victorian expectations were already developing within Victorian literature itself, providing ideas that later Decadent writers would transform and explore further.