Women In Goblin Market

“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti is a poem about two sisters that are faced with the temptation of eating goblin fruit. Laura was cautious at first but succumbed to the temptation, but her sister Lizzie was able to resist the enticement and struggled against being force fed the fruit too. Laura’s health began to fail, while Lizzie stayed healthy. In the Victorian Era, it was socially known and mostly accepted that a woman was to be kept in a household, and be protected by a male figure. If the woman left the house unprotected, bad events would happen to them. “Goblin Market” introduce the now modern idea that not all women need male protection, some women are able to face the big, bad world. In Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”, a woman is killed after coming in from the outside to meet a secret lover. The Victorian Age society believed that women were thought as the lesser of the two genders, and unable to face the outside world without consequences. In “Goblin Market”, it states,” ‘Nay, take a seat with us, Honour and eat with us,’…’Thank you,’ said Lizzie: ‘But one waits at home alone for me’” (Rossetti 1504). Since it was thought that a woman could not handle herself in the outside world, the fact that Lizzie refuses to give into temptation starts to inspire the idea of women being able …show more content…
Laura symbolizes how the Victorian Age society saw women; if a woman went outside, she would fall victim to evil beings. Lizzie, on the other hand, symbolizes the strength that women possess in resisting temptations of a world outside a home setting. In “The Great Social Evil”, a woman becomes a prostitute after leaving her home, and while this may have happened, it is not the fault of the woman for taking that risk of exploring the