Christina Rossetti: Day 1

"White and golden Lizzie stood . . ." (l.408)
"Goblin Market"

Points of Reflection

1. do the sonnets assigned for today together suggest a varied or unfaltering view of romantic love?

2. in an article entitled “The Political Economy of Fruit,” critic Richard Menke claims that, “In a curious way, the motion of Goblin Market itself parallels and reiterates the movement of fruit, its drift from the physical to the metaphorical and back to the physical” (The Culture of Christina Rossetti 106). What various ideas and objects might these “metaphorical” fruit stand for, if one were to read the fruits as symbolic?

3. does the evidence support the assertions of Lorraine Janzen Kooistra in “Visualizing the Fantastic Subject” that “Rossetti invites her readers to contemplate the ways in which her hero, Lizzie, has the power to be both spectator and spectacle without forfeiting her individual subjectivity” (Culture 141)? Kooistra reiterates this point late when she claims “Rossetti both exploits and subverts the notion that women are objects of the gaze” (Culture 142).

4) what is the dominant tone of “Winter: My Secret”?

cover for "Goblin Market" (1859)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu