From Chains to Change: Sexuality and Salvation in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
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Authors
Eugene Ngezem
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Journal Article, Academic Journal
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Abstract
As the title intimates, this essay examines a painful journey through acute sexuality to gleeful redemption in Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a symbolic representation of a Victorian society that seems insidiously hostile to female fulfillment. Having volunteered for ten years as a worker in the house of former prostitutes striving to be reintegrated into society, Rossetti seems to suggest that fallen women must be protected, supported, and reintegrated into their communities, for their cataclysmic choices are consequent on a yearn for survival in a harsh, thwarting Victorian patriarchal system, and not on lust.