Breaking the Boundaries between the Natural and the Supernatural World in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” Boglarka Toth College

Christina Rossetti’s most well-known poem, the “Goblin Market,” interested many literary and cultural scholars over the years, providing them an immense opportunity for writing down different, individual interpretations. Various topics were created by people who each read a unique meaning into the tale, for example the ultimate importance of heroic, sacrificial sisterhood; the underlying homoerotic tension between the girls; or the presence of far darker, human or inhuman, phenomena working in the background. Some of these above-mentioned scholars, like Mary Arseneau, partly focus on how Rossetti’s spiritualism filters through the symbolism of her work thus enabling a morally Christian, or even allegorical, reading. In this sense, the presence of the extraordinary, or the supernatural in general, is studied solely on a theological level, and is mainly seen in temptations presented by demonic creatures and in the eventual redemption of a once innocent, but now sinful soul. My aim is to present another, broader layer of supernatural reading that may be explicitly understood as a result of its familiarity, yet I believe it still deserves to be discussed and analyzed. The story of the young sisters, Laura and Lizzie, captures a...