SOURCE: "'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 415-34.

In the following essay, Carpenter suggests that "Goblin Market" presents a radical view of women's bodies and appetites that was influenced by Rossetti 's participation in the Oxford Movement's "women's mission to women," in which she worked with prostitutes and homeless women.

When Alice falls down the rabbit-hole she behaves, as Nancy Armstrong has pointed out, like a typical shopper—picking out and then putting back a jar of orange marmalade from the shelves of the rabbit-hole.¹ Later, she discovers that objects in Wonderland tend to come inscribed with such unsubtle advertising ploys as "eat me" or "drink me." Noting that all Alice's troubles seem to "begin and end with her mouth," Armstrong relates Alice's dilemma to "a new moment in the history of...