SOURCE: "Rossetti's Goblin Market" in The Explicator, Vol. 51, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 22-24.

In the following essay, Drake discusses "Goblin Market" as a modified epyllion—a small epic—in which Lizzie plays the role of the epic heroine.

Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" exhibits several of the characteristics and conventions of epic poetry and should be studied as a somewhat modified version of the epyllion—a poem that emulates the classical epic in subject matter and technique, but is decidedly shorter (typically depicting just a single heroic episode) and narrower in scope—modified because the epyllion is ideally composed using dactylic hexameter, and "Goblin Market" is, of course, written in free verse.

A substantial number of critics have noted that Rossetti's heroine, Lizzie, resembles a transfigured Christ who redeems her peccant sister by sacrificing herself to the malevolent goblins.¹ Feminist critics, meanwhile, have designated Lizzie a pioneering member of their...