SOURCE: "The Aesthetics of Renunciation," in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 539-80.

In the following excerpt, Gilbert and Gubar argue that "Goblin Market" demonstrates Rossetti 's opinion of the necessity for female renunciation of the "risks and gratifications of art. "

Like [Rossetti's]Maude, "Goblin Market" (1859) depicts multiple heroines, each representing alternative possibilities of selfhood for women. Where Maude's options were divided rather bewilderingly among Agnes, Mary, Magdalen, and Maude herself, however, "Goblin Market" offers just the twinlike sisters Lizzie and Laura (together with Laura's shadowy precursor Jeanie) who live in a sort of surrealistic fairytale cottage by the side of a "restless brook" and not far from a sinister glen. Every morning and evening, so the story goes, scuttling, furry, animal-like goblins ("One had a cat's face, / One whisked a tail, / One tramped at a rat's...