And Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

In literary history, the theme of the apparent female inability to curb curiosity has been a reoccurring one. In Greek mythology, Psyche's curiosity proved her undoing, when she fetched a lamp to see her husband's features that had been proscribed to behold. In Perrault's "Bluebeard", the fatal effects of curiosity are again depicted, with his new bride succumbing to the temptation to open the one door that was forbidden to her, with disastrous results. It would seem that the image of `woman' through the ages is somewhat unfavourable, suggesting that she is often weak, untrustworthy and is the harbinger of ill events. There is evidence of this doctrine of thought in both Paradise Lost and "Goblin Market", and yet it is manifested in dissimilar ways, influenced greatly by the fact that one author is...