"Goblin Market"

Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt (Essay Date Fall 1992)

SOURCE: Shurbutt, Sylvia Bailey. "Revisionist Mythmaking in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market': Eve's Apple and Other Questions Revised and Reconsidered." The Victorian Newsletter 82 (fall 1992): 40-44.

In the following essay, Shurbutt argues that in "Goblin Market" Rossetti revises traditional Christian myths to produce feminist readings of the Fall and the Redemption.

The notion of a woman writer attempting to offer an alternative version to the patriarchal explanation of being is not new: from Amelia Lanier to Virginia Woolf, women writers have attempted to amend traditional Western myth with its misogynist overtones, especially biblical myth so much a part of our Western ethical system. Sometimes blatantly overt (as in Lanier's apology for Eve, Nightingale's declaration of a female Christ or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's dream of a revisionist Woman's Bible), sometimes subtly muted (as in Shelley's retelling of paradise lost...