Subverting Romance and Sexuality in "Goblin Market" and "No, Thank You, John" Millie Jacoby 12th Grade

In Literary Theory: The Basics, H. Bertens asserts that even in the works of culturally and sexually liberal male writers such as D.H Lawrence and Henry Miller, male characters are “denigrating, exploitative, and repressive in their relations with women.” In the poems Goblin Market and No, Thank You, John, Christina Rossetti subverts the idea that female characters must remain submissive and resigned to accept conventional heterosexual, male-dominated relationships which were promoted in patriarchal Victorian society, and should instead embrace independence, sisterhood and homosexuality. Rossetti’s work provides a literary space for platonic, romantic and even sexual female relationships to thrive, and this serves to empower females as a whole.

By bringing her female characters’ avoidance and outright rejection of male advances to the forefront of her poetry, as well as presenting male characters’ pursuit of women as perverse and predatory, Rossetti brazenly shuns conventional heterosexual relationships. Both Lizzie and Laura in Goblin Market do this at the beginning of the poem when the goblin men try to entice them: "We must not look at goblin men/We must not buy their fruits." The repetition of “must not” implies a sense of...