Reading Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" From The Perspective Of "The Other" In The Second Sex

Christina Georgina Rossetti was one of the most important women poets in the nineteenth-century England.Her poetry mainly takes love,death and religion as theme and enjoys high reputation with its fresh and aesthetic style,simple and sincere language,rich symbols and metaphors.Rossetti's poetry in her life is rich in numbers,due to the strong religious charm imbedded in Rossetti's works,foreign scholars mostly focus on the religious influence and passionate religious beliefs in her poetry.Love is one of the important themes.Through careful readings of Rossetti's love poems,the author finds that women in Rossetti's love poems are portrayed as female images with a tragic fate.This thesis takes Rossetti's love poem “Goblin Market” as the research object,trying to discover and explore Rossetti's deep concerns for the fate of women who are lost in a predicament of survival in Victorian era by close reading.“Goblin Market” is the best-known poem in the collection of poems Goblin Market and Other Poems published by Rossetti in 1862.For a long period of time,“Goblin Market” is regarded as “the poem written to children” due to its smooth language,twists and turns in plot,rich fruit images and vivid image of goblins.However,by the close analysis of three female images in the poem,Laura,Lizzie and Jeanie,the author of the thesis finds that Rossetti shows her concerns about the woman questions in the society and presents the living dilemma of Victorian women.Simone de Beauvoir carefully analyzes the different fates of women in different situations.She believes that women are not born to be women,but it is education and social customs that force them to hide their transcendence,show their immanence and become the absolute other.This thesis uses Beauvoir's feminist theory in The second Sex to conduct an in-depth analysis of women as “the Other” in patriarchal society,including the presentation of sex in “Goblin Market” and the causes of women as “the Other”.In the second chapter,three female characters in “Goblin Market” are carefully analyzed in order to explore the status of women in the love relationship with men.In the third chapter,the detailed analysis of independent Lizzie and of the significance of sisterhood between Laura and Lizzie provide the possibility to understand the feminist thoughts expressed by Rossetti,that is,women who wants to pursue freedom should support each other and be independent of men spiritually and materially.