Fairytale Feminism

            This final act though is merely the ultimate climax of the poem’s central argument for the self-sufficiency of women. Rosetti establishes the necessity of female economic independence, then establishes the necessity of “sisterhood” or women advocating for women, and culminates in independence from men as the purveyors of sexual satisfaction. This view though is generally dismissed as a modernist indulgence because Rosetti was noted for her piousness and famous for her devotional verse and commitment to religion. The very idea of her postulating lesbianism is seen as far-fetched. However there’s some curious facts of the Victorian era that are generally overlooked in this consideration “in the eighteenth century, women’s romantic friendships were seen as unthreatening preliminaries to married life and even beneficial to the development of heterosexual love (Rowanchild). Indeed regarding lesbian sex “Queen Victoria was apparently unable to acknowledge even the possibility of female-female sexual relationships and women were left out of the 1885 Act which outlawed same-sex acts between men”(Rowanchild). This cultural conception of women’s relationships with each other combined with the era’s notable increase in feminist literature, and Rosetti’s own work with “fallen women” generates a preponderance of evidence that the apparent sensually sexual language she employs and themes of lesbian love and feminist independence were in fact what she intended.

Works Cited

Hill, Marylu. “‘Eat me, drink me, love me’: Eucharist and the erotic body in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” Victorian Poetry 43.4 (2005): 455+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 May 2010.

Rossetti, Christina Georgina, and Arthur Rackham. Goblin Market. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2010. Print.

Rowanchild, Anira. “Love between women: Anira Rowanchild looks at the love that Queen Victoria did not have a name for, in poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” The English Review. (Vol. 19). .1