Goglin Market - a tale of two sisters.

As the congregation of St. John’s drifted out of the church clutching their Palm crosses, I began to set up for the final production of ‘Visions in the Wilderness.’ The Space Drama Company which on this occasion consisted of five middle-aged actors were due to present an adaptation of Christina Rossetti’s highly acclaimed poem, ‘Goblin Market’ written one hundred and fifty years ago. As we are planning to tour this show to diverse community venues in the coming weeks, we have kept the staging as minimalist as possible. The poem tells the story of two Victorian sisters who live on the edge of the woods, and relates their dramatic encounters with goblin merchants who entice them with forbidden fruits at night. Laura succumbs to temptation and suffers a terrible sickness of body and soul, until she is restored by her heroic sibling Lizzie. To do so, Lizzie has to visit the dreaded goblins in the woods and withstand their sinister assaults, as they seek to defile her in the same way as her sister. I borrowed five cleverly crafted tree stumps from the props department at my school, piled bark-chippings around each one, to give them a more rooted appearance - and hey presto, we were in the woods! The stumps were arranged within a large circle of seats, providing somewhere for each actor to perch, whilst narrating the poem to the surrounding audience. As well as reciting the poem, we physically embodied the characters and dramatic encounters as often as we could, to really bring the verse off the page. Two members of the church had created an over-hanging orchard of exotic fruits which was lowered on a winch from the ceiling during the opening chant of the goblins: ‘Come buy, come buy!’ Sadly we won’t be taking this design feature with us ‘on the road’, but for now, this gave a powerful focal point for the symbolic heart of the poem. What are Rossetti’s forbidden fruits supposed to represent? Literary scholars have discussed this question, just as Biblical commentators have reflected on those hanging in the garden of Eden. Biographical facts provide some clues. Rossetti wrote Goblin Market around the time she began caring for fallen women in Highgate Penitentiary. Many of these were still teenagers, and had been lured into prostitution by pimps who strolled the streets of London by night. The girls were enticed by the prospect of escaping a life of poverty, since they could make more money in an evening, than many hours of grinding toil in the workhouse. However, apart from the hazard of disease, prostitution often led to a complete spiritual collapse for these poor souls, since they were ostracised from family and society in general. Many a girl ended up face down in the River Thames, unless they found a ‘sister’ like Lizzie to rescue them before it was too late. Rossetti, inspired by her robust Christian faith, became such a sister at the Highgate Penitentiary in the mid 1850’s, and her experience of serving there must surely have fired her imagination while writing the poem. However, it has been suggested that the poem reflects Rossetti’s spiritual journey in more complex ways. She was a sickly lass, herself, from her adolescence onwards. Her illness seems to have been both physical and psychological. If she lived in our time, we should say she was prone to bouts of acute depression. We may also conclude, as her brothers William and Dante Gabriel did even then, that her intense religious faith was as much the cause as the cure of her frequent maladies. Her older sister Maria was perhaps more the model for the heroic Lizzie in the poem than the authoress. Maria eventually became a nun, and throughout her life embodied the solid Victorian virtues expected of healthy females of the time. Christina was the poet, the artist struggling to give expression to an intense inner life, at a time when women were beginning to emerge from centuries of social and psychological oppression. Thus on one level, the poem can be read as a didactic tract for fallen women, pointing along the path of salvation from the degradation of vice. Yet at the same time it captures the tension between two sides of the poet herself, and perhaps many of her more intelligent, sensitive contemporaries. There is Lizzie the more conventional sister who listens to the advice of her elders and thus manages to survive in the brutal patriarchal society governed by Goblin merchants. The fat cats of the Victorian age? And there is Laura, who yearns to break out of the tightly proscribed lifestyle for virtuous young maids of her age, and discovers how vulnerable that makes her, in the ruthless, competitive society of the Darwinian age. Although Rossetti was a Christian and in many ways a high achieving woman for her time, she does not appear to be a happy or whole individual judging by recent biography. Her writing often seems to be a form of therapy, disguised behind the formal patterns of the verse. Many a commentator has remarked on the rich, even erotic sensuality of her description of fruit in the poem. On the one hand she preaches against forbidden desires, on the other she seems to almost celebrate them, in a splendid display of linguistic virtuosity. Whilst Lizzie is being force-fed the fruits by her goblin tormentors, Rossetti writes: ‘ Lizzie uttered not a word; / would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in: / But laughed in her heart to feel the drip / Of juice that syruped all her face / And lodged in dimples of her chin, / And streaked her neck with quaked like curd.’ There is a fine line between a positive self-denial and a negative repression and it so easily becomes blurred in our quest for fulfilment. There is much talk today from both religious teachers and pyschologists, about the importance of acknowledging our shadow side. That ofcourse is not the same as indulging it, but rather learning to understand and harness the deep conflicts within us in a constructive and creative way. I suspect that Rossetti's personal struggles resulted from her fear, or even disgust of her shadow side. Without the wisdom of Jung, Victorian moralists saw only the black and white of good and evil. This leads to self rejection, and thus often to depression. Yet in her writing, in her art, Rossetti expresses this shadow side in a way that is ultimately healing. In the character of Laura for example, she finds a sensuous and playful way of exploring this side of herself. Then through Lizzie, she expresses compassion and forgiveness to her darker side which brings empowerment to both the sisters by the end of the poem. So with this tale of two sisters, Rossetti brings us to the heart of her complex inner world. It's sad, though perhaps not surprising, considering the era she lived in, that Rossetti herself was not liberated or empowered by such spiritual insights in poems like 'Goblin Market.' Yet perhaps we may benefit from them, in our more enlightened age. A mature spirituality teaches us to live with, and positively embrace ambiguity, paradox and contradiction rather than reduce our world to a black and white of simplistic moral absolutes. The Space Drama Company will take this dramatized poem to the YMCA in Horsham, a retreat centre for the blind and partially sighted in Burgess Hill, a psychiatric ward in Crawley, perhaps a prison or two in Sussex. I hope and pray that this tale of two sisters, the goblins and their fruits, will be an entertaining and stimulating starting point for much discussion and reflection for us all! Watch this space!