Department of English

This thesis interrogates Christina Rossetti’s 19th century poem “Goblin Market” through both an eco-feminist and queer lens by emphasizing that women’s kinship to nature and intimate proximity to each other offer restoration and autonomy in the presence of violent, hegemonic, patriarchial systems. Current scholarship attends to these ideas but does not necessarily suggest that the queer acts of Lizzie and Laura fuel their rejection of the harmful economies of the goblin market. However, I argue that Lizzie and Laura’s sensual relationship to both the natural world and each other generates enough energy to liberate their bodies from posing as transgressive economies for the goblin men. This argument is articulated in three parts. First, I argue that fruit operates as a euphemism to reveal how the goblin men pose a unique threat to the women’s corporeality by inducing sexual, bodily harm through their heterosexual, male desire. Second, I position the circadian tempos of the natural world against the disorientation caused by the artificiality of the market space as expressed through Lizzie’s interaction with the goblin men. Finally, I look to the embryonic glimpses of queerness in Laura and Lizzie’s relationship, as well as the destruction of phallic imagery, to argue for queer acts as a restorative force against a violent and heterosexual bodily economy. These three core tenets are regulated by temporal markers that condition Rossetti’s poetics, ultimately revealing that as women experience the cyclical rhythms of communing with nature, they escape the threat of male inscription within harmful hegemonic systems.