The concept of the ‘proper feminine’ is questioned when in relation to the two texts that I will discuss in this essay, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ . If anything, these two texts use specific language to reveal a representation of the ‘improper feminine’. Throughout both texts sexual and religious connotations are used, these connotations help to highlight the unstable, contradictory and uneven conceptualization of feminine gender and female sexuality in the nineteenth century. The essay will include and use ‘The Fallen Woman’ in conjunction with these texts and show how it works in relation to emphasising the idea of the ‘improper feminine’. It will also mention the influences surrounding writers…show more content… Rossetti continues to use repetition throughout the text but uses it in different forms. This time Rossetti is using repetition by giving more than one description of the ‘unnamed forbidden fruit’. ‘sweeter than honey from the rock’ ‘wormwood to the tongue’
Both descriptions can be seen as quite sensual, depending upon the reading you are taking from it, thus being a sexual one from the connotations being used. Not only is the fruit ‘forbidden’ and unnamed, which could consequently link to the text having an unnamed meaning, but Rossetti also proposes an understanding of prostitution. ‘Buy from us with golden curl’
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl’
In this passage, Laura is giving up a part of herself to the Goblins, insinuating some form of prostitution whereby exchanging or selling something but the exchange is not equal at the end’ Prostitution for the female is not always an equal exchange, like Laura’s hair for the ‘forbidden fruit’ is not an equal exchange. Although both parties are gaining something from it that they perhaps need at the time the woman is losing a part of her dignity that she will carry with her