SOURCE: "Female Gothic," in Literary Women, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1976, pp. 90-110.

In the excerpt that follows, Moers regards "Goblin Market" as Rossetti 's contribution to Gothic fiction, or the "literature of the monster," and maintains that the poem serves as an examination of the cruelty and sexuality of children rather than as a Christian allegory.

Thinking about Wuthering Heights as part of a literary women's tradition may open up a new approach to a faded classic of Victorian poetry by a woman who was in fact, as Emily Brontë certainly was not, gentle, pious, and conservative: Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." In 1859, twelve years after the Brontë novel, Rossetti wrote her own contribution to the literature of the monster in the form of a narrative poem. Published in 1862, "Goblin Market" quickly became one of the most familiar and best-loved Victorian poems, and was given to little children to...