KUBLA KHAN

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the 14th child of a Devon clergyman. Before his death in 1834, he wrote many poems and prose works (often of a religious or spiritual nature) which have become recognised as significant components of the Romantic movement. His work varies, ranging from short lyrical ballads, epic supernatural poems and long philosophical pieces.

He is often seen as playing second fiddle to his close friend William Wordsworth, but he was responsible for shaping much of the other's major writing. Coleridge's work is often beautiful, strange and haunting. His poems are still popular today, especially famous pieces like The Eolian Harp, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and, perhaps the best known, Kubla Khan.






The Romantic movement is generally acknowledged to have taken place between around 1780 and 1830, and poetry particularly, can be seen to be the beginning of 'modern' thinking about nature, spirituality and philosophy; even anticipating twentieth century ways of thinking, such as Gaiaism and Environmentalism.

During this period, poets began to challenge traditional views of rationality, religion and human interaction with the world around us. While still drawing upon the images and sensibilities of their predecessors, the Romantic poets began to assemble a vision of a harmonic universe that did not rely on the old hierarchy of God, human, beast and plant. Part of the Romantic movement also embraced Pantheism;

“…the view that the Universe (Nature) and God are identical. Pantheists, thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or a creator god. The word derives from the Greek: pan meaning ‘all’ and  theos meaning ‘God’. As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that “God” is best seen as a way of relating to the Universe. Although there are divergences within Pantheism, the central ideas found in almost all versions are the Cosmos as an all-encompassing unity and the sacredness of Nature.” (Definition from Wiki.)

The populist view of these men and women is one of proto-hippies, wandering around the countryside stoned, hallucinating and becoming one with nature. While some of these elements do hold true, this simplistic overview misses many of the deeper social, political, religious and intellectual issues raised by these pioneers of poetry. Some of the great names to be associated with the movement were William and Dorothy Wordsworth, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Thomas de Quincey.


Kubla Khan was written in 1798, but not published until much later at the request of Lord Byron. The poem is usually printed with a preface written by Coleridge that explains some of the detail of how it came to be written. Specifically, he claims that the original work came to him in a dream while he was under medication. The poem was meant to be some 200 - 300 lines long3 and came to the poet fully formed. However, he was interrupted when he was writing down the work and when he came to continue, all he could remember was the remaining fragment. The vision of a palace built for the mighty Kublai Khan, came from the book Purchas's Pilgrimage which Coleridge says he was reading when he fell asleep.

Here is the little tale; it amuses me, but also reminds me of the many times that I have thought of a wonderful metaphor, usually when I’m doing something dull, like washing the dishes. Nothing as glamorous as being stoned in an opium haze -- only to find that the wonderful idea, has just slipped away.

“The Person from Porlock, was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock (a village in the South West of England, near Exmoor) while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "Person from Porlock", "Man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders.”

English poet and essayist Thomas De Quincey speculated, in his own Confessions of an English Opium Eater, that the mysterious figure may have been Coleridge's physician, Dr. P. Aaron Potter, who regularly supplied the poet with laudanum.

The poem mixes fantastical images of the place where Kubla Khan had ordered his pleasure dome to be constructed with Coleridge's yearning to return to the vision. In purely Romantic terms, the imagery in the poem shows the serene beauty and frightening violence of nature tamed by human thought and craft. There is also a spiritual undercurrent in the veneration of the environment and the prophetic wisdom of the ancients. The poet also places his own involvement within a religious framework by saying that he has 'drunk the milk of paradise' by having this dream. More modern interpretations might focus on Coleridge's relationship with drugs and how he seems to wish to withdraw into his hallucinations. A parallel could be drawn between the imagery of a contradictory landscape and the human psyche.

However the poem is viewed or interpreted, its timeless beauty and surreal qualities make it stand out as one of the great works of English literature.




In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

    But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
    A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
    As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced :
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
    And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.
    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
    And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war !

    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves ;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw :
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

THE TALE OF HARRY CRAWFORD

From Wiki.

Eugenia Falleni (Harry Crawford)
(1875 - 1938) Italy - Australia
Eugenia Falleni (1875–1938) (aka Lena Falleni, Nina Falleni, Eugene Falleni or Martello, Gene Falleni, Harry Leo (or Jack) Crawford and Jean Ford) was a female-to-male transsexual and convicted murderer.


Born near Livorno, Italy (according to family accounts), Falleni was the eldest of 22 children, of whom seventeen (ten boys and seven girls) survived. She migrated with her family toWellington in New Zealand circa 1877, aged about two. Her father, a stern disciplinarian, worked as a carrier with a horse and cart and as fisherman, among other occupations, and Eugenia, after repeatedly dressing as a boy to obtain work in brickyards and stables during her teenage years, left home in the guise of cabin boy.

By her own account her sex was discovered on board ship, and she was put ashore pregnant in Newcastle, Australia, in 1898, either as a result of rape or a consensual relationship. In the same year she gave birth to a daughter, Josephine, in Sydney, and put the child into the care of an Italian-born woman in Double Bay, and afterwards took on a male identity as ‘Harry Leo Crawford’, of Scots descent. After a series of manual jobs in meat works, pubs and in a rubber factory, in 1912 Harry entered the employ of a Dr G. R. C. Clarke in Wahroongah, Northern Sydney, as a general useful and sulky driver. On 19 February 1913 at the Methodist Parsonage in inner city Balmain, claiming to be a widower aged 38, Crawford went through a marriage ceremony with Annie Birkett, a widow of 35 with a 13-year-old son, who had been working as Dr Clarke’s housekeeper. Annie set up a confectionary shop in Balmain, evidently unaware that her husband was not a man, while Harry continued as a peripatetic manual worker.




In 1917, after Annie had apparently threatened to reveal her husband to the authorities for his deception, the couple quarrelled and Annie disappeared. Her body was discovered in October that year, partially burned and with cracks to the skull, in a forested picnic area near the Lane Cove River, but it remained unidentified for over two years. In the meantime, in a Sydney registry office in September 1919, Harry Crawford underwent another marriage ceremony with Elizabeth King Allison, a spinster.

Also in the intervening time, Annie’s son had alerted the police to his mother’s prolonged disappearance; the body of Annie was exhumed and identified, and Harry was arrested on 5 July 1920. At the time of his arrest, while living with Elizabeth in a house in Stanmore and working in an Annandale hotel, he asked to be placed in the women’s cells and requested that his wife be not apprised that he was not a man. Among male clothing in a locked leather suitcase, police located an ‘article’, later exhibited in court, made of wood and rubber bound with cloth in the shape of a phallus or dildo.

At Falleni’s preliminary hearing and trial for murder at Darlinghurst Court house in October 1920, the ‘Man-Woman case’ created a press sensation, with the accused appearing in the dock first in a man’s suit and then in women’s clothes. Falleni pleaded not guilty to the murder, but her alleged immorality in passing herself off as a man was made much of in the popular press, which portrayed her as a monster and a pervert. She was convicted and condemned to death, but her sentence was commuted to detainment at the Governor’s Pleasure. When released from Long Bay Prison eleven years later in February 1931 she assumed the name ‘Jean Ford’ and became the proprietor of a boarding house in Paddington, Sydney. On 9 June 1938 she stepped off the pavement in front of a motorcar in nearby Oxford Street, and died of her injuries the following day in Sydney Hospital. Eugenia Falleni was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at Rookwood Cemetery.

In the intervening years, after the publication by the press and popular crime writers of a large amount of speculation and various contradictory accounts of her life (many of them propagated by Falleni herself, who had grown up believing that impersonating a man was criminal offence), the case was largely forgotten until the appearance of a detailed biography of Falleni in 1988, after which her story was taken up in Australia by a number of artists, playwrights and short film makers, museum and photography curators, and academics with an interest in gender studies.

Times change. It’s been seventy years since Harry lived. Today, he’d have had the option of surgery. His life would have been completely different.

THE FARMER'S BRIDE: Charlotte Mew

From The Guardian newspaper. “Poem of the week”, 1st September 2008.
Charlotte Mew's work had already attracted the interest of Ezra Pound when, in 1912, Alida Monro spotted the poem, "The Farmer's Bride", in a copy of The Nation. She was "electrified". She immediately committed the verses to memory.

In the following year, Alida and her husband, the Georgian poet Harold Monro, started up the Poetry Bookshop in Theobalds Road, near the British Museum. Not only a shop and a poets' meeting place, it was also a publishing venture dedicated to the work of younger writers. In 1916, the press brought out the 17 poems that form Charlotte Mew's strikingly original first collection, “The Farmer's Bride.”

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) also wrote short stories; perhaps it was her prose-writing that led to a notably elastic treatment of the poetic line. Her style is elegant; graceful. She brings musicality to her vivid, naturalistic speech rhythms. Though she never seems to have written free verse, she was unafraid to mix meters and experiment with different line-lengths. It's said that she asked that the poems of “The Farmer's Bride”, should be typeset sideways, so as to accommodate those with unusually long lines.

Mew's poems amount to a slender but remarkable body of work. She brings to Georgian poetry not only a distinctive technique but an unusual, in many ways un-English, sensibility. She read widely in French, and in her younger days frequently visited Paris and Brittany. She was attracted by Catholicism, and there is a sensuous, Southern colour in much of her work.

The intense, hopeless romantic love that she often depicts, reflects her own emotional entombment. Both a sister and a brother had been confined to mental hospitals. Charlotte and her artist sister, Anne, vowed never to marry, because of the fear of hereditary insanity. Most of Mew's romantic attachments were to women, in fact, but she moved in a Bloomsbury less liberated than that of the Woolfs, enclosed in a shabby gentility where lesbian longings were hardly likely to be fulfilled.

The speaker in "The Farmer's Bride" tells his story with powerful immediacy, and no attempt at concealment. His dialect is tactfully indicated. Mew's paternal grandfather had been a farmer on the Isle of Wight, and she made childhood visits there. Perhaps this is where both the tale and dialect originated.




Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

The changing seasons that a farmer would naturally register in terms of work patterns, serve here to sharpen unbearable emotion. Three summers have passed since the ill-omened wedding: autumn is fading to winter, and the sense of wasted life is building. The terrified bride seems to be on the edge of madness. She communicates only with animals and birds: that she is wild and elusive like these creatures is beautifully suggested in the tripping dactylic rhythms (e.g. "shy as a leveret"). The rhyming scheme keeps giving way to couplets, as if to express the increasingly headlong passion of the speaker. He had once had better things to do "than bide and woo". Now desire is his whole, futile occupation. We realise this especially at the end, when he exclaims, first of all, not over the woman's hair or eyes, but over "the soft young down of her". He must have watched her closely, studied while she slept, the texture of her skin. How much longer he will be able to resist raping her is the unasked question. The shadow of that, and the possibility of eventual madness and death for them both, drives and darkens the whole poem: and yet it is still a love poem.

After her great year of writing, 1916, Mew became less and less productive. Unable to recover from Anne's death in 1927, she was admitted to a sanatorium for treatment for "neurasthenia". Perhaps it was the fear that the family madness had caught up with her that drove her to a horrible suicide by swallowing Lysol, a concentrated cleaning product. The newspaper report of her death referred to her as "Miss Charlotte Mary New, a writer of verse". The 20th century has since made up for its neglect, and she is now highly regarded.

Dark, ominous clouds gather. You know that the violation will happen. It is inevitable.

Here is Charlotte’s poem.

“The Farmer's Bride”.

"Three summers since I chose a maid, Too young maybe - but more's to do At harvest-time than bide and woo. When us was wed she turned afraid Of love and me and all things human; Like the shut of a winter's day. Her smile went out, and t'wasn't a woman - More like a little frightened fay. One night, in the Fall, she runned away.


"Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said, 'Should properly have been abed; But sure enough she wasn't there Lying awake with her wide brown stare. So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down We chased her, flying like a hare Before our lanterns. To Church-Town All in a shiver and a scare We caught her, fetched her home at last And turned the key upon her, fast.


She does the work about the house As well as most, but like a mouse: Happy enough to chat and play With birds and rabbits and such as they, So long as men-folk keep away. "Not near, not near!" her eyes beseech When one of us comes within reach. The women say that beasts at stall Look round like children at her call. I've hardly heard her speak at all.


Shy as a leveret, swift as he, Straight and slight as a young larch tree, Sweet as the first wild violets, she, To her wild self. But what to me?


The short days shorten and the oaks are brown, The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky, One leaf in the still air falls slowly down, A magpie's spotted feathers lie On the black earth spread white with rime. The berries redden up to Christmas-time. What's Christmas-time without there be Some other in the house than we!


She sleeps up in the attic there Alone, poor maid. 'Tis but a stair Betwixt us. Oh! My God! the down, The soft young down of her, the brown, The brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!"


(N.B. Searching the Web, I came across several different ways of how this poem was presented on the page. As Charlotte had specified a sideways typeset, to accommodate the longer lines, I like to think that this layout here is the layout she would have preferred.)

Jacques Lacan. Linguistics and Psychoanalysis

I am thrilled that the wonderful John Haber has given me permission to post his great essay on Jacques Lacan on my blog. You may have heard of Lacan and his linguistic theories -- been puzzled, or infuriated by him. John explains Lacan, clearly and concisely. So if you’ve glazed over at the mention of Semiotics, switched channels as soon as they start talking about Structuralism, never heard of “the mirror stage”, all will become clear when you’ve read John’s essay. You can access John’s haberarts blog here.
Who Is Jacques Lacan?


John Haber
in New York City
A Primer for Pre-Post-Structuralists







Jacques Lacan is a Parisian psychoanalyst who has influenced literary criticism and feminism. He began work in the 1950s, in the Freudian society there. It was a time when those official ties meant something—when one could be expelled for deviation, as if from the Communist party.

It was also a time when Freud's reputation in France was very low, for Existentialism was the thing. Lacan changed all that almost overnight, when he broke off to start his own society, commencing seminars there and at the École Normale Superior.

The cry of "return of Freud" went up at just the right moment. It was 1964, with pressure building against the establishment, the same pressures that led to the 1968 student riots and Michel Foucault's philosophy of suspicion. But then where would art be without sex, neurosis, ideas, and rebellion? Structuralism was in the air, too, and Lacan offered a structuralist Freud. A structuralist Freud? That is it in a nutshell, and that is what needs explaining.

Words, words, words

Lacan was fascinated by Sigmund Freud's earliest discovery—unconscious desires, as revealed through free associations and dreams. In other words, desires emerge through words and images. They speak a language parallel to our own.

Jean-Paul Sartre's followers had no interest in such things. Existentialists believe in conscious decisions. The unconscious seems far too squishy to them, too much a denial of responsibility. Instead of internal conflicts, Sartre said, other people create our identity. The "unconscious" is just the part of us that others understand when we do not.

Lacan picked up on the unconscious as a social being. He even spoke of a child's passage through a mirror stage, in which it must learn to see itself from outside before it can have an internal identity. Yet the psychologist refused to dismiss the reality of an unconscious mind. Nope, it is quite real enough to destroy lives, and it can be made perfectly precise: the unconscious is structured like a language. As Anthony Wilden's book about him puts it, the unconscious is The Language of the Self. To explain this, I have to spell out how Structuralists understood language

One often thinks of a language as a lexicon. Each word points to a familiar object, like a dictionary or even a picture book. In a real language, however, words take on meaning only from other words. Batty philosophers are not exactly catty because of a difference in sounds, and semantics works much the same way. Those clowns are not exactly insane or comical either, because shades of meaning emerge by contrast.

The ultimate unit of meaning is less the word than the sentence—or even the entire language. One has a system, a structure, without a base. Language is like a computer network without a central computer. Meaning is always "deferred" to the next word in the chain of associations.

Picking up on Freud's idea of free associations, Lacan tried Structuralism on the mind. The reward for him was in that mysteriously productive deferral. He marvelled at a word's absence of fixed reference taken alone, apart from a context in language. It reminded him of what happens when one feels an absence in oneself, a lack in life: desire. Lacan had brought together Freud's technique, of word association, with his subject matter, desire. In this way he found new relevance in Freud's whole vocabulary of unconscious urges.

The symbol truth

The trick was to stick to how words work. One necessarily expresses desires in words, so every desire needs a symbol. The father against whom one rebels is a symbol, and from it the mind takes shape. The mother is what each symbol lacks, so desire for her makes symbolic sense, too. These symbols form not some hidden art gallery of the mind, but a living vocabulary: "The unconscious is always empty."

Does it seem silly for Freud to talk about one's old man as a mythic figure out of Oedipus Rex? Does penis envy seem even sillier, if not sexist? Fine. What matters is "the name of the father" and the social authority of men, with their darn "phallus." Lacan used that word, rather than "penis," to stress its symbolic, downright arbitrary nature.

A healthy person thrives on this system of symbols and desires. One needs all this "Imaginary" to stay in touch with "the Real." A neurotic is someone for whom the system has broken down. Language has utterly deserted a depressive, who is reduced to mute despair. Psychoanalysis heals by restoring a tortured mind to speech. More formally, Lacan translated Freud's ego, id, and superego into levels of linguistic mastery, but the jargon ("schema R") is more than you need to know to cope with my Web site.

Students were spellbound, owing to the standard ingredients of cult status—ideas and charisma. Ironically, Lacan's ego got caught up in the very paradox of his work: psychoanalysis, too, seemed to need the name of the father. It could achieve maturity only by recognizing Lacan's unshakeable authority, even if only as yet another productive symbol. Oddly enough, the obscurity of Lacan's language fed into all this, or at least into his charisma. Mostly the difficulty comes through in print, too, for he writes just awfully.
Lacan at once relished his status and recognized a problem with it. He revelled in his high-handed style, but he dissolved his own society in 1980.

By that time, however, Lacanian thought had taken on a life of its own. At first its influence outside Paris was, to put it graciously, nil. Laying Existentialism and Structuralism on top of Freud, most therapists felt, only made the squishy into pure liquid. Lacan's lousy prose only confirmed how useless it all was. Even today, American undergraduates studying abnormal psychology beware: they will hardly find Lacan so much as mentioned in their textbook.

Per loins

Outside psychology, however, Structuralism was taking over intellectual life. Literary criticism, especially felt its influence. It was starting to call itself literary theory and imagining it was philosophy! Did Lacan treat the mind like a work of literature, to be interpreted through attention to its language? Hardly a bad message for those who take literature for the meaning of life, and a new kind of Freudian interpretation took hold. Lacanians got to insist that, unlike the nasty old kind, they were not just reducing books to the writer's hang-ups or to Freud's system. They were showing people how to read. One can even apply Lacan to Dickens.

What other critics were showing people, however, was no longer a system—not even Lacan's. Indirectly, Lacan helped give birth to a happy mess that his system could never comprehend. Starting with such titles as Grammatology, Jacques Derrida made the decisive step. The French philosopher took Structuralism apart and found he liked it better in pieces.

Can any meaning be traced through an entire language? Can any word take on fresh associations? Fine, but then what sense does it make to catalog a language—or the mind? The operative word became Poststructuralism, the first "post" in a long run of fashionable Postmodernisms.


Lacan himself helped out the literary trends: his opening seminar in his collected writings analyses "The Purloined Letter" as an example of how the mind works. Remember the letter used for blackmail in Edgar Allan Poe's short story? In the same way, Lacan argued, words take on new significance, threats, power, and desires for each person as they circulate.


If some English professors in America were happy, feminists were simply overjoyed. The Freudian father? Not even real. Just a mental construct. Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell in London saw that as cause for Marxists to re-examine how society creates gender roles for us, just as social and economic conditions create other sorts of havoc. Lacan's mirror makes a great metaphor for a world that surrounds women with mirrors and fashion photography, makes them into Madonnas and whores, and long called a still-life painting Vanitas.

Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigary, Hélène Cixoux, and other feminists in Paris found cause for yet another celebration. Art, they wrote, releases a kind of meaning that's freer than ordinary prose—a rich, meaningful babbling dominated by the dream of one's mother. The doctrine of lack and deferral truly means something for women who feel more like male society's displaced persons than happy creatures born to nurture men. And in fact Kristeva was an exile in another sense, Bulgarian born.

Po' Poe

The b.s. quotient here had not escaped the rest of the world, of course. Kristeva sounds like a typical Parisian intellectual. In her novels, women naturally watch film noir and always wear just the right outfit. The deacon of deconstruction himself, Derrida, demolished Lacan through another reading of Poe, just as he has frolicked through art history and Vincent van Gogh.


Let me look more carefully, then, at Lacan's "Seminar on the Purloined Letter." It was originally published in French as the opening essay in Ecrits ("Writings").
Derrida's response, "Le Facteur de la Verité," has a more punning title, typical of his playfulness. It means both "The Truth Factor" and "The Mailman Bringing Truth." Alan Bass's translation first appeared in what quickly became a legendary issue of Yale French Studies. Derrida included the essay as well in a book on Freud, which Bass also translated: La Carte Postale (or "The Post Card").


Lacan is as dense as ever, but Derrida is formidable for a different reason, one already announced in his title's virtuosity. Throughout a long essay, he finds room to play even as he sticks to a careful structure that one must also bear in mind. Quite a challenge, but worth it.


After that, can I risk a quick summary? Here goes. Lacan notes that the letter never changes as it circulates. Yet its significance changes constantly, depending on who holds it who recognizes it for what it is. Lacan takes this as emblematic of how the unconscious works.



In his theory, recall, the unconscious works like a language. The mind teems with desires that grow real only when translated into symbols, as in Freud's device of free association. Like words in a language, the associations are arbitrary. As symbols of desire for the lost intimacies of infancy, the thing they signify is simply not there: it is always lacking. Similarly, the letter, despite its power, remains somehow empty, for blackmail can no longer threaten the moment someone uses it.


Lacking Lacan


Derrida takes on Lacan, just as he had any Structuralist view of language. He criticized Structuralism for hoping rigorously to define meaning, as if a system like language could ever be closed and could ever have a fixed center. In the same way, Derrida deconstructs Lacan: he claims that the psychologist returns firmly to a system of tidy meanings.


After Lacan, psychoanalysis remains a system, with fanatical followers. Psychoanalytic readings, or so goes the standard complaint, still read a predetermined message into literary texts. Derrida agrees on both counts. Lacan finds what he wants in Poe because he pumps it into the text. This "lack" of which he speaks is poststructuralist only on the surface. Lacan may seem to play around, but for him lack is all too real, the essential subject of psychoanalysis.


Derrida also tears into Lacan's writing. That famously tendentious style is far from playful (unlike Derrida's own, he tactfully neglects to say). It is a sad blockage for readers. It cannot help being insensitive to a literary work like Poe's. In fact, by creating a breakdown between meaning and form, it again calls up a tired notion of literary content. The quaint Freudian in tweeds has returned, reading psychoanalysis into everything that moves.


Lacan, Derrida argues further, commits the ultimate sin against literature: he works from the plot rather than Poe's language. Lacan finds yet another way, too, to cut off the chain of meaning on which a literary work subsists: he isolates the story from two others about Detective Dupin. Worse, Lacan isolates the mythic triangle of characters in Poe's story from the narrator. By bursting these frames, Derrida hopes to open up all those Lacanian triangles.


Lacan, in other words, imposes a frame on the story as triumphantly as a blackmailer frames the innocent victim. He is one more player in the game, trumping the previous one to assert his own mastery—much like each person in turn in "The Purloined Letter."


For Lacan, context is everything. It creates desire, and so for each person, as in Poe, the letter bears profound significance: a letter always finds its address. Derrida plays on that truly memorable line. In language, literature, or psychology, meaning can never be closed off or translated once and for all, not even into other words: a letter never finds its address.


Art and the undecidable


Literary critics love arguments, and I suppose they will go on until the world loses patience entirely with anything so turgid. No wonder an American moved the dispute officially to the world of literary criticism. Barbara Johnson weighed in with "Poe, Lacan, Derrida," an essay in her finest book, The Critical Difference.


All three essays appear along with Poe's story—and goodness knows what else—in a paperback called The Purloined Poe. Johnson's book, which was her first, also has a superb essay (if longer and at least as tough) on Herman Melville's Billy Budd.
Johnson deconstructs the difference between the two Poststructuralists. She suggests that both men are up to the same games with the structure of words.


Really, does all that much separate them? Both are out to trump the master. Both play around with associations, desires, and lacks at the heart of consciousness. Besides, is meaning truly indeterminate, in the sense of having no fixed translation once and for all? If Derrida is right, then, the difference between him and Lacan must, she concludes, be undecidable.


I side with the French, but both at once, for the same reason that I want to end this primer in the world of fiction—and art. (After all, I have myself stolen from Derrida when I came to Constantin Brancusi and Andy Warhol.) With Lacan and Derrida, I take the idea of deferral to mean that differences matter. Meanings may never become final, but locating them is a necessary decision. It involves letting the differences multiply—between artists, between art objects, between art and life—even as the copy becomes a basic tool of Postmodernism.


Locating meaning is the difference between depression and vitality, between feminism and silence. It is the difference between unconscious lack and that fullness of desire called art.


Here is John Haber’s Wiki entry.


John Haber (b. June 5, 1954, New York City) is an American art critic and art blogger who lives in New York. He uses the perspective of critical theory in an accessible, journalistic prose to write online reviews and essays about topics ranging from traditional art history, Modernism and Postmodernism.When his New York Art Crit art blog site started in 1994 with art reviews from around New York, it was the most thorough and extensive set of gallery and museum reviews anywhere online. This art hyperbook currently features over 1,000 indexed artists, critics, and art historians from the early Renaissance to Postmodernism, with more than 7,000 links between reviews. Of special interest is the connection of art to feminism, philosophy, and politics.

Haber studied physics as an undergraduate student at Princeton University. His essays on new media bridge the connections between science and art.
Many of Haber’s articles have also appeared in Artillery Magazine, Perfect 8, Artists Books Reviews, American Abstract Artists Journal, and Sharkforum.

REWRITING HISTORY

MARK TWAIN

I’ve been thinking about posting something about censorship for a while. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, but as writers of Erotica, we censor our stuff all the time. We have to, if we want our stories to be published. I don’t particularly want to write underage sex stories, non-consensual sex stories, and “snuff” stories. If I do decide to, I have to file them away somewhere and wait for a cultural change.

Having said that, I have written a story about bestiality; another topic that’s on the censor’s hit list. I enjoyed writing it -- a few people have said they enjoyed reading it.

But as I’ve said before, there are examples of all of these practices in Homer and Shakespeare. So what’s going on? Perhaps folk in days gone by, weren’t so touchy about being politically correct. Maybe, just maybe, they were more in touch with themselves, than we are with all our ever growing gadgets, potions and technologies. Perhaps we, in the angst ridden 21st century, just look for stuff to worry about.

So, I was shocked and dismayed, when I read Benedict Page’s article in the Guardian newspaper, telling me that Alabama in the U.S. has dropped Mark Twain’s classic, “Huckleberry Finn”, from the school curriculum. Not only that, but the entire book is being re-written;

“…and will be published with a notable language alteration: all instances of the offensive racial term "nigger" are to be expunged. The word occurs more than 200 times in Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, and its 1876 precursor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which tell the story of the boys' adventures along the Mississippi river in the mid-19th century. In the new edition, the word will be replaced in each instance by "slave". The word "injun" will also be replaced in the text.”

Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of Auburn University, Montgomery says it will have the effect, of replacing "two hurtful epithets" in order to "counter the 'pre-emptive censorship' that Dr Gribben observes, “has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists worldwide."

Gribben said he had decided on the move because over decades of teaching Twain, and reading sections of the text aloud, he had found himself recoiling from uttering the racial slurs in the words of the young protagonists. "The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups," he said. "As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact."

"We may applaud Twain's ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era," Gribben added, "but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers."

So what next? Re-writes of “To Kill A Mockingbird”? “Of Mice And Men”? There’s bestiality in “A Midsummer Nights’ Dream.” And “The Merchant Of Venice” is blatantly anti-Semitic. So, for that matter, is Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”. And while we’re at it, what about Vladimir Nabokov’s pornographic novel, “Lolita”? Nothing more than a call for legitimising paedophilia. What’s that? It’s not porn? And it’s not advocating paedophilia? Well, it would surely embarrass Dr Gribben! Re-write it anyway!

I have a mischievous image in my mind of Dr Gribben’s lectures. His students would pick up on the esteemed Academic’s embarrassment immediately. There would be nudges and giggles and wonderful impersonations of Dr Gribben. How the great man would be mortified.

It may be an uncomfortable fact, but the human race does have a lot to feel ashamed about, in terms of how we have treated “the other”. The person, whom for whatever reason, be it race, sexuality, disability, is different to the majority. That doesn’t mean we should re-write history. That was how things were back then. Yes, blush and mumble our excuses. Learn from the past, don’t negate it. To do anything else, lacks integrity.

Shame on you, Dr Gribben, you attempt to make words a liar. But words are tricky, slippery things and the truth has a way of working itself out. You should know, as an Academic, that we don’t control language; it controls us. You mess with words; they bite back.

Mark Twain himself, was a passionate critic of American racism, and donated money to a number of civil rights organisations including the nascent NAACP, as well as ironically critiquing prejudice in both Huckleberry Finn and the later novel Puddn'head Wilson.

I am mildly amused that Mark Twain makes Dr Gribben feel uncomfortable, I like to think that Mr Twain would be amused too -- but really, Dr Gribben, don’t be such a baby. Get over it. Get over yourself.

EDGAR ALLEN POE

The tales are gruesome; morbid. We tremble as our lungs expand horribly, inhaling the stench of death; of putrication. The vile stink makes us retch. Yet, the stories are compelling, the reader is helpless, caught up in the powerful strokes of Edgar Allan Poe’s pen. The reader shudders at the thought of being buried alive or of digging up a corpse to gloat in the face of death. In the worlds that Poe creates, the Id is out of control.

Poe’s own life seems to have been plagued with death, love, unrequited love, abuse of alcohol, abuse of opiates and poverty. His stories tell of sex and death; the horrors of the grave, the vomit at the back of your throat, choking your scream.






From Wiki
“The works of American author Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) include many poems, short stories, and one novel. His fiction spans multiple genres, including horror fiction, adventure, science fiction, and detective fiction, a genre he is credited with inventing. These works are generally considered part of the Dark romanticism movement, a literary reaction to Transcendentalism. Poe's writing reflects his literary theories: he disagreed with didacticism and allegory. Meaning in literature, he said in his criticism, should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface; works whose meanings are too obvious cease to be art. Poe pursued originality in his works, and disliked proverbs. He often included elements of popular pseudosciences such as phrenology and physiognomy. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Though known as a masterful practitioner of Gothic fiction, Poe did not invent the genre; he was following a long-standing popular tradition.





Poe's literary career began in 1827 with the release of 50 copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems credited only to "a Bostonian", a collection of early poems which received virtually no attention. In December 1829, Poe released Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems in Baltimore before delving into short stories for the first time with "Metzengerstein" in 1832.His most successful and most widely-read prose during his lifetime was "The Gold-Bug" which earned him a $100 prize, the most he ever received for a single work. One of his most important works, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", was published in 1841 and is today considered the first modern detective story. Poe called it a "tale of ratiocination". Poe became a household name with the publication of "The Raven" in 1845, though it was not a financial success. The publishing industry at the time was a difficult career choice and much of Poe's work was written using themes specifically catered for mass market tastes.”

Biographies are interesting, yes? But let’s talk about the stories! In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the tale opens with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. Although Poe wrote this short story before the invention of modern psychological science, Roderick's symptoms can be described according to its terminology. They include hyperesthesia (hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, and tastes), hypochondria (an excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious illness), and acute anxiety. It is revealed that Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, death-like trances. Roderick then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be sentient, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it. Roderick later informs the narrator that his sister has died and insists that she be entombed for two weeks in a vault (family tomb) in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. They inter her, but over the next week both Roderick and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm. The narrator notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark, although there is no lightening.








The narrator reads to Roderick, as cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When metallic and hollow noises can be heard, Roderick becomes increasingly agitated and hysterical, and eventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed and that Roderick knew that she was alive. The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She falls on her brother, and both land on the floor as corpses. The narrator then flees the house, and, as he does so, notices a flash of light causing him to look back upon the House of Usher, in time to watch the house break in two, the fragments sinking into the tarn.

In "Supernatural Horror", H.P.Lovecraft solved a problem in the interpretation of Poe," by arguing that "Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and the house all shared one common soul". This notion has probably influenced later writers. I am thinking of Shirley Jackson’s excellent, “The Haunting of Hill House”, and Stephen King’s “The Shining”. In these stories, the houses have a consciousness and actively work against, and manipulate the characters. The explicit psychological dimension of “The Fall of the House of Usher, has prompted many critics to analyse it as a description of the human psyche, comparing, for instance, the House to the unconscious, and its central crack to the personality split which is called dissociative identity disorder. Mental disorder is also evoked through the themes of melancholy, possible incest, and vampirism. An incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeline is not explicitly stated, but seems implied by the strange attachment between the two.







From Suite 101.

In Berenice, Poe reveals his ability to imply extreme violence without actually depicting it. The short story, begins with the narrator’s complaint that “Misery is manifold.” He wallows in his self-pity, extrapolating that man’s fate is to always find ‘what is’ to be an agony and to find pleasure in what ‘might have been.’ He tells us that his first name is Egoeus and declines to tell us what his family name is. He suggests that his family is a prominent family and describes the richness of their family home, in particular the library.

Egoeus’ private residence is the library and he describes it as the location of his physical birth, the site of his intellectual growth, and the place where he existed as a non-entity before birth. The library is his entire life.
Berenice was Egoeus’s cousin. Their lives were opposite in every way. While Egoeus was dark, gloomy and sickly, Berenice was beautiful and energetic. Egoeus describes Berenice’s life as “the ramble on the hill-side - mine the studies of the cloister.”

Egoeus describes how Berenice’s carefree existence was destroyed by a mysterious malady, which ruined all that was fair and beautiful in his cousin. The disease left her subject to a form of epilepsy, which usually concluded with a deep trance that mimicked death.

During Berenice’s decline, Egoeus experiences a rapid progression in his own illness, which takes the form of obsessive monomania. This monomania allows him to fixate obsessively on one small, often inconsequential, object or detail for vast amounts of time.

Egoeus confesses that when Berenice was beautiful and healthy he did not love her. She, however, had loved him for a long time. When Berenice’s appearance was destroyed by disease Egoeus proposes to her out of a perverse remembrance of what had been.

At this time, Egoeus notices that Berenice’s teeth are the only part of her untouched by her disease, he then develops an obsession with them and imagines being able to hold them in his hand and examine them separately. As a result of his monomania, Egoeus enters into a long trance in which he contemplates Berenice’s teeth.

Egoeus recalls the servants notifying him that Berenice has died during one of her epileptic fits.

The next lucid recollection of Egoeus is when he is sitting in a chair. He recalls a woman’s scream and he has the feeling that he had completed some ‘deed,’ but he can not recall what it was. He notices a small box on the table; the box is like the box which doctors carried.

A servant arrives and tries to explain the situation to Egoeus. He tells Egoeus of wild cries during the night that roused the household. The members of the household discover the violated grave of Berenice and Berenice herself alive but disfigured. He indicates to Egoeus to examine the state of his own clothes, which were covered with blood and dirt. He points out to Egoeus the dirt covered spade leaning against the wall. Suddenly, Egoeus screams and grabs the box. When it falls open, dental tools and 32 teeth fall onto the ground.

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is a horror short story. I am including it here as a tribute to my Dad; he was an avid reader of Poe, and he told this story to my sister and me, one Sunday lunchtime as he was carving the roast beef. He also told us about the headless man he saw in our back yard. Mum was not pleased.


From Poe-stories blogspot.com


A noted doctor of worth, the honourable Dr. P_____, is fascinated by the art of mesmerism or hypnotism with respect to its rumoured ability to suspend a patient in a state of hypnosis to escape death. He describes his old friend, M. Ernest Valdemar, as a person "particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of his person." It is this man who has graciously volunteered his body and mind for Dr. P_____'s experiment in mesmerism. On the very eve of his death, Valdemar calls upon and receives Dr. P_____. Dr. P______ describes Valdemar's condition as ever-worsening and predicts his death to be forthcoming. Just before Valdemar's death, Dr. P_____ places him under hypnosis and maintains this state of mesmerization for seven months during which he visits Valdemar and asks him questions about his current comfort. Throughout first few days of mesmerization, Valdemar's condition deteriorates physically to the point that death is reached: "There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar: and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses." Horrifically, although his body was dead, Valdemar's mind was still in contact with the world and was also demanding, with increasing insistence, to be allowed to die: "Yes; --no;--I have been sleeping--and now-- now---I am dead." At this point, Dr. P_____ and his colleagues, Dr. F_____ , Dr. D______, and Mr. F______, decide to keep Valdemar in hypnosis for an indeterminate amount of time, believing that since death was halted due to the hypnosis, Valdemar would remain in his that state. For seven months, Dr. P______ continues to pose questions to Valdemar about his condition, questions to which Valdemar answers with increasing intensity and desperation until Dr. P_____ becomes unnerved by Valdemar's final answer: "For God's sake!--quick!--quick!--put me to sleep--or, quick!--waken me!--quick!--I say to you that I am dead!" The doctor rapidly performs his waking motions and witnesses the accelerated decay of a seven-month dead body:







“As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of 'dead! dead!' absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once--within the space of a single minute, or less, shrunk--crumbled--absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome--of detestable putrescence.”


"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" was one of Poe's great hoaxes. During Poe's time mesmerism was in vogue as a subject of medical and psychological investigation in Britain and the United States. Stories of its medical benefits had circulated, backed strongly by the Rev. C. H. Townshend--Facts in Mesmerism ( London, 1840)--and, ironically, by Poe himself--"Mesmeric Revelation," (1844). Poe created disgust and horror by his otherwise successful methods of creative writing. Judging from its immediate success and the seriousness with which it was taken, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" struck fear into its audience and conveyed the human dread of and morbid fascination with death and the decay that accompanies it. Poe shocked his audience with his gory imagery of fetid decomposition the impact of which was intensified by the public's belief that what they were reading was truth. He created such a fervour of reaction that on March 14, 1846, Poe included in an expense accountability letter the following disclaimer: "P.S. The 'Valdemar Case' was a hoax, of course."


But as I said earlier, Poe is not just famous for his horror stories, and “The Purloined Letter” is an example of a modern mystery story.


From Enotes.com

Modern mystery writers owe a debt of gratitude to Edgar Allan Poe. Although he is primarily known for his horror stories, Poe also wrote a series of what he called, ‘‘tales of ratiocination,’’ which helped define the conventions used in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective stories, and which helped influence the development of the modern mystery. One of Poe's most popular detective stories is "The Purloined Letter.'' Originally published in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1844, an annual magazine, the story was reproduced in Poe's Tales by Edgar A. Poe the following year. Today, a copy of the story can be found in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales, published in 1998 by Signet Classic. As with the other stories that feature C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's famous detective protagonist, ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ emphasizes the use of deductive reasoning—a specific type of logic that examines all factors in a case objectively— to solve mysteries that have stumped others.







In this story, as in other Poe detective stories, among the people stumped are the members of the French police force, who attempt to find a stolen letter which is being used for political blackmail. The police launch a series of scientific and precise, but misguided, investigations by using logical methods that are based solely on past experience and established systems of thought. Their investigative methods reflect the types of rational thought prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century. In the end, the police are unsuccessful in finding the letter because the thief has hidden it in the most unexpected place—right under their noses. Dupin figures this out and recovers the letter, turning the political tables on the thief.

So without Poe, there’d be no Miss Marple, no Hercule Poirot. Even “Murder She Wrote owes its existence to Poe…


He died in 1849, when he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore in distress, wearing tattered clothing that was not his own. He died four days later.
His final words were: "Lord, help my poor soul.”


In an aptly mysterious postscript to Poe's life, an anonymous visitor has brought three red roses and a bottle of cognac to Poe's grave at Westminster Church in Baltimore on the anniversary of the writer's birthday every year since the 1940’s. Although, according to what I read on the web, the anonymous visitor has been absent for the past two years.

I wonder what we’d think of Poe if he were alive today? The doctors would probably send him to rehab, give him Prosac -- certainly he’d have some serious therapy. But then, we probably wouldn’t have the stories.

My own story Winnat's Pass was influenced by Poe's "Berenice" I am delighted that it made a dear friend, Gary Walker, recoil in horror. You can find Winnat's Pass in my Fetish Transcendence collection.

This blog post has been put together with sources from the Web, my friend Jan Vander Laenen and my own ideas.

You can find my Fetish Transcendence collection via my Author page at Amazon

GOBLIN MARKET: CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Goblin Market, is a poem by Christina Rossetti. It was published 1862. It is a fairy- tale which has been subjected to many interpretations, some seeing it as religious allegory, others see it as sexual symbolism; it tells the story of two sisters, tempted by goblins with forbidden fruit.






To me, the poem is sumptuous with erotic menace and it is the erotica that I shall be concentrating on! (No surprises there then!)

The story narrated in "Goblin Market" is simple. Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who apparently live together without parents, are taunted by goblin merchant men to buy luscious and tantalizing fruits. Lizzie is able to resist their coaxing and runs home, but Laura succumbs. She pays for the wares with a lock of her hair and gorges herself on the exotic fare, but her desire increases rather than being satisfied. She returns home and informs Lizzie that she will venture back into the glen and seek the goblins again. But Laura goes back to the glen, she can no longer hear the call of the goblins and grows increasingly apathetic. She refuses to eat and begins to age prematurely. Fearing for her sister's life, Lizzie decides to seek out the goblins in order to purchase an "antidote" for her sister. When the goblins learn that Lizzie does not intend to eat the fruit herself, they throw her money back at her and verbally and physically abuse her, pinching and kicking, tearing at her clothing, and smearing the juice and pulp of their fruit on her. Lizzie refuses to open her mouth and returns home with the penny in her purse. She invites her sister to suck the juices from her body, which Laura does. The juice of the goblin fruit now tastes bitter to Laura, and she writhes in pain from having consumed it. But the antidote works. Laura returns to her former self, and the epilogue of the poem describes Laura and Lizzie as wives and mothers. Laura now tells the story to their children, reminding them that "there is no friend like a sister."






Christina Rossetti sates the reader with glutinous words as she describes the fruit; already, in the first verse she introduces a sexual theme to the poem. “Plump unpecked cherries/ Melons and raspberries…Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries,” The passionate words, the sexual sounds are very intentional and though sex is never explicitly mentioned, it is constantly referred to. Language often suggests a sexual growth, or readiness, “All ripe together”. Goblins proffering plump unpecked cherries tempt the two blushing girls.

Sensible Lizzie warns feckless Laura.

"O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men."






It is an ad man's dream, the luscious language drawing on the senses; the reader’s mouth waters, just as Laura’s mouth does. Why resist the lure of the Goblin men? Why shouldn’t Laura drink and eat the delicious fruit that is so full of promise? I’m with Laura here; I would eat the fruit, but then I am never one for doing as I’m told. The lure of sensuous excess is overwhelming.


So the language and structure of "Goblin Market" identify the poem's themes. The argument for the poem's erotic and sexual nature is supported by the language of the poem. The nature of the goblins' fruit is extensively detailed and described as luscious and succulent. Laura consumes the fruit ravenously. "She sucked until her lips were sore", and physically pays for it with a lock of her hair. In one intense moment of orgasmic ecstasy, Laura is left in a state where she "knew not was it night or day".



The next day, Laura is shocked to find no goblins and no succulent fruit in the glen. Surprisingly, only Lizzie can hear the insistent cries of the goblins. Laura falls into depression and sickness when she realizes that she may not experience the fruits again.

Rossetti’s description of Laura’s ‘come down’, is akin to that of an addict, coming off heroin; going cold turkey. Opium was prevalent in Victorian England. Laudanum could be purchased over the counter. Perhaps Rossetti had experience of addiction within her circle. She describes Laura’s fall.

“Her hair grew thin and grey;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay, and burn
Her fire away.”




Lizzie watches anxiously as her sister's health deteriorates. Finally, she can no longer bear it. At this point she takes a coin and goes to the glen to buy fruit for her sister in hopes of reviving Laura's well being. In a moving passage, Rossetti illustrates brutally, the rude and invasive behaviour of the goblins as they try to force Lizzie to eat the fruit. Lizzie refuses, knowing to absolutely resist the fruit, but she lets the juices of the fruit stick to her body to bring home to her sister. Upon returning, Lizzie invites Laura to "hug me, kiss me, suck my juices" Lizzie feasts upon her sister's skin, taking in all the nectars. The juices spark a moment of both bliss and suffering.


Rossetti's word choice in "Goblin's Market" consistently gives rise to many sexual connotations. She describes sensual parts of the body such as lips, breasts and cheeks. She also utilizes verbs such as to hug, kiss, squeeze and suck. Sexual connotations heighten the relationship between the male goblins and female maidens. Laura's ecstatic experience with the goblin's fruit, is an indescribable orgasmic high. The goblins' over-invasive and aggressive advances towards Lizzie represent sexual invasion; a rape.

Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;


In addition to these sexual relations, there is an erotic undertone to the close relationship of the two sisters. Rossetti describes their sleeping positions to be intimate and connected. The climatic description of the physical interaction as Laura shares the goblins' juices with Lizzie has erotic implications. These sexual implications would have been apparent to the poem's Victorian English audience. As a female poet, Rossetti makes a bold statement about female sexuality in her time, perhaps addressing issues that would have been silenced; taboo.


The meter and rhyme scheme are irregular in "Goblin Market." The poem generally follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, but not always. In fact, sometimes there's a long gap between a word and its rhyme, and sometimes there are many lines in a row with the same rhyming syllable at the end. This technique will have different effects on different readers. For me, Rossetti strikes a chord of dissonance.

There is no first-person narrator in "Goblin Market". There's no "I." Instead, there's an omniscient third-person narrator such as you'd find in most novels or short stories. A third-person narrator usually gives the impression of being more distant from the story than a first-person narrator; a third-person narrator isn't a character and doesn't participate in the plot. The narrator of "Goblin Market" is no exception. She seems to describe the "Goblin Market" objectively, at least at first. She lists all the goblin fruits for sale and doesn't make any judgments about whether they're good or not. The speaker leaves it to Laura and Lizzie to judge for the reader.

Occasionally, as the poem goes on, the narrator will slip in an adjective that suggests that she's not as objective. For example, she describes Lizzie's advice to Laura as "wise" and Laura's silence as "sullen". And finally, the narrator actually breaks out and addresses Laura directly:

“Ah fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!”

The narrator calls Laura a "fool" for "choosing" to eat the goblin fruit, even though it meant giving in to "soul-consuming care." The narrator's objectivity seems to go out of the window in these lines, which mark the climax of the poem. It's as though the narrator just couldn't keep her mouth shut during the exciting part – she had to throw in her two pennies worth.



In the assault on Lizzie by the Goblin men, Rossetti uses imagery, similes and descriptive language to carry the theme of temptation, and sex throughout the poem. The assault on Lizzie has sexual allusions; they scream rape. “held her hands and squeezed their fruits.” The violent acts inflicted upon her are not kicks and punches, but far slower and more thought out. “Tore her gown and soiled her stockings/ Twitched her hair out by the roots.”

The Goblin men taunt Lizzie. Their taunts carry heavy sexual overtones as well. First they "Squeezed and caressed her" and then invite her to "Bob at our cherries / Bite at our peaches”, and to "Pluck them and suck them". When she refuses to eat, they "Held her hands and squeezed their fruits / Against her mouth to make her eat".

Finally, when Lizzie returns home, battered and bruised, she invites her sister's embrace: "Come and kiss me. / Never mind my bruises, / Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / . . . Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me". Rossetti’s erotic use of language supports the reading of the poem as a sexual fantasy.

Although Rossetti was a frequent contributor to her brother Dante's Pre-Raphaelite journal “The Germ,” she achieved immediate and significant recognition as a skilled poet with the 1862 publication of “Goblin Market and Other Poems.” The publication of the volume was hailed as the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelites, earned critical and popular acclaim, and paved the way for the publication of Rossetti's next volume of poetry, “The Prince's Progress and Other Poems”. (1866). Rossetti went on to publish religious poetry, devotional prose, and nursery rhymes for children. Due to the early success of "Goblin Market," Rossetti rarely fell out of favour with critics or her reading public and remains a focal point of critical study of nineteenth-century literary figures.

Here is Christina Rossetti’s poem.


Goblin Market





MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."
Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
"Come buy," call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
"O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men."
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
"Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds' weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes."
"No," said Lizzie, "no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us."
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
Backwards up the mossy glen
Turned and trooped the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
"Come buy, come buy."
When they reached where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the moss,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
One set his basket down,
One reared his plate;
One began to weave a crown
Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown
(Men sell not such in any town);
One heaved the golden weight
Of dish and fruit to offer her:
"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry.
Laura stared but did not stir,
Longed but had no money:
The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste
In tones as smooth as honey,
The cat-faced purr'd,
The rat-paced spoke a word
Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard;
One parrot-voiced and jolly
Cried "Pretty Goblin" still for "Pretty Polly";
One whistled like a bird.
But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:
"Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather."
"You have much gold upon your head,"
They answered altogether:
"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away,
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
"Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the moonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow.
You should not loiter so."
"Nay hush," said Laura.
"Nay hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more," and kissed her.
"Have done with sorrow;
I'll bring you plums to-morrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons, icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink,
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap."
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings,
They lay down, in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars beamed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.
Early in the morning
When the first cock crowed his warning,
Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,
Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should
Lizzie with an open heart,
Laura in an absent dream,
One content, one sick in part;
One warbling for the mere bright day's delight,
One longing for the night.
At length slow evening came--
They went with pitchers to the reedy brook;
Lizzie most placid in her look,
Laura most like a leaping flame.
They drew the gurgling water from its deep
Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags,
Then turning homeward said: "The sunset flushes
Those furthest loftiest crags;
Come, Laura, not another maiden lags,
No wilful squirrel wags,
The beasts and birds are fast asleep."
But Laura loitered still among the rushes
And said the bank was steep.
And said the hour was early still,
The dew not fallen, the wind not chill:
Listening ever, but not catching
The customary cry,
"Come buy, come buy,"
With its iterated jingle
Of sugar-baited words:
Not for all her watching
Once discerning even one goblin
Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling;
Let alone the herds
That used to tramp along the glen,
In groups or single,
Of brisk fruit-merchant men.
Till Lizzie urged, "O Laura, come,
I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look:
You should not loiter longer at this brook:
Come with me home.
The stars rise, the moon bends her arc,
Each glow-worm winks her spark,
Let us get home before the night grows dark;
For clouds may gather even
Though this is summer weather,
Put out the lights and drench us through;
Then if we lost our way what should we do?"
Laura turned cold as stone
To find her sister heard that cry alone,
That goblin cry,
"Come buy our fruits, come buy."
Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit?
Must she no more such succous pasture find,
Gone deaf and blind?
Her tree of life drooped from the root:
She said not one word in her heart's sore ache;
But peering thro' the dimness, naught discerning,
Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way;
So crept to bed, and lay
Silent 'til Lizzie slept;
Then sat up in a passionate yearning,
And gnashed her teeth for balked desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.
Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain,
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
"Come buy, come buy,"
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and grey;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay, and burn
Her fire away.
One day remembering her kernel-stone
She set it by a wall that faced the south;
Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root,
Watched for a waxing shoot,
But there came none;
It never saw the sun,
It never felt the trickling moisture run:
While with sunk eyes and faded mouth
She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees
False waves in desert drouth
With shade of leaf-crowned trees,
And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.
She no more swept the house,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney-nook
And would not eat.
Tender Lizzie could not bear
To watch her sister's cankerous care,
Yet not to share.
She night and morning
Caught the goblins' cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy."
Beside the brook, along the glen
She heard the tramp of goblin men,
The voice and stir
Poor Laura could not hear;
Longed to buy fruit to comfort her,
But feared to pay too dear,
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest winter-time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.
Till Laura, dwindling,
Seemed knocking at Death's door:
Then Lizzie weighed no more
Better and worse,
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook,
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.
Laughed every goblin
When they spied her peeping:
Came towards her hobbling,
Flying, running, leaping,
Puffing and blowing,
Chuckling, clapping, crowing,
Clucking and gobbling,
Mopping and mowing,
Full of airs and graces,
Pulling wry faces,
Demure grimaces,
Cat-like and rat-like,
Ratel and wombat-like,
Snail-paced in a hurry,
Parrot-voiced and whistler,
Helter-skelter, hurry-skurry,
Chattering like magpies,
Fluttering like pigeons,
Gliding like fishes, --
Hugged her and kissed her;
Squeezed and caressed her;
Stretched up their dishes,
Panniers and plates:
"Look at our apples
Russet and dun,
Bob at our cherries
Bite at our peaches,
Citrons and dates,
Grapes for the asking,
Pears red with basking
Out in the sun,
Plums on their twigs;
Pluck them and suck them,
Pomegranates, figs."
"Good folk," said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie,
"Give me much and many"; --
Held out her apron,
Tossed them her penny.
"Nay, take a seat with us,
Honour and eat with us,"
They answered grinning;
"Our feast is but beginning.
Night yet is early,
Warm and dew-pearly,
Wakeful and starry:
Such fruits as these
No man can carry;
Half their bloom would fly,
Half their dew would dry,
Half their flavour would pass by.
Sit down and feast with us,
Be welcome guest with us,
Cheer you and rest with us."
"Thank you," said Lizzie; "but one waits
At home alone for me:
So, without further parleying,
If you will not sell me any
Of your fruits though much and many,
Give me back my silver penny
I tossed you for a fee."
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One called her proud,
Cross-grained, uncivil;
Their tones waxed loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously, --
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire, --
Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee, --
Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguered by a fleet
Mad to tear her standard down.
One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
At last the evil people,
Worn out by her resistance,
Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit
Along whichever road they took,
Not leaving root or stone or shoot.
Some writhed into the ground,
Some dived into the brook
With ring and ripple.
Some scudded on the gale without a sound,
Some vanished in the distance.
In a smart, ache, tingle,
Lizzie went her way;
Knew not was it night or day;
Sprang up the bank, tore through the furze,
Threaded copse and dingle,
And heard her penny jingle
Bouncing in her purse, --
Its bounce was music to her ear.
She ran and ran
As if she feared some goblin man
Dogged her with gibe or curse
Or something worse:
But not one goblin skurried after,
Nor was she pricked by fear;
The kind heart made her windy-paced
That urged her home quite out of breath with haste
And inward laughter.
She cried "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me ?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men."
Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruined in my ruin;
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
Her lips began to scorch,
That juice was wormwood to her tongue,
She loathed the feast:
Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast.
Her locks streamed like the torch
Borne by a racer at full speed,
Or like the mane of horses in their flight,
Or like an eagle when she stems the light
Straight toward the sun,
Or like a caged thing freed,
Or like a flying flag when armies run.
Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart,
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame,
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped water-spout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life ?
Life out of death.
That night long Lizzie watched by her,
Counted her pulse's flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cooled her face
With tears and fanning leaves:
But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,
And early reapers plodded to the place
Of golden sheaves,
And dew-wet grass
Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,
And new buds with new day
Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream,
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way,
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May,
And light danced in her eyes.
Days, weeks, months, years
Afterwards, when both were wives
With children of their own;
Their mother-hearts beset with fears,
Their lives bound up in tender lives;
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat,
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town;)
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
"For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands."