(Symons 141) Edmund Gosse would seem to agree with this intention, choosing not to make the suggestions of the poem crystal clear to its readers:.
Like a Japanese work of art, one perceives the general intention, and one is satisfied with the beauty of all the detail, without comprehending, or wishing to comprehend every part of the execution.
Yet, recent critics have not been so kind to Rossetti with her work and the sentiments it holds. Amongst the "indelicate" themes interpreted within Goblin Market are homosexuality, incest, drug addiction and the pain of rejected sexual desire.
While the relationship between the two sisters is never made clear, there are instances when the poem can be read as hinting towards homosexuality. For example, the sisters sleep entwined in each others arms, like lovers: .
Golden head by golden head,.
Like two pigeons in one nest,.
Folded in each other's wings,.
They lay down in their curtained bed.
Another example comes when Lizzie, after inducing the goblins to try to force her to eat, ensuring that she becomes splattered with "the drip of juice that syrupped all her face," invites Laura to:.
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.
Lizzie offers herself as satisfaction for Laura's "passionate yearning" and "baulked desire"; an action that can be interpreted as more erotic than sacramental. This erotic scene has removed the male and the sexual act is enacted and enjoyed exclusively by women.
While Goblin Market could be said to explore an infantile sexuality between the sisters, Greer believes this thought can be taken further. He suggests that the sisters" relationship is not about a homosexual case of physical love between sisters but is opposed to heterosexual relationships, as an expression of the subconscious incestuous desire:.
All of us, however, have grown up with the unexpressed incest taboo which regulated the degree of physical contact we think appropriate between brothers and sisters, and all of us have somehow violated it.
