Episode 295: “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, Part 2

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: The Literary Life Podcast
Episode: 295 – “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, Part 2
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks
Date: September 23, 2025

In Part 2 of their exploration of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks delve into the right and wrong ways to read the poem, focusing on how modern interpretations can obscure or distort its true meaning. The hosts champion a traditional, sacramental approach to literature, warning against reading solely through contemporary critical lenses such as Freudian, Marxist, or strictly sociological frameworks. By breaking down common misinterpretations and illuminating how Goblin Market operates as Christian allegory, they invite listeners into a richer, more transcendent reading experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trouble With Modern Readings of Symbolic Literature

[05:53], [20:49], [24:07], [29:13], [38:33]

• Horizontal vs. Vertical Reading:

  • Horizontal reading: Focuses on surface, material, or social aspects—what the poem “comments” on about life, history, society.
  • Vertical (Transcendental/Sacramental) reading: Sees art as a visible sign of invisible spiritual realities (sacraments/icons), connecting the physical and spiritual, and seeking transcendent meaning.

• Modern critics often over-literalize symbols, reading only on the horizontal level—“as if the reason you write art is because you want to make a comment on something or critique something... that’s not what's going on. Art is not about making comments on life.” (A, 25:42)

• Dangers of horizontal readings:

  • Reductionist: Cut symbols off from transcendent meaning.
  • Result in “blank canvas” interpretations—making the poem into “just anything” (“...the more obviously symbolic the work, the more that they treat it as their blank canvas...” A, 06:04).

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2. “Goblin Market” and Bad Interpretations

[35:15] and throughout

A. Marxist/Economic Lens

[29:39], [30:18], [31:06]

• Some critics see the goblins as symbols of capitalist forces oppressing “the people.”
• Misreads the fairyland setting: “...that completely misunderstands fairyland and how fairyland operates. This entire story is in fairyland...” (A, 30:18)
• Ignores the nature of symbolic storytelling, which uses fairy elements to represent inward, not outward, realities.

B. Antisemitic Stereotype Reading

[35:15], [36:43]

• A 2003 academic paper argues goblins are antisemitic caricatures.
• Hosts dismantle this, noting the goblins are various animals (not humans) and represent universal inner temptation, not “the other.”

C. Freudian (Sexual Repression) Lens

[16:22], [24:07], [43:20], [47:05]

• Popular readings reduce the poem to veiled sexual content and coded repression.
• Hosts (with support from C.S. Lewis) critique this as both reductionist and un-falsifiable (“If you can claim that someone has secret desires that they don’t know about, but you know about…you can literally claim anything about anyone.” A, 48:04).
• Notable quote:
  “It’s not what you give us as the problem, it’s what you take away...They take away the gospel and they give us economics, racism and sex.” – (A, 58:14)

D. Readings About Incest, Lesbianism, or Over-Sexualized Sibling Intimacy

[54:56], [55:32]

• Some interpret the sisters’ affection as evidence of sexual themes.
• Hosts point out that pre-modern societies (especially Victorian England) allowed much less sexualized but more intimate same-sex relationships and family affection—nothing to do with coded sexuality.

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3. What Is “Goblin Market” Really About?

[57:13], [57:35], [58:33], [62:22], [68:09], [85:39]

• Allegory of Temptation, Fall, and Redemption

  • The poem is a Christian, biblical allegory. The “obvious reading is the real one.” (B, 57:38)
  • The goblins represent inner sinful desires and temptation: “The goblins are our own sinful desires. That’s what’s tempting us.” (A, 59:32)
  • The two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, are everyman figures. Laura succumbs to temptation (eating forbidden fruit), experiences “the Fall” (echoing the Garden of Eden), and becomes spiritually desolate. Lizzie, embodying self-sacrificial love, redeems Laura—a clear Christ-figure.

• Symbols are Meant to Exhibit, Not Conceal

  • “Symbols in the tradition are not there to hide. They are there to exhibit it, to make it plain.” (A, 52:49)
  • The poem’s sensual, lush fruit imagery draws on biblical language (Song of Solomon, Proverbs), Eucharistic symbols, and traditions of spiritual longing.

• Eucharistic and Passion Images

  • Lizzie’s resistance and endurance, her bringing the fruit juice back, and Laura’s consumption of it are overt images of self-sacrifice and sacramental redemption—a “false Eucharist” is replaced by the true, redemptive act.
  • “She’s turning into a cup…she’s the cup that’s collecting all the fruit juice here. This is about to turn into some Eucharist wine.” (A, 81:59)

• Resurrection Imagery

  • Laura’s restoration is described as a resurrection, paralleling Christ’s victory over death.
  • “She fell at last. Pleasure passed, and anguish passed. And then Christina Rossetti makes it…Is it death or is it life? Life out of death. That’s it. There’s your death and rebirth. And she comes up.” (A, 88:41)
  • Morning, thrice-hugging, restored golden hair: all potent Christian, biblical symbolism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• C.S. Lewis on Freudian Criticism ([16:41]):

  “We do not mind being told that when we enjoy Milton’s description of Eden, some latent sexual interest is, as a matter of fact…and along with a thousand other things present in our unconscious. Our quarrel is with the man who says, ‘You know why you’re really enjoying this?...It all comes from so and so.’ What we resent…is not so much the suggestion that we are interested in the female body, as the suggestion that we have no interest in gardens.”

• Angelina on the trivialization of literary symbols ([29:21]):

  “It’s a complete and total distraction—stands in the way, leads us into…insane areas of thought that…stand in the way of you being able to have a transcendent experience.”

• Thomas Banks on misapplied allegory ([31:10]):

  “…the desire for allegory is by itself kind of a natural one, which we fall into, even if we haven’t been taught how to read allegorically in any formal sense. But then…when you try to construct…‘OK, so we have goblins…selling wares… She must be talking about the new, brutal market forces in the city life of urban England.’”

• Angelina on vertical symbolism ([59:32]):

  “The goblins are our own sinful desires. That’s what’s tempting us. And since they’re tempting with fruit, come and eat this fruit…that’s the Garden of Eden, that’s the forbidden fruit, it’s the Fall.”

• Thomas on the “fortunate fall” ([84:05]):

  “The idea that the fall, as awful as it was…nonetheless, it also enabled us to know God in a new way, as the Redeemer who saves us from sin, which we wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

• The heart of the poem, according to Rossetti (read out at [90:22]):

  “For there is no friend like a sister
  For 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.”

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Introduction and context: 00:18–02:15
• Discussion of what makes a good/bad reading: 05:53, 24:07, 29:13
• Breakdown of “horizontal” and “vertical” symbolism: 24:07–29:21
• Debunking Freudian, economic, and antisemitic readings: 29:39–42:11
• What the symbols really mean (temptation/fall/redemption): 57:13–68:09
• Eucharistic/Christ symbolism and Laura’s restoration: 81:59–88:41
• Conclusion and final reading: 90:22–94:27

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Conclusion, Tone & Takeaways

The episode is characteristically witty, lively, and rich with literary and theological wisdom. Angelina’s impassioned defense of the poem’s Christian symbolism and her warnings against reductionist interpretations are complemented by Thomas’s dry humor and scholarly asides. The main plea: don’t allow contemporary critical fads to rob literature of its transcendent power. Instead, read symbolically, recognizing the sacramental imagination at work.

Key takeaway:
Goblin Market is best understood—not as a repressed document of economics or sexuality—but as a vibrant, accessible Christian allegory of temptation, fall, self-sacrificial love, death, and resurrection. Only by reading it within this tradition does its meaning, beauty, and spiritual power become clear.

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Notable Quotes (with Attribution & Timestamp)

• “It’s not what you give us as the problem, it’s what you take away...They take away the gospel and they give us economics, racism and sex.”
  — Angelina Stanford, 58:14

• “The goblins are our own sinful desires. That’s what’s tempting us.”
  — Angelina Stanford, 59:32

• “The obvious reading is the real one.”
  — Thomas Banks, 57:38

• “Symbols in the tradition are not there to hide. They are there to exhibit it, to make it plain.”
  — Angelina Stanford, 52:49

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For Further Listening

• Next episode will be a rebroadcast of their Dracula series, applying the same symbolic, vertical interpretive principles.

For information on upcoming webinars and books mentioned during the episode, visit houseofhumaneletters.com.

Transcript

[A]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Before jumping into today's episode, I wanted to give listeners a small heads up about the content. We're going to be discussing the right way to read Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. And we're also going to be discussing some of the bad ways of reading the poem. We know that many parents listen to this podcast driving around in their cars with their children in the backseat. And while we are not going to be explicit in today's episode, parents might want to preview before deciding if this is appropriate for their children. Thanks a lot and enjoy today's episode. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here with me is the man who does not have wombats, the mysterious Mr. Banks.

[B]

Nor am I a goblin, last I checked. Well, I don't know. I've heard it both ways. I don't, I don't know what the podcast reviews are saying about me these days. Who knows? I could have descended to that level in the eyes of, you know, the general public. You could have, but we'll be optimistic and assume I haven't.

[A]

So one of the things that happens on this podcast is we record it, you know, a few days, sometimes a few weeks before it airs, which means I always forget what we talk about when it comes out. And so this past week, in all of my classes in the chat box, the kids are making jokes about wombats and how wombats were going to be the official mascot of the House of Humane Letters. And I did not get the joke until today when one of the students said, well, it's because of what Mr. Banks said about, I know for a fact wombats don't make good pets.

[B]

Yeah, because of Dante Rossetti's wombat.

[A]

But apparently the students are now all trying to figure out, do you know this from personal experience, that wombats are not like they want to know? In your life as a bachelor, did you house some wombats?

[B]

Years of field research? No, I was. No, I. I've read about it, though. I. Yeah, and. But. But evidently there are people who. This is a much Googled question, evidently. But I looked at, I think it was like the Australian Park Ranging Ranger Service, and they say, or did a few years ago on their website, say that it is often asked whether wombats, because of their adorable kind of cuddly appearance, make good household heads. But that would be absolutely disastrous. And, yeah, you would probably ruin your life.

[A]

I feel like there's a movie to be made about this.

[B]

But it interests me because Dante Rossetti, like, where would he have procured a wombat?

[A]

Where did he get.

[B]

Was he breaking into zoos or something like that? Because, I mean, they're not native to England.

[A]

I want you to know, though, even though we joke that you're not mysterious Mr. Banks anymore, that you're basically transparent, you're obviously still a mystery to our students because they wanted to know what the wombat story was. So I assured them that no wombats had entered this marriage.

[B]

I did buy recently a stuffed wombat for my nephew, who's a toddler. And my sister in law, our sister in law sent a picture to me of him baptizing his wombat, which might be wise. We don't know where he came from. It could have been a pagan wombat, but he was baptized him according, I believe, to the rites of the Church of England. So, yeah, so shout out to my nephew, little. Little Thomas. That's his name. He's another Thomas and his wombat whose name I do not know.

[A]

All right, I gotta try to pull myself together because I did not expect that story. That's. That's hilarious. Well, today we're going to continue our series on Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. So last week we set you up with the introduction and I teased a little bit about some of the bad ways of reading. And so today, again, in keeping with kind of the, I don't want to say new emphasis. It's always been the emphasis, but this past year I've tried to make things a lot more explicit for you guys based on questions we're getting. And, of course, so that recently we did an episode to try to answer the question, what is the literary tradition? And again, if you haven't listened to that, I'd highly recommend it. And so I want to go today through this poem, not just saying what I think it means, but. But pointing out some of the ways it's usually read and explaining not Only that that's wrong. But why it's wrong, how you can know it's wrong.

[B]

Yeah. And I think this is a kind of useful poem for doing that because it's a poem that's been misread a lot, but never in the same way, from what I can tell.

[A]

Well, this is what happens, right. Once you divorce yourself from understanding the universal symbolic language of the medieval period, then you can just make the symbols mean anything. And the more obviously symbolic the work, the more that they treat it as their blank canvas and they can just make it say anything. But we'll get to that. We'll get to that. So that's what we'll do today. But first, just a quick reminder of who we are. We are Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks of the House of Humane Letters. This podcast is a free resource that we make available, but we also have paid resources for people who would like to dive deeper, go further, or also just, you know, throw a few nickels our way so we can keep this podcast going for free. So we mentioned last week the stuff, all the things we have going on. We still have Ella Hornstra's Grammar of the Natural World class going on. Last week's Viking webinar by Dr. Michael Drought was amazing. Oh, my gosh. Like, seriously, our students were posting on the student forum that they couldn't go to sleep. They were so excited. So you definitely want to go to the store and snatch that one up. It was really fabulous. And there is definitely more Michael Drought coming, so you can watch for that announcement. But we've got. We officially launched Mr. Banks next webinar, Oliver Cromwell and the Civil war of the three kingdoms. That's going to be on October 16th. Mr. Banks, do you want to say anything about that webinar?

[B]

Yeah, I. I chose Oliver Cromwell because it gives me an opportunity to talk about war and religion and wars of religion, which are inspiring to me, as dismal as they might seem to normal and well balanced.

[A]

And wombats.

[B]

Yeah, and obviously wombats. Now, no, I, I will talk about some of the. The literary scene, because actually the. The English Civil War is a war in which most of the major English writers are engaged on one side or the other, either in a civilian or a soldierly capacity. So there will be some talk of literary matters. But it's. It's really a unique moment in English history because it's the only time in English history where England does not have a monarchy of any kind for a period of about 10 years and is first kind of a. Ruled by an increasingly dysfunctional parliament and then by a military dictatorship. And then it all ends kind of overnight after Cromwell's death and the monarchy is re established. It's. So yeah, it's a strange story. It's. Some people have found it inspiring as a sort of step in the march of democracy or whatever we want to call it. I don't think that the wiser historians have read the war that way, but it is a war with interesting heroes, villains and a great deal of sort of muddled individuals of mixed motives in between. And Cromwell himself is. Cromwell is kind of a fascinating character, I believe.

[A]

Oh, he is. And I know I've said this before, but I mean you are really such a gifted teacher of history. You, you make it come alive. Your mind is fascinating to me, the things that you can remember and you, you really make the make it alive for people. So this would be a fantastic webinar for someone who's studying this period of history. If you're a homeschooler or just want to learn more about this time period, it'll be a wonderful little addition.

[B]

Yeah, well, I hope so. I hope so. Yes.

[A]

We've also officially launched our 8th annual Literary Life online conference. I cannot believe we're up to number eight. And just a reminder, we heard from you guys that you wanted to move it earlier in the year and we did it. So this year it's going to be from January 23rd to January 30th and the theme is the letter killeth and the spirit quickeneth. Reading like a human. I'm so excited about this topic. The behind the scenes conversations between me and the speakers is really good. This is going to be a fantastic week of thinking through these ideas and the implications and what does it mean to read like a human and how have we lost that and what has happened to us and what is going to happen to us even more and best how we can recover it. And the keynote speaker, Honestly I said this last week, but it was a no brainer. Dr. Jason Baxter. Like soon as I came up with the topic I messaged him because I thought though he will knock this out of the park. So you can sign up for that for the webinar you can grab Dr. Drought's [e-mail] and of course don't forget our sister business is Cassiodorus press@casiodorus press.com and we've got Dr. Jason Baxter's book why Literature Still Matters there. And he just came out with the Audible read by the author. So head on over there, click those links, get your audio book, get your physical book. It rave reviews for that. And I just said we're going to have more Dr. Drought coming your way. We're also going to have another book by Jason Baxter coming out by the end of the year. So you pay attention for that announcement as well. He's just about finished with the manuscript, and then it has to go through all of its behind the scenes production. But, yeah, so that's. That's an exciting announcement that's coming up too, because I know you guys cannot get enough of Jason Baxter. And he's. He's speaking of fascinating minds. He has a fascinating mind and he's a fascinating, fabulous writer and speaker. He's just. He's a gift.

[B]

And this book he's writing is one. He is writing of his own free will. You're not, like, threatening him? You're not cracking the whip in an editorial capacity. More prose, Baxter. More prose.

[A]

Neither confirm nor deny. Okay, Senator, I do not recall.

[B]

You're merely exploiting him. He's volunteering to be exploited. We'll just put it that way.

[A]

He's volunteering to be. That is the world of small publishing. We're both volunteering to be exploited. Yes.

[B]

I like it that way. Yeah.

[A]

In terms of I'm the publisher, and I would definitely say I'm exploited. I'm definitely exploited as the publisher. All right, well, now that we've gotten that fun business out of the way.

[B]

You know, there's a Russian proverb, by the way, that says that a poet is a man who always cheats his boss. Well, I think the boss in that proverb is supposed to be the reader. I don't know if it's the publisher, probably. Maybe it's both. I don't know. But a poet always cheats his boss. I like that.

[A]

Wait, but you're a poet and I'm your boss. I don't like this at all.

[B]

No, no, I'm just. I just floated out there. I leave it to you or whoever listens to this to come up with possible applications.

[A]

Once again, our. Our readers alike and the subtitle of this podcast is A Marriage Disintegrates. All right, well, let's get to the point of the podcast where we share commonplace quotes. Mr. Banks, what do you have? Of course, my mind requires a backstory to the backstory. As always, mine.

[B]

I'll give a bit of backstory. Mine is a line from Alexander Pope, the great English Augustan poet. The premier Poet of the neoclassical period, Alexander Pope was a small man who was a great hater and a very witty hater. And in one of his major poems called the Dunciad, which is a mock epic, so if you know, Homer wrote the Iliad, the Tale of Troy, and, you know, Virgil wrote the Aeneid, Alexander Pope writes the epic of dullness. And instead of summoning the muse to assist him in his poetic labor, he summons the goddess of dullness, whom very naughtily, he describes in such a way that readers would have understood that her physical appearance is like Queen Caroline of Anspach, who was the queen consort of Great Britain at the time, which is really unkind.

[A]

But he got spicy there.

[B]

Yeah. So the book is an attack on the dullness of his age and the wr who embody it. Anyone less clever than he was, which is virtually everyone. He doesn't attack Jonathan Swift, but I think almost everybody else, because he and Swift were buddies, as you might understand.

[A]

They were buddies, but also, you know, if you attack Jonathan Swift, because his pin is definitely mightier than a sword.

[B]

Yeah. And actually, if you. I've read the letters they exchanged. They exchanged quite a few letters. And it's in one of the more famous letters by Jonathan Swift. Swift, where he talks about what's wrong with the world. And he says primarily that animal called man, whom I abhor and detest. Though I might be quite fine with man, the individual person, but man in the whole is a kind of a botch and a mistake. But anyway, in the Dunciad, talking about sort of this apostolic succession of dunces, Alexander Pope writes, dunce II reigns like dunce I, which is a line with many applications, I think.

[A]

Yes. I did this snort in the microphone. It was because of the way you said that. All right. Very funny and flippant and charming as always, Mr. Banks. All right. My, my, my. Commonplace quote is, not surprisingly from a C.S. lewis essay. But what might be surprising is that it is from an essay he wrote against Freudian criticism of literature. And it's hot, too. I. Part of me just wanted, like, to read pages and pages out loud, but, you know, the copyright people will come for me if I do that. We're going to talk today about Freudian criticism because it is a very popular misreading of this poem. And we'll explain, you know, where they're making their error, and hopefully you can learn something about the right way to read and the wrong way to read through this larger conversation. But it was really becoming pretty popular in the mid 20th century. To start trying to apply some of Freud's theories to literature, and in particular, looking at Freud's book on dream interpretations and applying it to literature. So this is the idea that in dreams, your secret repressed desires, most of which are sexual in nature, are making themselves known to you through symbols because your ego is too frightened by the things you desire.

[B]

Repressed.

[A]

It's too. Yeah, exactly. It's too repressed. She's a Freudian term. And so you're too embarrassed by your sexual desire, so your. Your mind suppresses them and they come out coded to you in symbols. Okay, I think that's. I tried to be very fair in my.

[B]

No, I think that's a fair statement.

[A]

That's a fair statement.

[B]

I don't think that's a caricature.

[A]

Okay, so Lewis is writing a very long essay against that, and I'll be quoting from this several times in today's podcast, but we'll start with this quote from him from this essay. And the essay is called Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism. We do not mind being told that when we enjoy Milton's description of Eden, some latent sexual interest is, as a matter of fact, and along with a thousand other things present in our unconscious. Our quarrel is with the man who says, you know, why you're really enjoying this? Or, of course you realize what's behind this, or it all comes from so and so. What we resent, in fact, is not so much the suggestion that we are interested in the female body as a suggestion that we have no interest in gardens. Not what the wiseacre would force upon us, but what he threatens to take away. If it is true that all of our enjoyment. I'm sorry. If it is true that all our enjoyment of the images without remainder can be explained in terms of infantile sexuality, then I confess our literary judgments are in ruins. But I do not believe it is true.

[B]

That's very good.

[A]

It is good. And that's exactly the point we're going to make as we. As we talk about this, because. And then Lewis says this, and Chesterton also has an essay where he. He makes this snarky comment, because when you talk to a Freudian, Anybody who's kind of immersed in Freudian ideas, if you push back against them and say, no, I don't think actually this is my coded sexual desires coming out, they will respond, oh, well, of course you'd say that because you're repressed. Right. So again, the idea is I'm too shocked and ashamed of my own desires, that I can only speak about them codedly. Right. So I can't even. I can't even acknowled that they exist because I can only speak in codes. And so Lewis makes this comment in his essay about. But of course, the Freudians are just going to say I'm repressed. And Chesterton also has a joke like that in. In an essay in a review he wrote of a psychoanalysis of Hamlin, which he says, but of course you guys will just say I'm repressed. Actually, the full joke he makes is this. The Freudians tell me that it's really bad for my neuroses and my psyche to repress anything I'm feeling. So let me not repress how I'm feeling about this book. And then he tears into.

[B]

I was going to say, I think there's. We've written so much about the dangers of repression. We've. I think we've done short service to its advantages. Don't you think? Like, maybe there's something to be said.

[A]

Yeah, we need to.

[B]

More just more of a filter generally on us as a society. I don't mean any individual person necessarily, just like us in the whole.

[A]

Well, I think we talked about that in our series. We just completed the Age of Innocence.

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think a profitable essay or book could be written on this.

[A]

I agree.

[B]

In praise of repression.

[A]

In praise of repression. There you go. So to Louis's point, no Freudian. It's not because I'm repressed. It's not because I'm uncomfortable with the idea of sex in literature, that I think you're reading it wrong. It's because, just like he says, it's not what you give us as the problem, it's what you take away. And that is going to be sort of my. My theme for today's episode. What. What is taken away from us if we read things through a Freudian lens. And I don't think what's given us in Exchange is worth 2 cents. But Lewis is being very gracious and he's like, okay, if I were to agree that what you're giving me is so good, what's the exchange? And look. Look what we're losing. Right? And I'm over here like, yeah, and you're giving us nothing and we're losing everything. But we will get more into that in just a moment. So Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. Why don't we start off talking about. So I'm presuming now everyone's read. Read the poem. And when I read it, it was so I mean, it wasn't even hard. It was like, oh, wow, okay, this is. I see obviously what she's doing here. And then to my. I guess I was in my naive moment, I googled what the rest of the world was saying, and it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And one of our line.

[B]

Huh? Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Getting on. Right. One of our dear listeners, Esther, Shout out to Esther Bills. But she said that she had listened to a podcast, I guess, of, like, several college professors talking about this poem. And as she put it, everything was power. Sex. Power. Power. More sex, more sex. Power.

[B]

Prejudice. Also figures. Prejudice, Racial prejudice.

[A]

Economics.

[B]

Economics, yes.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Criticism of market forces.

[A]

There you go. All right. So.

[B]

Because clearly the goblins are capitalists or something like that, or industrialists. I don't know.

[A]

Capitals.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Every time in my classes, I start to make like a fake, satirical, over the top Marxist reading of a book that I think would be obviously false by the time my mouth finishes the sentence. I always think, no, I could see someone getting a paper published on that.

[B]

One of the things I actually like very much about this poem is it doesn't seem like it belongs to any particular period or century.

[A]

One of the things that makes a great work of.

[B]

Yeah, I think one, an intelligent reader could say, yeah, this is obviously from the style. We could say this is a 19th century poem, but it doesn't seem trapped in a cage of 19th century interests.

[A]

Oh. I mean, it's like you go into fairyland at this poem.

[B]

There's the theme of the fallen woman, of course, but it's not. Not even in a typical way. It's.

[A]

No.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right. So before we jump into what are some of the bad ways of reading, let's back up just a little bit and. And review some things. Okay. So we've got the horizontal plane and we've got the vertical plane. The vertical plane is the one that has a basically transcendental, sacramental view of reality. Right. So, like, all of reality is transcended. All of reality is a sacrament. And a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible spiritual reality. Right. So if you listen to the literary tradition episode, we talked about all this. So art, the symbols of art are sacraments. This is the. This is the view that Lewis and Tolkien had. This is the view that comes to us through Coleridge and Spencer and Shakespeare and Aristotle. So. Well, not so much Aristotle, Neoplatonists and Neo Aristotelians. I should be more clear about that. But this is the idea that all of these surface things, symbols in Art, the human body, nature, the cosmos, all of these things are sacraments, and you can. They are signs and symbols that you see through to see a spiritual reality behind it. So that's the vertical perspective. Everything here is, is part of a, a unity, a cosmic unity, and it's divinely held together and it's meaningful. And then we're on that as human beings, we're always looking for contact with the transcendent, right? Like, we can't survive as human beings if we're not having those points of contact with the divine. Okay? The other plane is the horizontal plane. That's our everyday life. Now, I'm not suggesting that we're a bunch of Gnostics and we forget the horizontal plane and we're just going to be like, you know, me and my spirit with the, with, you know, the world spirit, nothing like that. The horizontal plane is our regular life, and our regular life is meaningful. So we wouldn't say that the natural world is only a symbol, because that would suggest that the meaning of the natural world is only symbolic or only spiritual when the fact is you cannot separate it. The, the, the, the physical form of the natural world is the form of the spiritual reality. Right? And, and honestly, this just comes back to the incarnation when, when God becomes man, that's, that's the anti Gnostic event of history, right? And so the body, the form, it matters, right? When, when Christ ascended, he didn't dump his human body. He still has it. He is forever the incarnated God. And so we don't. Sacrament doesn't mean the physical thing doesn't matter. So we're not suggesting the horizontal doesn't matter, but that what ultimately gives the horizontal its true meaning is its connection with the vertical. So it's always so hard. On the podcast, if you were students in front of me, I could, I could look at your face and say, okay, they're nodding, they're tracking. Or I could say, oh, no, this person seems confused. Let me restate this. So it's always hard to just talk into the void, but I'm doing the best I can, so it's, it's both of those things. In fact, plenty of people have argued that the sort of crisis we're having now, this angst that we're having, culturally, globally, almost cosmic angst, is because we exclusively interact with the horizontal as if that is all that there is and there is no reality outside of that. And then, of course, you know, that creates a great deal of psychic and spiritual despair. If this is all that There is. Right?

[B]

Men cannot bear too much reality.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

Like T.S. eliot said, there you go.

[A]

So there's a lot of implications, then, for how we read. Modern reading is part of modern cosmology and believes that the only thing that's real is the horizontal realm. Okay? That is the things I can see and touch and taste and feel. That's what's real. There is no transcendent. There is no vertical. And so the way that they approach reading is entirely horizontal, whereas the older, more sacramental, more iconographic way to read is to see that horizontal and to see through it. To see through it to the vertical. So one of the things that all of these bad readings we're going to describe have in common is that they are 100% focused on the horizontal. As if the reason you write art is because you want to make a comment on something or critique something. And that might be what you have heard. And this entire podcast with eight years. Eight years of podcasts now, is devoted to showing you that's not what's going on. Art is not about making comments on Life. I mean, C.S. lewis explicitly rejects that idea in Experiment and Criticism, and we did a whole series on. On that book. So, yeah, the horizontal is not all that there is. And art is looking through the horizontal to the vertical. I totally lost my train of thought. Can you tell? What was I saying? What was I saying?

[B]

I was flung from your train of thought.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

You know, at the same time, just before it went off the rails, I think.

[A]

So most of us as moderns have grown up thinking that the point of art, the point of literature, is to make some sort of comment on life.

[B]

And interestingly, that particular sort of call it a first principle of criticism, kind of goes back to the Victorian age itself, because Matthew Arnold defined. I think he defined literature itself as a criticism of life which describes a certain type of fiction. I agree. I think you could say that, yes, some of George Eliot's novels seem like criticisms of life or something, or maybe some of the hard times or something. The realistic tradition, certain types of poetry, like Matthew Arnold's, I think. But it leaves out so much.

[A]

Well, that's the point. In the 19th century, you have Matthew Arnold, and over and against him is Coleridge. Coleridge is arguing for this older way. So it's just like what CSW says that he says, look, it's not what you give us that's the problem. It's what you take away. So I'm not going to deny that lots of literature has little comments here. And there indirect comments, sometimes direct comments, but that's not all that there is. What there is is the transcendence in art. And to be perfectly frank, if everybody was talking about the transcendence of art, if everybody was reading art and seeing, oh, boom, that was a prism to the light. Capital L, I got it, then I could say, yeah, we can have conversations about what's this little side comment? What's this little side comment? And it wouldn't be a distraction from the real thing, but because no one talks about that now, and all anyone is concerned about is the surface, honestly, this is one of the reasons why we no longer value art and literature, because we don't see that there's any purpose in having little chatty comments. So at best, at best, I would say the horizontal comments have a place as a side aside.

[B]

They have an ancillary role to play.

[A]

They have an ancillary role to play.

[B]

Ancillary, from the Latin meaning handmade.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

There you go.

[A]

And at worst, it's a complete and total distraction. Stands in the way, leads us into some insane areas of thought that are going to now stand in the way of you being able to have a transcendent experience.

[B]

I think I would agree with virtually all of that, Ms. Stanford.

[A]

All right, let's talk about then, some of these bad horizontal readings. Let's start with the one you said about economic forces. So the Marxist lens is very popular.

[B]

Yeah. And this wasn't even particularly a Marxist criticism, but it was. I think it was some kind of literary critic with an especial interest in sociological readings who said that the goblins represent injustices within the market economy of Victorian Britain, and the sisters are the ordinary people who are the victims of said market forces.

[A]

So my response to that would be that completely misunderstands fairyland and how fairyland operates. This entire story is in fairyland. And there is a world of difference from what you just said that sometimes George Eliot is, you know, she makes comments. I totally agree with that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

George Elliot doesn't write stories in fairyland. George Eliot's stories are realistic. They're in this world with these characters, you know, goblins representing.

[B]

And they might have like even kind of a fairy structure, like in Silas.

[A]

Marner stab my eyes out. When I read the script. It's so frustrating.

[B]

I think a couple of lines in the poem itself kind of ought to have told that particular reader that they were following the wrong scent. So, for instance, where it says that the goblins are selling fruits which are not sold in any marketplace known to men.

[A]

And they don't take.

[B]

Whatever the line is.

[A]

How about that?

[B]

Yeah, Things. It's. I don't know.

[A]

We won't take your money, we're going to take your hair.

[B]

But it shows in a weird way. It kind of shows that the desire for allegory is by itself kind of a natural one, which we fall into, even if we haven't been taught how to read allegorically in any formal sense. But then when you try to construct. Okay, there must be an allegory here. Let me see what's going on. Okay, so we have goblins who are talking, who are selling their wares, saying, come by, come by. Aha. She must be talking about. She must be talking about, you know, the new brutal sort of market forces in, you know, the city life of urban England.

[A]

So I would argue that the. The impulse to allegorize is a human impulse that God has put in us and that we do understand that for something to have a greater meaning, we have to connect it to something outside of itself. Completely agree. The problem is, and I hope you can see this, right, they've cut themselves off from the vertical. So instead of looking for the transcendent allegory, they're looking for, what I say is just. I mean, how can it not be such a small reductionist thing?

[B]

Sort of like they. They simply introduce a secondary horizontal realm of significance that the. That the primary horizontal is, they would say, pointing to.

[A]

Right. And. And in this case, I would say, I mean, not only is it just a complete misreading, but it's one of those things where when we talk about what the real meaning is, you're going to realize that this is. This is. This is completely reductionist. This is like looking at certain stories in the Gospel, like, Judas is 50, his bag of silver for betrayal. Right. And thinking that the point is, well, the author of the Bible is clearly making a comment about economic forces and that, you know, poverty leads men to do horrible things. Right? Like that' not the point.

[B]

Actually, here's another thing. Something interesting that I. I mean, you hear about the 30 pieces of silver, you know, every time you go to church on Good Friday during the Easter season. Something that I read a couple years ago in a commentary on one of the Gospels. Assuming that the 30 pieces of silver are a coin of an ordinary denomination, like a denarius, that's probably not very much money.

[A]

Just goes to show how desperate the proletariat is.

[B]

Well, yeah, but I mean, again, it kind of. It's sort of the mystery of evil, like Judas's motives are not fully explicable.

[A]

But my. I'm making a show with the Marxist critic would say, right. I mean, it's just, it's just, it's not the point. It's not, it's not the point. And some of us might have strong feelings about economics, and that's fine. And that's good. Just, you know, don't, don't force that onto everything you read. There's always a temptation to make your personal bugaboo be something you see everywhere. And that is one of the reasons why on this podcast, I'm so careful to connect the things I see in stories to a long tradition going back 2,000 years and more, going, well, probably more like 3,000 years. Because I want you to know this is just not my personal bugaboo, that I'm the first person in the world to see this stuff and so everybody should listen to me. It's not at all. I am working in a tradition. It is bigger than me, is outside of me. And I'm constantly trying to remind you that's, See, it's Fry, it's Lewis, it's Tolkien, it's Coleridge, it's Shakespeare, it's Spencer. You know, I'm, I'm throwing that out there, that's golden thread. So that you can see this is not just my personal area of interest and I forced it onto something. But that there, there's a long tradition that I'm working in.

[B]

All right, so is this a signal, A signal from you, Ms. Stanford, that I should shelve that 25 page essay I'm writing on mercantilist themes in medieval Germany as seen in the Grimm fairy tales. You would be ashamed to be married to me if I were to publish this.

[A]

To say that's going to go on the back corner of the Cassidorus Press catalog.

[B]

I was going to say, I don't see a lot of money here. No pun intended.

[A]

Yeah, you might need to shop that. You might need to workshop that, Mr. Banks.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, well, what are some of the other. Let's save the Freudian bad readings for last. What are some other bad readings?

[B]

This one and I. This one I'll will approach delicately. But this saved the Freudian one. Yeah, this is not a Freudian one.

[A]

Okay, sorry.

[B]

This is the other, the other kind of hairy one.

[A]

We'll say see that one as a kind of a subset of the Freudian. Go ahead.

[B]

But in 2003, a paper was a peer reviewed paper was published regarding this poem in, in which the goblins, it is asserted, are anti Semitic stereotypes of Jewish merchants. And I don't, again, I just don't know where to begin with that one. In this. The only thing I can think of that the critic supposed was that you have negatively portrayed characters who are selling something. Let me think of other people who sells things. You know, negatively portrayed. And, but, but again there's, and again, it's. To be fair. So lest I make this sound stupider than it really is, in the 19th century amongst all sorts of people in Europe, Christian or otherwise, there are long standing traditions of anti Semitism that are still strongly ingrained and will be. You know, I mean there's, it still exists in our day, tragically. But, but yeah, I mean that the. Christina Rossetti introduces that into what's essentially a poem for. Yeah, I just, I just don't know where you begin with that one.

[A]

Right. So. Goodness, this is going to end up being a four hour episode because I feel like for me to explain why this is a bad reading requires so much backstory, but I can already hear our listeners do it, do it. This taps into a larger problem of more modern readers. And I'm not surprised this paper was written after 2000 because I would say the last 20 years is when this kind of stuff has become super popular is misunderstanding what goblins are. So instead of seeing that this is a fairyland portrayal of something evil and dark and it's using fairy tale and symbol, you know, even biblical symbolism of white and black. White is purity and, you know, your black heart, that kind of thing. And that these are not colors that have anything to do with racial features but are symbolic, spiritual colors. That's universal.

[B]

The goblins all look different from one another too. One looks like a cat, one looks like a wombat, one a bird. It's, it's like, yeah, human features.

[A]

But again, just like you said, they like hm. They're selling something. So let's connect this to something on the horizontal that sells something. That is what people do. The goblins here, they do it to the goblins in George McDonnell, they do it to the goblins in Tolkien. And I have seen popular books accusing Tolkien of racism because of the orcs for the exact same reason of not understanding what's going on and, and superficially thinking, okay, well this, this goblin has dark skin. And so then this book must be saying people with dark skin are evil. That is not what's happening at all. Okay. You have to understand that the way symbolism of the Fairy world works is the insides are on the outside. So if you want to show that somebody has a black heart, then their outside is going to reflect that. If you want to show that they, you know, they're. This is why the orcs are all kind of like distorted looking. It's what evil does to you. And they're not humans. They're not humans. In fact, they're. They're literally in this, in the, in the legendarium of Tolkien, they're elves which have been tortured and distorted by Sauron. So actually, I think. I think it's not. They're going to come for me. I don't think it's Sauron. I think it's somebody else. Forgive me. That was a wrong Silmarillion.

[B]

Every nerd is lining up at the.

[A]

Door already with, I'm going to be canceled because I got that wrong. It's not Sauron. I corrected myself, but I can barely remember my name right now. Really not feeling well. So just forgive me and we'll. We'll do the best we can. We'll muddle through. But that's misunderstanding it looking to say, well, these physical features of these symbols must go to somebody's human physicalness. And that is not how any of this symbolism has ever, ever worked. And I'll give you an example of this. So Tolkien actually addressed this. People thought at the time that the Lord of the Rings, speaking of horizontal readings, was an allegory of World War II, despite the fact that he wrote it before World War II. But I digress. And so he was asked about this. You know, are the Orcs Nazis?

[B]

Is the ring the bomb?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he said, now his, his answer to this is very interesting. He said, well, of course not. He said, what are you talking about? He's like, the orcs are not Nazis. He's like, the Orcs are us. It's not an other that I'm trying to attack. The Orcs is us. It's me. It's our own evil heart. And that is in the tradition of the fairy tale, okay? The fairy world. When a character in the fairy world meets a monster or a knight as an opponent, they are meeting a manifestation, a symbolic, almost an incarnation, an embodiment of some. Something inside of them, right? So it's their own greed or their own lust or their own avarice, right? And so the Orcs, in keeping with this amazing medieval tradition, it's. Tolkien didn't make orcs to make some kind of racist comment on other human beings. The orcs are there in the romance tradition that the hobbits are confronting and battling their own sinful hearts, that's what's happening symbolically. That's also what's happening in the goblins here. So you can see they're missing the hugely important, huge and hugely important point that the real enemy in these kinds of stories is your own heart. By obsessively thinking the enemy must be, quote, unquote, the other, capital T, capital O, the other. We also talked about this, I think, in the Dracula episodes which are going to air next. So we get to listen to those again as well, and then start looking to see, like, what human being, what social class, what. What race, you know, what, what gender, what is being othered here. And that is not how these stories work. The. The enemy is not out there. The enemy is in me. It's my own sinful heart. So you. That's such a perfect example of the horizontal versus the vertical. Just missing the point. Don't you dare let anybody tell you that Tolkien's a racist, because I will personally come and fight them because that. That is. That is a slanderous lie. And I'm feeling spicy. So I'm just going to say it. There's a book going around, and it's popular in homeschool circles, and it makes this unsubstantiated claim, and it is slander. It is slander against a brother in Christ. I said it. Okay.

[B]

I think I've read this book.

[A]

Yeah, indeed you have. And you wrote a bad review of it. It's a book who. Anytime someone mentions it in our Facebook group, I personally go and delete it.

[B]

I. I wrote a. I said some good things about it.

[A]

People are gonna be like, what book, huh? If, you know, you know.

[B]

Anyway, I praised the COVID design. No, it was next.

[A]

Next.

[B]

But to go ahead. But, yeah, I think it's a general principle. It's. It's a very unhealthy way of reading. When I. I'm reading a book, say, and I encounter a memorably drawn character who is portrayed negatively, who's very unsympathetic and evil, and I immediately start hunting around for his or her real life counterpart. So, yes, I wonder who the real Jadis in C.S. lewis's life was. Was she a mother figure that he.

[A]

Thinks this idea of. I'm going to attach this to the horizontal and it takes it one further. Right. So the author's not just making a comment on life, he's making a racist comment on life or a sexist comment on life. And that's part of a larger problem with reading right now that sees older books as part of older harmful and dangerous power structures that we need to be protected from. And that's just utter, utter nonsense. And it's completely upside down. Anyway. Now take a deep breath. What's the next bad reading? I thought you were going to say something different.

[B]

Those were basically the two that stood out to me. Yeah.

[A]

So now. Okay, so now we'll talk about the Freudian readings. Okay, so let's back it up a little bit and review about Freud. So, like, I'm not going to repeat everything I said at the beginning, but I do want to say that part of the reason that Freudian readings got popular in literature was that it's sort of a subset of the biographical fallacy. So one of the things that happens in the 20th century after, basically, as a world we cut ourselves off from the world of the imagination, we cut ourselves off from the tradition. And not surprisingly, when we connected everything to this horizontal realm that has nothing beyond it, well, nothing had any meaning. Totally makes sense, right? So we start looking around for meaning. You know, how. How am I going to make this work of literature, this work of art, my own life, mean something? Right? And so they start to come up with all these crazy theories of literature to try to make it mean something. So one of the first things you see is they figure out that the key to the meaning is not in some transcendent, outside objective reality, but it's inside the mind of the author. That's called the biographical fallacy. That's. That's where you look and you're like, oh, yeah, clearly Christina Rossetti has an allergy to. To fruit. And that's coming out here, you know, so that's when you. That's when you see them mining through the life of the author, trying to find the hidden clues for, you know, how to. How to interpret the work. And Lewis and Tolkien fought against that horribly. They called it the personal heresy and the biographical fallacy. And sadly, sadly and ironically, people have done it to Lewis and Tolkien and done horrible readings. There was a book out that claimed that Prince Caspian was really C.S. lewis's anger at his father coming out.

[B]

Oh, my gosh, I've heard. I. Yeah, I think you told me that before.

[A]

Angry about. I looked like. Took weeks for me to calm down about that. It was just. It was just. It was utter nonsense. And it was literally. I mean, everything Lewis has ever written is the opposite of that. Right. So the Freudian stuff is kind of connected to this thing.

[B]

Like. Like anything, you know, anything about Lewis at all. Can you really imagine him as, like, this sophomoric, like, scribbling in his room? I hate my dad and I hate my life. I'm gonna take revenge on him. Oh, my gosh. No, that's. That's too bad. That's too rich. It's too rich. It's.

[A]

It's deep reading. It's cheap and shallow and wrong. Calm down, Angela. I didn't realize this episode was gonna get me so worked up. Man, it's getting hot.

[B]

I know. I should start moving, like, whatever sharp objects are around.

[A]

Left opener over there.

[B]

No flailing about. And that's how Mr. Banks died.

[A]

It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye, as my mother used to say. Okay, so. Because. Because we had that real uncle in our life who actually lost an eye.

[B]

Oh, no.

[A]

And my mother would constantly bring it up in our life as this cautionary tale. She'd be like, well, remember Uncle Ray? Because when he was a boy, someone threw a pencil and it hit him in the eye and he lost his eye.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[A]

And so my entire life, that was a cautionary tale. If anybody threw anything, my mother would be like, you're gonna lose an eye.

[B]

Well, there you go.

[A]

This episode took a weird turn.

[B]

This episode brought to you by Uncle Ray.

[A]

Biological fallacy. And that's why everything Angelina writes is about pencils as swords and stabbing her eyes out. Yeah. No, not. Okay, so what the Freudians do.

[B]

They're agreed. I'm just gonna say we're agreed. This is one of the weirder episodes already. We're like, 30 minutes in. And this is. Yeah, new listeners. We're sometimes kind of normal. Yeah. We're not actually sociopaths. Have faith in us, please.

[A]

Okay. But, you know, I get passionate about this and bad readings because it's just what Lewis says. It's not what you gave us problem. It's what you took away. And we're going to show you what they took away, and then you'll see why we're so upset. Okay, so the next step then. If the secret key to the book is in the mind of the author, the next thing come, they start pulling in this Freudian stuff and saying, okay, the key to the work is in the secret repressed desires of the author. Okay? And so when they do this Freudian reading of Christina Rossetti, okay, Which is that they make the whole thing be about sex and sexual repression. And. And, you know, so if I were to come back and Say if you know anything about Christina Rossetti, she was incredibly chaste person. She's not writing a coded sex poem for kids. They would say, well, she's repressed. She doesn't know that these are her secrets.

[B]

She has a morbid obsession with these.

[A]

Yeah, because. Because she's so repressed.

[B]

Both an obsession with and a repulsion from.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. And then in, you know, to pull in what Lewis said, then they would also argue that me as the reader, that the reason I like this and delight in it is because I too am repressed and delighting in the secret coded language. Right. But here's the problem with that. If you can claim that someone has secret desires that they don't know about, but you know about it, and their denial that they have it is evidence that they're secret desires, then you can literally claim anything about anyone.

[B]

Psychological claims are enormously tempting because. And not everyone who engages in this has this particularly bad type of motive, but it allows us to attribute almost any kind of, any kind of intention to anyone based on some, as you say, some sort of secret method we have of reading their thought balloons.

[A]

One of the things that Lewis says in this essay that's so snarky is, does not Freud under underrate the extent to which nothing in private is really shocking so long as it belongs to ourselves? And then he goes on to say.

[B]

Wait, wait, read that one more time. That was too quick.

[A]

Does not Freud underrate the extent to which nothing in private is really shocking so long as it belongs to ourselves?

[B]

Oh, that's really good.

[A]

It is good. Right. And he goes on to say, who are all these people who are so ashamed by their sexual desire? I know, I was gonna say, where are they actually?

[B]

And again, if I.

[A]

We fly the flag of that quite proudly, don't we?

[B]

If we were to put Freud on his own couch, we might say that the reason he felt that other people were, you know, morbidly ashamed of is because he is. Well, actually the funny thing, like a lot of people, I don't know a lot about Freud himself as a man. I've only read one or two books about him. But a lot of people assume that he must have been some kind of libertine and, you know, flagrant bohemian, you know, I don't know, womanizer or whatever. I. From, from everything I understand about Freud, he was like this very mild mannered, sort of bourgeois, middle class family man who was, yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't assume he was the kind of man to develop the theories that he developed about the private lives of human beings.

[A]

You'll like this line too. This is from Lewis. Again. I'm sometimes tempted to wonder whether Freudianism is not a great school of prudery and hypocrisy.

[B]

Oh, that's a burn right there.

[A]

It is a burn. So Lewis makes this point again and again. It's not because you're trying to make the work of art about sex that we're offended. It's that you're making it only about sex and you're. And you're cutting everything off. That's the issue. Right? So again, the feeling with which we reject the psychoanalytic theory of poetry is not one of shock. It's not even a vague disquietude or an unspecified reluctance. It's quite definite feeling of anti. Climax, of frustration. It's not as if we had drawn an embroidered curtain and found earwigs behind it. It is if we had drawn it expecting to find a whole new wing of the house and found merely a door that led back into the old familiar dining room. Our feelings would be most unsuitably expressed by the exclamation, not that they demand, rather the disappointed grunt. Oh, so that's all. Isn't that good?

[B]

That is very good.

[A]

And he says poetical pleasure is not sexual pleasure simply in disguised. If we are disappointed at finding only sex where we looked for something else, then surely the something more had a value for us. If we are conscious of loss in exchanging the garden for the female body, then clearly the garden added something more than concealment, something positive to our pleasure. And then Lewis gets to the real heart of the matter with Freud, okay? People who read literature in a Freudian way believe that the symbols are there to conceal, okay? So we are too ashamed, embarrassed, repressed, whatever, to deal with our own desires, so we can only talk about them to ourselves and to others in a coded way. So the symbols are there to hide. And Lewis says that's the opposite of how symbols work. Symbols in the tradition are not there to hide. They are there to exhibit it, to make it plain. And that is what we're going to see as we read Goblin Market. This is not secret. These are not symbols to. To hide something that she's too ashamed to talk about and that we're all too ashamed to talk about. And so it's tee hee hee, tee hee hee being on behind our. Our little Victorian fans. But she's using the symbols to make plain what it is that she's actually saying. And like Lewis says, it's way better than sex.

[B]

You know, I thought of. Actually, I'm taking this conversation a step backwards, but I thought of another two interpretations which are sort of mutually exclusive because I have seen this poem read both as a pro feminist fable and an anti feminist fable. That's because the horizontal readings, they'll contradict because. Well, on the one hand, the two girls live by themselves. There's no male, you know, patriarchal figure. There's no father or husband who's, you know, ruling their life in some way. On the other hand, so you can say, oh, these are independent women who have, were, you know, self actualizing and autonomous and all that kind of thing. On the other hand, it's, you know, the fact that one of these girls is hopelessly naive that gets her in trouble. And that's where the anti feminist reading that, you know, these Christina Rossetti is trying to say that without a male guardian in your life, you will get involved with goblins and no doubt, you know, poison yourself with overeating fruit. But I think both of those, I don't know, end up kind of bumping their head against different sides of the same wall perhaps.

[A]

Okay, so two more things about the Freudian stuff which I hope to correct as we go through the poem. So one is to see the sensual imagery and to say that this is an allegory of women being tempted sexually by men. But if they do the. That in this Victorian society, it will destroy them. They will not be fit for brides. And there's a lot of references to brides in here, as I'll explain why that is when we get to that. But that's the basic reading. And it's completely wrong because Christina Rossetti is literally the last person in the world to write that poem. Okay. You, you would have to argue that her repressed desires are hidden down solo. They're in her toenails. That's how low it's hidden. Right. And somehow they just accidentally bubbled up. Absurd. The other thing that I think might be even more absurd is reading incest into this poem between the two sisters. And people do do that.

[B]

That's.

[A]

It's insane.

[B]

That's. That's probably the worst of all.

[A]

It is, it is, it is. It's just horrific.

[B]

So because they share a bed.

[A]

Well, so this is a trend.

[B]

It's like, did you not have any siblings growing up or anything like that?

[A]

I read, let's say that claimed that the Bennett sisters were incestuous for the same reason. The same reason. Sharing the bed and the Closeness and the kissing and the holding hands. I've read essays that in the Victorian novels, the close female friendships where they hold hand and kiss is all coded lesbianism that completely misunderstands time periods outside of our own. Okay.

[B]

And, and not all shows of affection were sexual shows of affection.

[A]

You know, we, our culture sexualizes everything. Every intimacy, every closeness must be sexual. The truth is siblings and, and women, not necessarily men. I can't see Mr. Darcy and Bingley snuggling up in the corner. But women were like that. They had close affection. You see that in literature. Lots of hand holding, lots of kisses, you know, stroking each other's hair.

[B]

Actually, I think, I think there's more, I don't know, say, extroverted shows of affection between men as well, which are not, I think, necessarily. Well, I think like In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson. That's a, that's a very weeping over you. Yeah, that, that kind of thing. Yeah, but, but to continue with your thoughts.

[A]

Well, no, that mean that is, that is the thought that we are so quick to read more coded stuff into, into things that was just ordinary human behavior. And that's not to say that there weren't genuinely homosexual people who were hiding that from the public. I mean, I mean that you could pull up any history book. I mean, that's well documented. It's not, you know, it's not hidden from the world's story. You can read plenty of books about that. That's just to say, though, that not every exchange of same sex affection in a book is sexual. Because before the modern time, people were just a lot more touchy and affectionate than now because it wasn't present.

[B]

And in some parts of the world, they still are. We're actually kind of Africa.

[A]

Grown men hold hands all the time.

[B]

I was going to say in Islamic countries. That's. Yeah. Anyway.

[A]

Yeah. So. All right, so if it's not all of that, what is it instead? Here we go. Let's do it. So as soon as I read this, I was like squealing with delight because I had never read it. And you were right, it was made for me. And this is, this is so obviously an allegory of the fall, the temptation. This is the garden. It's fruit.

[B]

I think the obvious reading is the real one.

[A]

Yeah, the obvious reading is the real one. I know.

[B]

Maybe that's another thing. It's like, no, there must be something else here. There must be something else in the secret vault. There must be some hidden treasure.

[A]

Be a medievalist this is over the top, in your face, Christian allegory. We're like, no, I think it's about the economy and incest.

[B]

Sure. We're lurking around for the hidden thing that we think will, I don't know, open this up like some kind of magical key. But no, it's already open. That's already there.

[A]

He has thrown the door open. And it's the transcendent reading, this metaphor.

[B]

I'm pursuing, I'm reminded of. Do you remember the Geraldo Rivera, Al Capone secret vault which had. Didn't have nothing in it? Yeah. That's kind of thing. That's what. And that. I think every literary critic should watch that. And like, just to be on guard against being the Geraldo Rivera of interpretation. Yeah.

[A]

That's awesome.

[B]

I'm sorry, I'm dating myself here. For anyone younger than, like, 30, okay.

[A]

It is an illustration of this horizontal versus the vertical. Okay. Because a vertical reading is going to see temptation, fall, redemption as the pattern of the gospel. That's the vertical. Right. And somebody else who's stuck in the horizontal is like, okay, I see that there's a temptation and I see that there's a fall. So it must be a sexual temptation. It must be a sexual fall. It must be. It must be about that. Right. And that. That is just the complete wrong way. And so to go back to what Lewis says is, it's not what you gave us. That's the promise. But you take away. What have they taken away? They take away the gospel and they give us economics, racism and sex. Now, I'm not saying that some people.

[B]

That's their jam, you know?

[A]

Yeah. And that's all. And I'm not saying that those are not topics to think about and to be thoughtfully engaging with. Okay. It's just all of that is ancillary to the gospel. All of it.

[B]

I think Christina Rossetti would agree with.

[A]

She would totally agree with it. That's why I'm so offended on her behalf that. That anybody would misread her work this way. Okay. So it starts off with the. So goblin market. We are. We are in the fairyland. And so the goblins, of course, like I said, that's your insides on the outside. That's. The goblins are our own sinful desires. That's what's tempting us. And since they're tempting with fruit, come and eat this fruit. Right? I mean, that's the Garden of Eden. That's the forbidden fruit. It's the fall. So that's what we're going to See that. That these girls are everyman characters and they are being tempted. They're going about their normal day and they can hear the call, the temptation, right, Coming by, coming by. And it's fruit. So you got these two sisters, Laura and Lizzy. And Laura, I mean, she is Miss. See no evil, hear no evil. Right? No, that's Lizzie. Sorry. Why do they put the two Ls? My brain cannot. Eustace and Edmund. My brain cannot get Sauron and Saruman. Like, come on, call them Alice and Susie. That'd be a lot easier for me.

[B]

Anyone in. In Wuthering Heights, you have Harriton, Heathcliff, Hindley. And there's only, like eight people in that book.

[A]

26 letters of the Alphabet. Give a girl a break, okay? Laura's the one who's gonna fall. All right, so at first, when they hear it, okay, Lizzie veils herself. Laura bows her head to hear. So she's. She's curious and she's kind of giving in to temptation. But Lizzie avoids it. She looks away, but Laura looks. So she's opening herself up to this temptation. And then I love how Lizzie literally flees. No, said Lizzy. No, no, no. Their offer should not charm us. Us. Their evil gifts would harm us. She thrust a dimpled finger in each ear, shut her eyes and ran. This is literally see no evil, hear no evil, flee evil. Okay, so. So Lizzie is. Is the model of how to resist temptation. See no evil, hear no evil, flee evil. But Laura's curious now.

[B]

Linger and reason with it.

[A]

That's right. And. And Laura's curiosity, of course, that taps her into all kinds of things. Pandora, which is a myth that is connected to the fall Eve, the fact that the fall is connected to forbidden in knowledge. So, you know, she. She's curious and. And desires to know knowledge that is ultimately going to harm her, just like in the fall.

[B]

By the way, do you know what the name Pandora means?

[A]

What does it mean?

[B]

All gifts.

[A]

Oh, well, there you go. Okay, so Laura. Laura's about to fall here to her temptation. Laura stretched her gleaming neck like a rush embedded swan, like a lily from the beck, like a moonlit poplar branch. Okay. Those are all images of purity and innocence. She's a lily that's white, that's purity. The Easter lily. Lilies associated with the mother of our Lord.

[B]

There's another poem by Christina Rossetti about a fall called. There's the image of a broken lily, a lost. The lost lily, I think, is the poem.

[A]

Okay, that makes sense. So she's. That's an Image of innocence and purity about to fall. All right, so come by. Come by. So somebody saw me saying, but if it's a temptation to eat the fruit, why isn't it come and eat? Why are they saying, come buy? Well, because look at. What do you have to sell? How do you purchase sin? You purchase it with your own life. And that's what she's doing, right? That. This is the bargain. It's like Faust. I'm gonna. I'm. Yes, I'm gonna buy this. And the cost is my life. Right. But of course, you know, it's not about economic. I don't have any money. And they're like, that's fine.

[B]

And also, as with the Fall in Genesis, we see, which is, you know, sort of the prototype here. She knows, or should know the consequences of this. It's not as though, you know, she hasn't been warned. It's, you know, just that the. The, you know, the enticement is stronger than any will she might have had to resist.

[A]

Exactly. Laura stared but did not stir. Longed, but had no money. So she's tempted here. Notice that their words go down smooth as honey. And Christina Rossetti picks this up again at the end. And so that's obviously a reference to the proverb. The words go down like honey, but rot the bones. Huh. Okay, so this is. This is. This is bad. All right, so she says, I don't have any money. Oh, feel free to jump in at any time.

[B]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[A]

I know. I'm getting excited. I can just, like, steamroll here. So I don't have any money. No copper, no silver, no gore. What do I do? And they say, well, you have gold upon your head. Okay, so in fairyland, the golden hair, that's a symbol of purity and innocence. And so that's what she's going to trade. That's. It's literally a picture of the Fall.

[B]

The natural wealth that is hers.

[A]

That's right. The natural wealth that is hers. I'm going to give that in exchange. Of course, her hair is going to turn gray and she's going to fade away like a ring race, but we'll get to that. So she buys it with a golden curl, and then she eats the fruit. I mean, this is the Fall. She eats the fruit. It would still be the Fall if they were selling bicycle parts, but at least I could understand somebody doing an economic reading on that.

[B]

One thing I wanted to say just, I don't know, and this might be unnecessary. You tell me, Ms. Stanford. But this is obviously inspired by the biblical fall being retold in this. This sort of fairy tale verse narration. That doesn't mean that everything in the original story, in the prototype will have a corresponding part in here. I mean, obviously, there's no Adam in this story.

[A]

Well said.

[B]

And so, I mean, sometimes one story inspired by another. I mean, a selection of elements is going to be made. That's. I mean, that's how art is made, after all. Selection and rejection. And so, yes, because you have an Eve figure and because you have devilish tempters, that doesn't mean that you have to have. I mean, there's no. God does not intervene here either.

[A]

Okay. It's. The Christ figure is female here. So. Yeah. Okay, so one of my favorite medieval scholars, D.W. robertson Jr. Who y' all have heard me quote before. So he makes this point that when people first get excited about learning how to read like a medievalist and. And, you know, picking up those layers, those vertical layers of allegory, he said, the first thing that they end up doing is trying to make a modern system out of it and trying to make everything one to one, match up. And he's like, that's not how it works. And he says, you know, I'm using medieval imagination here as sort of a. A big term for anybody who's got the. You know, the traditional imagination. But the way that the traditional imagination works is it. It takes what fits and it discards the rest. And you even see that in the Bible when there'll be a parable. And then Jesus explains the parable like he's. He doesn't literally line everything up one to one, because that's not how allegory works.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So. So there's no problem. And I laughed when Robertson said that, because that always happens in my classes. I'm trying to teach allegory, and everybody's getting excited, and I got it. I can see the gospel. And then somebody's like, he stopped to tie his shoe on page five. What's the symbolism of that? Nothing. It's nothing. Not. Not everything's a symbol, but some things are.

[B]

And not everything is a Christ figure. Also just one of those things. Not everything is about Vietnam. Walter. Sorry. That's a. Sometimes big Lebowski.

[A]

Black hat is just a black hat. Okay, so she eats the fruit, and it's sweeter than honey from the rock it's stronger than man rejoicing wine it's clearer than water that flowed that juice. Okay, if you cannot see that this is a false Eucharist image, I'm not sure I can help you. It's a rock, it's wine, it's water. Those are all three things that are. That are Christ images. And so she's having a false Eucharist and immediately what happens.

[B]

You know, it's interesting that, I mean, this is such a biblically saturated poem imaginatively, but there actually aren't that many phrases. I mean, there's honey from the rock, there's, I think, a few others, but there aren't that many phrases which are direct biblical allusions.

[A]

Oh, that's right.

[B]

Which is actually. I think that's actually very tastefully done. Again, she doesn't hammer it into her audience that the fall that she's describing here, she's describing with a. A, I guess you could say Christian understanding of it.

[A]

So Tolkien thought that explicit. Like, it's like, you know, plopping a Bible verse in there actually jolts you out of the fairyland and undermines the whole thing. And that's why sometimes people will fail to understand that Tolkien's legendarium is 100 Christian from page one to page 4,007. Because he doesn't have an explicit. You know, somebody comes in here and says, for God, so love the world.

[B]

And you never see characters engaged in any kind of worship.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Prayer.

[A]

That's.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Tolkien believes it has to happen on this symbolic, imaginative level. And if you introduce. That's why he didn't like the fact that Father Christmas was in Narnia. Like throwing something in from this world jolts you out of it. And so I think that's what she's doing here. She's keeping it completely in fairyland. And I think she's presuming an audience, which. For. When she's writing this in 1862. This. You can presume that your audience knows this story. They're going to get the biblical stuff without you having to spell it out. We, of course, she could have literally put the Bible verses in there and we still would be like, she's just coding her repressed desires for economic reform. I. I just like to say for the record, right now, none of my desires are repressed. I know what they all are.

[B]

So does anyone who spends any time around you. I. I think, yeah.

[A]

Some books. So don't let anybody do Freudian criticism of me. Okay. What happens immediately after she eats it? She knows. Not if it's night or day. Okay. Boom. Right. She's upside down. She doesn't know if it's day or night. She's going to be described as being in A dream.

[B]

Her sense of reality is overthrown.

[A]

Yeah, well said. Well said.

[B]

I was rehearsing that one.

[A]

That's really good.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you.

[A]

You're higher.

[B]

It was.

[A]

Okay, I'll keep you around. Send that process of your latest book to my. To my gal. To my. All right, so next, then Lizzie brings up Genie, and Genie is kind of the cautionary tale. Some of the. Some of the people who make a big deal that this is a. This is about fallen sexuality, thinks that Genie is a fall. Is a cautionary tale about fallen sexuality. That is not what happens. Okay? So Genie is our cautionary tale. She longed after the enchanted food. Okay? And enchanted food, I mean, this is all over the place in the fairyland in mythology. This is. This is the pomegranate that Persephone eats. This is the Turkish delight that Edmund eats. Eats.

[B]

This is the cookies on the witch's house. It could be, yes.

[A]

Yeah. This is the watercress that Rapunzel's mother eats. Okay, the.

[B]

Oh, I'd forgotten that one. That's good.

[A]

The enchanted food. And you need it more and more and more and you waste away if you don't have it. This is a fairy tale trope, okay? It's also kind of the lotus eaters, the way they kind of pine away there. Okay, so. So she's. She's the cautionary tale because she ate it and she faded away again. Tolkien's doing the same thing with, like, the ring wraith.

[B]

Oh, yeah. But. But, but people will insist on saying that she perished of an STD or something. You will get syphilis and you will die. It's subtle as not.

[A]

For Whom the Bell Tolls. Okay, so when Lizzy is telling Laura about Genie, Laura blurts it out. Okay, I confess. I ate. I ate and ate and ate my fill. Yet my mouth waters still. Tomorrow night I will buy more. Of course, the. The thing is, right, it's got you. And now she can't go back because she can't hear it anymore. She's fallen, so there's no temptation there. You know, we didn't talk about people who want to read this as drug addiction.

[B]

Oh, yeah, right.

[A]

And all I could say about that is there absolutely are parallels between drug addiction and becoming enslaved to sin. And that is exactly the metaphor that St. Paul uses. You're going to become enslaved to sin. And that's how addiction works. But that doesn't mean that every time you show somebody becoming enslaved that it's a parable about drug addiction.

[B]

Really. Heroin one? Yeah, yeah.

[A]

The opium eaters here.

[B]

Actually, one detail in Christina Rossetti's own background, I think, that has misled a lot of people in the reading of this poem. Did you know that she worked in a modeling house?

[A]

I did read about that, and that was.

[B]

Which was for reformed. For reformed prostitutes. I mean, she worked there as, you know, doing, I guess, charitable work, basically. But that doesn't mean that this poem he was writing, this is, you know, know, if you. If you don't take the lesson from this poem, you could end up like one of these girls in the model in the house. Yeah.

[A]

Or worse, that she meets them and now she's gonna write something that's. That's a rebuke of society.

[B]

Oh, sure, sure.

[A]

Which. There are other Victorian authors who do do that. So I'm not saying you can't run into that.

[B]

Yeah. And. And again, I mean, she. I. I dare say, like, everyone. She had a certain concern, like every major Victorian author you can name basically has a certain concern about. Yeah. Like, you know, know the. The. The new ways in which the world threatens women, especially young women.

[A]

They did my thesis on the fallen woman in Victorian England. So I'm. I'm well aware of this trope.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm. I'm more aware of this trope than the average reader. And so for me to read this and be like, you guys, what are you guys smoking? That's. This is not about that. Are you kidding me? Okay. And then we see a picture of. So she confesses. And then we see a picture of sisterly devotion. So very, very Victorian. I mean, think about even little women, how devoted the sisters are to each other. Right? So they're very, very close. They're, you know, one head in the curtain bed. This just. Just shows that they're. They're close. And, and obviously they're close because Lor. Lizzy's about to sacrifice herself, put herself in real danger to save her sister. So you have to establish that they're very, very close. All right? So the next day, Lizzy. Well, Lizzy's in trouble because. No, I'm sorry. Lizzy looks at Laura, and Laura is in an absent dream. One content, one second partial Lizzie's content. Laura's sick. One warbling for the mere bright days. Daylight one. Longing for the night. Okay, There is also a ton of vampire imagery in here. The sucking the fruit. Now it's night and I can't be in the light. Listen to the Dracula episode that's going to air after this because we explain all of that. That the Vampire imagery is all connect. It is a type of. Of fall. And it's not a sex thing, as the Freudians. And we talk about that in the Dracula episode, about how the Freudians get that wrong.

[B]

But she's been sapped of her vitality and apparently has nothing left to live for.

[A]

That's right. Now, the fact that this fall is She's. She's in this. This. This death that she's, you know, experiencing is asleep in a dream. Okay, so that. That totally fits in. Northern Fry explains how falling asleep and dying and being stuck in a dream, that's all the same image. And because of the fall, there's this sense in which we are all trapped in a nightmare in which we cannot wake up. Right. So part of what happens then, like, in Sleeping Beauty, is the resurrection image is waking up, that you're waking up out of this nightmare, that you're in this fallen state. And that's, of course, what happens at the end here. But that's why she's using. Using dream imagery to represent this fallen state, because Laura's trapped in a nightmare. That's why it's night all the time. And she's, you know, in this sleep, like death, death, like sleep, blah, blah, blah. All right, so moving on. I think you guys get the point. So she's listening because she wants more, but she can't get more because they got her now. Okay? This is like the Turkish delight. Edmund wants it the whole way through, and he's never going to get it again. Okay? Adam and Eve are never gonna get that apple again. They're never gonna get that first bite. Like, it's done. You're falling. That's it. Okay, so Laura is just. She's completely enchanted, going, like, about line 260. This. Okay. You can see what I wrote in the margin. I wrote, whoa, exclamation point. I was so excited. Her tree of life drooped from the root. That is the. That's another.

[B]

And once again, like, it's. Like I said, there's a. There's just a handful of phrases which are obviously biblical allusions or. Or snatched from scripture. And she actually deploys them where they count. She doesn't. She doesn't just broadcast, you know, scriptural epithets at us. And I think that's. I think that's tastefully done.

[A]

I didn't realize this episode on Goblin Market was gonna just, like, be a whole, like, how to not read and how to read, but here we go. This can be another episode that people come to.

[B]

That's so many of the episodes we.

[A]

Do well, I try to make that that. All right, so more vampire imagery. Night after night, she's looking for this. She's dwindling and she's in the moon and she's decaying. Burns her fire away. She tries. She even tries to grow the food, but she can't because it's fairy food. That's not a comment on how the means of production are taken out of the hands of the pro salitariat and they can't make their own thing. No, she's trying to grow the food. She can't because it never saw the sun. With sunk eyes and faded mouth. She dreamed of melons. Okay, so she's fading. She's becoming like a ring wraith in Tolkien. Lizzie looks at her and she thinks that her sister's being eaten by a canker.

[B]

I wanted to get your thought on that line. She. She dreamts of melons. Is that during the wanderings in the desert where the people cry out for the meat and melons of Egypt?

[A]

Oh, I don't know. She drinks.

[B]

I kind of had a question mark about that one.

[A]

False waves in a desert. I mean, it's like an oasis, right? She.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I didn't know if that is that. I'm not. I'm just reading a public domain thing. I don't have any notes.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But you might be.

[B]

That was one that. Yeah, I. I didn't track that one down, but I. I thought that might be another. Yeah. Tag from Exodus there.

[A]

That's good. That's good. Okay, so Lizzy, now, she thought of Jeannie in her grave, who should have been a bride, but who, for Joy's brides, hope to have fell sick and died in her gay prime. Okay, that's a line that the people who read this as an allegory of a fallen woman sexually point to. Right? That genie tried to get the. The things that only a bride can get, and that's why she fell. So let me address that because there obviously is a lot of seductive imagery in here. There's a lot of talk about bride. There's a lot of talk about if you eat this fruit, you won't be a Bride. Guys, as Mr. Bank said, the most obvious meaning is. Is the meaning, well, how does the Bible describe the life of faithfulness as a bride? That you have to be the bride of Christ? And how does God describe in the Bible, Unfaithfulness, Adultery. Harlot. This is right in the Bible, right? You want to be the bride. You don't Want to be the whore of Babylon, Right? You want to be Lady Wisdom. You don't want to be the harlot pulling men off the road in Proverbs. That's what this is. God uses romantic and sexual language in the Bible as to, to explain the spiritual journey that Christ is your lover. I mean, it's, it's Song of Solomon, which is, yes, it's about two earthly lovers, but it's also an allegory of Christ love of the church. You're right, exactly. So it's both of those. So the, the sexual image essential imagery here is 100 biblical. And she's using it that way. Right? So Genie, who should be a bride of Christ, fell. And so she's not. Not because she sexually fell, but because that is the alley. That, that's the metaphor for all of us, that when God tells Israel, you're an adulterous nation, like, what do you think they're doing? They, they turned away from God. That's the metaphor. If you're faithful to God, you're a bride. If you're unfaithful to God, you're a harlot. That's, that's straight up in the Bible and that is what she's using there. Okay, now I confess, I did not know where this was going. I was like, okay, okay, I was like, this is going to be a cautionary tale. What's happening? So Laura is now on death's door. She's fading and she's, she's really going to die, right? Because if you eat this fruit, surely you will die. So Lizzie thinks, okay, I've got to go after her. I mean, I've got to go get the goblin fruit to save her. Okay, but watch what's going to happen because she got, she got a fake Eucharist. That's what caused her fall. Let's see how she's going to get there. All right, so she goes over there and all these wombat snail, weird looking goblins hugged her and kissed her, sweeze and caressed her. Okay? So immediately I can hear them saying, see, See, this is a sexual assault. No, it's not. It's the same biblical.

[B]

They also held her with fruit.

[A]

Yeah, but it's the, it's the same biblical imagery though. The idea of, of the lover and the seducer seducing you away from the real God, the real bridegroom. It's all the same imagery here. But it's the fact that, that the hugging, the kissing, the caressing at the same time that they're Pelting over the suit and saying, eat the fruit. Eat the fruit. They're trying to shove the fruit in her mouth. That's not an allegory of rape. This. This is the temptation, especially this constant reference to pomegranates. And. And so you got Persephone there.

[B]

The food of death.

[A]

The food of death. Right. All right. So she says, look, here's some money. I want to buy some stuff. And they're like, no, no, no, no. You have to eat it with us. Us. Feast with us. So, again, it's kind of like a. A reverse Eucharist table there. And she says, no. And they get very menacing. And now they're trying to force it on her. So they're. She's. She keeps her mouth closed and they're shoving the fruit on her, and they tear her gown and soiled her stocking, twitched her hair out by the roots, stamped upon her tender feet, held her hand and squeezed their fruits against her mouth to make her eat again. The. That's almost straight up out of Dracula. The. The taking. I'm not. I guess I shouldn't spoil that, but read Dracula and you'll see that there's also an image like that of somebody being attempted to force. To feed off of the vampire. But in contrast to that, white and golden, Lizzy stood like a lily in a flood. Okay, so this is purity. Remember, Laura gave away her purity in exchange for this. And Lizzy standing there in her innocence and purity and refusing to fall. Fall. And they can try to force her, and she's not gonna. She's not gonna fall. She's described as a rock in the flood. I mean, hello, Christ imagery. Guys, if you know the Bible, you should know this, right? This is. He's the rock in the flood. You have to build your house upon this rock, not on shifting sands. I mean, she's the rock. She's not gonna. It's not gonna move. She's a beacon in a roaring sea. I mean, hello. Light. Like. Like, she's just. It's like Christina Rossetti's got a complete. And also heist imagery, and she's just pouring it into the. This poem. Yes. Dead fast. Exactly. Sending up golden fire, so good white with blossoms, honey sweet sore, beset with wasp and bee. Right? So I'm. I'm. I'm the. I'm the tree of life, and I'm getting beset by wasp and be. Okay, they kick her, they knock her, they maul and they mock her. By the way, this is so Princess and the goblin I know we said it last time, but this is. This is how the goblins kind of attack in. In there, too. It's very childlike, like. All right, so they're shoving it in her face. Lizzie uttered not a word, would not open lip from lip, lest they should cram a mouthful limb, but laughed in heart to feel the drip of juice that syruped all her face and lodged in dimples of her chin. She's turning into a cup. She's the cup. She's the cup that's collecting all of the fruit juice here. This is about to turn into some Eucharist wine. That's right. I hope y' all can see what's happening. Right. The mocking.

[B]

This was another scorn.

[A]

And it turns into the Eucharist.

[B]

Yeah, it's like a passion.

[A]

That's exactly what it is.

[B]

Very much.

[A]

She has descended into the goblin market.

[B]

And again, I think this would be another moment where someone could be tempted to say, but the fruit was the source of the girl's fall, but now it's going to be the source of her redemption as well.

[A]

But idea behind the fortunate fall, that's Good Friday. This terrible thing happened and it gets reversed. So the cross. I'll give you an example. So the cross itself, which is a symbol of Christ's torture and humiliation, it's an instrument of execution. It's. It's a symbol of his defeat, but because he ascends from it, it becomes a symbol of his victory. So that. That's consistent with Christianity to take. To take the emblems of those things and flip them around.

[B]

Actually, you know where that expression comes from? The fortunate fall.

[A]

Milton. Huh?

[B]

Actually, it's St. Augustine. And yes, I mean Milton, but I would bet that Milton got it from Augustine. There's a. I cannot remember. I want to say it's. I won't guess. It's in one of his books. Anyway, a passage which begins, o felix culpa, which means oh, happy fault, meaning, oh, happy fall, which merited to have such a redeemer.

[A]

And I think that's in Paradise Lost. So he did get that from Augustus.

[B]

Okay. Yeah. But, you know, the idea that the fall, as awful as it was, bringing sin and degradation and death into this world and every sadness that we know, know nonetheless, it also enabled us to know God in a new way as the redeemer who saves us from sin, which we wouldn't have known otherwise.

[A]

So. So Lizzy descends down there and she defeats them because they are not successful. And. And they give up at last the evil People worn out by her resistance, flung back her penny, kicked their fruit along whichever road they took, okay? But of course, she's got the juice in her cheeks, in her dimples. So she goes back and she also knows not if it was night or day. That's a parallel to Laura. And that's her. That's her symbolic death, right? So she goes down there and she. If she's the Christ figure, she has to die and be born. So that's the symbolic death because she. She's overcome all of that. So she. She literally takes on Laura's suffering and pain here, right? All right? So she said, here's the penny back in her purse, and it's bounce was music to her ear. And so she runs back. Not one goblin scurried after her, nor was she pricked by fear. So she comes back and says, laura, did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises. Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices, squeeze from goblins, fruits for you. This is. This is straight up Eucharist imagery. It makes me so upset that anybody tried to make this about sex. This is straight up. Up. This is Christ, take my body and eat. That's what this is.

[B]

I don't like the word, but do you think it's almost inevitable because sexual imagery is so much a part of just our.

[A]

Because we imagine about anything now without turning it into. Yes, it probably is. Eat me, drink me, love me. That is straight. Eat me, drink me. That is Eucharist image. That is. That is almost explicit. This is my body, take and eat, right? This is it. It. For your sake, I have braved the glen and had to do with goblin merchant men, right? So for your sake, I went. And she responds, lizzy, Lizzy, have you tasted for my sake the fruit forbidden? Okay? Somebody might be saying, but Jesus does not take the forbidden fruit. But doesn't he? He takes on the curse of man, right? So the byproduct of the Fall, God's curse, right, is that there will be thorns. Thorns. What does Christ do in the cross? He takes those thorns and he turns them into a crown and it's put on his head, right? So he literally, in that scene, takes the curse of the forbidden fruit, puts it on his own head and dies, right? So that's what she's saying. You took. You took on my sin. This is. This is Christ imagery. So she says, must your light like mine be hidden, your young life, like mine, be wasted, undone in mine undoing and ruined in my ruin, right? So. So she's correct. In saying, but this. This is a death. And of course it is, but it's going to be a rebirth, too. So just, you know, Christ is also ruined in our. Ruined on. On Good Friday. So she kissed and kissed and kissed her tears once again refreshed from her shrunken eyes, dropping like rains. She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth again. That is a Eucharist image. Her lips began to scorch. That juice was wormwood to her tongue. She loathed the feast. And I wrote wow in the margin. I was so excited. So. So it's like. It's like the. The bitterness of this death and rebirth, right? It's like. It's like Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when it burns, when he goes in the water, it's. It's all of that, right? So you can tell here that the nature of this goblin fruit juice has been transformed by what Lizzy did. So she's drinking it and it burns, right? Like wine. And it's going to. Gonna. It's gonna heal her from this addiction for less, lack of a better word, of this fruit, right? It's gonna set her free. So it's not the. It doesn't taste like it did before. It's fundamentally different now because of what Lizzy did. And she loathed it, all right? So swift fire spread through her veins Knocked at her heart, Met the fire smoldering there and overbore its lesser flame. She gorged on bitterness without a name. O fool, to choose such part of soul Soul consuming care since failed in mortal strife Like Watchtower of the town. Okay. She fell at last. Okay, Right. Because she's got to have her death and rebirth here. She fell at last. Pleasure passed, an anguish pass. And then Christina Rossetti makes it. She's like, how plain do I have to make it for you people to realize what this is? Is it death or is it life? Life out of death. That's it. There's your death and rebirth. And she comes up.

[B]

I thought you were gonna. I thought that this would be basically treading water for you. This part. This is. This is T ball for Angelina.

[A]

Thank you, though. Thank you. It's just so. It's so pure and good and wonderful. I can't believe.

[B]

And people want to make it dirty. That's who we are. That's who we are.

[A]

Honestly, I'm gonna say it hot. Take people who read Freudian sexual stuff into everything. That says something about them.

[B]

Not the work.

[A]

That's. That's what I say to the pure. All things are pure. All right, so Lizzie come. Laura comes back. As Lizzie watches, her pulse starts to come out. There's her, her. Her pulse and breath come back. And of course, when does she, when does she rise? At daybreak. Wonderful resurrection image, right? She comes up with the golden sheave. So yes, there's a little bit of alchemy image there if you guys listen to the Harry Potter episodes. So you know, the golden pure soul. So she comes up like golden sheaves. So she lost her golden hair at the beginning. But see, now she's. She's grown back up like a golden sheave. Opened up cup like lilies on the stream. Laura awoke as from a dream, see? Right. So she wakes up from her nightmare. More resurrection imagery. Laughed in the old innocent way, of course, because she's. She's new. Hugged Lizzy not twice, but thrice. Hugs her three times. Hello. Three times. The gospel. Her gleaming lock showed not one thread of gray. Right. So she's through this self sacrificial, you know, act of her sister. She wakes up, she's reborn, she's innocent again. And then it fast forwards to the end. Later, when both were wives, Laura used to tell her daughter this. Her daughter's. This story is kind of a cautionary tale.

[B]

Read the last handful of verses. Oh, okay.

[A]

You've got the good voice.

[B]

For there is no friend like a sister for 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.

[A]

Yes. And right before that, she tells her daughter.

[B]

I think those are probably some of the more famous lines I. You hear this quoted all the time, I think, I think I've seen that on inspirational poster, Hobby lobby. Get on this.

[A]

So right before that would tell them how her sister stood in deadly peril to do her good and win the fiery antidote. And that right there, that's Christina Rosetti saying that's the heart of this poem. That her sister for out of love, out of self sacrificial love, went into deadly peril to give the antidote. And that is what Christ did. He goes into deadly peril to get the antidote for us for having eaten the forbidden fruit. And that, my friends, is one of the most obvious Christ allegory parables I've ever read. And it's so plain to see. And don't let people distract you with the ancillary at best, the ancillary at worst. This distraction, right? I mean, now you see what Lewis says, it's not what you give us the problem, it's what you take away. Look, what they took away, they gave us repressed sexual desires. And what they take away, they took away the gospel.

[B]

I think that's a good note to end on. All right, well, thank you, Ms. Stanford. I knew this was going to be easy for you. This was. This is, you know, so good. I can't believe this was Little League for you.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you. I hope you guys enjoyed this. I hope you're continuing to learn about how to read and how to. How to tell the difference between good and bad reading. And. Yeah, we're going to rebroadcast our Dracula episode. So next week, we'll do the introduction and the first couple chapters and the. This. If you're new to the podcast, do this one. A lot of people said that was the first series we did that really opened their eyes to the difference between the right way to read and the wrong way to read. And. And it makes a huge difference. In Dracula. Dracula ends up being this, like, profoundly Christian story when you know how to read it. And again, this is not. I'm a Christian and I'm. I'm forcing that onto the book. Nope, that. That's clearly what the author is saying. There it is. It's. It's these other people who are forcing things on. It's not me. I'm just showing you what's there. Yeah. So. So join us next week for that. Stick around to the end of this. Mr. Banks has a poem picked out for you. Head over to HouseyHumaneLetters.com to pick up your conference ticket and get Mr. Banks's Cromwell webinar and pick up Dr. Drought's Viking webinar. While you're at it, go to CassiodorPress.com to get Jason Baxter's why Literature Still Matters or to pick up his audiobook and get on that mailing list so you can find out about his next new book. Guys, thanks so much for listening to me rant. You always tell me you want more rants, so I just. I guess this headache I had just gave me an excuse to let loose, Right? But until next time, keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast, brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the conversation at our member Only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[B]

To any reader By Robert Louis Stevenson as from the house your mother sees you playing round the garden trees, so you may see if you will look through the windows of this book another child far far away, and in another garden play but do not think you can at all by knocking on the window call that child to hear you you he intent is all on his play business bent he does not hear, he will not look, nor yet be lured out of this book for long ago the truth to say, he has grown up and gone away, and it is but a child of air that lingers in the garden there.