COVE

This is the cover image of the reprinted version of Goblin Market illustrated by Margaret Tarrant, published in 1912. This image shows the goblin-like creatures pawing at a young woman and pushing their fruit towards her. This image differs from other illustrations accompanying this text where the illustrators portray more sexually explicit images. While this version of the poem does take away the sexual imagery used in other texts, it still kept the sexual subtext in the text. What I mean by this is all the visual sexual content has been erased, probably to better appeal to a child audience. But Tarrant has kept Rosetti’s sexual content in the written poem but, as for the illustrations, it has been, arguably, erased. Although you could argue that the goblins pushing fruit towards her could be the sexual content Rossetti writes about and alludes to but, on the other hand, it has that Red Riding Hood effect. We, as readers may know about the sexual content in the original story but, through rewritings and redesigning the artwork and changing the target audience, that original content almost disappears. This specific edition of the poem has been reprinted with children in mind but the text has remained the same. The narrative the poem is representing has not changed even though the images have. But, as stated earlier, this edition was for children. What makes this so interesting is that children’s books were, for the most part, censored to protect children and created to teach them. Children’s books romanticized the experience of childhood. Everything was warm and happy and safe. Children were taught by adults to follow the yellow brick road, stay away from strange wolves in the woods, and that fairies aren’t the most reliable of friends. Childhood was made a fantastical world filled with safety and morals. These morals are usually that, if you listen to adults, nothing bad can happen. Tarrant makes the theme of these goblins more childlike rather than other depictions where they are more menacing. She gave illustrations that would fall in line with what a child’s fairytale book would traditionally look like. Tarrant removed the sexual subtext from the images, but the sexual subtext remains in the story.

Sources:

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gobmarket.html 

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/scholl.html 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002818?seq=1