The Lobster Dance

You ever read something that seems very “no, it’s not queer, they’re, uh, sisters/cousins!” and you’re like

GIF: Rei from Sailor Moon tries to stop her bike, skids past Usagi, Minako, Makoto, and Ami, and crashes into a “decelerate” sign. Source.

Welcome to Christina Rossetti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market.” Major spoilers below, force-feeding mention.

Illustration for the cover of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Via Wikimedia Commons

Queer-coding comes in two forms: 1. developing subtext, a set of cues and hints that readers in the know can read between the lines, which is useful for getting around obscenity laws; and 2. giving a character, often a villain, queer-coded characteristics (being flamboyant, being butch, etc.) to make them seem monstrous. Rossetti’s poem falls more into the former category.

I discovered the poem via Queers Destroy Horror in Catherine Lundoff’s “Creatures of the Night: A Short History of Queer Horror.” Lundoff writes that “Goblin Market” is filled with so much [sapphic] sexual imagery that the poem and poet are “now claimed by historians of lesbian and bisexual women’s writing,” yet the protagonists Laura and Lizzie are described as “sisters”; Rossetti claimed the poem was a “children’s poem.” “The alternatives,” Lundoff writes, “were too dangerous to consider” (loc 2615).

The premise of the poem is that Laura and Lizzie are two girls enjoying themselves in the woods, and every night a wandering group of fruit-selling goblins comes by to sell their wares: all variety and all seasons of succulent fruit. Laura is fascinated by the market, but Lizzie is having none of it (#nohomo):

“No,” said Lizzie, “No, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.”
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.

Laura trades a lock of hair for goblin fruits:

She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow’d that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore;

Then promises to bring Lizzie some:

“Have done with sorrow;
I’ll bring you plums to-morrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap.”

but then falls into a melancholy and cannot go. Lizzie goes to buy the fruit; when she will not eat the fruit herself, the goblins try to force her, smearing her face and body with the juices:

She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

GIF: Usagi nudges Michiru with her elbow and Michiru makes an awkward face; Haruka watches. Source

She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?

Read the poem in full on Poetry Foundation.

Contains goblins, female wasting disease, food, attempted force feeding, “bury the queer themes with incestuous ones I guess.”