Hair Symbol Analysis

In “Goblin Market,” women’s hair functions as a symbol of their purity and health—both spiritual and physical. At the start of the poem, Laura and Lizzie are both described as having golden hair, a desirable color during the nineteenth century and one that was often associated with youth, beauty, and purity in the literature of the time. Laura’s hair, in particular, might also be read as an allusion to Petrarch’s Laura, the beautiful, golden-haired, idealized woman immortalized as the love interest in the fourteenth-century poet’s sonnets (Rossetti was thoroughly familiar with Petrarch, incorporating allusions to his poetry within her own). When Laura and Lizzie are described as like “two wands of ivory/ Tipped with gold for awful kings,” their hair is associated with treasure, precious and pure enough to crown the scepter of a king. And earlier in the poem, Laura uses her golden hair as if it was literally gold or currency. At the goblins’ suggestion, Laura clips “a precious golden lock,” drops “a tear more rare than pearl,” and uses it to pay for their forbidden fruit. Hair is literally an extension of Laura’s self.

Within nineteenth-century culture, hair had great symbolic significance and value. Locks of hair were exchanged as tokens of love and kept as mementos of the dead. Hair also had material value, as many destitute women sold their hair to wigmakers. The act of giving away her precious hair in exchange for indulging in the sensual pleasures of the goblins’ fruit thus aligns Laura with the figure of the fallen woman. The change from golden hair to gray, then, symbolizes the loss of Laura’s youth and innocence after succumbing to temptation, selling a part of herself, and eating the fruit. As Laura loses her childlike innocence, she begins to physically age and decline, and this change is reflected in the quality of her hair. Laura’s hair only regains its golden color after she drinks the fruit juice that Lizzie brings back to her after a terrifying confrontation with the goblin men. Through Lizzie’s Christlike act of self-sacrifice, the goblins’ fruit is transformed from poisonous to restorative and life-giving. When Laura consumes it, it restores her youth and purity and the golden abundance of her hair.