Morality and Meaning
Gipps’s interpretive and musical focus in Goblin Market is on the sisters’ felt experience rather than on the moral reading of that experience. Gipps’s setting very much privileges the sisters’ subjective experience of temptation, corruption, resistance and recovery, to the exclusion of concerns with external social judgment and threat of punishment. This reading of the poem is in part achieved in Gipps’s adapted and abridged text by the omission of all lines referring to Jeanie and her fate, a textual redaction that removes from the text the significant moral overlay of a moral exemplum that charts the fate of the fallen woman. In addition, Gipps omits some of the description of Laura’s suffering after eating the goblin fruit, whereas Lizzie’s suffering at the goblins’ hands is described in full: “this shifts the emphasis from suffering through punishment for a transgression, to suffering as a consequence of noble self-sacrifice” (Halstead, p. 146).
minimizing the moral
Gipps’s abridged text also does not include the poem’s moralizing coda in which the mature and rehabilitated Laura—now a wife and mother—gathers the little ones around her to tell them of her experience and to teach them her hard-won lessons about the dangers of the goblin men and their fruits and the saving strength of sisterhood. Instead, Gipps’s cantata ends simply with Laura’s return to health, to be performed “scherzando” or playfully:
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way,
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May
And light danced in her eyes. (Rossetti, ll. 537-42; Gipps and Rossetti, pp. 75-78)
Interestingly, at the final line of text, “And light danced in her eyes,” the time signature changes from 4/4 time to Waltz time, or 3/4 time, a musical gesture that recalls the innocent aura of Laura’s first interest in the goblin men. The cantata ends with the chorus harmonizing in a slowly descending passage of chords sung to “Ah”s then “Mm”s that gradually slow and diminish in volume and finally fade away. The effect of this quiet ending is very peaceful and soothing.
addressing adults
Gipps’s deletion of the original coda and its scene of instructive story-telling, as Halstead observes, removes the poem’s internal child audience and leaves the external listening audience free to contemplate the narrative on more adult terms (p. 140). This textual change also makes the simple fact of Laura’s recovery itself—rather than Laura’s moral interpretation of it and her social recovery—the cantata’s satisfying final message. Thus, Gipps’s abridged text removes textual elements that would have shifted the poem’s meaning away from its sexual connotations toward a reading of the narrative as a moral and cautionary tale. Gipps’s libretto lets the main narrative remain directly addressed to its adult audience and removes any limiting or prescriptive moral overlay.
Source:
Halstead, Jill. Ruth Gipps: Anti-modernism, Nationalism and Difference in English Music. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006.