Gender and Sexuality

Photo of Black Button Eyes Production of Pen and Harmon's Goblin Market (Chicago, 2015)

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s essay “Performing Goblin Market” analyses some of the musical and dramatic choices made in recent productions of Pen and Harmon’s musical Goblin Market, emphasizing how such choices can radically alter the poem’s original meaning. First, Weltman notes the adaptations to Rossetti’s poem that Pen and Harmon make in their script and score. Weltman also comments on their adaptation’s explicit rejection of the poem’s subtext of a homosexual relationship between Lizzie and Laura: certain lines from the poem are excised, including the entire “Golden head by golden head” passage (Rossetti, ll. 184-198) that describes the sisters sleeping “Cheek to cheek and breast to breast” (Rossetti, l. 197). Instead, Lizzie and Laura sing the duet “Two Sisters,” a song with original lyrics by Pen and Harmon set to music by Brahms. This song develops the “Golden head by golden head” passage’s emphasis on the sisters’ near-identity, but it leaves out the passage’s description of the sisters’ physical intimacy as they sleep “Folded in each other’s wings” (Rossetti, l. 186). Instead, the song “Two Sisters” adds a definite dimension of sibling and female rivalry: 

O sisters we, so lovely, so lovely, 
Now who is the loveliest one? 
I am, I am, I am, I am, I am! 
You see we’re quite alike, 
We’re both so very contrary, 
Quite alike. (Pen and Harmon, pp. 78-85) 

As the sisters' rivalry mounts, this song builds to a harsh vocal dissonance. As Weltman describes it,

For four verses of the song, the girls sing in harmonious thirds emphasizing their supportive relationship, with Lizzie taking the higher vocal line. In the last verse, the girls’ voices become progressively discordant as they sing new words, “Now who is the loveliest one? / I am, I am, I am, I am, I am!,” with Laura repeatedly trying to get the upper hand as she grabs the higher note. The concluding “I” is sung only one note apart, gratingly. Rossetti’s poem is not often interpreted as about sibling rivalry, but this song humorously helps us to consider that possibility. (Weltman, “Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon’s Goblin Market") 

Thus, Pen and Harmon reshape Rossetti's poem's portrait of sisterhood in not only excising the hint of lesbian eroticism that readers find in "Goblin Market," but also in adding a very different view of female relationship as competitive.

Photos of Black Button Eyes Production of Pen and Harmon's Goblin Market (Chicago, 2015)

Meanwhile, other important interpretive changes occur in the directorial decisions in specific individual productions. Weltman focuses in on the central lines “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you” (Rossetti, ll. 468-69) and notes that how the pacing with which this line is delivered can be defining in an audience’s interpretation of the sisters’ relationship. In performance, an actress can deliberately pause at the line ending “suck my juices” and thereby imply a lesbian reading, or read through the unpunctuated line-end and thereby emphasize the juices’ origin in goblin fruit rather than in Lizzie’s own body (Weltman, Victorians on Broadway, p. 167). Weltman relates how this line was performed in the Princeton Rep production, a production that Polly Pen herself saw and approved of: “the actress playing Lizzie spoke the lines without the slightest hesitation at the crucial moment. The actress playing Laura, rather than sucking at Lizzie’s dimples on stage, took her sister’s face in her hands, drew her hands away to see that the goblin juice now clung to them, and voraciously licked her own palms, avoiding any perceptible sexual gesture between the sisters” (Weltman, Victorians on Broadway, p. 167). However, Weltman also notes that a trans-gender element is introduced into the musical theatre production, in that Lizzie and Laura each in turn play the goblins and each enact for the other sister the sexual temptation and threat that the male goblins pose: “by having each sister play the very sexual male goblins in turn, Pen and Harmon metaphorically accentuate the lesbian content their other changes elide” (Weltman, Victorians on Broadway, p. 162).