User talk:Mistihope

Discussion Board 8 / Group 7
This week, we were supposed to argue the point as to whether Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" was written to be read by children or adults. Below are the results that my group came up with.

Participants:
Misti Horn, Jolea Pogue, Savannah South and Baille Burkett all posted adequate initial posts and two separate comments that reached the word count minimum.

Summary:
Everyone in group 7 except for me, Misti Horn, thought that Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market was written for adults. A majority of this group thought that the story was extremely sexual and had concepts that were too mature for children to hear. For example, the arguably most seductive line of the poem, in which Lizzie asks Laura to suck the goblin juice off of her body seems to be much too inappropriate for young ears. There is also a moment in the poem in which many believe Lizzie is being abused and raped, which is not a subject anyone wants to talk to their child about. In addition to these situations, there are also moments that describe addiction, homosexuality, and incest. These topics are by far too mature for a kid to know or here about, which is why a majority believes that this had to of been written for an adult audience.

Nevertheless, I, the outlier, believe that this poem’s vivid imagery and fairytale morals make it into a children’s poem. Many times the imagery of this story is repeated, most likely in the hope to keep children interested and attentive. Also, children often hear things they do not understand and they let it go right over their heads. So, while reading something like this, they would never imagine a sexual situation in the first place. Kids are ignorant on the subject of sex, so they are unable to even fathom half of what we infer from these lines. If you do not believe this is true, you can easily search many inappropriate stories and movies that we grew up loving, not knowing there were bad in any way. When you lay out all the facts on the table, I believe this poem is child-frinedly, but the rest of group 7 initially did not agree. However, after reading my post, a couple peers stated that they agreed with my opinion and that it opened their eyes to a whole new interpretation.

Link:
http://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Nevin_Hum_2009.pdf