Artifact 6: Fruit

Fruit and more specifically forbidden fruit is a critical object in the Christian religion, as it symbolizes the disobedience of Adam and Eve from God’s commands and leads to them being exiled from Eden. The biblical story is that God gave Adam and Eve the Garden of Eden to reside in and gave them the free will to choose, hoping that they would follow his commands. Adam and Eve were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit, making them lose their innocence and forced to be separated from God due to their sin. The temptation of disobeying their commander to experience the forbidden fruit is like Laura and Lizzie in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market;” “The evil conscience and fear are the result of disobedience. The voluntary wrong choice, but not of the eating as such” (Eiselen 106).

Both Adam and Eve and Lizzie and Laura knew the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, and yet they continued to seek out and partake in eating the fruit. In Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” Lizzie warns Laura not to buy and eat the fruit from the goblin men. She shares with Laura a story of a women named Jeanie, who died from eating goblin fruit. Knowing that death may come after eating the fruit, Laura still attempts to buy fruit from the goblins out of temptation and curiosity: “the imaginative world is infinitely attractive but sterile and destructive, and those who commit themselves to longing for it waste away in gloom and frustration, cut off from natural human life” (Mermin 108). The goblins have a seductive tone and speech pattern that attracts Laura to them, but she ultimately craves to taste the fruit “The seductive market, Lizzie notes warily, has adopted the language of hospitality” (Rappoport 854). Once she eats the fruit, she cannot stop craving it and stops eating and working. Laura begins to get sick, and Lizzie knows that the only way to cure her is to get her more fruit because the goblins will only sell to Laura once: “once tasted, they have served their purpose and cannot be found again” (Eiselen 108). Lizzie sacrifices herself to get goblin juice, to save her sister. Within the Christian religion sacrifice sometimes symbolized devotion: “Catholic sisterhoods to signify women’s sacrifice and devotion…” (Rappoport 856). Although Lizzie knows the consequence of death if she eats the fruit herself, she still attempts this suicidal action to save her sister. The beauty in this melancholy is that Lizzie made this choice as an act of love for her sister. The object of the fruit is beautifully melancholic because it is so highly desired and yet it is destructive.