![]() ![]() ![]() Hair also had material value, as many destitute women sold their hair to wigmakers. Locks of hair were exchanged as tokens of love and kept as mementos of the dead. Within nineteenth-century culture, hair had great symbolic significance and value. Hair is literally an extension of Laura’s self. 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. And earlier in the poem, Laura uses her golden hair as if it was literally gold or currency. 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. 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). ![]() 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. In “Goblin Market,” women’s hair functions as a symbol of their purity and health-both spiritual and physical. ![]()
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