Goblin Market and the World of Contract - Sally Wheeler

The Edinburgh Centre for Commercial Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law present

Goblin Market and the World of Contract

Prof Sally Wheeler, Dean and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy, Australian National University

Discussant: Prof Sharon Cowan, Professor of Feminist and Queer Legal Studies, University of Edinburgh

Chair: Lady Wolffe, Hon Professor, University of Edinburgh, and Formerly a Commercial Judge in the Court of Session

 

About the lecture

Goblin Market is a narrative poem by Christina Rossetti of some 570 lines published by Macmillan in 1862 as part of Rossetti’s first public collection of her work. The poem explores the twilight adventures over a period of months of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, and their friend, Jeanie, at a fruit market run by ‘Goblin’ men. (There is no need for any prospective attendee to read the poem in advance; I will tell its story in the course of my paper).

Notwithstanding Rossetti’s own assertion that Goblin Market was nothing more than a children’s story, critics have offered a range of allegorical interpretations of it ranging from, inter alia, a story about fallen women, a Tractarian soliloquy, an ode to sisterly love and a tale of the Feminine Christ. Whatever interpretative frame we put around Goblin Market the denouement of its story is the redemptive action that Lizzie takes to save her sister, Laura, through her brave encounter with the Goblins where she tries unsuccessfully to buy their fruit.

Goblin Market has never been considered as a contract text. However it offers us the opportunity to compare and contrast a number of contractual settings some of which come within the bounds of contract law, others of which sit squarely outside this but within the life world of human experience. In this paper I identify and explore four distinctive transactions with different phases and degrees of completeness. They are, in broad terms, the status contract of marriage and the consequences that flow from that, the (un)enforceable prostitution contract, the contract for the purchase of goods and the relational social contract of obligation between sisters. All of these are influenced by the subtext of what it means for women to operate in the market place as subject or object.

 

This event is free and open to all but registration is required (link below).

 

 

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