Abstract
Texts that are traditionally associated with the trope of the falling or fallen women are often read in purely patriarchal terms. This paper attempts to add another critical standpoint to the reading of falling/fallen women texts. Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Marble Faun, are exemplary texts that complicate the foundational understandings and teachings about literature that addresses women and the physical and spiritual purity of women. By reading these texts using the allusions to myth and direct references to other, more complex stories of women and the loss of purity, both the Rossetti text and the Hawthorne subvert and reverse the standard understandings of Victorian purity indicating that a new critical understanding of these texts should be added.