{ACADEMIC}
Youth, beauty, sex, trauma, death. Each concept is imbued with individual memories and at the same time enmeshed in a particular cultural skeleton.
Youth, beauty, sex, trauma, death. Each concept is imbued with individual memories and at the same time enmeshed in a particular cultural skeleton. In Victorian England, youth was innocence, beauty meant purity, trauma became poetry, death was impending and sex, when had by an unwedded woman, was the essence of immorality. “Goblin Market” (1862) by Christina Rossetti is often framed as a retelling of these Victorian conceptions – that childhood must be protected, the loss of chastity is the loss of beauty, pain unfolds elegiacally, death is an ever-looming threat and sex is the cause of a girl’s utter wreckage.
The poem when observed through the eyes of an adolescent girl – like the eyes through which the poem’s world is observed, Laura’s and Lizzie’s – appears as a twisted fairytale, a nightmarish presentation of forbidden pleasures, bodily decay and violent attempts at penetration. Until the story’s ending; when Lizzie prevails through the goblins’ terrorizing her body, provides the fruit juices which heal Laura and the two sisters lead blissful lives with children of their own; the poem is a nearly unbroken chain of tragedies befalling young women. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence (2014) follows a similar structure, but without the redemption of the denouement.
Ultraviolence could be interpreted, identical to “Goblin Market”, as a sinister fairytale which explores the themes of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death through the presence of pleasure, decay and violence, each of which are experienced by a young woman (the personae Del Rey inhabits in each song). Through the consideration of how the texts form their ‘fairytales’ and an examination of specific representations of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death, conceptions of the “female body” present in the minds of each author and the cultural framework they wrote within, can be studied in relation to one another.
To juxtapose the established reading of how Rossetti’s text understands the themes at the centre of this analysis, Del Rey’s text conceives of adolescence (late youth) as early adulthood, beauty as glamorous or romantic tragedy, trauma as ordinary, death as desirable and sex as a tool to gain power, opportunity and love. Therefore, the folklore of Ultraviolence is vastly different than the folklore of “Goblin Market”. Rossetti’s work centres two hard-working maidens as the ‘princesses’ of the fairytale and goblin fruit-sellers as the villains, while in Del Rey’s work an alluring vixen is the ‘princess’ and the wealthy older man she is the mistress of is the villain.
In Rossetti’s fairytale one princess (Laura) falls victim to the temptation of the villains’ fruits, and after the overwhelming pleasure she experiences from them begins to grow lifeless. This is until the second princess (Lizzie), after resisting the fruits’ temptation and surviving the goblins’ tries to force the fruits into her, replenishes the first princess’ life force with the juices from the fruits she fought off. In Del Rey’s fairytale; the story formed by the narratives of the songs; the princess (herself, named Lana) is physically and emotionally abused by the aristocratic entertainment executive she is in a sexual relationship with for money and career opportunities. Though there is no resolution to the story, Lana’s using the older man to build an opulent life for herself could be read as its ‘fulfillment’. In each fairytale the princesses are both victims (Laura, Lizzie and Lana) and heroes (Lizzie and Lana), but the representations of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death, and how these concepts involve and affect the (internal and external) bodies of Laura and Lizzie, and Lana, are dissimilar.
To examine these representations, I will briefly analyze one to two lines of poetry which best demonstrate each author’s conception of the concepts of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death.
In “Goblin Basket” sex(ual activity) is presented as abnormal and painful, “Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; / She suck’d until her lips were sore (Rossetti)”. Eating the goblin’s fruit functions as a metaphor for engagement in sexual activity, and through the fruits’ foreignness and the physical harm they cause Laura, they are presented as unnatural and harmful. Just prior to her feasting on the fruits, Rossetti writes that “She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl, (Rossetti)”. With sex presented as dangerous, Laura’s tear could be read as momentary fear. Symbolically, this tear could represent the loss of Laura’s pre-feasted self. The tear thus could represent the fear of innocence (not having feasted, not having known sex) lost too early.
The loss of Laura’s innocence after she eats the goblin’s fruits emphasizes the sacredness of female youthhood, that it should never become un-innocent. This importance of innocence in youth, relates to its importance in beauty. Laura and Lizzie are described as, “Like two blossoms on one stem, / Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow (Rossetti)”. Blossoms are beautiful and they are delicate, newly fallen snowflakes are beautiful and they are untouched; the beauty of these objects could be understood as interrelated with notions of their ‘purity’.
Purity as beauty is a thinking evident in what happens to Laura after she eats from the goblins (once she becomes un-innocent), “She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn / To swift decay and burn (Rossetti)”. Laura is no longer a ‘blossom’ or a ‘new-fall’n snow(flake)’, she has become ‘dwindled’. Laura has lost her purity, and the effects of this loss of purity are weighing on her. Because of her feasting she is ‘decay(ing) and ‘burn(ing)’ – her life has become ruinous. This state of life could be compared to experiencing trauma. Rossetti writes this state of life as how the “fair full moon doth turn”, presenting what could be ‘trauma’ as poetical. Death is presented in much the same way, with the death of Jeanie recounted as, “Then fell with the first snow, (Rossetti)”.
Jeanie’s ‘f(a)ll(ing)’ being associated with the ‘first snow’, imbues her death with the romantic connotations of the first snowfall of the year. Further, the connection of her fall to the first snow, connects it to cycles of nature, cycles which cannot be controlled and are ‘inevitable’ in that they cannot be prevented. Jeanie’s death is thus framed as inevitable, as an impending part of a cycle.
Due naturally in part to the approximate 150 years separating “Goblin Market” and Ultraviolence, Del Rey’s conceptions of youth, beauty, sex, trauma and death contrast strongly against Rossetti’s. Del Rey presents the morality of sex as, “I fucked my way up to the top / This is my show (Del Rey, “F****d My Way up to the Top” 1:40-1:45)”. ‘Fuck(ing)’ is not framed as a significant action as ‘eating the fruits’ are in Rosetti’s work; sexual activity is itself, meaningless, what is meaningful are the outcomes which can emerge after it has been done. Like sex is grounded in realism and banality in Ultraviolence, so too is trauma. In Del Ray’s work, existing in a state of pain caused by a traumatic experience is not ‘enough’ (painful enough, debilitating enough) to be remarked upon, let alone elegised. She writes, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss (Del Rey, “Ultraviolence” 0:40-0:45)”. The physical, emotional and psychological trauma of being ‘hit’ is not registered – it appears that Lana has naturalized (to the point of romanticization) being traumatized.
The naturalization of suffering is evident in how Del Rey represents death as well. If Rossetti conceives of death as impending, Del Rey conceives of it as welcomed. Describing the escalating violence of a relationship she writes, “Got your gun, I’ve got my dad / Is this happiness? (Del Rey, “Is This Happiness” 0:42-0:55)”. Though the ‘'Is this happiness?’ is likely a hypophora, that the threat of a gun being used against her by her partner is not framed as alarming, reveals that death is not a cause of concern. Another much greater difference from “Goblin Market”, is that female youthhood is presented in Ultraviolence not as innocence, but as a forbidden sensuality. When Del Rey sings, “I’m a sad girl / I’m a bad girl (Del Rey, “Sad Girl” 1:42-1:46)”, she evokes girlhood not to express notions of innocence but of eroticism. “Girl” is used over “woman”, which Lana is, to present the personae as submissive and delicate, but the context in which the term is introduced into is sexual. The purity of ‘girl’ is twisted to achieve erotic ends, Lana's being a ‘sad girl / bad girl’ is purposed with being seductive.
To complete the comparison of how Lana Del Rey and Christina Rossetti represent the female body's relationship to purity, pain and sin, it must be examined how Del Rey conceives of beauty. When retelling how Lana becomes representative of beauty, Del Rey confesses, “I keep my lips red / To seem like cherries in the spring (Del Rey, “Black Beauty” 2:07-2:15)”. Red lips are a symbol of temptation and danger as they are characteristic of the deadly ‘femme fatale’ from old Hollywood film noirs. In juxtaposition ‘cherries in the spring’ evoke the feeling or essence of freshness, sweetness and sentimentality. Through these two lines it could be argued that Del Rey harmonizes the binary oppositions at the heart of Rossetti’s text, as beauty as she conceives it is the synthesis of ‘cherries in spring’ and ‘red lips’; innocence and sex; youth and death; Laura and Lizzie and the goblins’ fruits.
Bibliography:
Del Rey, Lana. “Black Beauty.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “Is This Happiness.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “F****d My Way up to the Top.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “Sad Girl.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Del Rey, Lana Del. “Ultraviolence.” Ultraviolence (Deluxe). Interscope Records, 2014. LP record.
Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market.” 1862. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market. Accessed 15 Feb. 2022.
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