When Laura consumes it, it restores her youth and purity and the golden abundance of her hair.Lizzie saves her sister, Laura, through an act of self-sacrifice that occurs at the poem’s dramatic climax. Through Lizzie’s Christlike act of self-sacrifice, the goblins’ fruit is transformed from poisonous to restorative and life-giving. Laura’s hair only regains its golden color after she drinks the fruit juice that Lizzie brings back to her after a terrifying confrontation with the goblin men.
As Laura loses her childlike innocence, she begins to physically age and decline, and this change is reflected in the quality of her hair.
The change from golden hair to gray, then, symbolizes the loss of Laura’s youth and innocence after succumbing to temptation, selling a part of herself, and eating the fruit. The act of giving away her precious hair in exchange for indulging in the sensual pleasures of the goblins’ fruit thus aligns Laura with the figure of the fallen woman. 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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