Reconceptualizing Gender Identities Through Metaphors

This study examines gendered metaphors in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market to reconceptualize gender identities, portraying and critiquing Victorian male-dominated systems. The study employs a cognitive poetics approach grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to examine how Goblin Market’s utilized conceptual metaphors influence cognitive attitudes and perceptions toward positive and negative attributes of male and female characters and how they mirror and shape broader Victorian ideologies. This approach helps readers of the poem to understand the way ideas and patterns in the source domain are mapped onto the target domain via cross-mappings. From this perspective, the study explores and interprets gendered metaphors of these domains to highlight animal, purity, and temptation as source domains, which are shaped through target domains such as emotions, gendered identity, and stereotypes. Such conceptual mappings help reveal how certain embedded metaphors in the poem, such as seduction, temptation, and related animal traits, are cognitively associated with men, whereas virtue, purity, and vulnerability are attributed to women. The study also demonstrates that through metaphors of resistance against male domination and authority, Rossetti subverts patriarchal gender ideologies, highlighting themes of female agency, salvation, and sisterhood as driving factors in a patriarchal world. This study employs a qualitative interpretive approach to explore the dual functionality of metaphors not only as mere figurative language and literary devices but also as ideological and cognitive tools to challenge gendered roles and stereotypes, thus emphasizing the need for an interdisciplinary approach to broader gender studies and literature.