Unbalancing Binaries: Re-thinking Lilith and Eve in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel," Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," and George MacDonald's "Lilith".

In the nineteenth century, religion, or rather, religious figures played an important role in determining appropriate societal roles for women. Two particular religious figurations - Lilith and Eve - began to emerge more frequently in Victorian literary works as a way to illustrate, discuss, and critique the binary formulation of the angel in the house and the fallen woman. This thesis examines three works that utilize the symbolic representations of these religious female figures in order comment on the fallen woman and angel in the house binary, as well as the place of women within the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century. I argue that by incorporating the Lilith and Eve typology, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel,' (1816), Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market,' (1862), and George MacDonald's Lilith (1895), exemplify and discuss the tensions surrounding the formulation of set female roles within Victorian society. Thus, it is though problematizing the rigid binaries of the angel in the house and fallen woman within these three texts that I illuminate the cracks within the dichotomy. --P. ii.