One of the most important decisions I had to make in this piece, of course, was how to represent the characters. I went with depicting the characters as fruit, pears to be specific, but I also didn’t want to leave the characters as entirely inanimate objects. I incorporated a vague, “living” aspect into the left two pears, by greatly arching the head of the “pears” downward and adding a dark spot near the end to resemble an eye. For instance, the top of the pear could be interpreted as a head with an eye and a beak (being the pear’s stem), so the pear might look like a bird to some viewers.
The middle pear represents Laura, and the leftmost pear represents Lizzie. To convey the different attitudes of the Lizzie and Laura, I made three choices in differentiating the two pears. First, I made the “living” component mentioned earlier more prominent in the middle pear than in the leftmost pear, by making the “eye” in the middle pear more apparent. Unlike Lizzie who maintains her purity by avoiding eating the fruits no matter what (even despite the goblins’ increasingly barbaric and violent behavior, whose “tones waxed loud, / their looks were evil. / Lashing their tails / They trod and hustled her, / Elbowed and jostled her” [396-400]), Laura is tempted by and gorges on the goblins’ fruits. In that way, I wanted to show the middle pear as being closer to the goblins, who are described as various, unhuman animals and creatures. In contrast, Lizzie, who does not really look like a bird or any other living creature, is more distant from the goblins’ influence.
Second, I added more shadows, dots, marks to the middle pear than to the leftmost pear. I wanted these marks to represent cuts, defects, or damage. In other words, the middle pear is more “damaged” than the leftmost pear, or at least more prone to being destroyed by the darkness which seems to surround all the pears (this represents the goblins’ influence).
Third, I placed the leftmost pear in front of the middle pear, and pushed the middle further back into the dark background. By being closer to the darkness, the middle pear, in a symbolic sense, is more prone to being influenced by and perhaps even consumed by the “darkness,” or, again, the goblins’ influence.
As for the half-eaten pear to the right, I wanted it to represent Jeannie, emphasizing her condition after eating the goblin merchants’ fruits: “[Jeanie] pined and pined away; / Sought them by night and day, / Found them no more but dwindled and grew grey” (154-156). Her condition being close to the death, if not dead already, serves as a warning for the other two pears, as it does in the poem. However, it is only Lizzie who is mindful of this warning and takes it to heart: “[Lizzie] longed to buy fruit to comfort [Laura], / But feared to pay too dear. / She thought of Jeanie in her grave, / Who should have been a bride; / But who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died / In her gay prime” (310-316); in contrast, Laura dismisses any warning: “‘Nay, hush,’ said Laura: / ‘Nay, hush, my sister: / I ate and ate my fill, / Yet my mouth waters still’” (163-165). I wanted to represent this difference in terms of the position of both pears’ heads: the stem of the middle pear points not towards the broken stem of the half-eaten pear, which could represent its head, but to its half-eaten body and to the sight of the pear’s flesh, which Laura might consider to be delicious. The stem of the leftmost pear instead points towards the head of the half-eaten pear, indicating sympathy and empathy with the pear which has “died.”
In making these decisions, I gained a new perspective on the corruptive influence of the goblins on the maidens. I had not thought of it too much, but after finishing this drawing, I realized just how pervasive and tempting their calls were. Now that I think about it, the goblins send their calls every day, and the maidens might accidentally catch sight of the delicious and gleaming fruits which they sell. In a sense, the goblins surround the maidens, and are seemingly everywhere—to be able to resist such temptations is an enormously difficult task, so I now have a newfound appreciation for Lizzie.
By representing the three maidens as fruit, I wanted to blur the lines between the maiden and the fruit sold by the goblin merchants—this is a significant change that restricts our ability as the reader to sympathize with Laura and Lizzie as fellow human beings. In other words, the characters lose their appeal as human beings in my adaptation, and are instead merely shown as fruit, or perhaps some sort of vague, living creature. This adaptation, however, allowed me to understand the relationship between the maidens and the fruit on a deeper level: by viewing Lizzie and Laura in terms of the goblin fruit, the two characters gain a degree of “honestly,” in a sense: what is normally kept concealed—their desires and wishes (Laura’s desire for goblin fruit, for example)—is now forcibly revealed and shown to the reader.