Two of Christina Rossetti's narrative poems, Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress, deal with themes of women in love who seem betrayed - at different levels and with different effects - by false ideals, false lovers, or what lies in the background of betrayal by false ideals and false lovers: innocence; in particular, innocence as the deceptive ignorance of flexibility. The results of reduced expectations and heightened awareness among Rossetti's love victims vary greatly. Some become harmful. Others, like the bride in The Prince's Progress, die or are confused by what amounts to the rape of their illusions. Yet some, like Laura in Goblin Market, ultimately benefit from their experiences and the denial of illusions and earthly morality. They are guided towards higher, spiritual ideals of love and unconditional acceptance. Through their suffering in love and their sacrifice to false ideals of love or pleasure, they are saved from the world. The issue of betrayed expectations in love is addressed in both The Prince's Progress and Goblin Market. In both stories the theme of the power of temptation to distract man from the worthy and serious work of life is common. In Goblin Market temptations are resisted and overcome; in The Prince's Progress they get the better of the main characters. Even in the case of Goblin Market the main temptations that took over Laura were sensorial and were ultimately equated with sexual pleasures. She allowed the goblin men to ravage her and foul her with the juices of their fruits with the ultimate goal of Lizzie freeing herself from her spell. Only one of the two central temptations, lust, in The Prince's Progress prevents us from understanding the implicit ideal that marital happiness is not just... middle of paper... for these characters it was destined to be unattainable and deceptive. The attempt to search for them represents a useless temptation to pursue because the simple variable of change is inevitable. This patriarchal society's denial of this truth is a cruel deception that, in both poems, victimizes women. The deception is maintained in the fairy-tale folklore of romantic poetry that Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress imitate, both literally and suggestively. Rossetti's narratives illustrate an instant gratification complex, especially with the incorporation of romantic ideas, and highlight that the fulfillment of these delights, however brief, leads to a certain betrayal and disappointment. In this way, Rossetti strangely criticizes Romantic ideas in traditional literature, while at the same time presenting a revision of the beliefs fundamental to those ideas..