Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market

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Christina Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market”
Christina Rosetti’s Poem The Goblin Market is a controversial poem that deals with many different issues although it is was considered a children’s poem, but in fact is a criticism of how knowledge and education are forbidden fruits because they make the person ask questions that are best left unanswered. It is also a comment on the society of that time that regarded many issues as taboo. This paper is a look at different parallel themes running through the poem.
Goblin Market' inscribes this love by bringing it home to some rather obscure premises, or rather by making a home for it there, premises dark indeed as far as the symbolic system governing religious discourse is concerned, but which Rossetti claims through a loving, literal adherence to the doctrine of word made flesh. `Honouring the God who becomes man, isn't that to make God incarnate in us and in our kind: daughter-woman-mother?' asks Luce Irigaray in `Femmes Divines,' a question Rossetti in `Goblin Market' may also raise. (DeVitis, 419) The daughterly-womanly-motherly communion of sisters in that poem surely honours and incarnates the divine, and so undertakes what is, strangely and culpably, never presented to us in such terms, says Irigaray, `by our culture, by our religion' . If representing God as incarnate in women is so difficult to accomplish through the symbolic machinery of `our culture,' `our religion,' then the efficacy of a certain literalism, a certain resistance to interpretation -- at least to interpretation which makes the letter something more or less than the spirit -- may become apparent. (DeVitis, 419-420)
Twice William Michael Rossetti recorded that `more than once' he had heard his sister say of `Goblin Market' `that the poem has not any profound or ulterior meaning -- it is just a fairy story'. This denial of deep or hidden meaning in her most celebrated and provocative work protests translation of her poem, especially metaphorical conversion of the tale into `moral apologue consistently carried out in detail'. (DeVitis, 421) C.M. Bowra thought Rossetti's `precise and literal' Christian orthodoxy countered her `naturally Romantic tendencies' as a poet, but she was as much a literalist in imagination as in creed, and her poems, `Goblin Market' pre-eminently, at once incite and frustrate attempts at meaning-mongering. (DeVitis, 424)
William reports his sister's deprecations only to insist `at any rate' that something is implied by the poem's `suggestive' incidents, into which `different minds may be likely to read different meanings' ; thus he models the typical response to the poem, single in inferential desire if diverse in what is brought to bear on the text. (Clerke, 46) That `Goblin Market''s fruit-call continues to tempt readers to find ulterior meaning there -- pertinent variously to sexuality or sexual fantasy, to feminist revisions or at least troubled siftings of society and the market economy, even to specialities like vampirism (Morrill) and eating disorders (Cohen, Thompson) -- testifies both to the suggestiveness of this fairy tale and to the differences among the tempted, but shows some disregard for the poem's (and the author's) literal-minded resistance to interpretive exchange. `Goblin Market,' like its own Lizzie, is steeped in the juices of the pelted fruits it refuses and bears. (Clerke, 54)
Whatever different minds may read into `Goblin Market,' for William Rossetti the poem did have a `central point' often missed, he thought, because Christina did not express her intentions with `due emphasis.' (Feuerbach, 132)William elicits this central point by first positing `the foundation of the narrative' -- women who once succumb to the temptation of tasting the `luscious but uncanny' goblin fruits die in their insatiate craving for a second taste -- and then by emphasizing Lizzie's resourcefulness in averting that disaster: obtaining for her sister Laura `the otherwise impossible second taste' of the goblin juices, Lizzie provides the antidote for the fatal effects of the first by having Laura `kiss and suck these juices' from her body battered and smeared by the goblins she has triumphantly withstood. (Feuerbach, 105)
In so representing the poem's `central point,' William highlights just those incidents, and certainly those verbs, which have suggested different meanings to different minds, but which for William guarantee Christina's scrupulous religiosity and sense of indebtedness to her sister Maria. In the poem's tribute to sisterly love, in Lizzie's rescue of Laura, William discerns Christina's personal homage to her sister Maria, to whom the work in manuscript is inscribed. `[A]pparently C[hristina] considered herself to be chargeable with some sort of spiritual backsliding, against which Maria's influence had been exercised beneficially,' William informed Christina's biographer Mackenzie Bell, inventing circumstances of which he was ignorant but none the less certain. As he declares in his Notes to `Goblin Market,' `Christina, I have no doubt, had some particular occurrence in mind, but what it was I know not' . (Bentley, 63)
A biographical event is thus fabricated in accordance with William's privileged perception of Christina as a strict and hypersensitive Anglo-Catholic given to exaggerating her own deficiencies, and as one whose deliberately constrained life had only, besides religion, the motive power of family affection, certainly including fondness and admiration for her sister (Memoir, lv, liv). Likewise, William's summarizing of the implications of `Goblin Market'. (Bentley, 74)
James Ashcroft Noble, whom Christina Rossetti seemingly appreciated as an `interesting and intelligent' critic of her work, put the case for a Christlike Lizzie more unmistakably, glimpsing `behind the simple story.This spiritual drama Noble converts, however, to morality play: `The luscious juices of the goblin fruit, sweet and deadly when sucked by selfish greed, become bitter and medicinal when spilt in unselfish conflict'. (Bynum, 84)
Such allegorizing of `Goblin Market' as a `little' lesson enacted by and for little girls politely salutes and confines, as does William Rossetti's reading, the supposed concerns of the devout female poet, but religio-moralistic interpretations of the poem have more recently recognized the disruptive feminist potential in the redemptive Lizzie, who appears to fulfil the prediction of Rossetti's co-religionist, Florence Nightingale: The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ,' that is, a female leader whose active imitation of Christ would truly set the world on its ear). (Bynum, 97)
Indeed, the social implications of Rossetti's `severe Christianity,' ideologically `far more radical than the middle-class feminist positions in her epoch,' have been influentially unfolded by Jerome McGann, who argues that Lizzie functions as a secular Christ figure `to mediate for the audience the poem's primary arguments about love, marriage, sisterhood, and friendship'. (Cohen 5) It is not surprising that McGann, persuasively assembling such allegorical `arguments,' both world-indicting and utopian, has no time for Germaine Greer's post-Freudian pounce on `Goblin Market''s almost unspeakable intimations of `repressed or infantile eroticism,' or for her rejoicing that its godless and pleasurably guilty riddling of childhood psychosexual secrets is evidence that Rossetti's greatest work is `the one poem she could not control'. (Cohen 10)
Not a r...