CHRISTINA ROSSETTI: TITLE COMMENTARY

"Goblin Market"

SYLVIA BAILEY SHURBUTT (ESSAY DATE FALL 1992)

SOURCE: Shurbutt, Sylvia Bailey. "Revisionist Mythmaking in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market': Eve's Apple and Other Questions Revised and Reconsidered." The Victorian Newsletter 82 (fall 1992): 40-44.

In the following essay, Shurbutt argues that in "Goblin Market" Rossetti revises traditional Christian myths to produce feminist readings of the Fall and the Redemption.

The notion of a woman writer attempting to offer an alternative version to the patriarchal explanation of being is not new: from Amelia Lanier to Virginia Woolf, women writers have attempted to amend traditional Western myth with its misogynist overtones, especially biblical myth so much a part of our Western ethical system. Sometimes blatantly overt (as in Lanier's apology for Eve, Nightingale's declaration of a female Christ or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's dream of a revisionist Woman's Bible), sometimes subtly muted (as in Shelley's retelling of paradise lost in her famous Gothic novel), women writers have sought to revise or reconstruct the patriarchal myths that influence our ethical values and limit the vision of individual possibilities.

Alicia Ostriker evaluates the terrain of myth and the process of revisionist mythmaking in this way: "At first thought," she says, "mythology seems an inhospitable terrain for a woman writer." Juxtaposed to the conquering gods and hardy heroes, "we find the sexually wicked Venus, Circe, Pandora, Helen, Medea, Eve, and virtuously passive Iphigenia, Alcestis, Mary, Cinderella. It is thanks to myth we believe that woman must be either 'angel' or 'monster'" (316). However, emendation of this highly polarized and often negative mythic portrayal of woman has long been an intriguing possibility for women writers. "When-ever a poet employs a figure or story previously accepted and defined by culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible" (317). In the case of revisionist mythmaking, Ostriker continues, "… old stories are changed, changed utterly, by female experience, so that they can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy. Instead … they are corrections; they are representations of what women find divine and demonic in themselves; they are retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered; in some cases they are instructions for survival" (316).

An example of the more subtle revisionist process can be seen in the lines of one of Victorian literature's most discussed and intriguing poetic tales, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." While the poem has generated a variety of critical interpretation—from the traditional explanation of the divided self struggling against an over-wrought libido to Rossetti's positing of a "covert (if ambivalently) lesbian world" (Gilbert and Gubar 567) to the poem as paradigm for a nineteenth-century version of anorexia nervosa (Cohen) and finally to the quasi-Freudian interpretation of the story as "conflict between oral sadism and the reality-testing anal stage" (Charles 149)—what Freudians and feminists alike tend to forget, however, are the deeply religious implications of the poem. Indeed, as Dolores Rosenblum writes in a 1982 article in Victorian Poetry: "In a sense … all Rossetti's poetry is deeply religious, concerned always with the relation of this world to the next" (33). It is this aspect of "Goblin Market" that I wish to focus upon, but not in the traditional or orthodox sense, rather as Rossetti's conscious attempt to revise traditional Christian myth in order to produce an alternative, "feminist" reading to the two most fundamental stories in Christian lore—the fall of humankind from grace and our redemption through the blood of Christ. It is pointedly significant that this devoutly religious poet has her female Christ figure say in the redemptive climax of the poem: "Eat me, drink me, love me" (l. 471).

That Rossetti, whom biographers have portrayed as a model of pious devotion, indeed, whose posthumous poems were altered by brother William Michael "to make them more saintly still" (Auerbach 113), should attempt consciously or unconsciously anything so rebellious in nature as revisionist mythmaking might seem incongruous; however, even her "saintliness" has been established as slightly unorthodox. As Catherine Musello Cantalupo has stated in her evaluation of Rossetti as a devotional poet, she was "no strict typologist" (275). And Ellen Moers, who calls Rossetti one of "the greatest religious poets of the nineteenth century," comments specifically on the unique unorthodoxy of "Goblin Market" (103).

In a work so filled with religious imagery and overtones, something is slightly out of kilter in its pious presentation of one sister's effort to save the other from slipping into concupiscent sin. At the moment when the devout sister Lizzie offers herself as a sacrifice for the other, says Moers, "it is the most eloquent, most erotic moment in the poem" (103). But this combination of eroticism and Christian imagery, itself not extraordinary if viewed in a Pre-Raphaelite context, is not the only puzzling aspect about the poem: there appears within the work a conscious effort to turn biblical and Miltonic myth, with its misogynistic intent, into heroic affirmation of the female, Christ-like principle of loving self-sacrifice and creative self-assertion through rebirth or resurrection.

As early as 1956, in an article entitled "The Feminine Christ," Marian Shalkhauser discussed "Goblin Market" as a "Christian fairy tale in which a feminine cast of characters is substituted for the masculine cast of the Biblical sinredemption sequence" (19). Shalkhauser associated Rossetti's two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, with Adam/Christ figures in a sacrificial drama in which "a feminine Christ redeems a feminine mankind from a masculine Satan" (20). In 1979, Gilbert and Gubar noted Rossetti's use and exploitation of Miltonic imagery, but they viewed such exploitation merely in terms of a "lesson in renunciation" (573), an affirmation of the patriarchal ideal of "angel in the house"; they were perhaps shortsighted in failing to see the ultimate power and expression of active autonomy communicated in Rossetti's revisionist myth-making.

One must free oneself from the traditional, patriarchal interpretation of self-sacrifice as ultimate expression of feminine submission, in order to understand the implications of the sisters' uniquely empowering act of renunciation. Despite Rossetti's seeming acceptance of "woman's place" as defined by a nineteenth-century patriarchy, she appears to have rejected the idea that female self-sacrifice was necessarily indicative of weak-minded submission. Indeed, Diane D'Amico has written of Rossetti's attempt to elevate the female principle and self-sacrifice to deific proportions, with Mary, Eve and Mary Magdalene serving in her writing as "a sort of feminine triptych" (175). D'Amico goes on to explain that Rossetti believed that woman had suffered "difficulty and pain" in her relationship with man as defined by the Judeo-Christian mythic scheme: "Even in the case of Adam and Eve, Rossetti did not overlook the verse in Genesis (13:12) in which Adam seems quite willing to let Eve take all the blame: 'The meanness as well as the heinousness of sin [says Rossetti in Letter and Spirit (84)] is illustrated in Adam's apparent effort to shelter himself at the expense of Eve'" (180-81). However, if "Genesis told her of Eve's weakness and shame," continues D'Amico commenting on Rossetti's devotional prose piece The Face of the Deep, "Revelation told her of woman's ultimate strength and glory" (191).

The biblical and Miltonic overtones in Rossetti's poem are obvious as the story of the Eve-like Laura's fall is unfolded. Captivated by the seductive call of the satanic goblin men, who appropriately slink, crawl, and slither their way into her consciousness (ll. 70-76), Laura/Eve succumbs to their serpentine enticement and yearns to partake of their luscious and lascivious fruit. Like Milton's serpent before being cursed by god to slither forever legless, the goblin men are "whisttailed" creatures, full of "airs and graces," whose honeyed words seduce the feckless Laura/Eve. The fruit with which they accomplish their seduction, like Milton's biblical fruit is rife with sexual and creative implication as well as with the power which forbidden knowledge affords. The vivid words Rossetti employs to describe the fruit and, most important, uses in Laura's own description of her voluptuous feast are rich with Pre-Raphaelite color, the details as brilliant as a Burne-Jones painting:

What melons icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed;
Odorous indeed must be the meed
Whereon they grow.…
(ll. 175-81)

The goblin men are purveyors not only of sexual liberation and bacchanal pleasures but of creative liberation as well; they hold the keys to the masculine world of creative activity and knowledge. Laura purchases their fruit with her golden lock, an obvious sexual gesture, and in clipping her lock, she trades her chastity for access to the male world of artistic and sexual freedom:

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice:
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore.
(ll. 130-36)

Rossetti's lines pulsate not only with sexual implication but with the suggestion that Laura's hunger, that her oral craving, goes beyond mere sexual fulfillment; the hunger here is also for knowledge and creative expression, for poetic articulation as well as for carnality. Laura is utterly lost in her sensual abandonment, in the awakening she experiences, and as her words vividly record, she is well able to articulate what she has experienced. Having tasted the forbidden fruit, she becomes God-like in her knowledge and in her ability to create, and, like the artist, she brilliantly portrays for sister Lizzie a portrait of her pleasure feast (ll. 164-83).

However, just as Milton's God feared Adam and Eve's gaining knowledge after tasting the fruit of paradise and cast them out of Eden, the goblin men reject Laura in her new-found knowledge. She too is cast aside and no longer privy to their call to come and feast. She is now a threat—a woman with creative and sexual knowledge, a rival; and like the doomed Jeanie, another willful lass seduced, she is condemned to pine and languish, never again invited to taste of the goblin men's fruit. Unfortunately, having tasted of masculine freedom and knowledge, Laura will forever be dissatisfied with the mundane world of womanly cares and duties; her common-day sphere of kneading dough, churning butter, and whipping cream holds little fascination now; she is as weary-worn and care-ridden as that primal pair banished from paradise and fallen upon a world of tears and pain (ll. 293-98), a world dulled by the postlapsarian shadow.

In her recently published study of Rossetti's poetry, Christine Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery, Katherine Mayberry has recognized the creative self-assertion prominent in Rossetti's portrayal of the fallen sister Laura: "Permeating the verse is a sense of the poet's breathless inebriation with the process of writing. The proliferation of words, rhythms, metaphors, and similes suggests an artist reveling in her creativity, whose love of her craft, like Laura's love of the fruit, is insatiable" (90). Laura's discovery of knowledge and creative self-expression is the narrator's discovery:

The narrator's apparent enchantment or intoxication with the tools of her art allies her with the wayward Laura, who experiences a comparable inebriation with the goblins' beautiful, abundant fruit. In Laura, Rossetti has produced a natural poet-figure—a character possessing all the impulses and instincts necessary, though not always sufficient, for the creation of art [i. e. her Eve-like curiosity, her instinctive attempt to give literary form to her experiences, and her richly "poetic language"].

(92)

Rossetti's version of "paradise regained," the second half of the poem, is unique in that she presents a female Christ figure who offers much more than merely an aesthetic of renunciation and self-sacrifice, the traditional feminist interpretation of the second half of the poem (Gilbert and Gubar 572). The sacrificial action of Lizzie can more appropriately be viewed as a positive act of defiance and, on Rossetti's part, as revisionist mythmaking.

Taking a silver penny with which to purchase the forbidden fruit for Laura, Lizzie/Christ seeks the goblin men herself. The imagery Rossetti associates with Lizzie at this point is the same traditionally associated with Jesus Christ; it is also imagery which fills the Pre-Raphaelite canvas—the lily (Dante Rossetti's "Ecce Ancilla Domini," Collins's "Convent Thoughts," Hughes's "The Annunciation"), the beacon (Hunt's "The Light of the World), the besieged city (ll. 409-21). Fearlessly, Lizzie faces the taunting goblin men, devilish in their wicked supplication:

Full of airs and graces,
Pulling wry faces,
Demure grimaces,
Cat-like and rat-like,

…

[They] squeezed and caressed her:
Stretched up their dishes.
(ll. 337-40, 349-50)

The protean forms the goblin men assume are those traditionally associated with Satan: cats, rats, wombats, magpies. As Lizzie confronts this raffish crew, she remains steady, unyielding to their persecution; and in conquering temptation and the flesh, she purchases redemption for her sister, as Christ in his passion bought redemption for fallen humankind. The mythical Christian imagery in the poem at this point is unmistakable:

White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,—
Like a rock of blue-veined stone …
Like a beacon left alone …
Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleagured by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.
(ll. 408-10, 412, 418—21)

Lizzie's is no mean or cowardly act of submission, but one of defiance and action; it is a decisive act of will, and in the face of her strength the goblin men slink and slime their way back into the dark recesses of the earth, back into the primal depths of their origin (ll. 437-46). And Lizzie, having bargained for the "fiery antidote" (l. 559) to her sister's malaise, returns to Laura and, bruised and dripping with the sticky goblin pulp, charges her sister to embrace her, indeed to "Eat me, drink me, love me" (l. 471). With heroic self-sacrifice, she has purchased salvation for her sister, and the redemption she offers pulsates with eucharistic imagery.

Overcome with the magnitude of her sister's sacrifice—"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted / For my sake the fruit forbidden?" (ll. 477-78)—Laura embraces her sister and accepts the offer of redemption. In so doing, she exorcises her demon spirits, and the act of a woman's tasting the forbidden fruit assumes heroic rather than sinful dimensions:

Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her
heart,
Met the fire smoldering there
And overbore its lesser flame.
(ll. 506-08)

At length, Laura swoons, and in symbolic death finds rebirth and salvation: "Life out of death … Laura awoke as from a dream" (ll. 524, 537).

The sisters go on to become mothers, teachers and story tellers, celebrating the heroic actions of Lizzie and the principle of sisterhood (ll. 543-67). At the end of the poem, the world they inhabit is one curiously absent of men, yet it is a creative world, a world of wisdom and knowledge that the sisters pass on to their children. In her remaking of Miltonic and biblical myth, Rossetti appears to legitimize the creative spirit of the nineteenth-century female, god-like in her ability to create life though seldom sanctioned the freedom to create art.

The sisterhood that Rossetti's poem celebrates is one not only reminiscent of the "Amazon" legends of Greek myth but also similar to those science fiction fantasies of the twentieth century, where female heroes bigger than life create a sister-hood and inhabit a heroic world without men. Perhaps such a sisterhood would seem especially appealing to someone like Rossetti, an individual both disenfranchised and powerless, and allowed little part in "brotherhood." One rather imagines Rossetti, fascinated and deeply interested in the work of her brother and other Pre-Raphaelites, feeling occasionally the intruder, the outcast, perhaps the work of art (as model) but never the artist (see "In an Artist's Studio"). Jerome Bump has written of the irony of Rossetti's exclusion from the "brotherhood": "The first literary victory of the Pre-Raphaelites was the publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems, and it was written by the member they excluded" (323). The extent of Rossetti's pain at such exclusion can only be guessed at; certainly, her poetry reveals a longing for fulfillment of heroic potential, though it might not be in precisely the same mode or fashion as that of her male siblings. In "The Lowest Room" she questions:

Why should not you, why should not I
Attain heroic Strength?

…

Who dooms me I shall only be
The second, not the first?
(ll. 15-16, 19-20)

Rossetti's interest in the concept of sisterhood has been explored by Dorothy Mermin, who notes the poet's work with fallen women, her wish to be an Anglican nun (a goal her sister Maria achieved in 1873), and her interest in joining Nightingale's core of female nurses bound for the Crimea (115). Mermin also speculates that Rossetti's fascination with the concept of a female Christ, not a totally novel idea in the nineteenth century, is due to the influence exerted on her by Nightingale, who writes in Cassandra, "The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ" (112). Certainly, Rossetti's Lizzie follows precisely the mythic/heroic paradigm of a Christ or a Dante or a Buddha—the only variation in this version of the separation, the journey, and the return with redemptive powers is that Rossetti's hero (her Christ) is cast in female guise.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROSSETTI'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENGLISH WOMAN'S JOURNAL

In the late 1870s religious scruples prevented Rossetti from joining the suffragists, and in the late 1880s she even signed a protest against female suffrage. Although The English Woman's Journal had a strong feminist tone for its time, it did not directly address the question of parliamentary votes for women.…

Of course it is impossible to know whether or not Rossetti would have contributed to the Journal had it supported female suffrage. However, the fact that it avoided the issue makes her appearance in the Journal all the more understandable.…

Rossetti did not include either "Behold, I stand at the door and knock" or "Gone Before" in any of her collected volumes, indicating perhaps that she did not consider them to be among her best work. Nevertheless, their appearance in The English Woman's Journal gives them a special place in her canon. They serve as evidence that in the early 1860s Rossetti was willing to have her name associated with a journal that had "an avowedly political purpose" to employ, educate and organize middle-class women …

[C]ertainly she was in sympathy with those who wished to expand a woman's sphere of action beyond the home and into the work place. Indeed, in the 1860s, as an unmarried middle-class woman still financially dependent upon her brother, she must have been very sympathetic to such a cause.

D'Amico, Diane. An Excerpt from "Christina Rossetti and The English Woman's Journal. "In The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 3, no. 1 (spring 1994).

Far from being an affirmation of the angel in the house, typical interpretation of Rossetti's poem, "Goblin Market" is revisionist mythmaking in a variety of ways. Here are certainly angels, but they are by no means passive and sacrificial. Rather, both Lizzie and Laura are strong-willed women who defy the nineteenth-century male version of creative and sexual prerogatives, exclusive to a single sex. When Laura/Eve succumbs to the goblin fruit, she is affirming her sexuality, her creativity, and her right to be an intellectual being; in so doing, she intrudes upon the male domain, becoming a threat and thus deemed worthless and no longer privileged to hear their call or share their fruit. Gilbert and Gubar have characterized the goblin fruit and Laura's fall in this way: "Rossetti's 'pleasure-place' is thus quite clearly a paradise of self gratifying art, a paradise in which the lines of 'Goblin Market' 's masculine fruit-merchants are anticipated by the seductions of the male muse …" (571). Yet, in the final analysis, the implication Gilbert and Gubar clearly find for "Goblin Market" is both anti-self and anti-artist for the female; "like Laura and Jeanie," they say, "Rossetti must learn to suffer and renounce the self-gratifications of art and sensuality" (571). There is, however, little suffering and less renouncing suggested in the final lines of the poem; indeed, the sisters' lives portend not only paradise regained but that Blakean version of "paradise" achieved through experience and testing. As for the sisters'—and Rossetti's—renouncing art and creativity, such is hardly the case. Indeed, what renunciation there is in the poem is uniquely empowering and in itself revisionist, for the sisters do not renounce sexuality or artistic expression on their own terms (after all, the conclusion presents full-blossomed women with children, women who carry on a tradition of storytelling and wisdom teaching, modes of artistic expression traditionally associated with the female world and only in recent years legitimized as "real" art); rather, theirs is renunciation of sexuality and artistic expression as defined by the goblin men, by patriarchal tradition.

Katherine Mayberry has written that for Rossetti creating poetry was "a tremendously powerful act, serving as an alembic through which all that was painful or confusing could be rendered beautiful and intelligible.… Through the poetic act, Rossetti could recast the unsatisfactory conditions of her temporal existence into beautiful and permanent experience" (109). One might conclude, as well, that in her choice to create, to be a poet, Rossetti went so far as to revise the "myth," the story of her own life: "Even the conditions of being a poet wrought a reinterpretation of the circumstances of Christina Rossetti's own life, changing her singleness from a misfortune into a professional requirement; as with the heroines of her ballads, Rossetti's spinsterhood was a condition that ultimately fostered autonomy, strength, and creativity" (109).

In some respect, what Rossetti was doing in such poems as "Goblin Market," "Repining," "The Lowest Room," "Moonshine," and "The Heart Knoweth its Own Bitterness" was what Carolyn Heilbrun calls "writing a woman's life." Heilbrun stresses the importance in women's lives of literature and myth and how, for the most part, women's "stories" have been written by men and the patriarchal myths and traditions which mold us all: "We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all" (37). At the conclusion of "Goblin Market," Rossetti presents women themselves narrating to their children their story, creating their own myth; and their story follows the pattern of Christ in its loving self-sacrifice and religious intent, though the roles are recast, revised, with the principal players women.

Dorothy Mermin has written that "religious belief," for Rossetti, "both curbed her ambition and offered escape from the restrictions imposed by her sex" (116). Though one might question whether her religious beliefs did indeed curb Rossetti's ambition, there is little doubt that Victorian women like Christina Rossetti provided themselves with a means of empowerment by their devotion to a religion of renunciation and self-sacrifice. Though a Nietzsche might not have seen the possibility of power through self-sacrifice, a host of nineteenth-century women found active and positive possibilities in following the paradigm provided through Christ's passion—certainly, Rossetti sensed the power of the myth and the appeal of revision of that myth to achieve her own sense of heroic self-fulfillment.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Bump, Jerome. "Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Ed. David A. Kent. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. 322-45.

Cantalupo, Catherine Musello. "Christina Rossetti: The Devotional Poet and the Rejection of Romantic Nature." The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Ed. David A. Kent. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.

Charles, Edna K. Christina Rossetti: Critical Perspectives 1862-1982. London: Associated UPs, 1985.

Cohen, Paula. "Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market': A Paradigm for Nineteenth-Century Anorexia Nervosa." University of Hartford Studies in Literature 17 (1985): 1-18.

D'Amico, Diane. "Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene: Christina Rossetti's Feminine Triptych." The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Ed. David A. Kent. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine, 1988.

Mayberry, Katherine J. Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Mermin, Dorothy. "Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market." Victorian Poetry 21 (Summer 1983): 107-118.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Ostriker, Alicia. "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking." Feminist Criticism: Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 314-38.

Rosenblum, Dolores. "Christina Rossetti's Religious Poetry: Watching, Looking, Keeping Vigil." Victorian Poetry 20 (Spring 1982): 33-49.

Shalkhauser, Marian. "The Feminine Christ." Victorian Newsletter 10 (Autumn 1956): 19-20.