Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

First published: 1862, in Goblin Market, and Other Poems

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

“Goblin Market,” which appeared in Christina Rossetti’s first published collection of poetry, is unquestionably her most original poem and stands out as a masterwork of aesthetic taste. Rossetti’s ties with her brother Dante’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (she contributed verses to their short-lived magazine, Germ) also explain why the anthology has been labeled the movement’s first literary success. It was Dante, furthermore, who suggested the title, having written a poem himself about the market of fallen girls. “Goblin Market,” however, differs notably from her other poetic work, which possesses a depth and a Victorian pathos all its own, principally in its alluring singsong quality and pervasive sexuality.

That Rossetti could have been unaware of the intense sexual imagery of “Goblin Market” seems unlikely, although in a note to the poem, her brother William Michael (who edited most of her poetry) speaks of her insistence that nothing “profound” had been intended. It is far more feasible to see her apparent obsession with certain images in the poem as suggestive of a more religious interpretation, one in which the goblins may be seen as maliciously evil creatures who have set out to beguile—and then seduce—the two girls. In this respect, the poem does bear a resemblance to Rossetti’s major poetic themes, which are heavily laden with introspection, suffering, and otherworldly love.

Dedicated to Rossetti’s sister Maria, “Goblin Market” deals with two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who, while on their usual way to a brook to fetch water, hear goblins hawking their wares, the goblin fruits. Lizzie warns Laura not to listen to them and flees, knowing that their sister Jeanie, who had eaten of the goblin fruit, had languished to her death. Laura, however, is thoroughly enticed by the goblins and buys their luscious fruit, paying them with a lock of her golden hair, as she has no coins. Shortly afterward, she begins to undergo the same transformation that Jeanie did, her hair growing thin and gray, and, almost inexplicably, she can no longer hear the goblin men’s cries, though she yearns passionately for their figs and plums.

The strong-willed Lizzie, in a desperate attempt to save her sister, returns to the goblin men that only she can now hear and offers to buy their fruit, although she adamantly refuses to join them at their feast. After bravely resisting the evil creatures’ attacks, during which her mouth and face are smeared with fruit juices, Lizzie makes her way home. Greeted by Laura, she invites her sister to partake of the restorative juices she knows will cure her:

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juicesSqueezed from goblin fruits for you,Goblin pulp and goblin dew.Eat me, drink me, love me;Laura, make much of me.

After Laura does as she is asked, Lizzie spends the night tending to her, holding water to her lips and cooling her face. When dawn comes, Laura has been restored to her former self, her hair once again gleaming and golden. Later, when the grown girls have become wives and mothers, they tell the story to their own children, exhorting them to cling together: “For there is no friend like a sister,/ In calm or stormy weather . . . .” Quite clearly, the main themes of the poem revolve around temptation and seduction as well as individual sacrifice and its saving grace. In a moral sense, which is perhaps the best of interpretive modes, the poem is very similar to those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and those of the French poet Paul Verlaine, in its nuances and musical cadence), evoking in the mind of the reader a wealth of pictorial images, a strong sense of the magical, and an almost spellbinding musical quality. There is no doubt that the language is captivatingly sensuous, almost shamelessly so, as can readily be seen from such lines as “She sucked and sucked and sucked the more/ Fruits which that unknown orchard bore.”

It is a unique trait of the poem that, even beyond its moral apologue, one can truly appreciate the richness of the language and the exquisite delight of the rhythm, as it jaunts on its way to the almost cloying climax. Clearly, in “Goblin Market,” it is not the buying of the fruit that presents a danger to the soul, but the actual consuming of it. Ironically, even though Lizzie “tossed them her penny,” holding out her apron to be filled with the delectable fruits, the goblins seek to entice her to sit and eat with them. Indeed, when Lizzie tells them she cannot join them in their repast, for she has one who “waits at home alone for me,” the creatures begin grunting and snarling, viciously attacking her. In essence, it is the “sharing” of the fruit in the physical presence of the goblins that holds the key to this particular type of damnation. Laura is in the thrall of their bewitchment, for this is precisely the “sin” she has committed, as Jeanie did. The goblin men have no need of money and take both pennies and curls alike, but the fruit they deliver must be consumed in their presence, in what could almost be described as a copulatory ritual. When Lizzie indicates to her tormentors that, if they will not sell her their fruits, she will want her money back and will very likely be on her way, their chattering turns to violence, and they begin trying to force the forbidden fruits into her unwilling mouth. Lizzie knows, however, that if she keeps the fruit from entering her mouth, she will be safe. Once she has returned home to her sister and explained the “sacrifice” she has endured for Laura’s sake, only the sucking of the juices from Lizzie’s face and mouth can truly restore Laura’s health. By kissing her sister “with a hungry mouth,” Laura is now allowed to taste the bitterness of the sacrifice itself, a sacrifice that was “wormwood to her tongue,” but that brought solace to her aching soul and healed its lost innocence. The juices on Lizzie’s mouth no longer harbor the sickly sweet taste of the original fruit/sin but have now been transformed into the chrism of salvation.

Rossetti’s basic message is a strong one: There is no love like that of a sister. It is interesting to speculate how the suggestive intimacy of the two girls, Laura and Lizzie, emphasized as it is throughout the poem, bears a resemblance to the close relationship between Christina (who never married) and Maria (who became an Anglican nun). It would indeed seem that, while avoiding forbidden pleasure will certainly keep Laura safe and chaste, physical intimacy with Lizzie (though not sexual in nature) is to be encouraged. It should be recalled that Christina originally wanted to call the poem “A Peep at the Goblins,” as if the two girls, totally unfamiliar with men and the seductions of the mundane world, had for one brief moment been allowed a glimpse of sexual pleasure outside the bonds of matrimony. Although the reader may wonder what physical pleasures, if any, were eventually reserved for Laura and Lizzie when they became “wives with children of their own,” Rossetti reminds us that, after all, Jeanie was in her grave because of “joys brides hope to have.” As unmarried maidens, Lizzie and Laura cannot taste the fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge, a joy granted to them only after marriage.

Proposed to by two different suitors during her lifetime (the first, James Collinson, was a friend and fellow art student of Dante, and the second, Charles Cayley, was a scholar and linguist), Rossetti saw both of these relationships come to an abrupt end. Although it is presumed that Collinson left her (and that her family merely kept up appearances by saying she had broken off the engagement), she turned Cayley down of her own volition. It appears that, in both cases, religion played a part in the difficulties, as Collinson wavered between Catholicism and Anglicanism and Cayley seemed an agnostic. Rossetti’s devout Anglican upbringing, in which her mother and her sister played such intrinsic roles, probably made her shrink from the idea of the fulfillment of love. To the quiet and often clinically depressed Rossetti, this may have been a way of reconciling her love of man with her love of God. It is unlikely, in fact, that she really would have married either man, perhaps more from a sense of honoring her own Victorian conviction that she would not give to man what was reserved for Christ than for any other reason.

In this regard, then, “Goblin Market” becomes the ultimate vehicle for Rossetti’s matrimonial convictions, and it is perhaps more revelatory than her other poems since it so fittingly weds the theme of unbridled sensuality—and its inherent dangers—with the salvation that can only be offered through family ties. The latter were especially strong for Rossetti and were assuredly a source of consolation in her later years. Though her later poems reveal a desolatory kind of suffering and an almost ethereal desire to transcend death in search of a more perfect love, “Goblin Market” seems to lightly foreshadow such yearnings, especially in her descriptions of Jeanie’s death and of Lizzie’s sufferings at the hands of the goblins. Until Laura and Lizzie do become the wives and mothers they were meant to be, thus eligible to eat the “goblin fruit,” they can only lie “cheek to cheek and breast to breast” in sisterly—but irreproachable—intimacy.

It should further be suggested, to emphasize the recently developed theory of child eroticism, that the poem is also a unique interpretation of how the Victorian mind imagined children within the spectrum of human sexuality. In retrospect, to identify the two girls as representatives of the erotic life of children and to see their misadventures as typical of a Victorian nightmare nursery world in which cruelty and sexuality are revealed in all their forcefulness would seem almost overemphatic. Yet, there is something musically childlike in the repetitious lilt Rossetti lends to the poem as well as in the girlish relationship between the two sisters, the infantile sucking of the fruit and the odd aloofness between the two sisters and the goblin “brothers”—the latter quite possibly suggesting a latent sibling animosity (although to all appearances the Rossettis had a serene and lifelong relationship).

In a perhaps equally disturbing analysis based on the transmigration of the personality or, more appropriately, on the metamorphosis of woman into grotesque creature—a theme dear to Victorian mythos—the reader can see how Laura, in her desire to eat more of the fruit she can no longer have, begins gnashing her teeth and weeping uncontrollably, revealing her own potential to become one of the goblins herself. This curious vampirish quality, at which Rossetti hints only subtly throughout the poem, makes “Goblin Market” all the more remarkable because the reader senses, and rightly so, that its enduring quality lies in both the fleeting elusiveness of its images and in the fact that Laura is, in actuality, waging a war with her own self.

From the moment she stretches her gleaming neck to the instant she sucks the fair fruit globes, Laura is destined to suffer a lasting change. She does not know whether it is night or day and, her mouth constantly watering, she begins exhibiting the signs of a hunger-crazed creature who longs for the night, the time she will be able to return to the brook and seek out the goblins. The fruit merchant goblins, however, whose seduction of Laura is by now complete, have no desire to pursue their intercourse with her and abandon her to her fate. Laura, cold as stone and in the throes of exceeding pain, dwindles in listless apathy, no longer tending to her chores and unable to get her seeds to bear the tiniest of shoots. Even her physical appearance coincides with her inner decay as her sunken eyes and fading mouth become the mark of the vampire’s victim. The only hope for Laura is the redeeming ruby juices on her sister’s face, whose cleansing properties work a miracle on Laura’s soul, restoring her wholesomeness and purifying her virtue, much like the blood of a sacrificial lamb. Lizzie’s steadfastness, like the cradling arms of an angelic savior, has ultimately broken the goblins’ witchery.

Bibliography

Bellas, Ralph A. Christina Rossetti. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A straightforward look at both Rossetti’s life and works, suitable for beginning students. Includes useful notes, bibliography, and index.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Christina Rossetti. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Collection of critical essays on Rossetti’s poetry, including several essays analyzing “Goblin Market.” The essays examine the links between this poem and Rossetti’s other works, interpretations of the symbolism and religious allegory in the poem, and the depiction of sisterhood and self in the work.

Hassett, Constance W. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Traces the development of Rossetti’s poetry, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses, the use of rhythm and diction, and other elements of her work.

Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. London: J. Cape, 1994. Biography based in part on newly discovered letters and other information. Quotes extensively from Rossetti’s poetry to describe her inner life and the relationship between her poetry and her life.

Morrill, David F. “’Twilight Is Not Good for Maidens’: Uncle Polidori and the Psychodynamics of Vampirism in Goblin Market.” Victorian Poetry 28, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 1-16. A fascinating journal article that deals with the theme of vampirism in “Goblin Market,” tracing its origins back to John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”

Palazzo, Lynda. Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Analyzes Rossetti’s devotional poetry within the context of nineteenth century women’s theology. Chapter 1 provides an examination of “Goblin Market” and her other early poems.

Spivack, Charlotte. “’The Hidden World Below’: Victorian Women Fantasy Poets.” In The Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre, edited by Patrick Murphy and Vernon Ross Hyles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Examines the theme of the fantastic as it was used by Victorian women poets, including Rossetti, and makes specific reference to “Goblin Market.” Applies the theories of Joseph Campbell to the genre.

Thompson, Deborah Ann. “Anorexia as a Lived Trope: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 24, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Fall, 1991): 89-106. Presents an unusual, yet exceptionally well-written interpretation of “Goblin Market” by viewing anorexia nervosa as the underlying theme of the poem.