Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

Abstract

The language of Christina Rossetti's best-known poem, Goblin Market, is remarkably mercantile. Come come buy, the iterated cry of the merchant men that punctuates the poem, has few parallels in English poetry in the nineteenth century. While buying and selling, markets and merchants and their customers, are a staple of nursery rhymes-To market, to market, jiggety jigmost literary Victorian poetry, like the little pig, resolutely stays home from commercial encounters. Goblin Market not only adopts the forms of the nursery rhyme but also carries the mercantile preoccupations of Mother Goose into a volume of serious poetry.' Much of the criticism of Goblin Market treats its story of buying and selling, like its rhymes and goblins, as the figurative dress for a narrative of spiritual temptation, fall, and redemption.2 But what happens if instead we read the figure as the subject: buying and selling, or more specifically, the relation of women to those markets of the nursery tales? Rossetti's merchants are goblin men; their customers are maidens. When Lizzie and Laura step from home into the male marketplace of Rossetti's poem, they cross a fictive but strongly invested boundary separating not only serious poetry from nursery rhymes but also moral from economic space, private from public, natural creativity from the alienated labor of capitalist production, andunderwriting and sustaining these distinctions-female from male.3 Victorian culture acknowledges only one figure who transgresses this boundary-the prostitute. The threat she inevitably poses to the security of these distinctions is contained when she is cast out from the company of moral women. Rossetti's poem is haunted by that shadowy figure. As in so many Victorian narratives of the fallen woman, Laura purchases pleasure only to discover that her own body is ultimately consumed. But Laura is not a prostitute; she is never excluded from the company of moral women by Lizzie or by her author. Rossetti avoids what might be thought the bolder move: she does not take the prostitute as a defining instance of all