The Fruit of Charity: Comus and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

Abstract

fascinated Christina Rossetti, who explored these same concerns in her own poetry and devotional prose.1 Not surprisingly, then, much critical discussion has been devoted to the influence of Paradise Lost on Rossetti's work, particularly on her most famous narrative poem, Goblin Market, But critics have persistently misunderstood influence on Rossetti, claiming that in Goblin Market Rossetti either reinscribes an oppressive Miltonic injunction against female creativity, or that she needs to radically revise Milton in order to celebrate female creativity and spirituality. This essay examines how another important work by Milton his 1634 Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, commonly known as Comus inspires Goblin Market I suggest that masque has a direct bearing on the meaning and structure of Rossetti's poem, especially on its feminist implications, and that Rossetti's most original and creative appropriation of Milton is to be found in Goblin Market These texts share a similar climactic event: a restorative, redemptive ritual that one woman performs for another. Both works are concerned with the virtues of chastity and charity, and both explore these virtues by using a female Christ figure whose divine power derives from her experience of a violent assault. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar devote an entire chapter to Milton's bogey a phrase (borrowed from Virginia Woolf's A Room of Ones Own [1929]) that they use to describe Milton as the primary patriarchal figure of oppression and Bloomian anxiety for women writers. Their critical formulation of Milton is worth quoting at length: