CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S “GOBLIN MARKET”: THE EROTICISM OF FEMALE MYSTICS

BRITTA ZANGEN

Christina Rossetti’s two older brothers had already been trying to further their sister’s poetic career for some years, but with little success. However, a breakthrough finally came in 1861-62. She had just turned thirty and had been writing poetry for some two decades, when what was to be the decisive year started yet again with a setback: Dante Gabriel’s own famous patron John Ruskin refused to provide any help with his sister’s poetry. Although Ruskin recognized the poet’s “observation and passion” and the poems’ “beauty and power”, their “Irregular measure” – this “calamity of modern poetry” – was as unacceptable to him as the poems’ “quaintnesses and offences” would no doubt be to any publisher.1 She should, he decreed, “exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like”, and then “all will become precious”. Fortunately for the history of poetry, there was a more far-sighted man than Ruskin: in the same year Alexander Macmillan, who, with his late brother, had been making quite a success of his publishing house, published three of her poems in Macmillan’s Magazine to great acclaim.2 In autumn he “took the liberty”, as he wrote to Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

of reading the Goblin Market aloud to a number of people .... They seemed at first to wonder whether I was making fun of them; by degrees they got as still as death, and when I finished there was a tremendous burst of applause.3

1 Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism. Papers 1854 to 1862, ed. William Michael Rossetti, London, 1899, 258-59. 2 They were “Up-hill”, “A Birthday” and “An Apple Gathering”. 3 The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters: Some 133 Unpublished Letters Written to Alexander Macmillan, F.S. Ellis, and Others, by Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael Rossetti, 1861-1889, ed. Lona Mosk Packer, Berkeley, 1963, 7. 248 Britta Zangen

In early 1862 he brought out Chistina Rossetti’s first collection of poems, Goblin Market and Other Poems.4 “Goblin Market” was met with bewilderment and disapproval but also with enthusiasm. Ever since the revival of interest in Rossetti, it has been accepted as a masterpiece, not least due to second-wave feminist scholarship in the 1970s. By 1985 Jerome McGann was able to assert: “The point hardly needs argument, for no one has ever questioned its achievement and mastery.”5 Perhaps it is for this reason that “Goblin Market” has attracted more interpretations than any of Rossetti’s numerous other poems – interpretations not only greater in number but also more radically diverse than those of any other poem I know. Essays on “Goblin Market” often contain comments on its “multifarious [critical interpretations]”,6 its being “very complex”7 or “most persistently puzzling”.8 The poem has baffled critics with regard to its genre, its main themes, and its sexual overtones. Regarding genre it has been placed in such widely different categories as a nursery rhyme, a fairy-tale or a fairy-tale for adults, an erotic fantasy, a Gothic tale, a horror story, a Christian allegory. Its main themes have been designated a critique of capitalism, a celebration of sisterhood, a propaganda piece for lesbianism, a case study of anorexia nervosa, a rewriting of the Fall, a story of redemption. Christina Rossetti’s poems are also widely understood as some kind of unacknowledged autobiographical treasure trove. This kind of interpretation usually harps on Rossetti’s two unfulfilled engagements or it relies on some unknown love affairs of hers.9 Personal disappointments in love are thus taken to be the models for her (in McGann’s words) “all but obsessive studies of women in love”. He calls all these efforts

4 This is apart from the small volume privately printed by her grandfather when she was sixteen. 5 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, Oxford, 1985, 220. 6 Sean C. Grass, “Nature’s Perilous Variety in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’”, Nineteenth- Century Literature, LI/3 (1996), 356. 7 D.M.R. Bentley, “The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and an Analysis”, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti ed. David A. Kent, Ithaca: NY, 1987, 65. 8 Steven Connor, “‘Speaking Likenesses’: Language and Repetition in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market”, Victorian Poetry, XXII/4 (1984), 439. 9 Incidentally, she broke off the first engagement to James Collinson nine years prior to writing “Goblin Market” and rejected the second offer of marriage by Charles Bagot Cayley seven years afterwards.