Christina Rossetti and the Triumph of Revision

Christina Rossetti is well known for subjecting her poems to what Jerome McGann calls ‘severe prunings’, the most conspicuous of her strategies for achieving her characteristically spare lyricism. She isolates the two stanzas of ‘Bitter for Sweet’ from a longer draft; she retrieves the two stanzas of ‘The Bourne’ from a shapeless 12-stanza poem. The extant Rossetti Notebooks, now at the Bodleian and the British Libraries, reveal intensely careful work—an adroit verbal change here, a rhythmic adjustment there—on the poems that eventually appear in Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866). For Rossetti, a manuscript ‘fair copy’ seldom remains pristine. The revisions to a poem such as ‘My Dream’ show that the deft revision that produces Rossettian understatement in her poems also produces their fine exuberance.

Of Fairy Tales: The Reparative Fantasy in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

With the heated debate on the utility of the humanities as a context, this paper reads Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an attempt to reconcile the emerging functional attitude towards the humanities and the susceptibility of the humanities to the neo-liberal condition. This paper traces connections between the “reparative” or the “post-critical” turn and fairy tales or fantasies in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much debated poem, “Goblin Market,” could be framed in a fantastic framework that substantiates a reparative orientation that is “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 149). A stubborn insistence on the hermeneutics of suspicion has informed much of the readings of the “Goblin Market,” especially the haunted market, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” (Sedgwick, Queer Performativity 15). I aim to provide a different approach given that recent scholarship on “Goblin Market” ignores the possibility of reparation. In this paper, I attempt to withhold suspicion in order to hone caring eyes to uncritical materials that are often deemed untenable to politicized life. I reparatively read the female participation in the market that resuscitates a full female identity and the “muted” ending that is often subjected to paranoid readings. Locating “Goblin Market” in a fantastic framework, I argue, helps us to see the actual world and it helps us visualize a fantastic world that brings out an ethical efflorescence that entertains human experience in its plenitude. This essay also argues that “Goblin Market,” partakes in “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” (Zipes 98) that gained ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and this serves as an affective archive to document long marginalized figures and feelings. I also argue that Rosetti’s poem invites thoughts on how aesthetic devices sustain and reproduce selves that ripple off from real-life experiences in a fantastic interruption of spatiality and temporality.

Vision, Vulnerability, and the Victorian Marketplace in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’

This article traces connections between nineteenth-century concepts of physiological sight and philosophies of vision in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much discussed and debated depiction of women in the marketplace in ‘Goblin Market’ should be framed by Victorian beliefs about vision and its moral extensions. I establish a historical, medical, and social context for the evolving views on vision in response to advancements in the visual sciences, particularly focusing on social responses to the physiological findings that allied the physical and psychological understanding of vision and knowledge creation in new ways. These theories of visuality within the medical and scientific communities affirmed the social rhetoric of female fragility, connecting frail female sight with precarious judgments and undermined morality outside the protected domestic sphere. I use this context to show that, although ‘Goblin Market’ clearly acknowledges potential dangers in the market for women, Rossetti ultimately presents a tale in which Lizzie is able to successfully participate in markets and in which feminine strength is shown to be a tool for self-governance more broadly. While keeping the moral values tied to female vision and public participation intact, Rossetti nonetheless undermines theories of simple determinism in the female body and mind. ‘Goblin Market’, I argue, can be viewed as a challenge to accepted beliefs about the vulnerability of physical and moral degeneration for women in the marketplace, a challenge that both operates within the social values of moral vision and offers a guide to an empowering public participation.

The Innocent Old Way: Reserved Interpretation and Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market”

Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” has long been recognized as an interpretive enigma. Simultaneously conducting its own surface reading and inviting us to interrogate its buried meanings, the poem adapts the Tractarian doctrine of reserve to set up a hermeneutic paradox rooted in Victorian exegetical thought. Variously a standard for reticent poetic style, an apologia for divine mystery, and a prescription for limiting complex theological knowledge, reserve also served Victorian thinkers as a hermeneutic strategy. Rossetti plays reserve against itself by dramatizing its dueling imperatives—inciting and containing curiosity. Laura's epilogue forecloses interpretation for “illiterate” spiritual children—those who might misconstrue mysterious meanings; simultaneously, the epilogue mobilizes a competing dimension of reserve, juxtaposing its interpretive gatekeeping against its hermeneutic potential. Anticipating recent reading debates, Rossetti's reserve generates a temporally recursive hermeneutic, within which competing interpretations and interpretive modes can be imagined to coexist.