[In the following essay, Mermin argues that "Goblin Market" explores the feminine fantasies of "freedom, heroism, and self-sufficiency," celebrates "sisterly and maternal love," and suggests the possibility of a Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood.]

"Goblin Market" is usually read as an allegory of the poet's self-division that shows, in Lionel Stevenson's representative summary, the conflict between "the two sides of Christina's own character, the sensuous and the ascetic," and demonstrates "the evil of self-indulgence, the fraudulence of sensuous beauty, and the supreme duty of renunciation."¹ Readings of his sort even when they are not reductively biographical (as Stevenson's is not) do not allow for the openness and multiplicity of meanings that we acknowledge in such predecessor poems as Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner or Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." They usually assume that the poem welled up spontaneously and artlessly from Rossetti's unconscious and press towards exclusively psycho-sexual interpretations. By turning the two sisters into parts of one person, they minimize or distort the central action in which one sister saves the other; they shy away from the powerful image of Lizzie as Christ saying, "'Eat me, drink me, love me'" (1. 471);² they ignore the energy, triumph, and joy of the poem; and they give insufficient weight to the ending. Recent readings have suggested other dimensions to the poem: that it is about art as well as sex, and that it represents the development of female autonomy in a largely female world.³ An inclusive reading will demonstrate what is evident from the sensuousness, luxuriance, cheerfulness, and energy of the poem and from the serenity of the ending: that it is not a poem of bitter repression but rather a fantasy of feminine freedom, heroism, and self-sufficiency and a celebration of sisterly and maternal love. It is a dream or a vision of the Pre-Raphaelite world from a woman's point of view.

The goblins represent the temptations of sexual desire, but of a highly imaginative kind.⁴ Jeanie "for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died" (11. 314-315). This sexuality is without marriage or issue: no grass grows on Jeanie's grave and the kernel Laura brings back does not sprout. As in much of Rossetti's poetry and that of others in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, desire here has no end or final object. The goblins are like odd, furry, cuddly little animals of the sort Rossetti loved, sometimes childlike and charming, purveyors of desire but not its object. The fruits are not the real object either, since they feed the appetite instead of satisfying it; once tasted, they have served their purpose and cannot be found again. They are unreal even in the fairy-tale world of the poem—"Men sell not such in any town" (11. 101, 556)—seeming to come from a paradise "'Where summer ripens at all hours'" (1. 152) but where no one ever goes. They represent desire for a paradise of the imagination that does not exist and therefore can be only desired, never obtained. The conflation of erotic and imaginative significance in a story about non-human objects of desire which exist outside of time recalls La Belle Dame Sans Merci, whose victims eat strange fruit in fairyland and then loiter, turn pale, starve, and waste away, and also Tennyson's "Tithonus" and (proleptically) "The Holy Grail." In Tennyson's poem the Grail quest begins with a nun who starves herself to a shadow after her love has been thwarted; the quest leads Percivale through a world of shadows and into a monastery and gives (as in "Goblin Market") a framework of explicitly Christian meaning to a deeply ambiguous story. In all these poems the sexualized imaginative world is infinitely attractive but sterile and destructive, and those who commit themselves to longing for it waste away in gloom and frustration, cut off from natural human life.

Rossetti's knowledge of the lives and art of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially her brother Gabriel's, as well as the idea of Keats that was current at mid-century would have enforced the association between imaginary worlds, sexuality, and art. In her story "The Lost Titian" (1856) she describes a party at Titian's studio that resembles both a glorified version of Gabriel's house and the goblins' feast:

The studio was elegant with clusters of flowers, sumptuous with crimson, gold-bordered hangings, and luxurious with cushions and perfumes. From the walls peeped pictured fruit and fruit-like faces On the table were silver dishes, filled with leaves and choice fruits; wonderful vessels of Venetian glass, containing rare wines and iced waters; and footless goblets, which allowed the guest no choice but to drain his bumper.⁵

The fruit both attracts and frightens Laura by suggesting a combination of sensuous richness, moral irresponsibility, and sinister eroticism that is frequent in Pre-Raphaelite art. "'Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?'" (11. 44-45), she warns; but then: "'How fair the vine must grow. . . . How warm the wind must blow / Thro' those fruit bushes'" (11. 60-63). The fruit seems to her to offer access to a paradise of art; she herself, moreover, is described in terms that suggest that she belongs in a Pre-Raphaelite picture. She "stretched her gleaming neck" like a swan, a lily, "a moonlit poplar branch" (11. 81-84)—or like the long-necked women in Gabriel's paintings—and finally like a "vessel" (1. 85) about to break free, an association of woman and drifting boat that recalls a favorite Pre-Raphaelite subject, the Lady of Shalott. The other extended description of Laura refers to the most notable attribute of Pre-Raphaelite women, long loosened hair (11. 500-506).

Laura sounds, in fact, like Lizzie Siddal, with her long neck and fabulously luxuriant red-gold hair⁶ —Laura's hair "streamed" like a "torch" (1. 500) even though it had turned "thin and gray" (1. 277). Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model and eventually his wife, was a painter and a poet too; she was reclusive, thin, and unhealthy, and took large quantities of laudanum, dying of an overdose shortly before "Goblin Market" was published. The goblins, "Brother with queer brother" (1. 94), suggest the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood with their queer lives and also, perhaps, childhood memories and fantasies of Rossetti's own two brothers; as Ellen Moers points out, the goblins seem to reflect "fantasies derived from the night side of the Victorian nursery."⁷ They call Lizzie "proud, / Cross-grained, uncivil" (11. 394-395)—terms that Rossetti could well have imagined applied to herself by the Brotherhood, among whom she was often both sharp-tongued and reserved.⁸ She was cool to Lizzie Siddal; nor did she get on well later with her other sister-in-law, Lucy (a name fortuitously apposite in sound to "Goblin Market"), the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, whom William Rossetti married in 1874. On the simplest biographical level, the poem seems to describe possible lives for women among the Pre-Raphaelites and to imagine a sisterly feeling among them that did not, so far as Christina Rossetti was concerned, actually exist.

In narrative terms the story is a transformation of a traditional fairy tale.⁹ The sisters live alone in a cosy little house. Asleep, they are compared to blossoms, snow, "wands of ivory / Tipped with gold for awful kings" (11. 188-191). Their sleep is protected as if by enchantment: "Wind sang to them lullaby, / Lumbering owls forebore to fly, / Not a bat flapped" (11. 193-195). A verbal ambiguity makes them seem imprisoned: "Cheek to cheek and breast to breast / Locked together in one nest" (11. 197-198) like sleeping princesses waiting for princes (or "awful kings") to rescue them. But this is a fairy tale that Rossetti usually tells with a difference. Her princes are dilatory and lovers seldom come to those who wait. (They are more likely to come to women who are doing something: making music in "Maiden-Song," getting married in "Love from the North.") Once Laura yields to desire she becomes that central figure in Rossetti's poems and stories, the woman "Grown old before [her] time" ("Song: Oh roses for the flush of youth," 1. 4), doomed to pine away like the princess in "The Prince's Progress" who dies before her lover gets there. Laura is cured, however, by discovering that what she pined for is not really desirable. Rossetti tells the same story again in "Commonplace" (1870), in which Lucy (again, a name fit for "Goblin Market") learns that the man she loved has married someone else. Immediately she ages, fades, and withdraws from her family and the world. Then she meets him again, sees that he's not worth pining for, regains her health, looks, and cheerfulness, and marries a nicer man. Similarly, the goblins show their evil nature when Lizzie resists them and the juice she brings back tastes bitter. Knowing the bitterness is the "fiery antidote" (1. 559) to Laura's yearning. She is cured not because her fairy prince comes but because she ceases to want him.

Since the goblin fruit has explicitly sexual connotations, however, and since in the moral logic of poetry desire and deed blur together, Laura is in effect a "fallen woman"—an object that fascinated Victorians from the Pre-Raphaelities up the social and moral scale to Gladstone. Several of Rossetti's poems deal with women who have been seduced and abandoned. Like "Goblin Market," these poems are remarkably uncensorious, particularly in contrast to the sentimental cruelty of works like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting "Found" or his poem "Jenny," to which the name "Jeanie" in "Goblin Market" may allude. Rossetti treats such women sympathetically, reserving her scorn for the men. Thus in "The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children" the speaker forgives the mother who does not dare to acknowledge her and blames her unknown father, and in "Cousin Kate" and "Light Love" illegitimate children cause their mothers more pride than shame. The speaker in "Jenny" compares the prostitute to "a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look" and contrasts her with his virtuous cousin:

Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.
It makes a goblin of the sun.

"Sister," "vessels," and "goblin" all suggest "Goblin Market." For Christina Rossetti, however, sin does not necessarily cancel sisterhood, and she thought like Barrett Browning that women should know and write about such things. In the 1860's she spent a considerable amount of time at a "Home for Fallen Women,"¹¹ a form of social welfare work that allowed respectable middle-class women to read in the "book" that Gabriel's "Jenny" says "pure women" may not look into. So Lizzie, emboldened by love for her sister, "for the first time in her life / Began to listen and look" (11. 327-328); and what she sees does not, in the end, hurt her. Laura's heated imagination inhabits the erotic world of Pre-Raphaelite art, while Lizzie's imagination leads her towards—if not actually into—a realistic, socially responsible moral world like Barrett Browning's. Rossetti's defense of "The Iniquity of the Fathers" against Gabriel's disapproval can serve as a reply to "Jenny" and an explanation of "Goblin Market:"

Whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be-desired unreality of women's work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within female range such an attempt as this: where the certainly possible circumstances are merely indicated as it were in skeleton. . . . Moreover the sketch only gives the girl's own deductions, feelings .. . and whilst it may truly be urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don't see why "the Poet mind" should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities.¹²

Lizzie's rescue of Laura, the main action of the poem, has several aspects. As in The Ancient Mariner redemption comes—thirst is sated—through imaginative identification analogous to the poet's own. Primarily, however, it is an heroic exploit. Lizzie stands firm under attack like a large, substantial object, mixing male and female qualities: a lily, a rock, a beacon, an orange-tree, a beleaguered town (11. 409-421). It is a triumph of cleverness and daring: she would not open her mouth, she made no bargain, she "laughed in heart" (1. 433) while the goblins attacked her. She outwits them like a folktale heroine, getting their treasure without paying their price; the "bounce" of her unspent penny in her purse is "music to her ear" (1. 454), an image as much simply economic as sexual. She runs home in the sheer physical pleasure of strength and freedom, impelled not by fear (1. 460) but by joy and filled again with "inward laughter" (1. 463). As her laughter indicates, her story has to do not with temptation resisted—neither the goblins nor their fruit attract her, and what she is resisting is attempted rape—but with danger braved and overcome, an heroic deed accomplished.

She brings the "fiery antidote" (1. 559) and she is the antidote. She brings proof that the goblin fruit is bitter, and she offers as an alternative both a gift of love and an example of a better way of life. She brings back "'the fruit forbidden'" (1. 479) without tasting it herself—that is, she shows that it is possible in erotic and artistic matters, if not in Genesis, to know good and evil and not succumb to evil. "'Eat me, drink me, love me'" (1. 471): like Christ, she saves both by her self-sacrifice and by her example. "The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ," Florence Nightingale wrote in Cassandra; "at last there shall arise a woman, who will resume, in his own soul, all the sufferings of her race, and that woman will be the Saviour of her race."¹³ The speaker in Rossetti's "From House to Home," written shortly before "Goblin Market," is saved from despair after losing her paradise of love by a vision of a woman suffering torment like the crucifixion. In simpler terms, the moral is a good Victorian one, familiar from many novels: moral and emotional salvation comes from a loving response to selfless love.

"'Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices'," cries Lizzie (1. 468), and Laura "kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth" (1. 492). The eroticism troubles many readers; we are more nervous about manifestations of affection between women than Victorians were, and we find it hard to allow a nineteenth-century religious poet the conflation of spiritual and erotic intensity that we accept without question in Crashaw or Donne.¹⁴ Calmer traditional images of eating and drinking are used to exemplify the relation of Christ to mankind in several of the devotional poems published with "Goblin Market" ("The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge," 11. 9-12; "A Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break," 1.4; "A Better Resurrection," 11. 17-24; "Advent," 11. 31-32). Embodying this symbolic relationship in two women evokes strange overtones. But there is nothing erotic in Lizzie's jubilant shouts of triumph, heroic boasting even: "'Laura, make much of me: / For your sake I have braved the glen'" (11. 472-473). Laura's reaction is excessive, but the excess here as in her gluttonous sucking at the fruit is part of the evil as well as its cure. She falls into a highly stylized, rather Biblical frenzy that is like a ritual of exorcism:

Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast.

(11. 496-499)

Then, "Pleasure past and anguish past" (1. 522)—the mixture of pleasure and pain, poison and delight characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite formulations of alluring, evil love—she falls senseless, almost dies, and is reborn at dawn into the natural cycle of life: chirping birds, reapers, dewy grass and buds, and moderate behavior. She "Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice" (1. 539).

The full meaning of the story, however, is seen in its consequences. "Afterwards, when both were wives" (1. 544), Laura would tell their children about the goblins and how her sister "stood / In deadly peril to do her good" (11. 557-558), and then,

joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
"For there is no friend like a sister."

(11. 560-562)

The story thus completed is clear and simple in its essential structure: two girls live alone; they encounter goblin men; they have children. Except for the word "wives," which legitimizes the children, there is no mention of any men but the goblins, who are explicitly male. The children are apparently all girls and are exhorted to keep the female circle closed and complete. This is a world in which men serve only the purpose of impregnation. Once both sisters have gone to the goblins and acquired the juices of their fruits, they have no further need of them.

Many of Rossetti's poems and stories suggest that the fantasy of such a world might well attract her. Sing-Song, for instance, is filled with a yearning for children that is so intense as to be painful:

Motherless baby and babyless mother,
Bring them together to love one another.

My baby has a mottled fist,
My baby has a neck in creases;
My baby kisses and is kissed.

In "Commonplace" childlessness is regarded as a terrible sorrow, and the death of children, a recurrent motif in her writings, is the worst of calamities (see "Eve," "Vanna's Twins," and much of Sing-Song). Relationships between mothers and babies and between women, usually sisters, are central to her poems and stories, whereas men are generally peripheral or absent; often the relationship is the darker side of the sisterly coin, competitiveness and envy, but even then it is a source of dramatic excitement and energy. Marriage is seldom depicted as wholly desirable. "A Triad" gives the most negative view, telling of three women:

One shamed herself in love; one temperately Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished died for love.

(11. 9-11)

In "Maude Clare" the speaker denounces her lover, who is marrying another woman; he quakes inarticulately with shame, but Nell (the name, perhaps significantly, of the virtuous cousin in Gabriel's "Jenny") answers her:

"Yea, tho' you're taller by the head,
More wise, and much more fair;
I'll love him till he loves me best."

(11. 45-47)

Maude Clare is strong, proud, and bold, while a good wife is humble, unambitious, uncensorious, and loving, like Nell: virtues that most of Rossetti's speakers find almost impossible to attain and hard even to praise, although admitting that in fact they lead to happiness. The speaker in "The Lowest Room" who reads Homer and is restless with her "'aimless life'" (1. 81) ends up unmarried, bitterly envious of her sister's cosy family—which a woman who is not content with a woman's lot cannot, evidently, hope for. But such discontent is a strong and persistent undercurrent in Rossetti's poems, and a good deal of poetic and moral energy goes into resisting it. She was encouraged to resist it, too: her brother Gabriel saw in "The Lowest Room" a "taint" of "falsetto muscularity" which he attributed to the influence of Barrett Browning and thought "utterly foreign" to his sister's "primary impulses."¹⁶

As in "Goblin Market," however, Rossetti sometimes imagines other alternatives than soft domesticity, resentful loneliness, and "falsetto muscularity." In Maude (written in 1850) the only mode of life the heroine admires is that of a friend who joins an Anglican sisterhood and is seen just once more "walking with some poor children," "thoughtful, but very calm and happy"; like Laura and Lizzie,¹⁷ she has both sisterhood and children. Rossetti was much attracted to sisterhoods; her work with fallen women made her an "Associate" of one, and in 1873 her older sister Maria became an Anglican nun, as she had long wanted to do—and thereby (as Lona Mosk Packer points out, p. 304) left the seclusion and limited sphere of home and entered a wider and busier world. The Anglican sisterhoods, like the central fantasy of "Goblin Market," satisfied the need that haunts Maude and such poems as "The Lowest Room," "A Royal Princess," and "Maggie a Lady": the need for a sphere of significant activity, combined with emotional fulfillment, within the limits of women's traditional roles. In 1854 Rossetti wanted to join Florence Nightingale in her Crimean venture—that apotheosis of a traditionally feminine activity into strenuous, serious, public deeds—but was rejected as too young. She thought that motherhood, too, could confer heroic strength and even masculine status: "I do think if anything ever does sweep away the barrier of sex, and make the female not a giantess or a heroine but at once and full grown a hero and giant, it is that mighty maternal love which makes little birds and little beasts as well as little women matches for very big adversaries."¹⁸ Unwed mothers, furthermore, are among the strongest figures in her poetry ("Cousin Kate," "Light Love"), and female strength often goes with rejecting a man, as in "Maude Clare" and "No, Thank You, John" (in which Gabriel found the objectionable Barrett Browning "taint" recurring).¹⁹ Virgin saints also offered a model of female independence. In Time Flies, Rossetti tells of St. Etheldreda, who remained virgin through two marriages and "after twelve years of successful contest, ended strife by separating from her enamoured husband." "Thus she fought the battle of life," Rossetti comments, carrying out the martial image, "thus she triumphed." Having escaped from husbands, Etheldreda founded and ruled "a monastery for men and women."²⁰ She is evidently one of Rossetti's favorite saints.

A world of female potency and exclusively female happiness appears in Rossetti's works only covertly, as fantasy, and in clearly unrealistic modes: ballads, fairy tales, and legends of saints. Her lyrics generally keep to conventional lyric themes, and when women in her narrative poems lose or leave their lovers, religion is usually their only solace. She accepted these limitations, writing with some wryness to her brother Gabriel in 1870:

It is impossible to go on singing out-loud to one's one-stringed lyre. It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I, and, having said my say, may well sit silent. . . . Here is a great discovery, "Women are not Men," and you must not expect me to possess a tithe of your capacities, though I humbly—or proudly—lay claim to family-likeness.²¹

Religious belief both curbed her ambition and offered escape from the restrictions imposed by her sex. Her didactic and devotional works assert women's inferiority with relentless stringency and with an undertone of rebellion and pain that she finds hard to subdue; but part of the comfort she finds in religion is the promise that in the soul's relation to Christ gender, finally, does not matter. She says in Seek and Find: "if our proud waves will after all . . . not be allayed (for stayed they must be) by the limit of God's ordinance concerning our sex, one final consolation yet remains to careful and troubled hearts: in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one."²²

The optimistic plot of "Goblin Market" reappears, however, in Speaking Likenesses (1874), an unpretentious little book of three fairy tales told in one narrative frame by a very prim aunt to her nieces. In the first story a little girl finds herself at a fantastic party with terrible children who torment her as the goblins do Lizzie and whose marvellously tempting food she does not eat; from this she learns to put up with the normally unpleasant children at her birthday party. In the second a little girl goes into the woods and tries unsuccessfully, with the help of friendly but ineffectual animals, to boil a kettle for tea; she learns that she cannot manage to live alone. In the third story a little girl walking through the woods on a generous errand refuses to join the terrible children's party, to feed or eat with a monstrous boy whose face has only a huge mouth, or to fall asleep with a band of gypsies. The way is cold and difficult and the recipients of her generosity are ungrateful, but she completes her errands. Apparently as a reward, she finds a pigeon, a kitten, and a puppy which she brings back to her cosy house and loving grandmother. As in "Goblin Market," resistance to male figures which attract some sympathy and yet repel and refusal to eat their food or join their dreams are parts of a painful and strenuous quest that frees the heroine both from a disagreeable social world of males and females together (as in the first story) and from helplessness (as in the second), and leaves two women self-sufficient and happy with baby creatures to care for. The frame is conventional, repressive, and moralistic, but the unstated theme is not.

Much of Rossetti's poetry presents frustrated, unhappy women yearning for love. "Goblin Market," in contrast, shows women testing the allurements of male sexuality and exploring the imaginative world that male eroticism has created. By entering but finally rejecting that world, they discover that a woman can be strong, bold, and clever, Christ-like in active self-sacrifice as well as in silent endurance, and that sisters and daughters can live happy lives together. For Rossetti this may have been as unrealizable a dream as the variously uninhabitable realms of art imagined by Keats and his Victorian followers; but it was a dream that sought to integrate passion and art into life and not, as critics often say, merely to reject or repress them. Sexuality is not repressed in the poem—it is quite evidently and undisguisedly there—but its proper function is shown to be the generation of children and literary works. Laura turns the encounter with the goblins into a tale told and retold as a ritual to bind the children together, and the moral she draws from it is not that girls should avoid goblins—the sisters seem to remember them, in fact, with some pleasure—but that "'there is no friend like a sister'" (1. 562). Similarly, the imaginative experience of the goblin world appears to generate the poem that includes and goes beyond it. Rossetti's sense of poetical possibilities was restricted by Pre-Raphaelite assumptions about the subjects, moods, and tones appropriate to art, but in "Goblin Market" she shows that the erotic and imaginative intensity cultivated by the Brotherhood need not be self-enclosing, all-engrossing, or male. The energy, freedom, and easy control of the fluent irregular meter (which seems to have shocked Ruskin with its apparent waywardness) reflect Rossetti's triumphant appropriation of Pre-Raphaelite materials for her own purposes. She uses a literary form, furthermore, that purports to be nothing more serious than a tale told by a woman to amuse and instruct children; the form, like the content, seems to betray an assumption that women can only be grown-up, independent, productive, and active in a life without men.

Notes

¹The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 105. Winston Weathers gives the fullest explication of the sisters as two halves of one self in "Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of Self," VP, 3 (1965), 81-89.

² Citations from the poems unless otherwise specified are from The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Crump (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), I.

³ A. A. DeVitis sees the sisters as two halves of an artist in "Goblin Market: Fairy Tale and Reality," JPC, I (1967), 418-426. The poem is read as showing, in part, growth into adulthood and the development of female autonomy by Martine Watson Brownley in "Love and Sensuality in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'," ELWIU, 6 (1979), 179-186; Ellen Golub in "Untying Goblin Apron Strings: A Psychoanalytic Reading of 'Goblin Market'," L&P, 25 (1975), 158-165; and Miriam Sagan in "Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' and Feminist Literary Criticism," PRR, 3 (1980), 66-76. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar find hints of "an effectively matrilineal and matriarchal world" as well as "bitter repressive wisdom" in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 567, 573. William T. Going shows that the poem draws significantly on the life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in "'Goblin Market' and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," PRR, 3 (1979), I-II, and Jerome J. McGann analyzes it as an enactment of the sisters' discovery that they need not be emotionally dependent on goblin men in "Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation," VS, 23 (1980), 237-254.

⁴ Weathers says that the goblins tempt to "a kind of imaginative, fanciful, visionary—even hallucinatory—state of mind" (p. 82), and Lona Mosk Packer sees it as (in Rossetti's own words) "'the seduction of imaginative emotion'" (Christina Rossetti [Univ. of California Press, 1963], p. 145). Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the fruits are works of art (pp. 568-570).

⁵Commonplace, and Other Short Stories (London, 1870), p. 149.

⁶ In her edition of "Goblin Market" (New York, 1975), Germaine Greer notes the likeness and makes it more impressive by calling Laura and Lizzie by each other's names (p. xxxi and passim). Violet Hunt associates Lizzie with Maria Rossetti and Laura with Christina herself. The story she tells is highly implausible (that Maria kept Christina from eloping by crouching for several nights on the door mat), but some general allusion to Maria, to whom the poem is dedicated, seems likely. See Violet Hunt, The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death (New York, 1932), p. xiii.

⁷Literary Women (Garden City, N. Y., 1976), p. 105.

⁸ Violet Hunt's characterization of her suggests that such opinions were held by some Pre-Raphaelites; see The Wife of Rossetti, pp. xii-xiii, 45, 58.

⁹ Thomas Burnett Swann points out that they are like fairy-tale princesses in Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (Francestown, New Hampshire, 1960), pp. 103, 105. Readings of the fairytale element in terms of repressed eroticism are given by Stephen Prickett in Victorian Fantasy (Indiana Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 103-106, and Maureen Duffy in The Erotic World of Faery (London, 1972), pp. 288-291.

¹⁰ "Jenny," The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti (London, 1911).

¹¹ Packer notes the connection between "Goblin Market" and this welfare work, p. 154.

¹²Three Rossettis: Unpublished Letters to and from Dante Gabriel Christina, William, ed. Janet Camp Troxell (Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), p. 143.

¹³Cassandra, ed. Myra Stark (Old West bury, 1979), pp. 53, 50. Cassandra was written in 1852.

¹⁴ Greer finds the poem "deeply perverse" (p. xxxvi). Brownley says, "Her sexual fall requires a sexual redemption" (p. 183). Cora Kaplan finds the poem "an exploration of women's sexual fantasy which includes suggestions of masochism, homoeroticism, rape or incest" ("The Indefinite Disclosed: Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson," in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus [London, 1979], p. 69). None of these critics thinks that Rossetti knew what she was doing when she wrote passages like this.

¹⁵Sing-Song, Speaking Likenesses, Goblin Market, ed. R. Loring Taylor (New York, 1976), pp. 125, 23.

¹⁶Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (Oxford, 1967), III, 1380.

¹⁷Maude: Prose & Verse (Chicago, 1897), p. 83.

¹⁸ Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (Boston, 1898), p. 124.

¹⁹Letters, III, 1380.

²⁰Time Flies: A Reading Diary (Boston, 1886), p. 244. As a child Rossetti would have read the legend in Hone's Every-Day Book.

²¹The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1908), p. 31.

²²Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (New York, [1897]), p. 32.

²³ See William Michael Rossetti, ed., Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism: Papers 1854 to 1862 (London, 1899), pp. 258-259.