Although "Goblin Market" has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest of children's poems¹ and has repeatedly been labeled a fairy tale, in line with Christina Rossetti's own insistence on this point, there has been no serious, extensive consideration of "Goblin Market" as a children's poem drawing upon the themes and forms of traditional children's literature. This is true because, in large part, readers from the beginning to the present have had difficulty concentrating on anything other than the framework of Christian allegory—a more "adult" genre—which is so apparent in the poem. This overriding critical attention to the allegorical moral, while it has produced a number of instructive and illuminating readings, has been less than entirely satisfactory. It is the contention of this essay that only by viewing "Goblin Market" as a tale for children, a tale which is structurally based on the interweaving of the predominant nineteenth-century strands of children's literature—the fairy tale and the moral tale—can the poem's true moral, for children and adults, be understood. Further, it is the interplay between moral tale and fairy tale that allows "Goblin Market's" thematic statement to be utterly subversive and yet ultimately moral.

I

In 1898, Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti's early biographer, quotes Christina's surviving brother as having written: "I have more than once heard C[hristina] aver that the poem has not any profound or ulterior meaning—it is just a fairy story: yet one can discern that it implies at any rate this much—that to succumb to a temptation makes one a victim to that same continuous temptation; that the remedy does not always lie with oneself; and that a stronger and more righteous will may prove of avail to restore one's lost estate."² The ambivalent reaction to the dual elements of fairy tale and allegory are neatly summarized by Bell's commentary on a contemporary critic:

James Ashcroft Noble, in a penetrating essay called "The Burden of Christina Rossetti," . . . says that "'Goblin Market' may be read and enjoyed merely as a charming fairy-fantasy, and as such it is delightful and satisfying; but behind the simple story of two children and the goblin fruit-sellers is a little spiritual drama of love's vicarious redemption, in which the child redeemer goes into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, that by her painful conquest she may succour and save the sister who has been vanquished and all but slain. The luscious juices of the goblin fruit, bitter and deadly when sucked by selfish greed, become bitter and medicinal when spilt in unselfish conflict." This is admirably and eloquently put, but it may be questioned whether the critic has not perhaps somewhat overstated the case for didacticism in the poem. [pp. 206-07]

With only a few dissenting voices,³ the moral of "Goblin Market" has, then, from the beginning been seen primarily within the framework of the Christian allegory of temptation, fall, and redemption. The goblin fruits become the forbidden fruit of Genesis and Revelation, the fruit of illicit sensuality. Knowing she should not, Laura trafficks with the goblin men, buys their fruit with a golden curl and a single tear. Having once eaten of the fruit, she is no longer a maiden and can no longer hear the goblins' cry, "Come buy, come buy" (1.4).⁴ She is saved from death only by the redemptive act of her sister Lizzie. Laura's commentary at the end that "there is no friend like a sister" becomes a tribute to Lizzie's saving love.

The moral is very clearly stated and seems to fit the allegorical redemption:

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.

[11. 562-67]

It should be a neat and satisfactory ending, but it is not. Indeed, far from being satisfactory, the allegorical moral makes many readers very uncomfortable, although they cannot readily explain their lack of ease. Eleanor Walter Thomas, a Rossetti biographer, writes about an early critic who sounds frustrated, almost angry: "The critic, F. A. Rudd, wrote paragraph after paragraph in solemn condemnation of the fantastic 'Goblin Market' as immoral: he could find not a syllable in the poem to show that yielding to evil as incarnate in the goblins was at all wrong in itself. What is the moral? he weightily inquires. 'Not resist the devil and he will flee from you, but cheat the devil and he won't catch you. Now all these sayings and silences are gravely wrong and false to a writer's true functions.'"⁵ Similarly, other readers simply do not believe that the poem says what the allegory says it says. They argue that rather than condemning physical passion, the story of Laura and Lizzie celebrates that passion: "Temptation, in both its human and theological sense, is the thematic core of 'Goblin Market'. . . . 'Goblin Market' celebrates by condemning sensuous passion."⁶ In the same vein, Ellen Golub says: "Rossetti seems to condemn such [sexual] passion, but in her condemnation she offers much description of it. Eros being very much present, it is the seduction of girls by goblins which engages reader attention."⁷

Those who are able to accept the moral at face value either have the courage of an appalling lack of sensibility (for example, "The most charming scene of all is that of the sisters, grown to woman's estate, telling their own children of their terrific adventure" [Meigs, p. 291]), or they read the lines as an accommodation to the prevailing status of women, and women writers in particular, in Victorian times, the very necessity of that accommodation calling forth a proud and defiant independence. Jerome J. McGann argues that the goblins represent the Victorian marketplace, "institutionalized patterns of social destructiveness operating in nineteenth-century England" that promise women fulfillment of their desires through love and marriage, promises which are illusionary and by which women are betrayed.⁸ But, continues McGann, "the poem is unusual in Christina Rossetti's canon in that it has developed a convincing positive symbol for an alternative, uncorrupted mode of social relations—the love of sisters" (p. 250). Gilbert and Gubar also see Rossetti as making a virtue of necessity: "Christina Rossetti and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Barrett Browning build their art on a willing acceptance of passionate or demure destitution. They .. . are the nineteenth-century women singers of renunciation as necessity's highest and noblest virtue."⁹ Gilbert and Gubar discuss the important connection which "Goblin Market" sets up between "the unnatural but honey-sweet fruit of art" and the "luscious fruit of self-gratifying sensual pleasure" (p. 570), and they rightly assert that "the fruit of 'Goblin Market' has fed on the desirous substrata of the psyche, the childishly self-gratifying fantasies of the imagination." But, they conclude, since "young ladies like Laura, Maude, and Christina Rossetti should not loiter in the glen of imagination, which is the haunt of goblin men like Keats and Tennyson," they must learn "the lesson of renunciation" and feed on "bitter repressive wisdom, the wisdom of necessity's virtue, in order to be redeemed" (p. 573).

As insightful as many of these readings of "Goblin Market" are, they still do not banish our discomfort over the ending of the poem. That this is so is because, finally, Christina Rossetti does not want us to be comfortable. It may well be that Victorian institutions necessitate a positive sisterly alliance in a male-less world. And it may be that women's sexuality and creative impulses are systematically and severely repressed. But Rossetti does not believe that it should be so. To be redeemed in this kind of world is to be damned. "Goblin Market" is an extremely subversive poem which, while acknowledging the "wisdom of necessity's virtue," refuses to accept it, insisting instead on the right to dearly bought goblin fruit. This stance is made possible through Rossetti's choice of form for the poem: the interplay of fairy tale and moral tale. This interplay subverts the accepted moral into the immoral and makes imaginative knowledge the only righteousness acceptable.

II

Mary F. Thwaite, in her history of children's books, From Primer to Pleasure in Reading, lauds "Goblin Market" by saying: "With Christina Rossetti .. . the children's muse found the crystal springs of true poetry. There had been nothing of the quality of her lyrics for the young since Songs of Innocence. Finest of all is her fairy poem 'Goblin Market'. . . . Both the theme and the style are fascinating, expressed with a lilt and pace new in children's verse" (p. 135). Although the poem may appear to be something new, its form is firmly rooted in two traditional genres of children's literature. "Goblin Market" is, as Christina Rossetti repeatedly insisted, a fairy tale. But the poem is also a moral tale. Both genres have had a long history in children's literature, and both were popular in Rossetti's time. That she was familiar with the whole range of moral tales and fairy tales is clear from her own and others' accounts of her youthful reading.¹⁰ However, the forms are essentially antithetical, one being used for didactic purposes to teach children proper spiritual and social conduct, the other being secular or amoral, or even immoral, in its lesson.

Moral tales of the mid-nineteenth century, some of which emphasized a virtuous life founded on right conduct and some of which were unabashedly religious in their didacticism, had their source in the emblem books, Christian allegories, and stories of saints and martyrs of earlier centuries. The subsequent evolution of the moral tale occurred in response to social and philosophical changes, stimulated by the theories of John Locke, who held that books for children should be pleasant and entertaining to read. Morality and right conduct were seen as more important than knowledge, and reason as preferable to imagination. "Fairies and fairy lore, 'goblins and spirits'; with other superstitions, he [Locke] regarded as belonging to the useless trumpery. Imagination and enthusiasm were to be avoided—as were unintelligible ideas about God, the Supreme Being whom children should be taught to love and reverence. The sober light of reason and common-sense was to illumine the child's life" (Thwaite, p. 34).¹¹

The strictures against fairy tales, which had caused them to be available for many years primarily only in chapbooks, had, by the end of the eighteenth century, been eased by the tales being transformed—albeit through truncation and softening—into models for moral instruction. The fairy tale, thus bowdlerized, became domesticated and acceptable. "The moralizing of fairy tales (when they were admitted by the creators of juvenile literature at this period) was recognized as a cunning method of utilizing for good the youthful predilection for the fabulous" (Thwaite, p. 72). Still, reputable English editions of the Perrault tales were published in the last half of the eighteenth century, and German Popular Stories, or Grimm 's Fairy Tales, was published in English in two volumes (1823-26). Therefore, by mid-nineteenth century, legitimate fairy tales were readily available.

In "Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti combines the social and religious forms of the nineteenth-century moral tale, making the religious allegory seem to serve the social function of warning against any illicit desire or action outside the boundaries accepted by society. At the same time, the context for this moral tale is the goblin fairy tale, precisely the imaginative, out-of-bounds kind of story that had aroused so much suspicion.¹² Rossetti uses these two popular, but embattled, forms for her own purposes, simultaneously diffusing and intensifying the true moral of her poem by making it a poem for children.

The musical lilt and fast-paced narrative of "Goblin Market," the short, easily read lines and the concrete, sensory imagery of color, taste, sound, and texture all argue for the poem's special appeal to children, as do also the fantastic goblin creatures and the fairy "haunted glen" (1. 552). But it is not only on the level of the Victorian child as audience that "Goblin Market" is a tale for children. within the poem itself, the story of Laura and Lizzie's encounter with the goblins is the story told the children, time after enraptured time, by the maiden turned mother. The tale that Laura lived becomes the tale her children—and we—hear. There is a shift in critical perspective when we listen as a child to the poem. What seduces us into wanting to hear the story again and again is not the moral tale warning but the same thing that enthralls the children and seduced Laura: the goblin fruit of a fairy tale. The overt text of the moral tale makes the story "acceptable"; the subtext of the fairy tale presents Rossetti's moral. And we believe the fairy tale.

III

"Goblin Market'"s Laura and Lizzie live in the safe and orderly daytime world of the moral tale in which one event follows another in predictable, simple fashion:

Early in the morning
When the first cock crowed his warning,
Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,
Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should:

[11. 199-209]

In this domestic scene, work, common sense, and right conduct prevail, and the moral tale assures us that this, indeed, is the way things ought to be. The maidens' orderly lives are lived within boundaries, a life of milk and honey, cakes and cream, wholesome food of innocence and righteousness. They are, in fact, as Rossetti makes clear through her verbal allusions, following the moral percept of Isaac Watts's well-known poem "Against Idleness and Mischief," published in 1715 as one of his Divine Songs for Children:

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

The admonition to be as neat as the bee is followed by the warning that Satan will find mischief for idle hands. Presumably, as long as one is industrious, one is safe. However, Laura has always been busy as a bee, and still she has eaten goblin fruit. In addition, it is after her eating of the fruit that the passage comparing the sisters to bees occurs. It is not until Laura realizes that she cannot have more goblin fruit that

She no more swept the house,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney-nook
And would not eat.

[11. 293-98]

If Laura cannot have the goblin fruit, she will not eat the cake and honey either.

There is other evidence as well that the overt didacticism of the moral tale is at variance the actual message of the poem, that the fairy tale, in other words, is subverting the moral tale. By not doing her chores, Laura leaves herself open to the punishment warned against in country superstition for those who do not keep their houses clean and tidy—to be pinched by the fairies. Although a visit by the goblins is precisely what Laura desires, they do not come to her. It is, instead, Lizzie who is pinched "black as ink," having offered the goblins the payment of a "silver penny" (11. 427, 324)—the traditional reward left in the shoe of the neat housekeeper. The moral tale sequence of cause and effect and the usual admonitory system of punishments do not seem to hold in the expected way. We are in the out-of-bounds world of fairy tale rather than the orderly world of the moral tale.

Wariness of "Goblin Market"'s moral tale message increases when we recall another instance from the earlier moral tale tradition of the bee's being used for moral instruction. In 1686, John Bunyan published A Book for Boys and Girls; or Country Rhimes for Children. This book, known in the mid-nineteenth-century as Divine Emblems; Or Temporal Things Spiritualized, has as one of its figures the bee:

Upon the Bee
The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring;
And some who seek that Honey find a sting.
Now wouldst thou have the Honey and be free
From stinging; in the first place kill the Bee.

Comparison
This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin
Whose sweet unto a many death hath been.
Now wouldst have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye,
Do thou it in the first place mortifie.

In his poem on the busy bee, Watts had domesticated the bee, turning it into an example of industry and order. Rossetti, through the force of her fairy tale, undercuts this meaning and goes back to Bunyan's earlier identification of the bee with sin. Bunyan advises those who wish the honey without the sting to first kill the bee. The fruits of the goblin men are "like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood" (11. 554-55). The words are spoken by Laura at the end of "Goblin Market," and like the speaker in Bunyan's poem, she has wished to divide the honey from the sting. The moral of Rossetti's poem is that one who would have the sweet "and yet not dye" must "in the first place mortifie" the neat and busy little bee of the moral tale. Goblin gifts often bring a curse with them;¹⁵ in this case, the curse is the painful death of the view which the moral tale embodies.

In "Goblin Market," the bounded and orderly world of cottage and domesticity is juxtaposed to the "haunted glen" of "wicked quaint fruit-merchant men" (11. 552 53). Traditionally, goblins were "evil and malicious spirits, usually small and grotesque in appearance,"¹⁶ who were known "to tempt mortals to their undoing" (Thwaite, p. 135). The temptation in "Goblin Market" is to leave the world of moral tale and enter the world of fairy tale. Katherine Briggs notes in The Faeries in English Tradition and Literature that "the plot of ['Goblin Market'] is a variant of three main fairy themes: the danger of peeping at the fairies, the TABOO against eating FAIRY FOOD, and the rescue from Fairyland" (p. 193). Christina Rossetti's original title for the poem was A Peep at the Fairies, indicating perhaps that the poem is her own dangerous peep at the fairies, despite the injunctions against such a look.

True fairy tales often bear little resemblance to light, delightful fantasies; in fact, they are stories of abandonment, betrayal, violence, and irrationality. To enter the world of fairy tales is to enter a world different from the world of order and reason and common sense which we inhabit in our daytime lives; there are ordering principles in fairy tales, but they operate the boundaries of ordinary life. As Bettelheim argues, "The 'truth' of fairy stories is the truth of our imagination, not that of moral causality."¹⁷ Fairy tales are "spiritual explorations" and hence "the most life-like," revealing "human life as seen, or felt, or divined from the inside."¹⁸ The world of fairy tale is a world of knowledge, knowledge not accessible within the limits of the real world. The real world limits us to the known; it is safe, rational, capable of empirical proof. The fairy tale world is the "long, long ago" world of infinite possibility, existent now only in and through the imagination. Entering into the realm of possibility is dangerous—for possibility includes both vision and nightmare—but necessary for wholeness. The risk of imagination is most assuredly a temptation, the risk of chaos for the possibility of knowledge which is truth, truth which is beauty.

The temptation of fairy tale is immediate and urgent in "Goblin Market". Maidens are urged to eat the luscious fruits of the natural world, which are also, paradoxically and magically, the fruits of imaginative creativity. The fairy tale world is inhabited by creatures of the imagination, born out of the human psyche. Here, natural and supernatural meet. Here, there is a suspension of disbelief. Here is the place where the oxymoronic exists. In the fairy tale world, one risks going beyond the boundaries of empirical rationality to experience more fundamental and intuitive truths. The fairy tale world is tempting because it promises knowledge and because we sense the underlying truth of that knowledge. "Subjected to the rational teachings of others, the child only buries his 'true knowledge' deeper in his soul and it remains untouched by rationality" (Bettelheim, p. 46). It is this "true knowledge" that "Goblin Market" tempts us to, away from the rational teachings which limit and restrict the imagination. The cry of the goblin men is almost hypnotic in its rich catalogue of fruits so numerous as to be virtually unending. The kinds and quantities and combinations of taste and color are unlimited, appealing to the senses and to the possibilities of imagination. The fruits are all ripe to the bursting point and "All ripe together / In summer weather" (11. 15-16); they are "full and fine," ready to "fill" the mouth (11. 21, 28), very like "Joy's grape" of Keats's Ode to Melancholy:

Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to Poison while the bee-mouth sips:

[11. 22-24]¹⁹

Intensity of experience, whether sensual or imaginative, requires the reconciliation of opposites, Melancholy and Delight. Joy that dwells with Beauty is achieved only through the sacramental bursting of the grape. "Honey to the throat" and "Poison in the blood" are necessary accompaniments.

The "mossy glen" (1. 87) where maidens may hear the cry of goblin men is a haunted, fairy place with "brookside rushes" (1. 33), fertile and rich and erotic in its connotations. It is a place as much feminine as masculine. In addition, as Gilbert and Gubar point out, the glen "represents a chasm in the mind, analogous to that enchanted romantic chasm" (p. 570) of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, a "holy and enchanted" place, "haunted / By woman wailing for her demon lover!"²⁰ Coleridge's chasm is itself the fertile ground of the androgynous creative imagination. The goblin men, who presumably also eat the fruit they sell, are similar to Coleridge's poet of whom one should beware and around whom one should weave a circle thrice since "he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise" (11. 53-54). So Lizzie says, "We must not look at goblin men" (1. 42). The goblin men may be seen as androgynous creatures, unlike the men—or the women—of the town. Rossetti's liking for animals, especially unusual or bizarre ones,²¹ should keep us from assuming that she intends us to see the appearance of the goblin men in a negative way. Rather, their form combines the parts of the masculine-rational-mind and feminine-animal passionemotion traditional dichotomy. It is they who are the possessors of the sensuous fruits of the imagination, but they also desire that maidens buy the fruit. "We must not buy their fruits," says Laura. "Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?" (11. 43-45). Since the fruit shapes are full and round, erotically masculine and feminine, the soil would seem to be the androgynous ground of creative imagination.

A number of critics have noted in passing the resemblance between Christina Rossetti's poetry and that of Coleridge.²²The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in both its similarities and dissimilarities, seems a particularly instructive gloss for "Goblin Market" since the same concerns are at issue in both poems. To begin with, the Rime and "Goblin Market" are both, broadly speaking, fairy tales. Both are journey stories, quests for the fruits of knowledge. The Mariner leaves the safe harbor of the rational and the known to enter, through an act of "irrationality," the world of fairy tale, that is, the world of the supernatural. Out-of-bounds and separated from the support provided by the dependable order of the natural world, community with his fellows, and a domesticated religious structure, he suffers the nightmare time of life-in-death. Finally, through an intuitive act of imagination and love, he perceives the beauty of the water snakes and the spell breaks. If one participates fully in the imaginative world, then that world is perceived in its wholeness and perceived as beautiful. Lack of participation shifts the perception so that the beautiful becomes ugly and destructive. In his spiritual alienation, the Mariner is repulsed by the crawling, slimy water snakes. Reconciled with, and by, the wholeness of love, he says, "No tongue / Their beauty might declare" (11. 282-83). At last, he is spirited back to the safety of the land where he is compelled to tell his story to those who are receptive to its meaning.

Laura leaves the cottage and goes to the haunted glen. Despite all the warnings, she moves outside the limits of safety to buy with the coin of her body and the anguish of experience the fruits which cannot be had in any other way: "(Men sell not such in any town)" (1. 101). The goblin men invite maidens to "sit down and feast with us, / Be welcome guest with us" (11. 380-81), and as long as the maidens do feast, the merchants' voices coo like doves and sound "kind and full of loves" (1. 79). It is only when Lizzie tries to give them back the silver fairy penny, in accordance with the moral tale, that the goblins revenge themselves on her. The punishing "rape" in which the goblin men try to force Lizzie to eat the fruit is a nightmare vision not unlike the "viper's thoughts" of the "dark dream" (11. 94-95) summoned by the imaginative storm of Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode.

Laura, like the Mariner, becomes a storyteller, and the overt moral at the end of "Goblin Market" is strikingly similar to the moral at the end of the Rime:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

[11. 614-17]

Both morals, childishly sing-songey in cadence and almost simple-minded in tone, sound disconcertingly inadequate to the reader as summary statements for the turmoil that has preceded them. In both cases, we as readers are supposed to understand more than the speaker. What the Mariner says is true, but truer than he can explain. What Laura says is true, but not true enough; her vision is insufficient and, therefore, true to the moral tale but not to the fairy tale. The Mariner is changed by his experience. His tale is a "ghastly" one, and his glittering eye holds the listener. Because his moral is true to the fairy tale, the listener, the Wedding-Guest, is also changed:

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

[11. 622-25]

Laura and Lizzie repudiate the fruits of knowledge. They are neither sadder nor wiser the following morning. For a terrifying experience of grace, they substitute a formulaic religiosity. We believe the Mariner's moral, but we do not believe in the efficacy of Laura's. What we do believe in "Goblin Market" is the truth of the fairy tale. Laura and Lizzie are saved to their damnation, and we and Christina Rossetti know it, even if they do not. The whole poem then becomes a moral poem of a different kind, one in which the immoral moral triumphs.

To see with the eye of imagination is to be outside the safe confines of conventional life; it calls for perception and participation in whole vision. The institutions and cultural attitudes of Victorian society make goblin fruit forbidden to maidens—and almost kindly so: one taste of the fruit cuts them off from expected female domesticity, and yet they are not allowed full and continued feasting. "Must your light like mine be hidden / Your young life like mine be wasted," Laura asks Lizzie. The light of imagination must be hidden, and thus life is wasted. Girls like Jeanie, who eat the goblins' fruit and wear the crown of flowers, pine away in "noonlight" (1. 153), lost equally to the glen and to the town. Lizzie's intervention keeps Laura from Jeanie's fate, but the "salvation" scene is strangely ambiguous. Laura, admonished by Lizzie to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices" (1. 468), "Kissed and kissed and kissed her." And again, "She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth" (11. 486, 492) in an orgy of hunger for goblin fruit. But at the same time that she writhes "as one possessed," leaping and singing in a frenzy of Dionysian ecstasy,²³ she "loathed the feast" and "gorged on bitterness without a name" (11. 495-96, 510). Does the bitterness come from having eaten the fruit or from having to be saved from her desire for its taste? Similarly, who is speaking the lines, "Ah fool, to choose such part / Of soul-consuming care!" (11. 511-12)—Laura or the narrator? And where, exactly, is the foolishness? There is a tone of longing even at the point of rejection. Laura has desired that which is forbidden her, though it should be hers by right. Perhaps what we hear in her voice is frustrated anger.

What is clear to the reader at the end of the poem is that the progression from innocence to experience and back to original innocence is no progression at all; it is at best, sad—we are the ones sadder and wiser—and at worst, immoral. Had Keats's Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes²⁴ remained

Blissfully havened both from joy and pain;

Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again,

[11. 240, 242-43]

she would have been lost. For a rose to become a bud again is no more natural than to regain one's innocence; therefore, Laura's salvation becomes ironic:

Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind up-rooted tree
Spun about,

Like a foam-topped waterspout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?

[11. 513-23]

The Mariner falls "down in a swound" (392); when his "living life returned" (1. 394), he prays, "O let me be awake, my God! / Or let me sleep alway" (11. 470-71). He awakes to speak of the unity of life. Laura, her sense having failed, chooses "Life out of death" and falls at last, past the possibilities of both pleasure and anguish, "Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain." She has become a bud again.

Fairy tales have traditionally been able to triumph over the morals attached to them. The moral tags may or may not fit the story; they may be cynical or comforting; they may disappear altogether.²⁵ But, as Christina Rossetti knows, the power of the story remains, impervious to attack, reaching out like Laura's own yearning after goblin fruit:

Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone

[11. 82-86]

The power of the fairy tale remains as long as the story is told, passed down from generation to generation, whatever the intent of the teller. Thus,

Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood
(Men sell not such in any town).

[11. 548-56]

The children listen—as do we—fascinated and intrigued by the story of the goblin men and their fruit. And Christina Rossetti, by letting her female character tell a fairy tale which delights and entertains as the children join "hands to little hands" (1. 560) to form a magic circle, affirms the truth of imagination and knowledge over conventional moral conduct. Maidens have the right to buy the fruit of Goblin Market.

Notes

¹ The following is typical commentary found in histories of children's literature: "In the midst of what was, for the most part, merely pleasant verse for children, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) provided them with one real, one can even say, one great poem in 'Goblin Market' (1862)," in Cornelia Meigs, et al., A Critical History of children's Literature (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1953), p. 290. See also Mary F. Thwaite, From Primer to Pleasure in Reading (Boston: Horn Book, 1963), p. 135.

² Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (1898; rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971), p. 206.

³ Delores Rosenblum, in "Christina Rossetti: The Inward Pose," in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., Shakespeare 's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), says, "The poem really has less to do with temptation than with the consequences of indulgence" (p. 95).

⁴ Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 1:11-26. References to 'Goblin Market' will be taken from this edition.

⁵ Eleanor Walter Thomas, Christina Georgina Rossetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. 60.

⁶ Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1963), p. 142.

⁷ Ellen Golub, "Untying Goblin Apron Strings: A Psychoanalytic Reading of 'Goblin Market,'" Literature and Psychology, 25 (1975), 158.

⁸ Jerome J. McGann, "Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation," Victorian Studies, 23 (1979-80), 237-54.

⁹ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 564.

¹⁰ Packer, pp. 13-14, discusses Rossetti's early reading, as does B. Ifor Evans, "The Sources of Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,'" Modern Language Review, 28 (1933), 156-65. See also Thomas, pp. 151-52.

¹¹ For a full treatment of John Locke's influence on children's literature, see Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., John Locke and children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

¹² For accounts of this controversy see F. J. Harvey Darton, children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1939; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 218 ff.; Paul Hazard, Books, Children and Men (Boston: The Horn Book, 1944); Michael Rotzin, "The Fairy Tale in England, 1800-1870," Journal of Popular Culture, 4 (Summer 1970), 130-54; Anita Moss, "Varieties of Literary Fairy Tale," children's Literature Association Quarterly, 7, No. 4 (Summer 1982), 15-17.

¹³ Patricia Demers and Gordon Moyles, eds., From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children 's Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 68.

¹⁴John Bunyan: The Poems, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1980), which is vol. 6 of The Miscellaneous Works of Paul Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock.

¹⁵ Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 59.

¹⁶ Katherine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 194.

¹⁷ Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 117.

¹⁸ Quoted by Bettelheim, p. 24, from G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909) and from C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).

¹⁹ John Keats, The Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, Harvard University, 1978). Quotations from Keats's poetry will be taken from this edition.

²⁰ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, ed., E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912). Quotations from Coleridge's poetry will be taken from this edition.

²¹ See, for example, Packer, who observes: "We have seen that in 'From House to Home,' written only six months before 'Goblin Market,' such small animals form part of the speaker's earthly paradise" (p. 143).

²² See, for example, Zaturenska, p. 79; Packer, pp. 129, 132, 135, 198. D. M. Stuart, in Christina Rossetti (London: Macmillan and Co., 1930), says explicitly: "One of the earliest admirers of 'Goblin Market' was Mrs. Caroline Norton, who compared it to 'The Ancient Mariner.' It has, indeed, certain vague affinities with more than one of Coleridge's dream poems" (p. 54).

²³ Carolyn G. Heilbrun's quotation from critic Thomas Rosenmeyer's discussion of The Bacchae of Euripides is interestingly appropriate: "Dionysus appears to be neither woman nor man; or, better, he represents himself as woman-in-man, or man-in-woman, the unlimited personality. .. . To follow him or to comprehend him we must ourselves give up our precariously controlled, socially desirable limitations," in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Colophon Books, 1974), p. xi.

²⁴ "It was in Hone's three-volume popular miscellany (1825) that Christina at nine discovered Keats. . . . She, and not Gabriel or Holman Hunt, was the first 'Pre-Raphaelite' to appreciate Keats. The poem which caught her fancy .. . was The Eve of St. Agnes" (Packer, p. 14). Barbara Foss, in "Christina Rossetti and St. Agnes' Eve," Victorian Poetry, 14 (1976), 33-46, discusses Rossetti's awareness of the passive role of Victorian woman and the frustration of always having to wait in inactivity. Rossetti's lines in From the Antique:

It's a weary life, it is, she said:—
Doubly blank in a woman's lot:
I wish and I wish I were a man:
Or, better than any being, were not:

[11. 1-4]

echo Tennyson's "Mariana" in the weariness and wish for death that often accompanies the unimaginative passivity of "a woman's lot." It is little wonder that the goblin fruits are so tempting and being forbidden to feast on them so frustrating.

²⁵ For example, in Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood, the girl learns that "young lasses .. . do very wrong to listen to strangers" (Charles Perrault, Perrault's Complete Fairy Tales, trans. A. E. Johnson et al. [New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1961], p. 77). What Red Cap learns in the Grimms' tale is to obey her mother. The moral at the end of Puss in Boots adjuring young people to value "industry, knowledge, and a clever mind" (Perrault, p. 25) is totally at variance with the success through deception taught by the tale itself. Moralités have now all but disappeared in the hands of today's publishers of fairy tales.