‘Transfigured to His Likeness’: Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’

LINDA E. MARSHALL 'Transfigured to His Likeness': Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' Christ's mirror she of grace and love, Of beauty and of life and death: By hope and love and faith Transfigured to His Likeness, 'Dove, Spouse, Sister, Mother,' Jesus saith. ('Herself a rose, who bore the Rose,' lines 16-20; The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 2:238) Announcing their primacy, Christina Rossetti's fairy tales anchor her first two collections of poetry. 'Goblin Market' and 'The Prince's Progress' begin and title the volumes of 1862 and 1866, and 'Maiden-Song' follows directly on 'The Prince's Progress' in 1866; these three poems inaugurate, in their original order, the 1875 and 1890 'new and enlarged' editions of her poems. Their positioning at the beginnings of sequences that conclude with 'Devotional Pieces' suggests that these texts, for all their priority, belong to the more secularized band of Rossetti's poetic spectrum. Indeed, in her concordance The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti, Nilda Jimenez finds no scriptural echoes in any of these poems, an absence truly remarkable given the ubiquity of scriptural resonance in Rossetti's work. Her brother William Michael speculated that removal of Biblical references and diction from Christina Rossetti's poems would reduce her pages 'to something approaching a vacuum': 'the Bible was so much her rule of life and faith that it had almost become a part of herself, and she uttered herself accordingly' (Preface, Golden Treasury Poems, xii). Despite the appearance of a biblical vacuum in her fairy tales, however, they do in truth call up Scripture and speak Rossetti's Christian devotion through and through, but in ways, it may be, inapparent to our usual apprehensions of religiOUS utterance. The alleged 'godlessness' of 'Goblin Market' in particular recommends that fairy tale to Germaine Greer, who otherwise dismisses much of Rossetti's verse as pious nonsense (x, vii, xxii); but even Jerome McGann, who contra Greer sensitively confirms the Christian 'machinery' of the poem, locates its metaphorical operations on 'secular grounds' (237-8, 247, 251). Oddly enough, the poem William Rossetti placed foremost in his sister's Poetical Works because 1t has always held a certain primacy amid Christina's poems' (Notes, 459), can UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1994 430 LINDA E. MARSHALL one way or another be set apart from what is prime in Christina Rossetti's writing as in her life: 'a very literal manner' of construing 'biblical precepts' and of professing her faith (W.M. Rossetti, Memoir, lxvii). It is just this literalism in the writing of IGoblin Market,' I would argue, which speaks Rossetti's faith in all its passionate simplicity: 'she clung to and loved the Christian creed because she loved Jesus Christ' (Memoir, liv). IGoblin Market' inscribes this love by bringing it horne to some rather obscure premises, or rather by making a home for it there, premises dark indeed as far as the symbolic system governing religious discourse is concerned, but which Rossetti claims through a loving, literal adherence to the doctrine of word made flesh. 'Honouring the God who becomes man, isn't that to make God incarnate in us and in our kind: daughterwoman -mother?' asks Luce Irigaray in IFemmes Divines/ a question Rossetti in 'Goblin Market' may also raise. The daughterly-womanlymotherly communion of sisters in that poem surely honours and incarnates the divine, and so undertakes what is, strangely and culpably, never presented to us in such terms, says Irigaray, 'by our culture, by our religion' (Sexes, 84; my translation). If representing God as incarnate in women is so difficult to accomplish through the symbolic machinery of 'our culture,' 'our religion,' then the efficacy of a certain literalism, a certain resistance to interpretation - at least to interpretation which makes the letter something more or less than the spirit - may become apparent. Twice William Michael Rossetti recorded that 'more than once' he had heard his sister say of 'Goblin Market' 'that the poem has not any profound or ulterior meaning - it is just a fairy story' (quoted in Bell, 207; Notes, 459). This denial of deep or hidden meaning in her most celebrated...