"Come Buy": The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

Almost a century and a half after its 1862 publication, Christina Rossetti's canonical poem Goblin Market continues to captivate with its critical yet ambivalent assessment of the overlapping spheres of Victorian economics and sexual politics despite its deceptively simple form. As is evident even in the earliest critical responses, the poem has been traditionally received as a facile children's story or didactic fable with a fairly transparent moral component, yet the poem also offers a nuanced evaluation of ascendant, mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Indeed, the seemingly straightforward plot can only proceed by way of an unseen process of textual exchange—an economy that, in commerce with consumer capitalism, remains partially hidden by the poem's fantastic veneer. I attempt to track these hidden forms of exchange proper to the goblin market and their relation to the production of desire—the desire of the characters, of the text, and of the text's projected audience.

I argue that the poem's language of economics as well as its economics of language rehearse a form of desire and a mode of enjoyment based on self-negation. The paper is divided into five sections, each offering close-readings of the poem inflected rather intimately, if not somewhat idiosyncratically, by Marxist and psychoanalytic theoretical work. In the first, I track briefly the tradition of treating the poem as an allegory, arguing that while Goblin Market does in fact correlate to various Victorian social symptoms or conditions, the often hasty recourse to an allegorical reading threatens to reify the poem as allegory, thereby ignoring the process of fetishism that the text identifies and at times criticizes. In the second section, I show how that process of fetishism is intimately related to the body of the audience, both the reader of the text and, to a lesser extent, the consuming Victorian public. The third studies the poem's uses of gold, which Karl Marx, a contemporary of Rossetti, esteems as the material, albeit tenuous, "expression" of the values of commodities. Though not always in the ways Marx theorizes, gold does indeed play an important part in the poem's dialectics of value—use, exchange, surplus, aesthetic, and moral value—especially vis-à-vis the goblin men. The fourth attempts to get at what has been called the "central mystery of the poem," Lizzie's silver penny, which she "tosse[s]" to the goblins "for a fee."¹ If Lizzie's coin seems to afford her both the ability to fend off the goblins' violence as well as consumer power in the face of those merchant men's mysterious terms of purchase, then the manner of how it does so is at the heart of the larger questions of economic and sexual agency. Finally, in the last section, I return to several passages discussed earlier in the body of the paper in order to underscore the production of models of consumption, desire, and enjoyment committed to the very denial of pleasure, to the practice of asceticism. Following the argument made by Christina's brother, William, that her poetry was "replete with the spirit of self-postponement," we might locate the speaker's moments of jouissance (crudely, enjoyment born out of displeasure) not at the happy—that is, normative and normalizing—ending of the poem but within the very processes of the mystification of language and the very moments of self-denial during the erotic exchanges at market.² Ultimately, if Rossetti intended that the poem be read as a critical renunciation of capitalist commerce and sexuality, as critics have suggested, then we must consider that it is that very act of renunciation that allows for the text's own production—and enjoyment—in the first place.³

I.

There is a tradition of reading Goblin Market as an allegory of various Victorian symptoms. By "allegory" I mean a form of narrative that has a primary, seemingly arbitrary sense that correlates to a secondary, larger narrative, perhaps an actual event, series of events, or cultural condition outside of the text. And by "symptom" I mean...