Enclosed Creativity in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”
In this theoretical essay, I examine Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' through a Feminist lens of enclosure and entrapment. Further, I intertwine aspects of Rossetti's biography in my analysis to propose the argument that Rossetti utilizes themes of entrapment in her poem to navigate the challenges of creating as a woman in the nineteenth-century.
by Emma Cook
Christina Rossetti’s brother once remembered her remarking that she did not intend “Goblin Market” to be read with moral profundity (Packer 375); however, many who have encountered its mystical meter have been struck by its themes of temptation, sacrifice, and redemption. In her assessment of “Goblin Market’s” symbolism as a signifier to events based on Rossetti’s life, Lona Packer determines that Rossetti’s poem demonstrates her personal struggle with temptation, as love can be “destructive and redemptive” (380). Reading “Goblin Market” with a similar biographical undertone as Packer’s, Scott Rogers accepts the notion that this poem is steeped in Rossetti’s experience, yet he argues that “Goblin Market” was not Rossetti’s final declaration of what sisterly love ought to exemplify because it was written before she started working with the Church Penitentiary Movement at Highgate (860). Here, Rossetti administered care within a women’s community in her parish, and it shaped her view of what godly relationships between women ought to look like (Rogers 859-861). However, some scholars believe that Rossetti’s poetry should not be examined through her personal experiences such as Packer and Rogers have done.
Leaving a strictly biographical reading behind, scholars such as Megan Hansen and Victor Roman Mendoza have sought to analyze “Goblin Market” through questions that engrossed the culture of Rossetti’s age. For instance, Mendoza reads “Goblin Market” through Rossetti’s Victorian Christian conviction of “self-postponement,” which is the sacrifice of ones desires, and he determines that if her poem is a renunciation of the desires of money and sex, then these themes must be found through the “self-postponement” of the simple text itself. Hansen similarly looks at the reflection of the Victorian marketplace and gender roles within the text. She argues that although “Goblin Market” does show the dangers of female fragility in the marketplace through Laura, Lizzie ultimately conquers the market by subverting Victorian ideals about the physical and moral degradations of women occurring in this male-dominated space.
Scholarship on “Goblin Market” often focuses on how Rossetti, a nineteenth century woman writer, navigates the challenges of her historical landscape. Considering this scholarship, I intend to produce a similar reading to that of Packer and Hansen: I will analyze how feminist themes of entrapment and enclosure occur in and out of creative spaces as an outpouring of Rossetti’s own experience. In her piece “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf attests that women writers were often closed off from creative spaces as they were offered neither education nor a platform to provoke creative flourishing (374). Woolf further advances that even in creative spaces, women were entrapped in anonymity as “publicity in women [was] detestable” (374). Later Feminist theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar further develop how themes of entrapment and enclosure pervade nineteenth-century women writer’s texts. Gilbert and Gubar write that the enclosure present in these texts “. . . reflects the woman’s writer’s own discomfort, her sense of powerlessness, her fear that she inhabits alien and incomprehensible places” (911). It becomes apparent that Rosetti herself grappled with navigating creative spaces as a woman when one assesses her other poems similar to “Goblin Market” such as “In an Artist’s Studio” (Harrison 2-3). Rossetti's interaction with the Pre-Raphaelite group, a group of creatives consisting of her brothers who sought to create art that predated the influence of Rapheal, also ought to be considered when discussing her navigation of creative spaces (Harrison 2-3; “Pre-Raphaelite,” Adj.). While Rossetti contends that she found no deeper meaning in her compilation of “Goblin Market,” I propose that a feminist reading of the enclosed spaces such as the goblin’s market, the house of Laura and Lizzie, and the poem’s closing lines reveal that Rossetti utilizes entrapment to navigate the challenges of creating as a woman in the nineteenth-century.
“Goblin Market” unfolds the reactions of the text’s three women (Laura, Lizzie, and Jeanie) to the market’s enclosure, showcasing how women acted with and against the pressures of patriarchal, competitive, creative spaces. While the poem opens with goblin men who freely coerce others into buying their wares, the sisters Laura and Lizzie are hidden amongst “the brookside rushes” with Laura physically closing off her body to the market by “bowing” her head, and Lizzie “veiling” her physical reaction to the men's space in which they are warned against interacting with (ll. 32-35). Lizzie blushes at the thought of joining male spaces, which when paired with her recited warnings to Laura, serves as a representation of women who sought to act in accordance with the warnings of the patriarchal world. Lizzie wishes to confine herself to women’s spaces instead of risking compromising her anonymity in the face of masculinity. However, although Laura presumably hides her body from the market, this position makes it better to “hear” the male space in hope for its future navigation. She wishes to gain insight into the market to learn how to best maneuver it as a woman. Thus, Laura exhibits the temptation of many women to resist the creative confines placed on them. This may be a temptation that Rossetti felt as she navigated producing her own “feminine works” alongside those of her brothers and their peers, who were a part of the esteemed Pre-Raphaelite group—a group that she has been excluded from in past scholarship (Harrison 1-2). Yet Rossetti poses one more choice for women in the character of Jeanie, who, after interacting with the male marketplace, found herself entrapped in the grave “Where she lies low” (l. 159). Jeanie represents the perceived consequences of women openly choosing to enter the space they were previously excluded from. As Woolf anticipated, women who create in the male sphere will have their livelihoods stripped away from them.
Even if women choose not to interact with the closed marketplace of male dominated creativity, they will likely still encounter entrapment in their designated space of the home. As Laura and Lizzie interact with the home, Rossetti draws images of entrapment through “their curtained bed” where they resemble birds “Locked together in one nest” (ll. 187 & 198). Although this curtained home is “safe” from the male dominated market and creativity in the sense that it can be a space for women to experience “feminine strength,” the home is also confinement thrust by males upon women as they are closed off from competitive spheres (Hansen 21). Woolf describes the home as a space that is not the woman’s own, as they are either supervised by a husband or father, or other family members (375). Women, according to Woolf, then are plundered of their autonomy. Control over the body is even stripped away in designated women’s spaces; as Gilbert and Gubar state, women can perceive their own wombs as houses which are only to be inhabited by husband or child. The woman’s womb then becomes the bearer of entrapment in which the woman may become imprisoned by confines of sex and pregnancy (913-914). Thus, women of Rossetti’s time are left with choosing to embrace and nourish the space they have been given or embracing its feelings of captivity.
For Lizzie, the house she inhabits with her sister becomes a place of warmth and creativity related to homemaking as she approaches her entrapment “with an open heart” and “content” disposition (ll. 210 & 212). Lizzie makes the best of what she has, much like how Rossetti and other woman writers carefully inhabited the spaces of creativity allotted to them, such as personal letters, anonymous works, and duplicity crafted poetry. In fact, Rossetti’s poem “In an Artist’s Studio,” serves as a duplicity crafted poem which details a painted woman excluded from her own creative spaces and entrapped by only being an object of the male creative space. “In an Artist’s Studio” coyly maintains a façade of being a pithy poem about women in artwork while critiquing the ways Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite brother, Dante Gabirel, represents women as docile objects to gaze at. Rossetti also used a plea of anonymity to pursue publishing her works, as it is recorded in a letter to an editor that she deemed herself “unknown” and a “nameless rhymester” (Harrison 1). By subjugating herself to patriarchal ideals of women as creators,
Rossetti successfully began to merge the hidden female creative space into the dominate male creative space. Thus, “Goblin Market” utilizes the character of Lizzie to showcase that women ought to start creating in the spaces they are “given” to pursue social change just as Rossetti did herself.
Laura, on the other hand, after encountering the delights and tribulations of the male creative space, strictly views her place in the home as entrapment. Laura becomes stuck in “an absent dream” in which she avoids her chores of creating the goods of the home (ll. 211 & 294–298). Despondent over not being able to experience the male sphere again, Laura forfeits the creative space she has been allotted and starts to lose her livelihood. Lizzie and Laura’s interactions with their home then become for Rossetti a place to unravel the tension of the nineteenth century woman writer—should she embrace her entrapment or succumb to miserable madness?
Ultimately, Rossetti, through the ending imagery of Laura’s redemption in the enclosed home, presents the female creative space as a field where women can take initiative to create life and enjoyment—where women can transform their cages into cradles. The creative cradle of “Goblin Market” is found for Laura and Lizzie after they reject the male-creative space and take ownership of their homes and wombs. In the closing lines, the sisters each have a home where their lives are “...bound up in tender lives” (l. 547). Rossetti presents children as a connection—a closed space of the mother's own in which they can tend to flourishment and emotional care. Similarly, Laura and Lizzie, now both well versed in understanding the brutality of the male market, have the capacity to create, without repercussions from male dominated spheres, a hedge of protection around their own home. They do so by “. . . joining hands to little hands/Would bid them cling together” (ll. 560-561). Although already in an enclosed space, the sisters expand the home into one where the flourishing of lives will take place: a creative cradle of mutual support. Finally, within the sphere of the home, Laura and Lizzie create their own rhyme in the closing lines: “For there is no friend like a sister/In calm or stormy weather” (ll. 562-568). The sisters have finally realized the creative redemption in taking advantage of the spaces they have been confined to. Although the home/womb may be experienced as an entrapment, it is finally an embrace of these allotted spaces in which the woman writer will find the companionship and creative flourishing needed to resist the patriarchal ideals of womanhood.
Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” serves as a reflection of navigating the creative spaces in which the women writers of the nineteenth century were socially allowed. This navigation is brought to light through reflections on how the characters of Laura and Lizzie encounter enclosure and entrapment in strictly female spaces. Rossetti, closed off from male creative spaces in her own life, finally subscribes to a narrative in which woman writers of her time ought to transform their cages into cradles that will nourish and protect creativity. Rossetti understands that social change in the creative spaces of her time will only occur through the transformation of the home, through a quiet and steadfast resistance. Even now, meeting and empowering women where they are at is how we transform the world.
Works Cited
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