Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market

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Christina Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market”
Christina Rosetti’s Poem The Goblin Market is a controversial poem that deals with many different issues although it is was considered a children’s poem, but in fact is a criticism of how knowledge and education are forbidden fruits because they make the person ask questions that are best left unanswered. It is also a comment on the society of that time that regarded many issues as taboo. This paper is a look at different parallel themes running through the poem.
Goblin Market' inscribes this love by bringing it home 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: daughter-woman-mother?' asks Luce Irigaray in `Femmes Divines,' a question Rossetti in `Goblin Market' may also raise. (DeVitis, 419) The daughterly-womanly-motherly 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' . 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. (DeVitis, 419-420)
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'. This denial of deep or hidden meaning in her most celebrated and provocative work protests translation of her poem, especially metaphorical conversion of the tale into `moral apologue consistently carried out in detail'. (DeVitis, 421) C.M. Bowra thought Rossetti's `precise and literal' Christian orthodoxy countered her `naturally Romantic tendencies' as a poet, but she was as much a literalist in imagination as in creed, and her poems, `Goblin Market' pre-eminently, at once incite and frustrate attempts at meaning-mongering. (DeVitis, 424)
William reports his sister's deprecations only to insist `at any rate' that something is implied by the poem's `suggestive' incidents, into which `different minds may be likely to read different meanings' ; thus he models the typical response to the poem, single in inferential desire if diverse in what is brought to bear on the text. (Clerke, 46) That `Goblin Market''s fruit-call continues to tempt readers to find ulterior meaning there -- pertinent variously to sexuality or sexual fantasy, to feminist revisions or at least troubled...