“Come Buy, Come By”: Miscommunication across Culture, the Imagined Market, and Colonialism in "Goblin Market"

Abstract

Christina Rossetti’s popular poem, Goblin Market, “continues to captivate with its critical yet ambivalent assessment of the overlapping sphere of Victorian economics and sexual politics despite its deceptively simple form” (913), as Victor Roman Mendoza has pointed out. However, I will provide a colonial reading of Goblin Market in this essay. Who are goblins? Why they are portrayed like “animals”? What is “goblin market” in the poem? What causes the violence on Lizzie at the end of the poem? I suggest that while goblins’ fruits appear as exotic products, Lizzie’s carrying juice with her body symbolizes importation and colonization. I argue that Goblin Market represents a misunderstanding of foreign gift-exchange culture from the capitalist point of view. Either “market” or the “merchant” is two sisters’ misinterpretation of goblin’s feast activity and their “remote” identity, rather than Goblin’s self-recognition. Lizzie’s value of trade enforces capitalism in Goblin’s area, which implies and reveals the colonization in nineteenth century.