Rossetti and the Risorgimento: An Allegorical Reading of Goblin Market

Abstract

An examination of the biographical details of Christina Rossetti’s life opens up the possibility of a political allegorical reading of Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market. Rossetti’s family connections to Italian nationalism suggest that her writing expresses pro-Risorgimento sentiments in support of nineteenth-century Italian unification. Goblin Market’s politicized narrative presents Rossetti’s two female protagonists, Laura and Lizzie, as figures who embody both the oppressed landscape of Italy and the collective of local inhabitants who are threatened by colonialism and imperialism. My reading builds on Robin J. Sowards’s economic interpretations of Goblin Market in “Goblin Market’s Localism”, in which he analyzes dichotomies of the foreign and the local, the colonizer and the colonized. Laura’s consumption of foreign goblin fruit indicates her submission to foreign imperialist forces, and the allegory can expand further to construe Lizzie as a symbol of Britain, a cosmopolitan centre that wielded a stronger sense of national identity and economic power than other European nations in this period. Reading Lizzie’s position in Goblin Market in terms both of Italian revolutionary forces and Britain’s continental solidarity underscores Sowards’s assertion that Rossetti’s preferred alternative to a global capitalist market is a self-sufficient local community. This desire for an autonomous local community in Goblin Market parallels Italian nationalists’ desire for independence and for equal status as an individual nation amongst European relations. The exploration of Goblin Market as a political allegory seeks to draw conclusions about the influence of Rossetti’s family background in her writing, and it allows the poem to be read beyond the traditional literary confines of sexual, religious, or economic readings that have appeared in previous scholarship.