The Spiritual Economy of “Goblin Market"

“Goblin Market” offers readers seven tempting encounters with its superabundant goblins, including five episodes in which their wares are consumed, but only one explicit instance of redemption. This spiritual economy of scarcity hints at a moral and aesthetic imperative that includes heroic sisterhood while, through the poem’s appropriation of the conventions of parable, inviting further critical scrutiny. In the postredemptive moment enabled in the poem by Lizzie’s heroic resistance, and in the biblical narrative informing the poem by Christ’s death and resurrection, the interpretive fecundity of Rossetti’s critics emblematizes a world in which resistance and redemption are mutually constitutive.