On “Not Returning Time”

Melancholic Resignation in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market

Abstract

Scholars have widely asserted that Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) is an emancipatory narrative of redemption, in which two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, are tempted initially by Goblin men selling their wares in a traveling market. After succumbing to the Goblin cries, the moribund Laura needs to be saved by her sister, who braves the volatile and seductive marketplace to procure the fruit on Laura’s behalf. At the poem’s conclusion, Laura is restored to health, and the two are redeemed through domestic motherhood. Heather McAlpine argues that the sisters pursue “healthy domestic work” (121) as the antidote for consuming the fruit of the goblins. While the poem does conclude with the two women in an idyllic domestic space, Rossetti’s poetics of space and time undermine the anticipated peripeteia of the women’s redemption. My thesis endeavours to more closely examine the poem’s trajectory from the pastoral depiction of the matriarchal domestic space to an ending that reflects Rossetti’s resignation and melancholy.

Discipline: English Honours

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Daniel Martin