SOURCE: "Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'," in ELH, Vol. 58, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 903-33.

In the essay below, Helsinger reviews "Goblin Market" as a "fantasy of consumer power, where the empowered consumer is a woman," concluding that such power is gained by women through the "withholding of desire" and that the poem describes a Utopian withdrawal from the economics of sex and marriage.

The language of Christina Rossetti's best-known poem, "Goblin Market," is remarkably mercantile. "Come buy, come buy," the iterated cry of the "merchant men" that punctuates the poem, has few parallels in English poetry in the nineteenth century. While buying and selling, markets and merchants and their customers, are a staple of nursery rhymes—"To market, to market, jiggety jig"—most literary Victorian poetry, like the little pig, resolutely stays home from commercial encounters. "Goblin Market" not only adopts the forms...