SOURCE: "Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 107-18.

In the following essay, Mermin argues that "Goblin Market" explores the feminine fantasies of "freedom, heroism, and self-sufficiency," celebrates "sisterly and maternal love," and suggests the possibility of a Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood.

"Goblin Market" is usually read as an allegory of the poet's self-division that shows, in Lionel Stevenson's representative summary, the conflict between "the two sides of Christina's own character, the sensuous and the ascetic," and demonstrates "the evil of self-indulgence, the fraudulence of sensuous beauty, and the supreme duty of renunciation."¹ Readings of his sort even when they are not reductively biographical (as Stevenson's is not) do not allow for the openness and multiplicity of meanings that we acknowledge in such predecessor poems as Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner or Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." They usually assume that the poem welled up...