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The Innocent Old Way: Reserved Interpretation and Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Aubrey Plourde
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Abstract

Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” has long been recognized as an interpretive enigma. Simultaneously conducting its own surface reading and inviting us to interrogate its buried meanings, the poem adapts the Tractarian doctrine of reserve to set up a hermeneutic paradox rooted in Victorian exegetical thought. Variously a standard for reticent poetic style, an apologia for divine mystery, and a prescription for limiting complex theological knowledge, reserve also served Victorian thinkers as a hermeneutic strategy. Rossetti plays reserve against itself by dramatizing its dueling imperatives—inciting and containing curiosity. Laura's epilogue forecloses interpretation for “illiterate” spiritual children—those who might misconstrue mysterious meanings; simultaneously, the epilogue mobilizes a competing dimension of reserve, juxtaposing its interpretive gatekeeping against its hermeneutic potential. Anticipating recent reading debates, Rossetti's reserve generates a temporally recursive hermeneutic, within which competing interpretations and interpretive modes can be imagined to coexist.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 5 , October 2019 , pp. 1076 - 1093
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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