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Let’s begin Cybirdy new blog with the reproduction of the postscript of Goblin Market/Marché des Gobelins, Cybirdy Special Edition.
For those who have read Goblin market/Marché des Gobelins or are considering reading it, in English, French or both, Alix Daniel’s postscript shows once and for all that Goblin Market is not feminist.
Goblin Market is not about victims of a patriarchal power, it is about the diabolical effects of drugs and how familial strong connection is the fundamental element against this societal issue which has affected humanity for centuries.
And so, here is the post-scriptum in its entirety. Wishing you a Happy reading.
TRANSLATOR’S POSTSCRIPT
“Morning and evening maids heard the goblins cry”
So begins The Goblin Market, the brilliant work which inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Its author is Christina Rossetti and she represents, with Tennyson, the vanished pre-1914 essence of British Victorian verse.
Christina Rossetti was not only admired by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and by her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, she was considered by many of her contemporaries to be the equal of Tennyson.
She was a genius and was first published at the age of 17. She never ceased to write poetry, in both Italian and English, until her early death from hyperthyroidism and breast cancer at the age of 63.
Christina Rossetti never married and refused three suitors one after the other. Yet while religious and pious, she was not narrow-minded, self-effacing or reclusive, on the contrary. Christina was a poet from her teens, but she also worked from the age of 29 at a refuge for ‘fallen women’ in London named St Mary Magdalene House. She was active against slavery and was a keen protector of the animal cause. She fought against vivisection, the surgery on live animals for the purpose of science.
Christina Rossetti participated actively in the highly mythologised Pre-Raphaelite movement founded by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. While publishing poetry of her own, she wrote and edited many articles in The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite literary periodical with the inspiring subtitle “Thoughts towards nature in art and literature”.
Christina was beautiful and sat for The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Ecce Ancilla Domini and other Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Her poetry later inspired Fernand Khnopff’s painting, Lock My Door Upon Myself.
Like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Goblin Market is a surreal masterpiece where magic, goblins featuring as animalistic diabolical beings, forbidden fruits and guilty pleasures are all at stake.
The poem is constructed like a tune with an iterative motif. I see it as a Pre-Raphaelite poem or a rhapsody with an ambiguous feral quality that simutaneously shows and covers up a mysterious meaning. All through the poem, a phantasmagoric secret is held in suspension as an allegory of something from the realm of human intimacy, something in conflict with guilty pleasures and the biblical forbidden food, or simply something within, an inner struggle without a name.
To an expert reader, the poem can only be the result of scrupulous and precise work with cautious thinking and mastering of prosody and verse. This hard work of the wordsmith and a clever use of balanced verse renders The Goblin Market elegant and sensual, with a timeless, universal and powerful poetic exuberance.
I discovered Christina Rossetti through the present work of translation. Her prose instantly resonated with my life and my past youth. The Goblin Market reminded me of familiar Christian domesticity together with the gold of the furze and the broom of the Brittany countryside of my childhood, just on the other side of the Channel.
As well as this familiarity, the more I worked the more I admired her verse and valued its universal content and morality.
In my solitary work, it was like I befriended the poet. She became an acquaintance with things in common, someone I had a lot of admiration for. So I have tried my utmost to faithfully translate her verse and its meaning for you, the readers of today and tomorrow, and in respect of Christina Rossetti’s beliefs and art.
When The Goblin Market was first published in 1862, two journals, The Athenaeum and The Saturday Review, published very eloquent reviews, praising the talent, hard work and skills of the poet, who had created not merely a fairy tale but a moral story with domestic Christian life as its centrepiece, while still acknowledging a mysterious, almost wild meaning.
Since then, many critics and academics have interpreted the poem through the prism of deleterious Freudian theories and 20th-century Western polarised feminist and atheist critiques. Those academics and reviewers misread the poem and categorised it as a mere evocation of the corruption and suffering of women in a dominant patriarchal and Christian world.
However, these interpretations do not stand. Laura and Lizzie are living by their own, far away from the city where men are not like the goblins. Men do not sell strange and
intoxicating fruit: they are city dwellers, civilised and not dangerous or dominant. Furthemore, the goblins are not human, they are diabolical.
The absence of men is mentioned repeatedly throughout the poem. The patriarchal dominance does not exist, it is not part of the story. The wrong is coming from a diabolical force and not from humanity.
Christina Rossetti purposely presented Laura and Lizzie all alone with no father, brothers, lovers or workers. In the surroundings of the two sisters, there are no men, Laura and Lizzie are all alone on a little farm. This very fact is obvious evidence against the academics and their judgmental views on patriarchal and Christian society. These critics were wrong and sadly propagated this misinterpretation for many years. In doing so, they possibly prevented Christina Rossetti’s poetry from expanding over time.
I hope this new edition, augmented by my translation into French, will help to clarify the true meaning of the poem and the reality of Christina Rossetti. She was not bothered by the dominance of men or by her religion, but rather she had empathy for people without family and was concerned by morphinomania, which was as problematic and prominent as the drug use of today. She was a Christian artist helping others, expressing herself with talent and working with men and women alike to produce art and to write poetry to express not only herself but her concerns for others too.
In my view, The Goblin Market is the story of the inner struggle of a woman who is at risk because of the absence of a family.
I would add that it is possible that Laura is all alone. And so, The Goblin Market could be the tale of one young woman saved from poison and intoxication by her alter ego, referred to here as a caring, courageous and loving sister. Laura and Lizzie could be one, two facets or two personalities of one single human being. Lizzie is Laura’s alter ego, the young woman’s strong and unalterable side. Laura, in her lonely life, created or imagined Lizzie to keep sane, while all alone and so far from the city, the people and civilisation. It is Laura’s inner strength to imagine by her side a courageous sister that will help her to win a secret and intimate battle against intoxication, deadly dependency and the inner struggles of the self.
While Dr Jekyll lets his dark side run wild with a potion that transforms him into the animalistic and murderous Hyde, Laura lets her bright side run with powerful imagination that transforms her into clever Lizzie, who is able to confront and lure the goblins to transform their poison into a cure.
The poison which killed Jeanie in the prime of her life and on which Laura now depends and suffers from was laudanum, the most popular medicine of the time. The whole of Victorian society was lured by it. The opiate drug, created through alchemical principles, was perceived both as panacea and poison. It was cheap, accessible anywhere and was widely used to treat everything from pain to insomnia. The consequent addiction was known by many. However, it took until the Pharmacy Act of
1868 for laudanum sales to be restricted to qualified druggists and chemists, stating that all opiate bottles should be labelled as poison.
While the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning praised laudanum in her poetry, Christina Rossetti simply ignored its name and benefits. And she went further. As a caring and noble Christian woman, she glorified the possibility of inner strength to fight the habit of using the poisonous substance and in all simplicity, at the end of her poem, recommends to young people to keep close tight to their family to prevent such struggles and dangers.
The poem can be seen as an allegory for the intoxication, the wasting away, the craving and then the cure via small doses of it, as per the classic cycle that most morphinomaniacs would have to go through.
Her hair grew thin and grey;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away
……..
“Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruin’d in my ruin…”
It is highly probable that Christina Rossetti witnessed the disastrous effects of the drug at St Mary Magdalene’s House, where she cared for fallen women: human beings without any family support. Furthemore, while writing The Goblin Market, a familial drama was unfolding at the same time. Elizabeth Siddal, the famous model and artist and her sister-in-law, suffered from laudanum dependency. She had a still birth and died the year of the publication of The Goblin Market.
Dear readers, you may have found another meaning to it, but I am certain that you have desired all along to understand more. This is the magic of pure literature.
The vividness and the clever succession of the verses, the wonderful and delicious words, some nearly forgotten, cannot disappear or die for ever. So, let us translate, print, read and memorise them again and again.
And for once, let’s imagine, read or even listen to Christina Rossetti’s wit from the past with this quote, reported by Virginia Woolf as something Christina is supposed to have said at a tea party:
‘Yes, I am a poet ... Here you are rambling among unimportant trifles, rattling my writing-table drawers, making fun of ... my love affairs when all I care for you to know is here. Behold this green volume. It is a copy of my collected works. It costs four shillings and sixpence. Read that.’
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