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THE REPRESENTATION OF VIOLENCE/ THE VIOLENCE OF REPRESENTATION: HOUSMAN’S ILLUSTRATIONS TO ROSSETTI’S GOBLIN MARKET L O R R A IN E J A N Z E N K O O IS T R A University of Toronto T h e critical history of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, written in 1859,1 and re-written many times since then by masterful critics, tells the story of representation — the story of representation as violence. Each suc cessive critic’s will to power is in evidence in his/her desire to suppress difference and to assert dominance in the powerful symbolic mode of writ ing, for criticism may be described as a willful representation of the creative text according to a particular interpretative approach. Such re-presentation of another’s words is not an innocent reflection of the original text, but rather the site of struggle between conflicting discourses — discourses that, as Stephen J. Greenblatt suggests, are “never fully coordinated. . . . [T]here are always conflicts of interest, strategy, and desire, so that the artist’s task includes a substantial element of choice or tact or struggle” (xiii). Whether the re-presenter is a literary critic or a pictorial illustrator, the violence of these conflicts is ineluctably a part of representation. And when the creative text both invites and resists allegorical interpretation — as does Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market — the complicities and conflicts between represen tation and violence demand investigation. According to William Michael Rossetti’s testimony, Christina repeatedly denied that she meant “anything profound by this fairy tale — it is not a moral apologue consistently carried out in detail. Still the incidents are such as to be at any rate suggestive, and different minds may be likely to read different messages into them” (459). The poem’s incidents have been no toriously suggestive to critics, who have read many different messages into Goblin Market; the last two decades in particular have seen a remarkable increase in critical representations of the poem. Goblin Market has been represented as a central feminist text, as a lesbian manifesto, as an aesthetic manifesto, as a sexual allegory, as a Christian allegory, as a social indict ment of Victorian culture, as a psychological case study, and as a subversive treatment of the issues of language and form, including the form of fairy tale.2 As a paradigmatic model for what happens when a critic re-presents E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 3 , September 1993 a text, I offer the 1893 edition of Goblin Market, illustrated by Laurence Housman. I will be reading Housman’s illustrations as a critical visual text that re-presents Rossetti’s verbal text in an attempt to stabilize the shift ing and uncertain meanings of the poem’s language with its own mastering discourse.3The conflicting discourses of Goblin Market will provide the focus for my consideration of the complicity between the representation of violence and the violence of representation. Goblin Market is about violence. Two of the primary lexical senses of violence are contextualized in the poem. The first of these is “violence” understood as a physical force that causes bodily injury; the obsolete sense of violence as the violation of some condition — such as virginity — is also implicit here ( OED). The narrative line of the poem can be read like this: “two girls live alone; they encounter goblin men; they have children” (Mermin 113). According to the logic of the plot, both the goblins’ physical enticement of Laura to eat their fruits and their physical enforcement of the fruits on Lizzie are rapes that engender. To understand what such vi olence engenders, however, a second lexical sense of violence must be put into play. Violence may be understood textually as well as sexually — as the improper treatment or use of a word; as the wresting or perversion of meaning or application (OED). In other words, violence may be understood as representation. Goblin Market is a poem about representation as much as it is a poem about violence. Three story-tellers compete for the dominant representa tion of the girls-meet-goblins story...
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