De-historicizing Rossetti: Queer Potentialities in “Goblin Market”
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This essay employs a risky strategy of de-historicization in reading Christina Rossetti’s much-discussed poem, “Goblin Market,” in order to identify the pattern of utopian desire embedded in the text. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s emphasis on futurity in his consideration of queerness as a point in the utopian horizon, I argue that queer eroticism in “Goblin Market” evades historical underpinnings exactly because its state of jouissance is representable only as a dreamy, gestural, and ephemeral process, and poetry becomes the most appropriate form for preserving such a ghost-like gesture that can avoid the suffocating prison house of the present and project a potentially subversive shadow onto the futurity. For Rossetti, the reality is always already dominated by Victorian patriarchal and religious ideologies, but there is no clear deliberation on her side to destabilize and subvert that status quo. Instead, by way of representing queer performativity, she lets the text imagine what Muñoz calls “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something Rossetti herself is quite unconscious of, yet summoning inspirations for a radical alterity. However, despite my reliance on Muñoz’s theorization of queer utopianism, this essay is not interested in Rossetti’s actual political stance concerning gender insofar as I abandon any sort of historicization, which may be necessary in Muñoz’s search for historical 144 Sein Oh concreteness in tracing the queer traces. Rossetti’s utopian future is not only indefinite (though Muñoz seems to deem it indefinite as well), but also non-existent in her cognitive realm, which makes her eroticism all the more autonomous and potential in emancipating itself from the grips of history.
Abstract
This essay employs a risky strategy of de-historicization in reading Christina Rossetti’s much-discussed poem, “Goblin Market,” in order to identify the pattern of utopian desire embedded in the text. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s emphasis on futurity in his consideration of queerness as a point in the utopian horizon, I argue that queer eroticism in “Goblin Market” evades historical underpinnings exactly because its state of jouissance is representable only as a dreamy, gestural, and ephemeral process, and poetry becomes the most appropriate form for preserving such a ghost-like gesture that can avoid the suffocating prison house of the present and project a potentially subversive shadow onto the futurity. For Rossetti, the reality is always already dominated by Victorian patriarchal and religious ideologies, but there is no clear deliberation on her side to destabilize and subvert that status quo. Instead, by way of representing queer performativity, she lets the text imagine what Muñoz calls “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something Rossetti herself is quite unconscious of, yet summoning inspirations for a radical alterity. However, despite my reliance on Muñoz’s theorization of queer utopianism, this essay is not interested in Rossetti’s actual political stance concerning gender insofar as I abandon any sort of historicization, which may be necessary in Muñoz’s search for historical 144 Sein Oh concreteness in tracing the queer traces. Rossetti’s utopian future is not only indefinite (though Muñoz seems to deem it indefinite as well), but also non-existent in her cognitive realm, which makes her eroticism all the more autonomous and potential in emancipating itself from the grips of history.
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