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    Almost a century and a half after its 1862 publication, Christina Rossetti's canonical poem Goblin Market continues to captivate with its critical yet ambivalent assessment of the overlapping spheres of Victorian economics and sexual politics despite its deceptively simple form. As is evident even in the earliest critical responses, the poem has been traditionally received as a facile children's story or didactic fable with a fairly transparent moral component, yet the poem also offers a nuanced evaluation of ascendant, mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Indeed, the seemingly straightforward plot can only proceed by way of an unseen process of textual exchange—an economy that, in commerce with consumer capitalism, remains partially hidden by the poem's fantastic veneer. I attempt to track these hidden forms of exchange proper to the goblin market and their relation to the production of desire—the desire of the characters, of the text, and of the text's projected audience.
    I argue that the poem's language of economics as well as its economics of language rehearse a form of desire and a mode of enjoyment based on self-negation. The paper is divided into five sections, each offering close-readings of the poem inflected rather intimately, if not somewhat idiosyncratically, by Marxist and psychoanalytic theoretical work. In the first, I track briefly the tradition of treating the poem as an allegory, arguing that while Goblin Market does in fact correlate to various Victorian social symptoms or conditions, the often hasty recourse to an allegorical reading threatens to reify the poem as allegory, thereby ignoring the process of fetishism that the text identifies and at times criticizes. In the second section, I show how that process of fetishism is intimately related to the body of the audience, both the reader of the text and, to a lesser extent, the consuming Victorian public. The third studies the poem's uses of gold, which Karl Marx, a contemporary of Rossetti, esteems as the material, albeit tenuous, "expression" of the values of commodities. Though not always in the ways Marx theorizes, gold does indeed play an important part in the poem's dialectics of value—use, exchange, surplus, aesthetic, and moral value—especially vis-à-vis the goblin men. The fourth attempts to get at what has been called the "central mystery of the poem," Lizzie's silver penny, which she "tosse[s]" to the goblins "for a fee."1If Lizzie's coin seems to afford her both the ability to fend off the goblins' violence as well as consumer power in the face of those merchant men's mysterious terms of purchase, then the manner of how it does so is at the heart of the larger questions of economic and sexual agency. Finally, in the last section, I return to several passages discussed earlier in the body of the paper in order to underscore the production of models of consumption, desire, and enjoyment committed to the very denial of pleasure, to the practice of asceticism. Following the argument made by Christina's brother, William, that her poetry was "replete with the spirit of self-postponement," we might locate the speaker's moments of jouissance (crudely, enjoyment born out of displeasure) not at the happy—that is, normative and normalizing—ending of the poem but within the very processes of the mystification of language and the very moments of self-denial during the erotic exchanges at market.2 Ultimately, if Rossetti intended that the poem be read as a critical renunciation of capitalist commerce and sexuality, as critics have suggested, then we must consider that it is that very act of renunciation that allows for the text's own production—and enjoyment—in the first place.3
    There is a tradition of reading Goblin Market as an allegory of various Victorian symptoms. By "allegory" I mean a form of narrative that has a primary, seemingly arbitrary sense that correlates to a secondary, larger narrative, perhaps an actual event, series of events, or cultural condition outside of the text. And by "symptom" I mean an intransigent inconsistency or anomaly that belies the supposed coherence of a structure or system—in this case, the supposedly universal practicability of the mid-nineteenth-century free market. The poem itself has been read, then, as registering increasing public concerns during the Victorian era over female sexuality or purity, drug addiction, and uneven and oppressive division of labor, all of which seem to be resolved neatly by the end of the poem. In the conclusion, Laura reclaims her sexual probity and kicks her drug habit, ostensibly via the brave deed of her sister Lizzie in the face of the goblins' insidious business, and the two sisters are thus able to resume the hetero-normative course of marriage and childbearing.4Lizzie's heroic act—she "had to do with goblin merchant men" (474)—staves off the threats of deviant sexual behavior and hostile consumer traffic introduced by the goblins, allowing for the easy introduction of the moral of the allegory at the end of the poem.
    More recent critics have speculated as to whether or not the poem had an actual didactic, moralizing function for the "sisters" at the Highgate-based penitentiary for "fallen women," St. Mary Magdalene Home, where Rossetti was working as early as 1859, the year of the poem's composition.6Lorraine Kooistra, moreover, traces briefly how the allegorical nature of the poem led to its 1887 reprint in M. A. Wood'sA Second School Poetry Book, which was "used as a recitation piece in the Middle Forms of High School for girls."7Recent critics, then, seem to have inherited the presumption of the poem's function as allegory; surely, they say, inheriting Norton's transference, Rossetti meant for this simple poem to stand for something.
    The critical tendency to treat the poem as almost entirely allegorical, however, leaves any internal contradictions and narrative aporias of the text unattended.8The plot has its own symptoms, in other words, its own points of internal negation or breakdown. Paradoxically, as with all symptoms in relation to the structure or system in which they manifest, these points of negation prove indispensable for the narrative to function seamlessly. Yet Norton's appeal that we "accept [the poem] in all its quaint and pleasant mystery" seems to have been taken up uncritically by subsequent readers. Rather than completely exploring the poem on a crude narrative level—that is, on the level of plot—readers have been satisfied with a mere "half understand[ing]" of the narrative, more inclined instead to conjecture or "ponder over" hastily what it means vis-à-vis history. As I will demonstrate below, however, the mutually-inflecting wirings of commercial and erotic exchange within the poem prove far more tangled than such readings can brook and are often routed into a kind of short-circuitry. Purely logistical questions of plot and motivation remain unanswerable: What kind of market is the goblin market—that is, what are its means of production and what are its terms of exchange? How is Lizzie, unlike her less fortunate sisters Jeannie and Laura, able to resist the alluring advertisements and the assault of the goblin merchants? Why do the goblins refuse the coin of Lizzie at the moment of purchase? Does she acquire some kind of consumer agency, as indicated by that very resistance? If so, what are its terms? And what really saves Laura? If such questions remain unexplored, the recourse to an allegorical reading seems an increasingly questionable hermeneutic practice that threatens to reify or hypostatize the poem as allegory. At stake, then, is a failure to see the very processes of fetishism, as I will describe later, that the poem works to reveal.
    Rossetti herself seems to have emphasized reading the fairy tale on its own terms, insisting that "the poem was not an allegory," that the poem was only a story, utterly without "any profound or ulterior meaning."9I don't mean to suggest, along with Rossetti, that Goblin Market can remain an unproblematically autotelic text. Quite the contrary: it remains necessary to consider seriously the hidden labor of the poem, to scrutinize the text as one might a commodity. Ultimately, we might be able to glimpse not how the poem phantasmatically translates the bourgeois liberal market and its symptoms into some self-sufficient metanarrative but rather how the poem itself operates by way of and circulates within that very system.
    In the 1990s literary critics began to look more attentively at the various economies—political, sexual, and intertextual—staged and exposed by Goblin Market. Perhaps in response to Terrence Holt, who charges that critics all too often discuss "the goblins... and the issues of sexuality and gender they seem to represent" without regard to "the market," several critics have pointed to the complicated ways in which the poem's "issues of sexuality and gender" are always intimately intertwined with those of Victorian business.10Yet even in the attempt to situate the poem's various exchanges within larger narratives of Victorian culture, politics, and market events, readers have generally continued to treat the plot as more or less coherent. Nowhere do I find this critical "half understand[ing]" of the poem's story more conspicuous than in the discussions concerning the conditions of Lizzie's resistance to the violent advances of the goblin men. More specifically, readers have neglected to discuss in strictly economic terms the mysterious nature of Lizzie's coin, the "silver penny" (324) she "tosses" the goblins "for a fee" (389).11
    Lizzie's "having to do" with the goblin men consists of each party's attempt to set the terms of exchange. To save her sister Laura from her inexplicable wasting away, Lizzie ventures "by the brook" at "twilight" (326) with the intent of buying and carrying away from the goblin men the fruits she thinks will alleviate her sister's fatal condition. Though the goblins instead refuse her terms of transaction and try to force her to "[s]it down and feast" (380) with them on their hitherto irresistible fruits, she remains able to endure the merchant men's violently hard sell. Yet the text does not account for Lizzie's ability to refuse—it only makes explicit what we've already guessed, that those "evil people" would soon grow "Worn out by her resistance" (437–38). The text does, however, offer some hint: by having "put a silver penny in her purse" (324) before her entry into the market, Lizzie somehow arms herself from the goblins' pushy advances. So what is the secret behind Lizzie's silver penny?
    In order to get at the nature of Lizzie's consumer agency by way of her coin, we might first investigate the terms of exchange of the goblin market before Lizzie tosses her coin into the fray. After the poem begins by suggesting that the market is always open—"Morning and evening/ Maids heard the goblins cry" (1–2)—it quickly begins to list, via the unison cry of the goblins, the market's wares: "Apples and quinces/ Lemons and oranges,/ Plump unpecked cherries,/ Melons and raspberries,/ Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,/ Swart-headed mulberries" (5–10). It is precisely in the form of the list that we see how the goblin market proceeds by way of fetishism. At the moment the goblins' fruits are introduced into circulation, at the moment they are put into contact with each other both in the market and in the syntax, they "take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour."12In the first volume of Capital, first published just five years after Goblin Market, Marx famously narrates that the imagined—indeed, fantastic—social relation between the products of labor, that is, commodities, arises as a substitute for and a symptom of laborers' alienation from both their labor and each other. Laborers are not only alienated from their work, which, as guaranteed by a liberal market, has assumed a social form, but also from the things produced by their work. Marx argues that capitalism compensates for this three-fold alienation—between laborer and laborer, between laborer and her labor, between the laborer and the product of her labor—by providing the illusion that the worker's products, at least, have some social relation, some "life of their own" (C, 165) vis-à-vis other products. This compensatory illusion is legitimated precisely by the promise that the labor that produced the social objects itself had a "peculiar social character" in the first place (C, 165). The products of their labor, therefore, are fetishized as they acquire on top of their supposed use-value an imagined social occupation.

Notes
1. Christina Rossetti,Goblin Market, inThe Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti: With Memoir and Notes &c. (1904; repr., London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), lines 367, 389. Hereafter cited parenthetically by line number. All citations of Rossetti's poetry are to this edition. The claim that the fourth episode comprises the "central mystery" of the poem was made by Richard Menke, "The Political Economy of Fruit: Goblin Market," inThe Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony Harrison, and Lorraine Kooistra (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1999), 104–36. Hereafter abbreviated "P" and cited parenthetically by page number.
2. William Michael Rossetti, "Memoir," inPoetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, lxvii. 
3. This performance of self-negation might be a tactic demanded by exigencies the Victorian literary market often placed on women writers. See Sharon Marcus, "The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre,"PMLA110 (1995): 206–19.
4. Regrettably, I cannot here provide a more thorough reading of the poem's reflection on—and direct involvement in—female prostitution. See Jan Marsh, "Christina Rossetti's Vocation: The Importance of Goblin Market,"Victorian Poetry32 (1994): 232–47.
5. Caroline Norton, quoted in Kooistra, "Modern Markets for Goblin Market,"Victorian Poetry32 (1994): 250.
6. See, for example, Marsh, "Rossetti's Vocation," andChristina Rossetti: A Literary Biography(London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 229.
7. Kooistra, 252.
8. David Bentley, for example, suggests that the reception of the poem as allegorical results from Rossetti's didactic intentions: "In whatever context it was or is heard or read,Goblin Market serves the Christian-humanist function of testing and strengthening, not merely an audience's reading skills, but also their moral and spiritual awareness. If it was not read at the St. Mary Magdalene Home, one cannot help but think that it should have been" (Bentley, quoted in Marsh, "Rossetti's Vocation," 244). Marsh herself then goes on to "confirm" Bentley's "critical intuition": "My conjecture... is that Goblin Market was not written explicitly for the girls or Sisters at Highgate, but was prompted by the prospect or challenge of working there, and was perhaps composed, or at least begun, during the period between Christina's initial approach and formal induction" (244).
9. Rossetti, quoted in Marsh,A Literary Biography, 229.
10. Terrence Holt, "'Men Sell Not Such in Any Town': Exchange inGoblin Market,"Victorian Poetry28 (1990): 51. For other readings of the poem's economics, see Elizabeth Campbell, "Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,'"Victorian Studies33 (1990): 393–410; Mary Wilson Carpenter, "'Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market,"Victorian Poetry29 (1991): 415–34; Elizabeth Helsinger, "Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," ELH58 (1991): 903–33; Kooistra; and Menke.
11. Campbell, for example, calls Lizzie's penny "simply a medium of exchange used to gain something of real value, power" (407).
12. Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (1867; repr., London: Pelican, 1976), 164. Hereafter abbreviated Cand cited parenthetically by page number.