Rehearsing social justice: temporal ghettos and the poetic way out in "Goblin Market" and "The Song of the Shirt".

Maclure, Jennifer

Prosodists don't call stress stress for nothing," Herbert Tucker claims. "[I]ndeed, they might as well, on good Victorian premises ... call prosody itself stress management." (1) Poetry began to demand more effort from readers in the mid-19th century, Tucker claims; reading it required virtual effort, mental exertion. Popular poets like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning understood the reader's need for "poetic equity"--for oscillation between moments of focus and moments of relaxation, between labor and leisure. They practiced a kind of stress management when they built a pleasurable sine wave of energy expenditure into their prosody, balancing new figures that the reader must imaginatively realize with moments of repetition that allow readers to relax. In his discussion of EBB's "The Cry of the Children," Tucker makes explicit the parallel between the virtual labor of reading poetry and the actual labor of the child workers EBB speaks for in the poem. It is no coincidence, he suggests, that poetry imbued with merciful alternation between effort and rest preceded social reform concerned with shorter work weeks, weekends off, and paid holidays.

Two of Tucker's implied premises in his discussion of fatigue--that the temporality of prosody is akin to the temporal experience of labor, and that social and political power is located not just in the content hut in the form of poetry--lay the groundwork for an investigation of a particular kind of social subjugation, which I will call "temporal oppression," and which, I will argue, poetry is particularly well suited to address. Temporal oppression, I propose, goes beyond the deprivation of rest or free time; it can take multiple forms, because social time takes multiple forms. I focus on two modes of time--one that is conceived to be progressive or linear, associated with the time of industrialization and modernity, and another that is characterized by repetition or cyclicality, associated both with natural rhythms and with industrial repetitiveness. Neither is intrinsically better than the other. In parallel ways, each can be used to create "temporal ghettos." (2) I am borrowing this phrase from Jeremy Rifkin, but repurposing it to describe the disenfranchisement of those who are marginalized through their experience of time. In these temporal ghettos, individuals are not just deprived of free time, but are denied access to whole practices and organizations of time that are available to more privileged others. These temporal ghettos are modeled in the content and the form of the two poems I examine: Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt." But, the poems also model a way out of these temporal ghettos, offering a poetic solution to a temporal injustice.

Like EBB's "Cry," Thomas Hood's immensely popular poem "The Song of the Shirt" presents unjust working conditions to the public in poetic form. He wrote the poem in 1843 in response to the growing controversy raised by The Perils of the Nation (1842), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's novel about the abuses of the dress trade, and the governmental Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission published in 1843. The poem was published in Punch magazine and quickly became "one of the best-known poems in the nineteenth century." (3) It describes the plight of a poor seamstress, struggling to sew fast enough to keep up with her hunger. The repetition in the poem echoes her repetitive, mind-numbing work:

   Work! Work! Work!
   While the cock is crowing aloof.
   And work--work--work,
   Till the stars shine through the roof! (11. 9-12) (4)

It also echoes, as Peter Simonsen points out, the labor of its composer, Hood, who, during the time he was working on this poem, was essentially living paycheck to paycheck, scrambling to publish enough poetry in literary periodicals to feed himself. In a letter to his friend Philip de Franck, Hood describes his work conditions as a struggling writer for literary magazines in terms not unlike those he uses to describe the plight of the seamstress: "I have to write, till I am sick of the sight of pen, ink and paper" (Simonsen, pp. 56-57).

In inverse ways, both "The Cry of the Children" and "The Song of the Shirt" recreate the experience of labor in their form, bringing to mind two different kinds of fatigue. As Herbert Tucker notes, EBB's trochaic meter, alternating six- and four-foot lines, calls to mind the "piston-pushing, time-clock-punching din of heavy steam machinery," pushing along forcefully through the poem's iambic and spondaic resistance (p. 125). The poem's subject matter and metrical density make it laborious to read--a labor that is occasionally alleviated by the poet's use of rhyme and repetition. In contrast, readers need no assistance in skipping through Hood's "Song." Its eight-line stanzas are written in a loose trochaic meter: four feet each in the third and seventh lines of the stanza, and three feet each in the rest. Hood makes liberal use of metrical substitutions as well, but unlike EBB's, they slide readers along rather than tripping them up. Speedy anapests give the poem the feel of a nursery rhyme, while repetitive exclamations reduce several lines to three emphatic monosyllables:

   Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
   In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
   And still with the voice of dolorous pitch
   She sang the "Song of the Shirt!" (11. 5-8)

This song about labor does not, in fact, require much labor from readers--a fact that may account for its immense popularity and, perhaps, the lack of critical attention it has received. It does not challenge; if anything, it numbs. This lack of difficulty should not, however, be cause for the poem's dismissal. In its very numbing quality, it does something important, adding a wrinkle to our picture of Victorian fatigue.

In "The Song of the Shirt" rhyme and repetition do not serve as a respite from a cerebral density of image and emotion, as they would in a poem like "The Cry of the Children." Rather, these devices are so unvarying as to be themselves exhausting, wearing down our minds in the same way that a road-trip round of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" wears us down. The moments of difference, of new language and new ideas, refresh us from the oft-repeated "Work! Work! Work!" and "Stitch! Stitch! Stitch," which are so incessant that they seem to dictate our heartbeats and our breath. This reversal is crucial; it reminds us that there are different ways of becoming exhausted. Reading Tennyson or Browning is tiring because the language and imagery are so complex, nuanced, rich; imagining a vivid and varied world requires mental effort from the reader. In contrast, the work of Hood's seamstress is tiring precisely because it is so unchanging, because it requires so little mental effort and so much mindless repetition. Hood's poem, in which repetition exhausts and variety relieves, turns our attention toward the experiences of the temporal underclasses of Victorian society.

Some have suggested that Victorian temporal experience was fundamentally different from the temporal experience of earlier ages. Time was thought of as primarily cyclical prior to and throughout the eighteenth century. Nature, in this paradigm, did not change over time; it merely moved through predictable cycles. Scientific knowledge of the mechanisms underlying those cycles progressed, but the cycles themselves remained stable. This cyclicality was ascribed to social and political systems as well: "revolution" suggested a return to a natural, proper state, righting a minor instability in an otherwise stable system. However, the scientific, industrial, and imperial changes of the nineteenth century brought about a new conception of time as linear or progressive. (5) Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield describe this moment as "the discovery of time." Some imagined this linear movement as upward-thrusting progress; others imagined it as downward-trending decay (Toulmin and Goodfield, p. 41). In either case, the cyclical paradigm was replaced by a linear paradigm; whether imagined as epic or as tragedy, natural and human history acquired a plot. (6)

Hood's "The Song of the Shirt" undermines the division between these "old" and "new" temporal modes and sheds light on the dark corollary of Victorian progressive time. While industrialization seems and perhaps is progressive from the perspectives of the middle class and the nation, it is enormously repetitive for the workers whose labor fueled that progress. (7) In the seamstress's "voice of dolorous pitch," we hear the repetition that "progressive" capitalism creates (1. 7). The repetition of the word "work" not only echoes the labor but also demonstrates its homogenizing influence. It is a repetition that denies all difference, flattening life into a vast monotony of one endlessly repeated action: "Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!" (1. 5). The woman's life loses all variety; she longs for "one short hour" to "breathe the breath / Of the cowslip and primrose sweet" or just to do a "little weeping" to "ease [her] heart" (11. 69, 65-66, 85). An hour's respite, however, "costs a meal," and the tears hinder her sewing; her life, actions, and even emotions are collapsed into the incessant repetition of the stitch. (8)

In this way, this poem undermines too simple a binary between the progressive, forward-moving time ot the Victorian empire, marketplace, and laboratory and the cyclical, repetitive time of the past. After all, the woman's endless sewing--"Seam, and gusset, and band, / Band, and gusset, and seam"--is cyclical and repetitive, but it is also integral to capitalism (11. 21-22). "The Song of the Shirt" exposes the temporal contradiction within industrial capitalism, which claims to be progressive and yet is premised on deeply repetitive labor. The temporality of capitalism, for the seamstress woman, is not progressive at all, but oppressively repetitive--repetitive in a way that denies difference, denies rest, denies physical needs, and denies natural time. The repetition of the stitch subsumes and interferes with all other repeated cycles, restructuring the woman's time around its persistent monotony. The droning rhythm of her work prevails over the rhythms of day and night, dominating while the "cock is crowing" and while the "stars shine" (11. 10, 12). It interrupts sleeping and waking; the woman sews "Till over the buttons I fall asleep, / And sew them on in a dream" (11. 23-24). Her livelihood deprives her of life; she is "Sewing at once, with a double thread, / A Shroud as well as a Shirt" (11. 31-32).

This oppressively repetitive time--the side production of the purportedly progressive time of capitalism--puts the seamstress in a "temporal ghetto." The seamstress in the poem represents a temporally ghettoized underclass because her marginalization is manifested in her experience of time--the monotonous repetitive-labor time that stands behind and beneath the progressive time of the Victorian period. The mirage of the forward-moving, progressive temporality of Victorian industry is only possible because of this temporal underclass. In this way, linear time cannot come to replace repetitive time; it is utterly dependent upon repetitive time. The middle and upper classes can obscure or devalue repetitive time but cannot erase it, because it is the foundation on which the progressive temporality of industry is built.

These two contrasting and differently valued temporal modes are not gender neutral; economic and scientific reasoning conspired to associate each temporal mode with a gender. While "[w]hite, middle-class men" were thought "to embody the forward-thrusting agency of national progress," (9) women were associated with the backwardness and inertia of cyclicality. M. Norton Wise explains that modern science, particularly Darwinian sexual selection, was manipulated to support these associations between gender and temporality. (10) Elizabeth Campbell explains this gendering of temporality in economic terms: "Because the Victorians perceived the marketplace as directing the course of history, the middle-class man's role in production gave shape to the social configuration of the era and to the mid-Victorian view of historical time as progressively linear, moving onward and upward to humankind's perfectability." (11) Women, limited to the domestic sphere, were "left, figuratively, to spin circles within the confines of the home," remaining associated with the cyclical temporality of the past (Campbell, p. 394). We see traces of this gendering in "The Song of the Shirt," as the female seamstress is confined to repetitive, cyclical sewing in order to produce commodities for the men who populate the progressive marketplace. The term "shirt" was used specifically to refer to men's clothing, and when the seamstress appeals to the purchasers for her "linen," she calls upon "Men with Sisters dear" and "Men! with Mothers and Wives," suggesting not only that the wearers of the clothes she makes are exclusively male but also that they could only feel sympathy for her repetitive labor through association with the women they love (11. 25, 26).

This gendering of time becomes much more overt in the second poem I'll discuss: Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." The poem, composed in 1859 and first published in 1862, follows two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who live a solitary, rural existence, troubled only by the titular goblins, who tempt the young girls to buy their fruit. Laura gives in to the temptation, gorging herself on fruit and paying with a lock of her golden hair, much to Lizzie's dismay. She yearns to return the next day for more fruit, but she can no longer hear or see the goblins and she soon begins to waste away, just like Jeanie, another village girl who ate the goblins' summer wares only to wither and die in the fall. Laura seems destined for the same fate, until Lizzie decides to risk a trip to the goblin market to buy more fruit for Laura. The goblins forbid Lizzie to take the fruits home with her and try to force-feed her, covering her in fruit juice in the process. Lizzie runs home to Laura, who licks the juices off her sister. This second taste of the goblin fruit sends Laura into violent convulsions, which, remarkably, bring her back to health. The girls live happily ever after to tell their children the tale.

The experience of reading "Goblin Market" is unusual; it feels, in a sense, like poetry and prose at once. Rossetti fills the poem with rhyme and repetition, but in such a way as to make their recurrence impossible to predict. Here, a rhymed couplet--"All ripe together / In summer weather" (11. 15-16). (12) There, four lines rhymed ABCB: "Evening by evening / Among the brookside rushes, / Laura bowed her head to hear, / Lizzie veiled her blushes" (11. 32-35). Elsewhere, single end rhymes are repeated for several consecutive lines, while other end rhymes are suspended over several lines, the second word of the pair only coming after readers have nearly forgotten the first. The poem's meter is similarly unpredictable, sometimes lulling readers with several lines of predictable trochaic tetrameter only to jar them with iambs and spondees, making it difficult to read aloud. The result is an idiosyncratic looping structure, in which repetition and rhyme confuse as often as they soothe. Cyclicality and progression mix together inscrutably, confounding readers who hope to parse them.

This looping prosodic structure manifests and punctuates the poem's temporal subject matter. The two gendered temporal models discussed above--the masculine forward thrust of Victorian industrial-imperial progress and the feminine repetition of nature--come into conflict in the fairytale space of "Goblin Market." Laura and Lizzie live in a bubble of natural, cyclical time, seemingly cut off from any outside world. Their existence is both domestic and repetitive: they spend their time doing daily household chores like fetching honey, milking cows, churning butter, and sewing (11. 203, 207-208). Only when Laura enters the marketplace does linear, forward-moving time enter the poem. She purchases and eats the fruit; "She had never tasted such before" (1. 132). This purchase is new--an event. Unlike the repeated chore or the return of a season, Laura's fruit purchase belongs to the realm of linear time. It could be marked on a timeline. Moreover, it sets off the "plot" of the poem and necessitates Lizzie's trip to the market, which marks the poem's climax. Without the presence of the goblin market, the poem would be without a plot, only describing the repetitive lives of its co-protagonists.

Elizabeth Campbell explores Rossetti's representations of these two temporal modes in relation to economic structures. She notes that Laura's entrance, as a woman, into masculine linear time exiles her from feminine, repetitive, natural time: "women's involvement with the market denies them their right to motherhood, reproductivity, and nature's cyclicality" (Campbell, p. 406). Campbell argues that Laura mistakenly believes that the market production of the goblins is similar to maternal reproduction, but learns through her ordeal that "motherhood and mercantilism do not mix" (p. 403). She sheds light on the poem's implicit critique of the progressive time of the capitalist marketplace and affirmation of "cyclicality and reproduction--according to Kristeva, the temporal modalities popularly associated with female subjectivity" (p. 397).

This argument--that "Goblin Market" affirms cyclical time and demonizes (or perhaps "goblinizes") masculine linear time--is compelling. However, looking at "Goblin Market" in conjunction with "The Song of the Shirt" gives us a perspective from which to extend and complicate our understanding of Rossetti's critique of capitalist time. In "The Song of the Shirt," Hood undermines the binary between feminine cyclical time and masculine linear time, demonstrating how both are integral to the marketplace. The same is true of Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; just as we cannot determine where cycles of rhyme begin and end, we cannot easily separate spaces and acts of feminine cyclicality from those of masculine linearity in the poem. Moreover, while Hood shows, in the seamstress's plight, how a repetitive temporal experience can be oppressive, Rossetti shows in Laura's story how a progressive or linear temporal experience can be oppressive, and even lethal. I contend that the poem functions not simply as an affirmation of feminine repetitive time over masculine linear time, but as a more complex indictment of the oppressive temporalities that are produced by Victorian capitalist "progress," in which both workers and women are relegated to "temporal ghettos."

In "Goblin Market," we see the female market consumer rather than the female laborer, and we see how linearity, rather than repetition, can be oppressive. The temporal ghettoization of the female laborer is, of course, not equivalent to the temporal ghettoization of Laura in "Goblin Market." The seamstress's repetitive temporality is generated by an economy that needs but disavows her labor; the social forces structuring Laura's time are different (but related) and less self-evident. The situations of the two women are similar, however, because in both cases, time becomes, as Fabian describes it, an "instrument of power." (13) Thinking about this temporal oppression offers a new way of connecting marketplace-based readings of this poem with readings that focus on sexuality or the figure of the fallen woman.

"Goblin Market": Flattening Repetition, Flattened Progression

At the opening of the poem, the goblins introduce progressive time into the formerly cyclical world of Laura and Lizzie. They do so, however, in terms that strangely echo the repetitive labor time that the market produces. Their marketing cry repeats throughout the poem: "Come buy, come buy" (11. 3, 4, 19, 31, etc.). (14) The identical cry, echoing again and again, seems to deny the differences between the various fruits it is used to promote, celebrating the market's ability to bring all of this variety together and make it available as a commodity:

   Come buy, come buy:
   Apples and quinces,
   Lemons and oranges,
   Plump unpecked cherries,
   Melons and raspberries,
   Bloom'd own-cheeked peaches,
   Swart-headed mulberries,
   Wild free-born cranberries,
   Crab-apples, dewberries,
   Pine-apples, blackberries,
   Apricots, strawberries;--
   All ripe together ... (11. 4-15)

The goblins bellow the same cry for apples, lemons, cranberries, pineapples--and the list goes on and on. Their market combines domestic with foreign fruits; as Mary Carpenter notes, "these are not just common, home-grown English apples and cherries, but also a rich variety of gourmet fruits imported from foreign climes--pomegranates, dates, figs, lemons and oranges, 'citrons from the South.'" (15) It also combines fruits that are harvested in different seasons, like strawberries, a midsummer crop, and apples, a fall crop. Fruits that ripen in different seasons and grow in disparate places all coalesce into one commodity by the goblins' monotonous "jingle." The market collapses all difference (seasonal, physical, national) into similarity--a luscious similarity that looks, at first glance, to be nearly the opposite of the seamstress's painful and dull labor in "The Song of the Shirt," but actually represents the other side of the same marketplace coin: the tempting repetition of pleasurable commodity consumption rather than the painful repetition of laborious commodity production.

In the moment of Laura's purchase of the fruit, "Goblin Market" continues to blur the distinction between linear time and cyclical time. It is by accepting and engaging with the repetitive cry of the goblins that Laura enters into linear temporality--a temporality that is almost immediately revealed to be dangerous. Lizzie meets Laura at home and reminds her of the story of Jeanie, who also "met [the goblins] in the moonlight" (1.148). The fruits are dangerous, Lizzie suggests, precisely because they are "Plucked from bowers / Where summer ripens at all hours" (11. 151-152). In other words, the goblin fruit comes from an origin of excessive repetition, of flattened difference--a place where summer ripens all the time. The fruit's dangerous temporal origin translates into dangerous temporal results--not excessive repetition, but excessive linearity. As Lizzie retells, Jeanie's consumption of goblin fruit caused her to enter into an oppressively, fatally linear temporality:

   But ever in the moonlight
   She pined and pined away;
   Sought them by night and day,
   Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey;
   Then fell with the first snow,
   While to this day no grass will grow
   Where she lies low:
   I planted daisies there a year ago
   That never blow. (11. 153-161)

The new temporality that Jeanie enters is linear time taken to the extreme. She can buy the fruit only once; she can experience summer only once; she dies with the first snow of winter. Even flowers cannot grow in the soil in which she is buried. This is linear time that allows for no repetition whatsoever. While the goblin's cry reduced all difference to sameness, Jeanie's transaction with them reduces all forward movement to a single event--the purchase and consumption of the fruit. The temporality of the goblin market is both reductively repetitive and oppressively linear.

After Laura eats the fruit, she enters, predictably, into this same oppressively linear time. She spends the day "longing for the night," when she hopes to return to the goblin market to buy more fruit. When the night comes, however, she cannot hear the "iterated jingle," "come buy, come buy," nor can she see the goblins (11. 232-233). Laura cannot return to the market; now that she has eaten the fruit, she is barred from ever eating it again. Whereas Hood's seamstress in "The Song of the Shirt" was relegated to an entirely repetitive temporality, Laura is relegated to an entirely linear temporality and is excluded from repetition. The temporality of the goblin market is not just linear; it is apocalyptic. By excluding all repetition, it requires its customers to die after a single purchase. It represents linear temporality taken to such an extreme that it is determined to run itself out. Laura, by purchasing the goblin fruit, is unwittingly inducted into that apocalyptic temporality.

Like Jeanie, Laura begins to decay: "when the noon waxed bright / Her hair grew thin and grey" (11. 276-277). She is outside of natural time, coming to the twilight of her life even as the sun shines at noon. She stops doing her repetitive but life-giving household chores and no longer eats. The extreme linear time of the goblin market has put her on the fast track toward death. Her life becomes a timeline with a single event on it: the purchase of the fruit. She makes an attempt to regain access to the natural cycles of plant growth when she sows the kernel-stone she took from the goblins. However, it does not grow; no "waxing shoot" appears; the seed never "[sees] the sun" or "fe[els] the trickling moisture run" (11. 284, 286-287). Laura is excluded from cyclicality, repetition, and regrowth altogether. In this way, she is relegated to different kind of temporal ghetto. While the seamstress was marginalized through her experience of extreme repetitive temporality, Laura is marginalized through her experience of extreme linear temporality. Both are essentially consigned to death: the seamstress to death by repetition, Laura to death by progression.

Laura's experience of collapsing linear temporality brings to light a connection between two common ways of reading this poem. To many critics, "Goblin Market" is a poem about capitalism: the market sells commodities, and Laura's purchase is a form of consumerism. (16) To others, it is a poem about a fallen woman: the goblin market sells sexual experience--"joys brides hope to have" (1. 314)--and Laura's purchase represents a loss of virginity. (17) As many scholars have noted, Rossetti was involved in groups that assisted the reintegration of fallen women into society. (18) D.M.R. Bentley even suggests that Rossetti may have written the poem specifically with the aim of reading it to "fallen women"--the prostitutes at the St. Mary Magdalene Home in Highgate where she is believed to have volunteered in the 1860s. (19) In my view, the goblin market is a marketplace that cannot be straightforwardly reduced to an allegory for something else, like female sexuality or virginity. However, it would require an act of selective blindness to ignore the fact that all the consumers in this market are female. The marketplace is not merely an allegory for sexual experience, but it is a gendered and sexualized marketplace--a marketplace that begs to be read in terms of sexuality. Exploring the oppressive temporalities of this poem allows us to connect these two modes of reading.

I argue that Laura's fate in this poem reveals what we might call the temporality of the fallen woman. The poem suggests similarities between the way that Laura is temporally ghettoized as a goblin fruit consumer and the way that Victorian women are temporally ghettoized as sexual beings. Laura's life is compressed into a single event: the purchase of the goblin fruit. Once that event is complete, her life rushes toward its end. After the completion of the purchase, she loses access to all newness, all life, all nourishment, and all joy. She becomes a remainder. Similarly, the fallen woman's life is compressed into a single event; the loss of virginity, like the purchase of the fruit, is singular and irreparable. The fallen woman's life is linear in the same extreme way that Laura's life is linear: it is reduced to a single notch on a timeline, after which death seems to be the only option. She is temporally ghettoized--not by being relegated to endless repetition, but by being relegated to extreme linearity, in which events are non-repeatable and non-recuperable.

The inherent needs and inequalities of capitalism are clearly responsible for the temporal ghettoization of Hood's seamstress, while the causes of Laura's temporal ghettoization (and that of the fallen women with whom she is associated) are less clear-cut. However, those causes are still intimately bound up with economic forces. The gendered capitalism of Victorian England confines women to a very limited set of financial opportunities. They can enter the "marriage market," in which virginity becomes a single-sale commodity. This economy of virginity also exists in a state of collapsed linear temporality; the "sale" of virginity is the only available event on the timeline of women's lives, and if a woman fails to make a profitable transaction, she cannot try again. Marriage is the only "normal" way for women to secure economic agency, and those who do not succeed in marrying, and who therefore must make their own living, are left with a narrow range of options. Because they cannot enter male professions, unmarried women without family money are left to either become overworked and starving laborers (like Hood's seamstress) or socially ostracized and physically endangered prostitutes. (20) The shady but ingrained collusion between economic forces and social values makes it difficult to state exactly who the creator of the temporal ghetto actually is--and this collusion also makes the slippery, variously interpretable "Goblin Market," with its overdetermined protagonists, a particularly fitting poem in which to discuss the joint temporal ghettos created by those forces.

A Temporal Problem, A Poetic Solution: Repetition with Difference

I have argued that "The Song of the Shirt" and "Goblin Market" present social injustices as temporal problems; the temporal ghettoizing of (female) laborers and (fallen) women. In doing so, they position these problems within the realm of poetry. Poetry, after all, seems uniquely equipped to tackle a problem of rhythm, of repetition, of cycles and linearity. I contend that in "Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti proposes a way out of these temporal ghettos--one that is distinctly poetic. I will refer to this solution as "repetition with difference."

Critics have described the ending of "Goblin Market"--in which Lizzie risks a trip to the market to get fruit to save her fading sister and comes back covered in fruit juices which, when sucked up by Laura, prove to be the cure to the dying girl's mysterious ailment--in many ways. It demonstrates the triumph of sisterhood over the dangers of the marketplace; (21) it illuminates women's vulnerability to physical and economic exploitation while affirming a kind of homoerotic feminine sexuality (Carpenter, p. 427); it champions the virtues of thriftiness and denial of bodily pleasure; (22) it reveals the potential for pleasure in excessive giving or sacrifice (Rappoport, p. 869). In the terms of this article, I propose that the ending demonstrates the liberatory power of repetition with difference.

The climax of the poem begins with what appears to be an ominous prediction of repetition, as Lizzie seems poised to fall into the same fate as Laura:

   Tender Lizzie could not bear
   To watch her sister's cankerous care
   Yet not to share. (11. 299-301)

Lizzie cannot bear to watch her sister suffer alone, and determines to share in her suffering. The reader expects a repetition of Laura's (and Jeanie's) narrative, and initially, it seems, will get it. Lizzie hears the monotonous goblin cry "night and morning": "Come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy" (11. 302, 304-305). She longs to buy the fruit and bring it back to Laura to "comfort her" (1. 310). But before we find out whether Lizzie's fate will repeat Laura's, we get a different repetition: a second telling of Jeanie's cautionary tale.

   [Laura] thought of Jeanie in her grave,
   Who should have been a bride;
   But who for joys brides hope to have
   Fell sick and died
   In her gay prime
   In earliest winter time,
   With the first glazing rime,
   With the first snow-fall of crisp winter time. (11. 312-319)

The story aligns the extreme linear time of the goblin market consumer with that of the fallen woman: the timeline of Jeanie's life is compressed into a single action, and once that action is completed, the possibility of future life is foreclosed. This story of linear time, however, is also repetitive; the second telling exactly parallels the first. This repetition without difference precludes liberatory action; it reminds Lizzie of the dangers of the marketplace and causes her to stay at home, leaving Laura in her descent toward death and leaving the poem unresolved.

Finally, however, Lizzie sees that her sister is "knocking at Death's door" and decides that it is time to act. In this moment, she enters into the linear time of the marketplace: she "put a penny in her purse" and "for the first time in her life / Began to listen and look" (11. 324, 327-328). She goes to the goblin market and pays the goblins a penny for the fruit. When they refuse to allow her to take the fruit home, she asks them to return her penny. This angers the goblins; "grunting and snarling," they try to force her to eat the fruit:

   Lashing their tails
   They trod and hustled her,
   Elbowed and jostled her,
   Clawed with their nails,
   Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
   Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
   Twitched her hair out by the roots,
   Stamped upon her tender feet,
   Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
   Against her mouth to make her eat. (11. 398-407)

She stands firm against the goblin assault until they give up and throw back her penny. Covered in fruit juice, Lizzie rushes home to Laura.

This scene repeats Laura's experience at the goblin market, but with a crucial difference. This repetition with difference also occurs at the level of the imagery used to describe each of the sisters. Just before Laura enters the goblin market to make her fateful purchase, she is described by a list of similes:

   Laura stretched her gleaming neck
   Like a rush-imbedded swan,
   Like a lily from the beck,
   Like a moonlit poplar branch,
   Like a vessel at the launch
   When its last restraint is gone. (11. 81-86)

Rossetti reprises the similes to describe Lizzie as she withstands the goblin attack:

   White and golden Lizzie stood,
   Like a lily in a flood,--
   Like a rock of blue-veined stone
   Lashed by tides obstreperously,--
   Like a beacon left alone
   In a hoary roaring sea,
   Sending up a golden fire,--
   Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
   White with blossoms honey-sweet
   Sore beset by wasp and bee ... (11. 408-417)

Both girls are like lilies; both girls are compared to trees or branches; both girls are described in terms of seafaring. However, the repetition of imagery highlights difference rather than flattening it. Overanxious Laura is like a lily leaning forward; steadfast Lizzie is like a lily withstanding a flood. Laura is a launching ship, moving forward unrestrained; Lizzie is a beacon, providing guidance. And most tellingly, Laura is a poplar branch at night; Lizzie is a thriving fruit tree, and the violent goblins are the wasps and bees that beset and ostensibly pollinate her. While Laura was a branch, Lizzie is a fruit-bearing tree, made productive by the goblin's very aggression. The repetition with difference in the imagery is a microcosm of the repetition with difference in the plot: Lizzie is a lily, like Laura, but Lizzie is a different kind of lily; Lizzie goes to the goblin market, like Laura, but Lizzie has a different kind of experience there. Unlike the repetition of Jeanie's story, which foreclosed action and agency, this non-identical repetition opens outward, triggering another non-identical repetition.

Lizzie runs home and cries to Laura, "Did you miss me? / Come and kiss me. / Never mind my bruises, / Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you" (11. 465-469). Laura fears that she is seeing repetition without difference, asking Lizzie, "Must your light like mine be hidden, / Your young life like mine be wasted, / Undone in mine undoing / And ruined in my ruin" (11. 480-483). But instead, Lizzie's differently repeated encounter with the goblins leads to Laura's differently repeated encounter with the goblin fruit. In her initial trip to the goblin market, she "sucked and sucked and sucked" the fruit juice; now, "with a hungry mouth," she "kissed and kissed and kissed" her juicy sister (11. 134, 492, 486). However, the juice that once was "Sweeter than honey from the rock" becomes, in the second iteration, "wormwood to her tongue," throwing her into a fit of agony (11. 129, 494).

Rossetti describes Laura's agony with a list of similes that echo those that described her just before her first taste of the fruit:

   Her locks streamed like the torch
   Borne by a racer at full speed,
   Or like the mane of horses in their flight,
   Or like an eagle when she stems the light
   Straight toward the sun,
   Or like a caged thing freed,
   Or like a flying flag when armies run. (11. 500-506)

Again, Laura is described in terms of rushing forward motion--"lamentable haste" (1. 498). The similes seem to describe only her hair (the very part of her that she exchanged for the goblin fruit in the first place). However, if her hair is the racer's torch, then she must be the racer; if her hair is the horse's mane, then she must be the horse; if her hair is the flag, then she must be the army. Once a launching vessel, she is now a racer, a horse, an army. She remains associated with linear time, but this second act of rushing forward remedies the damage of the first. She becomes a figure not of forward movement but of repeated forward movement, which, with the allowance of this repetition, becomes life-giving rather than apocalyptic. What once was the poison becomes the antidote when repeated: "Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart, / Met with the fire smouldering there / And overbore its lesser flame" (11. 507-509). Only by allowing for a second iteration of the once-dangerous flame can that danger be neutralized and the damage it caused be healed.

Why this second taste of fruit cures Laura continues to be a subject of debate among critics. I propose that the repetition of the fruit consumption is a temporal solution to a temporal problem. Laura, ghettoized by extreme progressive time, is excluded from repetition. Her life has been collapsed into a single event--the one-time consumption of the fruit, after which she must die. The repetition with difference that Lizzie facilitates disrupts that oppressive temporality by revealing that the event is not singular: it can be repeated and it can turn out differently. The repetition of the event and its multiplicity of endings are intertwined. Only when the event is repeated do we realize that the narrative is not predetermined: repetition makes difference possible. Repetition with difference represents an emancipatory temporality, opening up both agency and a future for the so-called "fallen woman" consigned to death.

Reading "Goblin Market," of course, does not immediately bring about material or social change for the women and workers of Victorian England. Here, I return to Herbert Tucker, who speculates about the connection between "public developments," like "shorter hours, weekends off, paid holidays and leaves," and their "rehears[al] in print" by the "Victorian poets of fatigue"--between poetic form and social reform (Tucker, p. 127). While "Goblin Market" might not immediately alter the experiences of marginalized women, it rehearses social change, and in that way it has sociopolitical agency. The language of "Goblin Market," in form and in content, models an alternative temporal experience--a more just, more equitable, more livable one. When Rossetti's Victorian audience read it, memorized it, and performed it, they rehearsed that temporal experience, making the alternative not just imaginable, but familiar. Though its political impact is hard to measure, this kind of mass poetic rehearsal of social change must encourage its political performance.

We can see repetition with difference in Hood's "The Song of the Shirt" as well--both within the language, and outside of it in the poem's larger political life. (23) One instance of repetition with difference within the poem is particularly notable: the final stanza is an exact repetition of the first, except that one line--"Would that its tone could reach the Rich!"--is inserted between the penultimate and ultimate lines, creating the poem's only nine-line stanza. The added line sounds hopeless within the poem, seeming to indicate the fact that the seamstress, confined to constant sewing by her poverty, will never have the chance to plead her case to a wealthy audience with the power to alter labor conditions--or to any audience at all. However, the line sounds more hopeful when we think about it in terms of the actual circulation of the poem in the Victorian world. The poem was enormously popular; it was read, memorized, excerpted, and chanted throughout England. William Michael Rossetti, the less famous of Christina's two brothers, said that "it ran like wildfire, and rang like tocsin, through the land" (quoted in Simonsen, p. 57). In its echoing fame, "The Song of the Shirt" achieves its self-proclaimed goal; it carries the seamstress's "voice of dolorous pitch" to the ears (and mouths) of the rich (11. 7, 95). It not only allows middle-class and wealthy people to hear the seamstress's plight; it allows them to repeat her words. (24) If poetry can rehearse social justice, then its proliferation can encourage powerful people to recite social justice.

In this way, poetry can function as an engine of potentially emancipatory forms of repetition with difference. The construction of a poem can resist oppressive temporalities through differently repeated phrases, rhymes, images, motifs, and events, as "Goblin Market" does. Moreover, the circulation of a poem through reprinting, excerpting, memorization, and recitation in different social settings can encourage social change, bringing alternative temporalities to many ears and mouths, as the repetition of "The Song of the Shirt" demonstrates. Rossetti's and Hood's poems not only reveal to us how time can be used to oppress--how social forces can situate certain groups of people in temporal ghettos. They also show us that poetry itself can be a form of resistance to that kind of temporal oppression. In a period of temporal change and conflict that saw both oppressive linearity and oppressive repetition, poetry can represent an assertion of alternative time in which repetition and progress not only coexist but jointly facilitate liberation.

Notes

(1) Herbert Tucker, "Overworked, Worked Over: A Poetics of Fatigue," in The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 2011), p. 120.

(2) Jeremy Rifkin coins this term in Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), p. 167. He uses it to refer to a poor unskilled labor class that is restrained from planning for the future by the immediacy of material needs: "The laborer remains stuck in a present-oriented temporal ghetto, unable to reach out and claim some measure of control over the future." I am expanding the term somewhat in my usage to include the situation of any group against whom time is wielded as a tool of power.

(3) Peter Simonsen, '"Would that Its Tone Could Reach the Rich!': Thomas Hood's Periodical Poetry Bridging Romantic and Victorian," Romantic Textualities, 16 (2006): 57.

(4) Thomas Hood, "The Song of the Shirt." Representative Poetry Online (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Libraries, 2003). http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/song-shirt. All subsequent quotations to this poem refer to this edition.

(5) In science: first, astronomers determined, based on their study of Enke's comet, that the planets would eventually collapse into die sun. The Cambridge mathematician William Whewell proclaimed: "We conceive that this state of things has had a beginning; we conceive that it will have an end." Meanwhile, Robert Chambers's popular and controversial book Vestiges of Creation put forth a theory of progressive geology, asserting that the stages of natural history come and go, never to return. And soon afterward, Darwin would publish his theory of natural selection, teaching people that species change over time and putting the idea of extinction solidly into the public consciousness. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Hutchinson, 1965).

(6) Although I do not have space to address it in this essay, it is interesting that the newfound plottedness of history coincides with the explosive popularity of the novel. Was the Victorian period a particularly plotted age? Could that account for why comparatively little attention is paid to Victorian poetry?

(7) Norton Wise, "Time Discovered and Time Gendered," From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, eds. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 39-58.

(8) Hood may also have been drawing on A London Dressmaker's Diary (1842), in which an anonymous seamstress describes her work as "the everlasting repetition of the same" (Simonsen, p. 59).

(9) Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 359-360.

(10) For example, some interpreted Darwin's descriptions of sexual selection (in which women choose mates based on favored characteristics, leading to an increased frequency of the occurrence of diose traits) to mean that men essentially did the work of adaptation and species progress, while women passively reproduced but did not contribute to that progress. This and other scientific "interpretations came to support some tenaciously gendered stereotypes of linear and cyclical time" (Wise, p. 56).

(11) Elizabeth Campbell, "Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in Goblin Market," Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 394.

(12) Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th Edition, The Major Authors, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, M. El. Abrams (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 2143-2155. All subsequent quotations to this poem refer to this edition.

(13) Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: Houi Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), p. 144.

(14) In "Rossetti's Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye," Herbert Tucker argues that the goblins' "iterated jingle" should be read in the context of a burgeoning Victorian advertising industry, casting Laura as an impulse buyer. (Representations 82 [2003]: 117-133).

(15) Mary Carpenter, '"Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,'" Victorian Poetry 29 (1991): 427.

(16) Terrence Holt, "'Men Sell Not Such in Any Town': Exchange in Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry 28 (1990): 51-67; Elizabeth K. Helsinger, "Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,"' English Literary History 8 (1991): 903-933; Richard Menke, "The Political Economy of Fruit: Goblin Market," in The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 105-136.

(17) Jill Rappoport, "The Price of Redemption in 'Goblin Market,"' Studies in English Literature 50 (2010): 868: "The most radical suggestion Rossetti's poem makes is that Laura (or other fallen women) might be completely redeemable. Victorian discourses of fallenness frequently saw women's purity as irrevocably lost; the 'fallen' could reenter society only at a distance, as servants or emigrants."

(18) See Carpenter, see Rappoport.

(19) D.M.R. Bentley, "The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and an Analysis," in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), p. 58.

(20) Or nuns--or writers, like Rossetti.

(21) Dorothy Mermin, "Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 107-118; Helena Michie, "'There Is No Friend Like a Sister': Sisterhood as Sexual Difference," English Literary History 56 (1989): 401-421.

(22) Victor Mendoza, "'Come Buy': The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,"' English Literary History 73 (2006): 943.

(23) Critics have mixed answers to the question of how much real political impact this poem had. Some accuse it of exciting sympathy but lacking political impact; Friedrich Engels suggested as much in The Condition of the Working Class in England, calling Hood's piece "a fine poem ... which wrung many compassionate but ineffectual tears from the daughters of the bourgeoisie" (Simonsen, p. 57).

(24) Of course, these words are actually Hood's words; perhaps his composition of them could be seen as a repetition with difference in itself as he attempts to ventriloquize the feelings of the female working poor.