The Rossettian Formula: No Love without Suffering

Abstract

This article will align Christina Rossetti's poetics with Susan Sontag's work on suffering to argue that in Rossetti's poetic universe suffering is a necessary precursor to a realisation of love. Turning to Mikhail Bakhtin's theorising of the carnivalesque, the article describes the landscape of Goblin Market as one in which established social convention is overturned and suggests that it is against this landscape of perversity that suffering is reimagined as a precursor to love. Furthermore, to demonstrate how this cult of suffering becomes established at the heart of Rossetti's Goblin Market, I turn to both Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan to investigate how a desirable quota of suffering is achieved through both Lizzie and Laura's interactions with a burgeoning commodity capitalism.