As in the frontispiece, the neck is at the centre of the title page illustration. The vignette, though it occupies less space than its older sibling, achieves a similar impact, and the misjudgement in its transition from product to publishing entity, from the personal to the public, only emphasises its importance.89 Laura and Lizzie recline (albeit at an unnaturally upright angle) enveloped in luxuriant fabric, and
hemmed in by a portal, which allows us the ‘peep at the goblins’ which Christina’s poem always meant to offer. Whether this orb is a vision or dream belonging to one of the figures, or merely a caprice, it stresses the triangular shape of the composition. The eye is drawn from left to right, as text in a codex, travelling along the slope of the projected hillside, into the almost-unshaded whiteness of one sister’s arm and up to her head, level with the portal, and below which (in the first edition) lies the problematic and faint delineations of the jawline and throat. The unintentional incongruity of the faintness of the lines of the neck and jaw and the strong demarcation of the rest of the female figures’ bodies allows us room to consider the relationship between the vignette and the wider title page design which contains it.
Macmillan’s ‘sweet […] woman face’90 may be marred by the vague jawline, but the flaw makes the face
89 In considering Gabriel’s assertion that ham-fisted workmanship had marred the “face” of the block, it is difficult to know what that might tell us about his own interpretative faculty. Does it express his awareness that the broad, bowed neck was becoming something of a calling-card for his pictorial art? Or does it neatly encapsulate the neck’s utter dominance over his representational mode when depicting the human woman? Perhaps such a sentiment might suggest that he saw all elements of the human body (and perhaps particularly the neck) as possessing the same expressive capacity as the face? It could be argued that Gabriel never mastered the complexity of expression of which Millais or Hunt were capable: this might be one reason behind the prevalence of gorgeously somnolent, unconscious, and bored-looking women in his oeuvre.
90 Letter, Macmillan to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 28October 1861, quoted in Packer, p. 7.
more interesting and complex than the second edition, providing a suggestive foil to the graphic uniformity of the title page.
The idea of the ‘gap’91 in the cut image of the title-page, against which Gabriel raged, although
unintentional on the artist and engraver’s part, is an interesting literary-visual device. It presents the eye with a conjured absence, just as in his letter Gabriel presented Macmillan with a conjured obscenity. The idea of looking at a ‘gap’ serves to make the perceptive subject sensitive to the fact that all art and all writing must acknowledge its own pretence to some degree, and that this image must have passed through the interpretative filter, as well as under the hands, of many perceptive subjects already. The image in front of us may feign an organic wholeness, but it comes to us as a product of the commercial as well as the creative economy.
Perhaps the source of the unpleasantness in the neck is from this tension of the organic and the artificial;
the blurred jawline is an unpleasant reminder of illness and malformation in what should be an idealised image of beauty, in which the consumer may immerse themselves. In her article on Christina’s volunteer work with fallen women Diane D’Amico refers to the contemporary notion that the woman who gained sexual experience outside marriage would be transformed ‘into a “horrible” spectre’,92 which plays further on the anxieties attending the enjoyment of a potentially morally-dubious beauty. Or indeed, two: here the pure and fallen woman lie side-by-side, with no distinguishing feature, which only becomes apparent once the poem has been read, and its message understood. When cross-referenced with the poem, this
moment of rest can be recognised as post-lapsarian, taking place in the poem after Laura has been tainted by her taste – and knowledge – of goblin fruit. Once the flaw is rectified there is no way to distinguish the women, who appear similar enough in the second edition that they may be feasibly considered the two profiles of one face (see Fig. 3). Gail Lynn Goldberg is particularly interesting on this aspect of the image, remarking that Gabriel uses ‘a single outline to delineate twinlike forms: the heaving bosom of one suggests the curved neck of the other’93 In the same terms, the presence of sexuality is planted both by the intimacy of the envisioned setting, but also by its inverse theme of innocence, hinted at by the framing device of the dream.
The notion of the image which has been mauled and falsified, creating division at its heart, has neat parallels with critical readings of the image. The figures can be understood as individuals, or interpreted as two interlocking halves of an emblematic whole woman, reflecting the small yin-yang figure at the top left hand corner of the page design. Fredeman states that originally a tissue guard was placed between the illustrated pages to protect them, and the idea is a pleasing parallel to Victorian notions that a virtuous sister should need protection from a promiscuous one, although I have not found a reference to this
91 Letter, Gabriel to Macmillan, 24 January 1865, quoted in Packer, p. 40.
92 D’Amico, ‘“Equal before God”: Christina Rossetti and the Fallen Women of the Highgate Penitentiary’, p. 69.
93 Goldberg, p. 147.
‘offset tissue’ in other works of criticism.94 Indeed, it proves the subversive power of applying Merleau-Ponty’s model of an immersive culture to art consumption in theorising the work of art as a body which is ‘sensible for itself’95 and will strive to touch itself, unless physically prevented.
Gabriel may be deliberately playing on, and tripping up, the anxieties of the readers who return to the image, searching for clues as to the moral of the whole work in its illustrations. He illustrates experience on one page and innocence on the other, but with what end? The reading eye moves over the pages from left to right, from frontispiece to title page, which could be a way of emphasising the moral arc of the story. Yet Kooistra astutely observes that this progression ‘replaces sororal difference with feminine sameness, thereby displacing the moral story with sexual fantasy.’96 In this way a combination of the eye, the art, Western reading practice, and the book’s composition can ‘bring us to the … beings in depth’97 because we are led through this sequence. The reader/viewer looks at, rather than down on, these figures.
The uses of shading in the title page vignette compounds this effect; the female bodies seem on the verge of toppling out, making the throat of the nearest figure seem an inviting hollow of an almost tangible body.
The sensual suggestiveness of Gabriel’s double-page spread can be seen as either a cue for one’s perception of the poem’s subject matter, or a false trail, working to warn the perceptive subject, Laura-like, of the dangers of unthinking consumption of the tempting goods of strangers, whether books, pictures, or fruit. Within either scenario, the Rossetti siblings are co-operating to destabilise the
comforting notion that art is something in which you lose yourself. In this fantasy, one is never very far from the darkest and most dangerous elements of the imagination.
The mis-cut neck serves to highlight the instinct for pleasure which is given free rein throughout the volume, as shown in the reaction of one of its first readers outside the family circle, and its earliest public audience. Macmillan’s response to ‘Goblin Market’ – inspired by that of the ‘working’ men – is informed by the poem’s ability to harness the body and mind through sensual captivation, disregarding the divisions of physical presence from imaginative experience. His letter fuses the prosaic and the fantastic in
imagining a tangible printed product, a beautiful encasing physical form whose referent is the innocence, and yet availability, of a ‘sweet’ sensual female presence.98 Goblin Market evokes this reaction in striving to dissolve its textual confines in order to make the act of artistic consumption a more aesthetically radical one, whether experienced in the head, read aloud, or envisioned through graphic representation.
94 Fredeman, p. 17.
95 Merleau-Ponty, p. 135.
96 Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration, p. 69.
97 Merleau-Ponty, p. 136.
98 Macmillan believed that the ‘prettiness’ of a book was a key quality of any book, and Kooistra makes a case that Macmillan’s output, particularly those he published with the Rossettis, were decades ahead of their time. Kooistra,
‘Christina Rossetti and Her Publishers’, p. 64.
The Rossettis confront the perceptive subject of art with fiction, destabilising and then re-establishing the means through which art keeps itself separate; the means of their creative engagement become
immaterial. The siblings were prepared to exacerbate the delay in the object’s release in striving for this, in order to make us consider more carefully our implicated position as consumers of what can be labelled female sexuality, whose thematic potency can in turn be transferred to the aesthetic exchange itself. The significance of the neck, in all the manifestations of Goblin Market, is in what it stands for interpretatively:
that it forms a site of both indulgence and restraint, and as a threshold between different sexual iconographies of mid-Victorian culture.