Entering a "Goblin Market:" Visuality, Commodities, and Gendered Desire in Mid-Victorian Fiction

Abstract

The mid-Victorian world was overrun with commodities. In the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851, spectacular display of commodity goods was not only a retail strategy, but it also prioritized visual consumption as a means to interact with objects. In this thesis, I examine gendered commodity consumption and visuality in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. These authors each respond to the demand for visual consumption of commodities, representing female characters whose consumer habits challenge the boundaries between subject and object. I approach all three cases through Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish. For the women in these texts, fetishizing a commodity by projecting agency onto an object creates a delusion that affects their engagement with the real world. Similarly, by displaying fetishized objects like jewelry on their body, these women are themselves visually consumed and objectified. This objectification is dangerous, as it counters their status as subjects and threatens to diminish their subjectivity. Each text also proposes a solution to the alienating effects of commodity fetishism. I explore sympathy, a term used consciously by George Eliot, as a way of resisting the logic of a capitalist market that enforces patriarchal norms of gender, class, and sexuality by opening the possibility for affective relationships. Visuality is central to this project, and I discuss the illustrated editions of each of these works as a means of visually representing the text to readers. I explore how illustrations offer their own interpretation of the text they accompany to critique visual consumption within the narrative.