"O Wanton Eyes Run Over: Repetition and Fantasy in Christina Rossetti

How do we reconcile the Christina Rossetti of Goblin Market with the Christina Rossetti of "The Lowest Place"? In order to explore the extraordinary conflict between religion and sexuality Rossetti's poetry expresses, this paper will read Rossetti through the writings of Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalytic interpretations of poets like Christina Rossetti have become unfashionable in a critical milieu that prefers to emphasize the self-reflexive, ironic, and parodic possibilities in Rossetti's writing. Such readings explicitly or implicitly rely on the image of Victorian poetry presented by Isobel Armstrong, who sees it

explor[ing] expressive psychological forms simultaneously as psychological conditions and as constructs. . . . often initiat[ing] a debate between . . . a subject-centered or expressive and a phenomenological or analytical reading, but above all [drawing] attention to the act of representation. ¹

Because of its "phenomenological" interest in criticizing mental events and the discourses in which they are couched, Armstrong suggests, Victorian poetry is fundamentally an "agnostic," "skeptical," ironic, and self-reflexive form (pp. 13-15). Armstrong as well as many Rossetti scholars thus account for the strange heterogeneity of Christina Rossetti's lyrics by seeing her juxtaposing their discourses to produce aesthetic and critical effects. ² But the problem with such readings, as others have noticed, is that the faith Rossetti avowed was not entirely compatible with the production of aesthetic ironies and emancipatory critiques, especially where these would put Christianity itself into question. ³ Raymond Chapman has described Rossetti as a major practitioner of Tractarianism, in which poetry was used as a threshing ground for the higher purpose of faith, not an avenue for its evaluation. ⁴ Tractarian writing set itself against the unbounded critical project of the Enlightenment, and sought a more confessional and subjective "self-revelation" (p. 182). On the other hand, the concept of the double poem was developed by Robert Langbaum on behalf of Robert Browning, who, as both Langbaum and Armstrong explain, was deeply rooted in the Enlightenment project that equated authority with critical objectivity. ⁵

The confessional self-revelation Tractarianism undertook to produce is arguably closer to the self-knowledge produced in psychoanalysis than to the knowledge of discourses the ironic Browning left his critics to unpack. Psychoanalytical subjects, as Lacan explains, are not split "between the unconscious and the conscious"--like the subject of the double poem can be seen to be, split between a naïve speaker and a knowing author. Rather, the schism in the psychoanalytic subject is between two conflicting psychic functions:

something which is repressed and tends simply to repeat itself, that is to say speech which insists . . . and something which is an obstacle to it, and which is organized in another manner, namely the ego . . . the imaginary. ⁶

These two functions correspond to Lacan's categories of the "symbolic order" and the "imaginary order" in the subject, each of which is partially repressed. These two functions, though they operate at cross purposes to each other, are both essential to human existence. The symbolic order is the order of language and culture that links us in a linguistic and cultural community; the imaginary order is the order of spontaneous attraction and aggression that seeks more basic animal goals such as survival and reproduction. The goal of psychoanalysis is to reveal the unconscious aspects of these functions, each of which partly determines the nature of our desires.

Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests, delivers up repressed aspects of each of these drives by way of the other. An analysand in the Lacanian practice is induced first to "symboliz[e] the imaginary . . . facet [of the subject's desire] . . . which was non-integrated, suppressed, repressed" when her desires were subjected to the symbolic order. ⁷ For Lacan our identities and desires are first formed spontaneously in relation to the images of others around us; but when we learn language the symbolic order begins to shape our desires along socially prescribed lines, such as gender. ⁸ Some of the original...