The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (review)

Suzanne Waldman’s first book, The Demon and the Damozel: The Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is a psychoanalytic study of the work of the Rossetti siblings. Waldman’s premise is that “the common factor structuring both Christina Rossetti’s and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s presentation of human experience and the psychoanalytic presentation of the subject is that of an integral duality” (1). This duality, explains Waldman, is differently experienced for each sibling. For Christina, duality falls within the Christian framework that pits “world against heaven” (2). For Dante Gabriel, duality is expressed as a conflict between the self and the world, or the individual freedoms of the subject and his social duties and ties.

These observations do not distinguish Waldman’s work. The tensions between devotional and worldly desire in Christina’s work are self evident, and have been well examined. And Jerome McGann in particular has analyzed in depth Dante Gabriel’s ambivalent relationship to social institutions and the constrictions they represent. Waldman’s insistence, however, that Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva provide the most helpful lens through which to view these tensions and frictions is original and gives her book a set of tensions of its own.

Waldman briefly justifies her use of this theory on historical grounds: “A congruence between nineteenth-century art and twentieth-century theory in this case is neither ahistorical nor coincidental, given the range of formative contexts shared between the Rossettis and psychoanalytic theory” (3). This claim goes undeveloped, unfortunately, and we are often driven to read poems as prototheory, rather than shown how the two emerge from shared historical conditions. Furthermore, Waldman’s psychoanalytic framework pushes her toward biographical readings of texts that limit social and historical understandings of the Rossettis’ themes, to say nothing of their aesthetic concerns. The poems are read largely for their content, with little attention paid to form, prosody, figuration, sound, repetition, or other poetic devices.

Chapter 1 takes on Christina’s devotional and love poetry. Exploring how she “transgresses the boundary between religious and sexual love” (10), Waldman argues that Christina sublimates amorous desire in spiritual fulfillment. Redefining a Christian process (in which spiritual desires replace worldly ones) in Lacanian terms, Waldman writes, “This . . . process . . . is consistent with Lacan’s view that in accepting the castration of one’s drives, one finds ultimate jouissance ‘on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire’” (21). But we could as fruitfully reinterpret Christian spiritual growth as the Lacanian “castration of one’s drives” in the work of any number of Christian poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Still, in this first chapter, Lacan does lead Waldman to some exciting conclusions, as when she argues that Christina’s linguistic ambiguities and concisions “permit the direction of desire toward symbolic ends” (22). In poems such as “Confluents” (1865 “Confluents” (1876) and “If I Had Words” (1864 and “If I Had Words” (1896), the speaker’s minimalism moves toward “the end of language,” which draws her close to the Other, who is beyond language. “The purging of extra words,” as Waldman puts it, “reflects the purging of self that Christina Rossetti’s speaker seems to be trying to achieve through her quest for sublimation” (24).

In her second chapter, on Christina’s gothic and fantasy writings, Waldman argues that Christina distinguishes between “benign and malignant internal authorities” in much the same way Lacan does when he delineates between the “ego-ideal” (which elevates the subject) and the “superego” (which constrains the subject) (41). Waldman understands the demonic figures and grotesques (beasts, goblins, demon lovers) that show up in some of Christina’s early writings as emblems of the Lacanian superego. In keeping with the effort to read Christina’s work as exemplifying her maturation, Waldman concludes this...