Suzanne Waldman. The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Athens, OH; Ohio University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0821418161 Price: US $39.95

Suzanne Waldman's basic assumption throughout The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti is that the alignment of two powerful discourses, "psychoanalytic theory and Victorian literature," yields valuable results (6). Aiming to rescue the Rossetti siblings from pathologizing readings that dismiss Christina as a victim of "severe Christian commitments" (5) and Dante Gabriel as an inveterate sensualist, Waldman proceeds with great subtlety to read the Rossettis' art in terms of Jacques Lacan's theory of cleavage between the imaginary and symbolic orders and Julia Kristeva's re-articulation of this split in terms of desire and symbolic law. Beginning with Christina Rossetti, Waldman divides the poems into two broad categories: devotional lyrics that pursue transcendence in relation to a divine Other and gothic narratives that feature temptations and guilty attachments to demonic others. A willingness to view Rossetti as a latter-day mystic, provides the impetus for a Lacanian description of the devotional poetry's "tendency toward sublimation" (10). The poem "Confluents," with its shuttling between referents that are either "suggestively erotic" or "determinedly spiritual," is said to mime precisely the "semiotic actions" Kristeva finds in the biblical Song of Solomon (18). For poems about spiritual anxiety, including such pieces as the beautiful "Weary in Well-Doing," Waldman invokes both Kristeva's warning that religious desire can undergo "slippage" into merely narcissistic yearning and Lacan's wry prediction that spiritual disappointment is inevitable given that "the Other does not respond" (20). In her somewhat unconventional comparison of Christina Rossetti's sonnet sequences, Waldman views Monna Innominata as a narrative of failed sublimation that concludes with the lady "mourning for earthly joys" (27). In contrast, Later Life rigorously analyzes "the empty nature of her desire," but comes to regard it as dispensable and succeeds in sublimating it "into a religious quest" (33). Although Rossetti's consistent theme is attempted self-transcendence, some of her best-known work considers guilty submission to what Waldman, in an arresting Lacanian phrase, calls the "ferocious figure" (39). Generated by the super-ego, this false authority figure appears variously as the beast of "My Dream," the cruel seducer of "Love from the North," and the commanding tempters of "Goblin Market." Reading these narratives against the background of the devotional lyrics, Waldman observes how their "glamorization of desire contests with condemnation of it" and how, as an ensemble, they reveal Rossetti's program for "becoming a writer who is master of her demonology" (43). On turning to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Waldman first examines the revisionary tendency of the paintings based on Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia and La Vita Nuova. Her choice of this coherent body of pictorial work, allows discussion to focus on the appeal of Dantean erotics for a painter bent on exploring the imaginary Order, that is to say, the psychic Order where "libidinal investments are dominant" (71). Close analysis of the watercolor triptych, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (1855) emphasizes that the right-hand panel's depiction of the lovers embracing in hell conveys none of the "misery" recorded in Dante's poem (75). On the contrary, Rossetti's pair is still caught up in what Lacan calls the "specular mirage" (75), his label for the effect of the passionate glances that, in Francesca's account, propelled the couple into their affair (Inferno 5.130-38). In this reading, the painting's central figure, the onlooking Virgil, represents "the regulating gaze of the symbolic Other" whom Paolo and Francesca adulterously defied and are, Rossetti shows, defying still (76). The chapter's chief interest, however, is Rossetti's evolving interpretation of Dante's love of Beatrice. The dynamics of the represented gaze is a significant feature …