| dc.contributor.author | Waldman, Suzanne Maureen. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:38:46Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2003 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2003 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ83709 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55934 | |
| dc.description | This thesis explores convergences between the presentation of the subject in works by Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the subject of psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Jacques Lacan. Underlying this study of intersections between theory and art is an assumption that these two bodies of writing share a dualist notion of the subject mediated by Christianity and European Romanticism. Both Rossettis, in their own ways, consequently elaborate how a person is split between the function of desire that Lacan identifies as the imaginary order of the subject, and the drive to transcend desire that Lacan characterizes as the symbolic order of the subject. | en_US |
| dc.description | Two of the chapters in the thesis address CR's representations of the symbolic and imaginary orders, and two address DGR's representations of these orders. In the first chapter, I observe a quest for symbolic transcendence in CR's poetry, describing how she attempts to sublimate her desire into religious dedication through a number of confessional and analytical strategies. In the second chapter, I examine outbreaks of libido in CR's gothic and fantasy writings, which feature characters who become enthralled by ferocious figures of the sort that Lacan and Kristeva identify with the narcissistic super-ego. In the third chapter, I analyze DGR's visual and poetic responses to Dante's writings, finding that DGR swerves away from Dante's example of symbolic sublimation and instead valorizes the narcissistic passion that Dante condemns to the first circle of hell. In the fourth chapter, however, I observe that DGR seeks to attract the symbolic gaze of the Other by offering images of women as "lure[s]" that will "arouse the desire of God" or men (Lacan). | en_US |
| dc.description | The thesis weaves together perceptions of the human psyche offered by DGR and CR---two exceptionally nuanced and candid analysts of human desire---with readings of latent psychodynamics in their works. In order to elaborate both the manifest and latent subjects of the Rossettis' works, the thesis gives attention to the literary and religious influences they drew on as well as the historical and biographical contexts that formed them. Meanwhile, it proposes ways in which reading the Rossettis' texts as both psychoanalytically speculative and expressive can complement, as well as challenge, prior historicist, biographical, feminist and classic Freudian readings. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2003. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | The demon and the damozel: Lacanian dynamics of desire in the works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
