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In Victorian studies, as in other fields of literary and cultural studies, the predominance of various kinds of historicism has tended to lead to the devaluation of psychoanalytic approaches to literature. Christopher Lane's Burdens of Intimacy argues for the continued importance and relevance of a psychoanalytic approach, claiming that nineteenth-century literature's understanding of the unconscious “repeatedly challenges a strictly materialist understanding of identity” (xi). More specifically, he argues against the notion of psychic life as “an effect of cultural pressure or historical events” (xviii) and for the ways in which “desire conveys and masks internal difficulties” (xi), chiefly “the insurmountable division between consciousness and the unconscious that belies all hope of unifying personal objectives” (xiii). Thus, rather than seeing the cultural regulation of sexuality as the primary force thwarting desire between men in Victorian novels, Lane uses psychoanalysis to demonstrate the complexities and ambiguities of desire and identification. For him “sexual desire is not constructed as such, but is instead the point of identificatory failure” (xiii).
Lane makes his argument through seven chapters of eloquent and subtle readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Chapter One, on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham, examines the revisions of this novel made between 1828 and 1840. The revisions tend to masculinize an initially effeminate dandy figure. Rather than reading them purely as the effect of increasing cultural intolerance of effeminacy, Lane focuses on the novel's critical engagement with the very process of repression itself, and the impossibility built into that process. Chapter Two, on the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's novel, Lesbia Brandon, argues for Swinburne's understanding of the unconscious and the ways in which it complicates his understanding of desire. Chapter Three, on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, is one o