Victorian studies over the past two decades has been marked heavily by historicism, whether new or otherwise. This historical emphasis has perhaps especially been noticeable in studies of the novel, where scholars have done valuable work in opening imperial, sexual, and myriad other discourses to our attention. This scholarship has yielded a greater sense of the novel's place in everyday life, as well as an understanding of the ways that ostensibly private experiences or autonomous discourses are inflected by sociopolitical institutions. One could argue, however, as Robert Lougy does in his elegant study, Inaugural Wounds, that the recent tendency to reach immediately and exclusively for historical interpretations has had an unintended consequence: it tends to flatten our sense of the imaginative possibilities of language. The Victorian novel, Lougy suggests, is not simply another archive, endlessly convertible with anthropological, medical, legal, and other forms of prose discourse.

Inaugural Wounds is, at its core, a scrupulously close reading of five texts: Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), Thackeray's Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853), Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860), and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). Though Lougy does not make his principles of selection explicit, this constellation of texts is hardly accidental: he has chosen novels that have, as it were, ready-made historical interpretations that beckon so seductively we almost need not read the actual novel. (For example, Thackeray's title alone will send most critics reaching for their copies of Orientalism, Ruth is caught up in nineteenth-century anxieties about prostitution, etc.) In each of his chapters, then, Lougy begins by conceding the press of history on the various narratives but then proceeds to show how “when we read the books that nineteenth-century novelists wrote instead of those that we think they should have written or those that we have been told they wrote, the books often astound us not only by the resonance and range of their language, but also by their ability to take us to strange and haunting places” (2). Lougy's interpretive gamble is that the notorious “loose, baggy monsters” of the Victorian period can in fact be read with the attention and care we usually spend on poems. In the main, I think that this gamble repays handsomely: it is impossible to read this book without being convinced that we have not yet exhausted these works.

This is all well enough: no one will be surprised that a practiced literary critic should urge us to read more closely. Inaugural Wounds's sting is announced in its subtitle: “The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives” (my emphasis). Lougy urges us to consider the interpretive utility of psychoanalysis over and against more explicitly historical methods; not only this, he further asserts that the theory of desire offered by Jacques Lacan, the notoriously enigmatic and rebarbative French analyst, can help us read narratives written a century before the theory's elaboration. Lougy argues that Lacan and the novelists he considers share an interest in the difficult relationship between desire and speech. This interest is represented by the idea of an “inaugural wound”: a price that must be paid before speech, identity, or narratives are possible. This is not to be understood developmentally, but rather as a kind of fantasy, wherein subjects feel goaded into speech. They then contrast this goading with an imagined experience of plenitude or satisfaction. Lougy refuses to call this wound “castration” in order to emphasize, not limit, threat, or anxiety, but rather what the wound makes possible: speech, culture, and art.

This is obviously not a historical argument, and a certain sort of reader will at this point choose not to follow Lougy through his finely wrought readings of the novels. But I think that this would be a mistake, because their meticulous attention to literary form, and to the way these forms both give and withhold meaning, is quite canny about the limits of historical analysis. Or, to put this a slightly different way, his analyses (especially the chapter on Gaskell's Ruth and prostitution) show how paratextual materials—whether from authorial biography or sociopolitical context—can produce, rather than resolve, uncanny ambiguities in literature.

I want to close by commending two aspects of Lougy's style. First, there is something wholly winning about a text that adduces Lacan and Willie Nelson to unpack a scene in Elizabeth Gaskell (88) or invokes the “fifth little piggy” (142) in a discussion of Jude's Arabella Donn. (That Arabella flings a pig's genitals into Jude Fawley's face raises this brief reference to genius.) The other point is subtler. It is customary to begin sentences with one's own words, using them as a transition to a quotation that you want to address. Lougy constantly breaks this custom, beginning his sentences with another's words and then trailing after with his commentary. He so frequently shifts from one text to another that it can be genuinely difficult to know who is speaking. My favorite example is from the chapter on Jude, where one sentence ends with Arabella's mock complaint about the difficulty of resisting temptation, and the next sentence begins with the wry irony of Hélène Cixous, with only a parenthetical reference separating the two (162). This method, because it implicates the voices of his theoretical frames within the fiction he interprets, clarifies the value of those frames. Beginning sentences in this way with such regularity induces a kind of interpretive delirium, because one is always doubling back to make sure that one has attributed the quotation correctly, much less construed it accurately. It is as if this delirium is the analytic tool with which Lougy wishes to return us to our readings of Victorian fiction, because it forces us to read the actual words on the page with renewed intensity. It is only a slight stretch to say that the form of Lougy's citational practice exactly models the inaugural wounds of his title in at least one respect: they incite interpretation.