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Abstract
"Prisons and Prisms: Edward Burne-Jones's Art of Reflection" explores Burne-Jones's work as a species of creative nostalgia that attempts to recuperate both personal and cultural losses. This work relies on Julia Kristeva's conception of a form of depression that occurs logically and chronologically prior to primary narcissism. It is experienced not as internalized hatred against the frustrating maternal but as fundamental ontological despair. With respect to the construction of the work of art as a means to relieve such melancholy, Kristeva employs Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and allegoresis as it is articulated in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Kristeva contextualizes Benjamin's allegory as a means by which despair and decay can be rehabilitated into beauty and plenitude. Allegory in this schema both retains the material and discursive traces of its earlier incarnations yet is thrown open into unlimited future polysemy even as it clings to an imaginary auratic past. Burne-Jones's work demonstrates how allegorical mourning for the remnants of an imaginary past he loved and located in quattrocento art, Greek mythology, and medieval romance could be reinvented for the late-Victorian present. He both repeats that which he cannot bear to lose but which never existed and alters it for the future in a complex creative visual anamnesis. Burne-Jones, however, escapes the psychological implosion and metaphysical peril such obsessive rumination always implies. He makes pictures that ask for ekphrastic partnering. His work thus becomes a communal art in which both artist and spectator must re-member the past in order to preserve and to reinvent its beauties and moralities for the future.
