In her engaging and eminently readable Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs, Duc Dau inverts what I consider the default relationship between the topic of a Victorian studies book and the range of materials explored to elucidate that topic. Generally, books examine a broad and abstract topic (such as my own exploration of "missionary cosmopolitanism") through a narrowly curated range of evidentiary materials (in my case, mostly novels). Dau instead charts a focused and specific topic through a vast and broad array of media: novels, poems, essays, and an unpublished journal, but also paintings, illustrations, stained glass windows, and even a decorated piano. The result is an unexpected reception history of how the Song of Songs resonated with the Victorian writers and artists who often operated at the margins of social acceptability.

What the book deliberately doesn't provide is a single, sustained argument regarding the significance of the Song of Songs to the Victorian imagination. Certainly, it draws broader patterns: the sensuality of the Song of Songs is rich fodder for imagining diverse forms of sexual relationships; the power dynamics between the Shulamite and her beloved can occasion a rethinking of gender dynamics; the imagery of walled gardens leads to explorations of the ways "safe" enclosures might generate new selves and new modes of self-expression. But to try to condense these various uses of the Song of Songs into one definitive reading would be antithetical to Duc's more fundamental argument in Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: that there isn't any one way the Song of Songs was interpreted, used, or referenced in Victorian artistic culture, precisely because the Song of Songs was a key means of unchaining the Bible more broadly. Duc's use of "unchaining" is here drawn from Hugh S. Pyper's The Unchained Bible: Cultural Appropriations of Biblical Texts (2012), which metaphorizes the medieval practice of chaining Bibles to English churches (to protect these Bibles from theft or vandalism). The implication is that once "unchained," in Pyper's words, "The Bible proves to be a text that gets everywhere" (qtd. in Dau 2). Set loose in the world, its meanings proliferate and transform, often in unexpected and unsanctioned ways.

As the Bible's only love poem--one that explicitly celebrates sensual joys and sexual intimacies--the Song of Songs is for Dau a "prime candidate for unchained, and more specifically, counter-readings by women, same-sex attracted authors, and artists, celibates, effeminate men, and those outside the established church" (7). With the advent of higher criticism, dominant readings of the Song as an allegory for the love between God and the Church made room for the more literal possibility that the Song was precisely what it appeared to be: a poetic consecration of romantic desire. On these grounds, some readers, like the Scottish Unitarian minister William Maccall, called the Song of Songs "the chief stench in the Bible" with its "hot amatory breathings" (qtd. in Dau 5). Nonetheless, the Song was still "undoubtedly the canonical Judeo-Christian book on love" (12). The text's strange status in this regard, as a book at once canonical and potentially controversial, made it especially potent for Victorian reinterpretations. As such, Dau argues, it proved fertile ground for queer and feminist reworkings of biblical themes, a site where one could think through various constellations of love, sex, celibacy, and matrimony that fell somewhat outside of Victorian cultural norms.

Dau's five chapters trace these constellations. The first chapter examines how Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy differently deploy the Song of Songs in their novelistic explorations of marriage. Because the Song of Songs is the only book in the Bible written primarily from a woman's perspective about her own feelings toward her beloved, it offered prime material for thinking through a Christian discourse that conceived of romantic relationships as built on equality and mutual respect, rather than wifely subordination to patriarchal authority. In Jane Eyre, argues Dau, this Christian interpretation of marriage is embodied in Jane and Rochester's union, a union that also opens fresh horizons for religious devotion. "An awareness of typological interpretations of bridal imagery in the Bible," she explains, suggests that "St. John's marriage to Christ [is] the typological fulfilment of Jane Eyre's marriage to Rochester" (28). But where St. John's Revelation-inspired devotion focuses primarily on the life to come, Jane hews more closely to the Song of Songs' model: her companionate marriage creates a "new realm of possibilities" centered on the beauties of nature, one which invites "sensory gratification and a communion with the outer world" (30). Hardy also referred to the Song of Songs to illustrate an ideal of companionate marriage. But Hardy's initial attraction to this ideal, Dau shows, gave way to skepticism about both marriage and the Song of Songs. This is expressed through Sue Brideshead, a character who embodies the "the perils of marriage and biblical exegesis if they both produce constraints on individual freedoms" (41).

The second chapter turns to visual culture, analyzing Edward Burne-Jones's surprising focus on the Song's scenes of violence in his stained-glass windows, and Phoebe Anna Traquair's more joyful engagement with the book's themes (63). Burne-Jones, the chapter contends, is a "literal window into the world of gendered and sexual violence, not just in the era but also the Bible ... invit[ing] the viewer to draw a parallel" between the two (53). By contrast, Traquair, an artist who took part in the Edinburgh Arts and Crafts movement, depicted figures from the Song of Songs alongside the god Pan on a Steinway piano--a "canvas," Dau observes, "to convey both literal and musical art" (60). Harmonizing sight and sound, as well as biblical and classical images, Traquair's Song of Songs "amplifies the message of harmonious union between husband and wife, nature and humans, the soul and the divine" (63).

Chapter three explores how Augusta Theodosia Drane and Christina Rossetti found in the Song of Songs resources for imagining female religious community and celibate devotion. For Drane, a Catholic convert and prioress, the Song of Songs provided imagery for expressing the difficulties and rewards of religious vocation, often through military metaphors that helped her reconceive the "lover nun" as a "masculinized" spiritual warrior (72). Rossetti's "Goblin Market" meanwhile emerges in Dau's reading as a complex engagement with the Song's themes of sweetness and sisterhood. The Shulamite is called "my sister, my spouse" in the Song of Songs, and Rossetti's poem meditates on the "vital importance of the sororal bond as if it were a marriage" (88). Ultimately, Dau suggests, the poem privileges the sanctity of sisterhood over earthly marriage.

The fourth chapter examines how Simeon Solomon and John Gray queered the Song of Songs through their artistic and poetic engagements. Solomon's homoerotic art, for Dau, reveals how the artist used hand-holding and gesture to subvert heteronormative readings of the Song, in the process connecting "concepts of Jewishness, the effeminatus, and Hellenism" (93). She then turns to Gray's poetry to show how the Catholic convert priest used the Song's wa?f style (describing the beloved's body from head to toe) to describe Christ's crucified body. Pierced and wounded, Gray's "feminized body of Christ" draws on medieval Catholic imagery to suggest how the crucified body "draws" in and "encloses" the soul (112, 114).

The final chapter considers how Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (publishing as Michael Field) employed the Song of Songs to articulate how romantic love flourishes through, rather than despite, an awareness of mortality. Here Dau contends that "the Song of Songs is one of the great unexplored texts linking Michael Field's pagan and Catholic periods" (122). Rather than marking a rupture, their conversion to Catholicism represented a natural extension of their ideas: "Michael Field's singular religious beliefs had always incorporated elements of the Bible including the Song of Songs. In fact, the women's conversion allowed for a continuation of many of their preexisting ideas into a Catholic framework" (122). Drawing on their journal Works and Days and other unpublished material, Dau traces how they interpreted the Song in relation to their partnership, their beloved dog, Whym Chow, and, eventually, their awareness of their own impending deaths. Dau's theological focus offers interesting possibilities for dialogue with recent Michael Field scholarship--for instance, Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo's edited collection, Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (2019) and, especially, Carolyn Dever's Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (2022)--but, regrettably, Dau's book doesn't engage with these studies. The omission is striking given the potential friction between Dau's reading of Michael Fields' conversion as affirming their eternal devotion as "spouses in Paradise" (qtd. in Dau 137) and Dever's argument that the Catholic Church "externaliz[ed] Michael Fields' passion rather than consolidating it ... channel[ing] love outside married intimacy in favor of individual intimacies" (Dever 183).

It's worth mentioning that Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance runs up against one of the primary limitations with academic publishing: it's tough to appreciate the book's interpretations of Traquair's decorated piano, Burne-Jones's stained-glass windows, or Solomon's inks and watercolors without seeing these objects. The limitation feels especially acute given how several of Dau's arguments rely on close analysis. Dau's descriptions are precise and evocative, but still, I wish there were more integrated access to her visual evidence. This limitation brings me to another of the book's structural curiosities. The most substantial discussion of what the book doesn't examine appears not in the introduction but within the coda. Here, Dau lists the important areas her study necessarily excludes, including working-class engagements with the Song (particularly through hymns), dramatic adaptations, pornography, and nationalist and Jewish interpretations of the book. The choice to leave the announcement of these omissions to the end is a potentially productive one, as it reads as a list of future avenues to explore. In other words, what could have been a sort of apology for book's limitations is reframed as an invitation to continue thinking about the topic.

While the book moves rapidly across different media and artists--sometimes leaving a reader wishing for more depth and less speed (such as in chapter five)--Dau makes a couple of profound contributions to the way we understand Victorian religion and literature. First, she highlights how the Song of Songs' ambiguous position in Victorian culture--at once spiritual and sensual, traditional and subversive--enabled artists and writers to discover counter-discourses within the biblical canon itself. More broadly, she demonstrates how secular aesthetic innovations were not necessarily opposed to religious texts and traditions, but sometimes emerged precisely through a creative engagement with these sacred sources. In these respects, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance effectively demonstrates how reception studies can reveal the persistence of religious thought in Victorian culture, and, even more, its capacity for continuous, radical reinvention.

Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Massachusetts.