Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England.

Naomi J. Miller. Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. xi + 279 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 0-8131-1964-2.

Naomi Miller frames her study of early seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and prose writer Mary Wroth with two resonant tropes. "Changing the subject" suggests early modern women's attempts to transform their subordinated position into a platform for cultural engagement; it marks the critical shift towards gender as a key category of analysis; and it embraces the poststructuralist critique of the autonomous, implicitly male, subject of liberal humanism. "Figurations of gender" oscillates between diechronic and synchronic registers to suggest the dialectical formation of gendered subjectivity. Together these tropes model a historical approach that corrects essentialist tendencies in French feminist elaborations of woman and a theoretical approach that counters the new historicist (re)marginalization of women.

Each chapter moves from non-literary texts to the canonical triumvirate of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare to the relatively neglected works of Marguerite de Navarre, Aemilia Lanyer, and Elizabeth Cary, each time positing Wroth's oeuvre as a touchstone for the multifaceted, often contested, formation of the gendered subject. In her introductory chapter, Miller deliberately situates Wroth outside the "Sidney circle," a critical paradigm that promotes a "Noah's ark" pairing of "minor" women writers with "major" male figures (8). Alternatively, she highlights Luce Irigaray's model of woman as "other in herself" rather than the mirrored Other of man. Though Miller's recursive technique begins to lapse into redundancy by the end of her study, her attention to bonds between women allows her to represent Wroth, along with other early modern women writers, as a subject of change rather than an essential victim.

Subsequent chapters focus on early modern women's multivalent roles as wives, mothers, rulers, and writers. Chapter two situates early modern women in relation to male lovers-cure-husbands by focusing on that shady woman whose silence elicits phallocentric desire, the sonneteer's "dark lady." As Miller convincingly argues, early modern women writers such as Wroth challenged the containment of the "dark lady" by transforming the silenced object of phallocentric discourse into an "object who speaks" her own desire. Nonetheless, the complete absence of attention to the racialized configuration of the "dark lady" significantly compromises Miller's analysis, particularly since Kim Hall has established the imbrication of gender and race in early modern subject formation with specific reference to Mary Wroth.

In her third chapter, Miller contests the critical assumption that a monolithic "fatherly authority" governed early modern domestic relations by moving from women's subordinated position vis-a-vis family patriarchs to their supportive, though often ambivalent, relations with other women. Chapter four, which emphasizes Elizabethan "gynecocratic rhetoric" in the writings of Jacobean men and women (109), cleverly undermines the liberal humanist norm of the "sovereign subject" by stressing the unstable subject position of women who vacillated between sovereignty and subjection. Chapter five considers women not only as writers but as readers, especially readers of women's writing. Miller perhaps goes too far in positing the role of author as "a perpetually alternative venue for 'changing the subject'" (143); however, she presents a persuasive case for the decisive role of gendered audience response. The final chapter consolidates Miller's ongoing concern with bonds "between women" by situating early modern female friendships within Eve Sedgwick's continuum of homosocial bonding. Miller's glib dismissal of the possibilities for female homoeroticism within female homosocial bonds nevertheless constitutes a serious evasion of the irreducible difference between sexuality and gender.

Miller begins her study by stressing the "long-range consequences" of the hostile 1621 suppression of Wroth's published prose romance (11), which was not reprinted until 1995. She concludes with an anecdote illustrating the continued suppression of Wroth as a key figure for early modern studies, epitomized by a hostile reviewer's response to Miller's 1990 grant proposal for the present book: "studies of Wroth are 'already an overworked field" (234). In 1990, as Miller documents, not one book-length study on Wroth had been issued, and a significant number of the articles on Wroth were by Miller herself. With its innovative methodology and scholarly breadth, Miller's present contribution to the barely tapped field of Wroth studies promises to become a touchstone not only for early modern women's writing, but for the related fields of early modern and women's studies.

BERNADETTE ANDREA West Virginia University