Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature.

Desire in the Renaissance collects essays that focus on the interplay between psychoanalytic theory and Renaissance literature. As the editors point out in the introduction, Freud himself often turned to the Renaissance for material for his analysis: Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ariosto, Tasso, not to mention Shakespeare. These essays reflect recent developments in the use of psychoanalytic theory in literary studies of the 1990s: Freud is still an important presence, but the dominant figure here is Lacan, even as his theories are revised by feminist film theory on the gaze and extended by Slavoj Zizek's work on ideology. One finds here as well an essay inflected by object relations theory that revises Freud's preoccupation with the father to turn its attention to the preoedipal mother (William Kerrigan on "female friends/fraternal enemies" in As You Like It). Not surprisingly, almost all the essays focus on the question of gender and sexuality, the exceptions being Natasha Korda's on class in Castiglione, and Elizabeth Bellamy's on the epic topos as "uncanny return."

In her essay on Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, Marjorie Garber examines female sexuality from a feminist perspective that counters the problematic construction of femininity in Freudian psychoanalysis. She reads Alsemero's virginity test by juxtaposing it to Freud's letters to Fliess and his studies on hysteria, as well as to the history of early modern medicine. Her striking point that the symptoms elicited by the virginity test are indeed those of orgasm leads her to find there a battle between men and women for control over women's sexuality and desire, and a possibility for woman's agency.

Conversely, Harry Berger and Juliana Schiesari both examine the construction of masculinity in relation to the representation of women. Berger brings a critical feminist eye to his earlier, extremely influential work on "conspicuous allusion" of traditional discourse in Spenser's Faerie Queene. In this self-reflexive and witty essay, he argues for Spenser's critique of what he calls "the logic of castration" through a revision of traditional discourse which defends or legitimates male dominance and desire. Yet this critique eventually suffers a "backlash": the male fear of abjection in the face of maternal power and eroticism finds expression in the Faerie Queene's retreat from the representation of women with increased and integrated powers. Schiesari's interesting essay on Machiavelli's letter to Luigi Gucciardini concerning his encounter with a grotesque old woman reads the figure as analogous to the figure of Fortune in The Prince; for Machiavelli, both figures condense economic and sexual anxieties triggered by powerful women.

Lynne Enterline and David Lee Miller examine in revisionary ways the construction of masculinity through textual tradition. Enterline, like Berger, is interested in the use and critique of prior discourse, in her case Petrarch's rewriting of Ovid. Her own view of Actaeon as the figure of exemplary linguistic castration which represents for both Ovid and Petrarch "the condition of the poetic subject" (136) revises through Lacan and Zizek Nancy Vickers's important work on the Petrarchan blazon as a defense against Actaeon's dismemberment. Miller juxtaposes Ben Jonson, Freud, and Lacan, whose common dream of the "spectral son" represents the originary dream of a culture founded on filial sacrifice, "a distinctly homosocial masculine pathos" (231), and "the unmourned, unrelinquished object of a forbidden desire" (255). This context allows Miller to counter the largely pious and sentimental readings of Jonson's celebrated poem, "On My First Sonne," by laying bare its narcissism, showing that the death of his son constitutes Jonson's own symbolic identity, and that the poem enables him to take possession of his son's death in order to defend against his own.

In their introduction, Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz implicitly answer critics of psychoanalysis who fault it for making claims that tend toward the trans-historical by emphasizing the historical differences between Renaissance England and Italy on the one hand and nineteenth-century Vienna on the other. Although Schwartz's essay on voyeurism in Paradise Lost does inflect contemporary film theory with the historicizing context of Galileo and Renaissance optics, and Finucci invokes sumptuary laws in discussing the female masquerade in Ariosto, several of the other essays apparently do not share the editors' interest in historicizing psychoanalysis; rather, their interest is in literary history or the relationship between texts. The editors would have made a stronger intervention in defending psychoanalysis against the now dominant historicist discourse if they had directly confronted the question of whether psychoanalysis must be interested in history, or alternatively, if they had affirmed the particular strength of psychoanalysis in mapping literary history.

The editors are nevertheless to be commended for bringing together such a strong collection of essays which employ psychoanalytic theory to read Renaissance texts in deft and at times dazzling ways. Especially in the focus on gender and sexuality from various perspectives, this collection constitutes an important contribution to Renaissance studies as well as to the literary use of psychoanalysis.

MIHOKO SUZUKI University of Miami