Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne.

Ronald Corthell. Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne.

Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. 227pp. (no price available) ISBN: 0-8143-2676-5.

Dorothy Stephens. The Limits of Eroticism  in Post-Petrarchan Narrative Conditional Pleasure From Spenser to Marvell.

(Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 29.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi-xii + 248pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-63064-9.

The criticial objectives of Corthell's study are impressive but daunting: first, to examine "the problematic relationship between literature and history" (14) by identifying textual practices in Donne's poetry and in contemporary literary discourse which produce "literary ideologies" in similar ways; and second (an extension of the first), to demonstrate that a distinctively "literary subjectivity" is common to both kinds of texts. Fundamentally, Corthell would identify Donne's work as the site of an ideological struggle to represent Renaissance literary subjectivity, and as an early stage in a "long historical process" (19) in which similar struggles in modern and postmodern representations of subjectivity may be read "in light of Donne as a terminus a quo" (16).

A tall order, to be sure. Not unexpectedly, the mighty historical weight that Corvell asks Donne's poetry to bear translates into a formalist methodology in which the complexities of the poems themselves, paradigmatically superimposed on later critical practices, are used to illustrate "historical process." For example, Corthell's first chapter ("Donne's New Historicism and the Practice of Satire") would connect the "processual representations" in Donne's satires with those developed for "the project of the new historicism," arguing that both attempt to reconfigure "relationships between text and power, literature and history" (26). Subsequent chapters (including "Donne's 'Disparitie': Inversion, Ideology and the Subject of Love," "Mutual Love and Literary Ideology," and "The Subject of Devotion") focus on the "interplay of desire and ideology" (17) in the construction of subjectivity. Again, Corthell would establish a hermeneutic tension by which postmodern criticism and theory (here primarily psychoanalyti cal) may be explicated in terms of Donne's devotional and love poetry, and vice versa.

There is, by any measure, a huge amount to be digested here by the reader, an effort complicated by Corthell's propensity to muffle his own analytical voice in a dense clutter of (often lengthy) references to contemporary criticism and theory, and also by his disturbing tendency to conflate the personae of Donne's poems with Donne himself. Nonetheless, Corthell's book, which has a refreshing intellectual energy, rewards study. It would seem, in fact, that the complex structure of Corthell's analysis is prompted by a desire to engage imaginatively with seminal issues from as many angles as possible. As a result, the book offers the reader some important pay-offs -- Corthell's discussion of the function of fantasy in the Holy Sonnets, to give only one example, breaks new ground. Presumably, Corthell's own critical intelligence, isolated in a less populous landscape, could have provided a great deal more.

The title of Stephens's provocatively rich study is somewhat misleading because it suggests parameters rather than uncharted territory, which is what Stephens finds in Spenser's poetry (the "limits of eroticism" are a greater concern in her later chapters on Marvell and the Cavendish sisters). In Stephens's lexicon, "conditional eroticism" suggests a "confederation of literary techniques" that Spenser generated in order to explore "the problematic sutures of gender" (8). These techniques were rooted in Spenser's ambivalent response to Petrarchism, whose lyric conventions made it possible to represent the desiring individual as complexly gendered and conflicted; in probing "the womb of [the Petrarchan] disturbance," Spenser was able to fashion a distinctively epic voice For The Faeroe Queene (5). Stephens would thus approach the "variously gendered selves" in Spenser's allegory in terms of a "poetic process" that begins with Spenser's venture into an interior, conditional space of his own in which resides "fe male figure" (Petrarch's "lady"), representing a "feminine imagination" or inner self (21, 8-9). For Spenser to "flirt" in the Freudian sense with this idea of his feminine self -- that is, to both disavow it and to invest in it -- is "to allow [him]self to be multiplied ....to occupy a large number of gendered positions in succession" (18). Spenser's engagement with this "intriguing hazard of self-dispossession" is implicit in his invention of figures throughout The Fairie Queene and also in Epithalamion and Amoretti) whose designated genders are similarly at risk (21).

In four chapters on Spenser's poetry, Stephens examines "productive exchanges" between Spenser's constructions of "masculine" and "feminine" with an eye toward tracking what happens when instances of gender slippage empower some version of feminine agency (13). Thus, to give several examples: Amoret's avoidance of Busyrane's "authorial manipulation" in Book III opens "a space for feminine desire" -- for Amoret's dalliance with Britomart, and for her intimate confidences with Aemylia in the Cave of Lust ("Into other arms: Amoret's evasion," 28, 32); in Book II, the "characteristically feminine" visions of Phantastes in Alma's Castle of Temperance "cross and recross the body's proper outlines" so that "Spenser ends up rearranging the architecture of the self" ("'Newes of devils': feminine sprights in masculine minds," 47, 52); and, in Amoretti 23, "the roles of Penelope and the suitor 'keep changing places'" so that the sonnet "enacts a flirtation with gender itself" ("Narrative flirtations," 105, 107). But it is Spenser's version of the Minerva/Medusa myth in Epithalamion, in which "the bride becomes a figure for a goddess who has completely internalized her monster," that becomes, in Stephens' powerful analysis, the encapsulating metaphor for the "monstrously beautiful interiority" that Spenser constructs as the "feminine," and that lies in the "secret interior" of his "dark allegory" ("Monstrous intimacy and arrested developments," 83, 86, 98).

Throughout her study, Stephens makes explicit reference to the poetic process by which the conditional space of Spenser's own interior -- his feminine imagination -- enables a poetry that is "in part inaccessible to Spenser himself," a poetry that from this perspective represents "a productive loss" (99, 95). Her methodology thus depends on a kind of back-tracking: she examines Spenser's textual representations of gender "dispersal and deflection" as cultural constructs, mediated by the Petrarchan tradition, but she also views them as products of a prior psychological struggle in Spenser, thereby invoking structuralist principles of psychic process (100). In short, Stephens insists--and without in any way endorsing a naive notion of authorial intentionality -- on a kind of authorial causality in which Spenser's secret interior becomes that of his poetry.

There is a course a major theoretical issue implicit here which may be negatively stated as follows: what would be lost if Stephens analyzed Spenser's poetry without reference to the mental processes of the poet? There is no easy answer to this question, but it seems fair to say that the concept of Spenser's interior struggle is obviously what fires Stephens' imagination, so that her compellingly clear and intricate analysis of the fugitive genderings in Spenser's poetry cannot be divorced from a methodology that combines synchronic and diachronic kinds of evidence. Unfortunately, Stephens never overtly addresses the theoretical implications of her methodology, which might have significantly buttressed the sophistication of her argument.

In my view, Stephens's last two chapters, on Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Cavendish Brackley's comedy The Concealed Fancies, and on Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," attempt to encompass too broad an historical sweep. Stephens would track the literary anxieties generated by the influence of Spenser's Petrarchan models on these seventeenth-century authors, but in each case she must also try to accommodate -- reductively, I think -- historical determinants that likewise shaped their Spenserian borrowings (such as the entrance of women into the literary marketplace, or the relationship of Marvell's poem to post-war national politics). However, despite the density of these chapters, Stephens' readings of the Cavendish/Brackley and Marvell texts are characteristically probing, once again demonstrating the exceptional critical acumen that is the hallmark of this fine study.