Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell.

Spirited by a conviction that "the usual truism of women's objectification by art need[s] to be rethought" (8), Barbara Estrin's energetic study theorizes and demonstrates a way of "reading the female consciousness back into" English Renaissance poems (14). Although to my mind Estrin's arguments are sometimes theoretically overwrought (especially in the introduction), her many skillful readings of poems succeed in challenging the influential critical assumption that the Petrarchan lyric always silences and objectifies women. Her readings are also important in their detailed attention to imagery, plot, and the representation of subjectivity in several important poems by Petrarch, Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. Further, Estrin sometimes contextualizes her readings in analyses of the visual arts, challenging her readers to think broadly about viewer and reader position.

With the support of Jean-Francois Lyotard's genre theory and Judith Butler's gender theory, Estrin posits Petrarchism "as a series of anamorphic representations imbricated by three principal spaces: the main plot, with Laura as Daphne - or woman who denies sexuality; and the two subplots with Laura as Eve, or woman who returns sexuality, and Laura as Mercury, or woman who invents her own life by escaping configuration altogether" (9). In the first section of the book, Estrin demonstrates how these multiple plots and subjectivities work in Petrarch. In the remaining three sections, she demonstrates how English Renaissance poets "inherited the subversions" of Laura-Eve and Laura-Mercury along with the main plot (14).

These Lauras are decidedly alluring and admirable; readers might even find themselves rooting for them, as it were. But readers may also find themselves frustrated in trying to grasp the extent of agency Estrin claims for them. For example, Estrin reads line 82 of Petrarch's Rime 23, "I'non son forse chi tu credi" ["I am not perhaps who you think I am"] as if it were in a dialogue or drama, and so really Laura's line, not the poet-lover quoting Laura in a lyric poem (65). She uses the line to demonstrate how Laura "privileges the world of poetry to herself, appearing as author and critic. As competitor, Laura threatens Petrarch and immediately wins. She is Mercury and Diana, always able to turn her victimizer into a victim" (68). Reading Donne's "The Broken Heart" and "A Valediction: Of Weeping," Estrin argues that "the imagined listening woman, who is herself aware of the way women are conventionally idealized, shapes the poem she is in and future poems the poet might write" (152).

Estrin prepares readers for these claims in her introductory explanation: "Once the originating poet imagines the imagining woman, she (in turn) proceeds to probe in directions not yet revealed by - but nevertheless implicit in - the original representation" (10). However, I found myself continually unsatisfied by the lack of distinction made between the existence of the originating poet and the existence of the "imagining woman" imagined by this poet. How can their subjectivities have parity if she has her origins in his imagination?

Readers equipped with their own post-structural convictions about language, genre, and gender, might answer this question easily, and might welcome the extreme figurative phrasing and the shifting attributions of agency that suggest the imagined Lauras' real power. But other readers - and many with a deconstructive bent as well - will find Estrin's observations most useful when she emphasizes the agency of the speaker, not the Lauras - his triumphs in transforming his state of mind and sense of self by imagining, empathizing with, fearing, or otherwise acknowledging the otherness of the woman. For example, Estrin emphasizes his agency when she argues convincingly that the "gift" of Donne's "The Dreame" "is that the man begins to imagine 'excess of joy' as if he understood that boundaries - the difference between 'he' and 'she' can be suspended" (200). Of Donne's "Elegy: Change," she observes insightfully: "The remarkable change of 'Change' is that the distrustful 'I' at the opening speaks the exuberant lines of the conclusion . . . . The misogynist becomes the woman he initially challenged" (212).

In brief, Estrin often demonstrates beautifully how lyric subjectivity grapples with questions of gender. But at some points in the book, I wish she addressed more fully both the importance and the limitations of her most extreme claims about shifting subjectivities, beyond her acknowledgment that her work is a kind of over-reading, in Carol Thomas Neely's sense (15), and her disclaimer that her view of Petrarchism "does not deny that most Petrarchan sequences commodify the female body" (314). Still, Laura contributes vividly to the current project of examining our assumptions about the representations of women in lyric poetry; for this reason, and for its generous, intelligent readings of poems, the book will prove valuable to scholars of gender studies, genre studies, and English and continental early modern poetry.

ELIZABETH HARRIS SAGASER