Mary Beth Rose. Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. xxii + 140 pp. index. $15. ISBN: 0-226-72573-1.

Now is a particularly appropriate time to read Mary Beth Rose's thoughtful exploration of heroism, as our culture struggles to define its values after the disastrous attack on the Twin Towers. Rose posits two models of heroism as having been current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first is the aristocratic warrior who takes vigorous and public action against evil; this model traditionally is gendered masculine, as in knighthood. The second is the person who can "resist and suffer with patience and fortitude" (xii); this model is private and traditionally gendered female. Rose argues that during the early modern era the second form, passive heroism, comes to take precedence over the earlier active heroism, as powerful nation-states, technology, and social and economic transformations render the individual aristocratic warrior an anachronism. Because Protestantism emphasizes interiority and the self, for example, that which is private takes on heroic stature. Marriage becomes a site for heroism, with an ongoing need for mutual patience and forbearance, values associated with women. Heroism, once considered masculine, then becomes possible for either sex.

To assess cultural values, Rose analyzes the degree to which literary protagonists occupy male and female subject positions, and for her case studies she has chosen canonical and non-canonical literature, by male and female writers, in a variety of genres. In the first chapter, Rose examines canonical Elizabethan drama, focusing on Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus, Jonson's Volpone, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Marlowe's and Jonson's plays seem to project an overwhelmingly masculine model, and Rose does not dispute that point, but she argues that, ironically, female positions are not erased, but embraced, by the protagonists. In Tamburlaine, for example, the warrior becomes an "aesthetic object" (5), traditionally a female position, and Faustus identifies himself with Semele and becomes a supplicant. To Rose, it is Macbeth that "provides the most unrelenting scrutiny and scathing critique of aristocratic male heroism in all of English Renaissance literature" (3); Macbeth murders compassion, fear, and all that is conventionally female, with horrifying results. In her second chapter, Rose examines how Queen Elizabeth constructs her royal authority in speeches by manipulating both male and female subject positions, but privileging neither, fashioning herself as ready to fight in battle and as having suffered for her beloved subjects. In the third chapter, Rose moves to autobiographical writings by Restoration women--Margaret Cavendish, Ann Fanshawe, Anne Halkett, and Alice Thornton--women who were not queens but who create themselves as heroes in their life writings. These women can and do speak out, but Rose suggests that their writings demonstrate the problems of creating female heroic identity. In her final chapter, Rose brings together Milton's Samson Agonistes, Behn's Oraonoko, and Astell's Some Reflections upon Marriage, arguing that all three offer a "critique of physical strength as the basis of male privilege" (86) and present an alternative version of heroism in which wives and slaves, victims of violence, survive. Rose calls this version the "heroics of endurance."

Rose is aware of the potential problems of her study and acknowledges them. She is concerned with her definitions and aware that she has chosen to employ selected case studies, not to inclusively survey the protagonists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature; readers will find themselves musing about how the analysis might have differed had other writers and works been chosen. Rose's arguments are sufficiently provocative that readers also may wish that she had explored the implications of her readings at greater length. Rose correctly points out that her work risks oversimplification into familiar oppositions--life and death, the violent and the victim--but she hopes to complicate our thinking, not valorize one form of heroism over another, and the book is stimulating. Is suffering automatically heroic? or even good? To Rose, the forms of heroism are united in one sense: "embedded in both the heroics of action and the heroics of endurance are the human capacity and desire to survive" (xxii).

SARA JAYNE STEEN

Montana State University