Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric.

Pamela S. Hammons. Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. x + 188 pp. index. bibl. $69.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0780-1.

Sidney Sondergard. Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern Women Writers.

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2002. 188 pp. index. bibl. $38.50. ISBN: 1-57591-059-4.

In their studies of canonical and less canonical texts by early modern women, both Hammons and Sondergard explore questions of textual authority and gender roles in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. Both authors are politically astute and historically knowledgeable; however, neither writes with an overdetermined agenda. In fact, a distinguishing quality of both books is the authors' providing of space and light to the primary texts themselves.

Hammons's study has three parts: "the widespread phenomenon of child loss poetry; the extemporaneous ballads, originally performed in public, of radical sectarian Anna Trapnel; and 'Book M,' a virtually unexplored commonplace book composed and compiled by Katherine Austen" (3). This eclectic group of texts enables Hammons to "challenge assumptions that have limited the study of early modern women's writing (such as anachronistic gynocritical assumptions)" and to demonstrate how these poets "exert poetic resistance by employing various lyric traditions to change or to reconceive damaging, restrictive conventions that shape their social lives" (3, 12). Here I comment on two of Hammons's three main chapters.

By Hammons's own account, Anna Trapnel is "the poet at the very heart of this study" (166) and indeed, Hammons's engages us in the dazzling ironies of Trapnel's intense career as poet and visionary. As Hammons explains, "the crisis of authority that permeated the social order during the English Revolution was inextricably linked to uncertainties and conflicting views concerning how to read divine signs" (62-63). Members of this society had no sure way to distinguish between the pure, empty passive vehicle of God's energy and voice--the female prophet--and her opposite, the outrageously ambitious, self-aggrandizing woman, speaking on her own authority with her own political agenda--the female preacher. Trapnel's "capacity to play the role of a prophet was instrumental to her ability to access a public forum" (55) argues Hammons, as she deftly brings us into this world of desperate passions, gender stereotypes, and high political stakes. But she also insists on reading Trapnel as a poet, one who weaves together poetic convention, political and religious critique, and biblical themes, particularly from the Song of Songs and David's Psalms.

In her chapter on child loss poetry, Hammons describes vividly a culture in which motherhood was mythologized, idealized, feared, and demonized, one in which many believed women's acts of imagination during pregnancy "could influence the shape of their unborn babies" (165), one in which "a mother-poet's agency in writing a poem on child loss" could easily "be conflated with her supposed agency in ensuring (or not) the life of her child" (13). In this context, Hammons argues, poet-mothers such as Gertrude Aston Thimelby, Katherine Austen, Katherine Philips, and Mary Carey crafted different strategies of resistance. In Thimelby's elegy for her child, for example, the poet-mother "resists blame for her child's death by excluding from this poem the displays of skill she employs elsewhere" (39). In Mary Carey's "Upon ye Sight of My abortive Birth," the poet-mother scorns herself as being "'voyd of life, and feature' ... her own 'poore despised creature' (2,1), and God is ultimately the creative agent--the miscarrying mother--behind her neglected state of being" (53). Scholars of lyric poetry might wish for a fuller account of the English elegy and seventeenth century plain style as context for Hammons's central readings (though she does discuss skillfully canonical child-loss poems by Jonson and Milton). Still, Hammons's carefully researched, provocative discussions will prove valuable for scholars of the period and absolutely essential to future studies of familial elegy and early modern women's writing.

In Sharpening Her Pen, Sondergard foregrounds powerful verses and passages from the six authors of his study: Anne Askew, Elizabeth I, Anne Dowriche, Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth, and Lady Anne Southwell. Readers are therefore compelled both by these women's voices and by Sondergard's psychologically insightful explorations of "rhetorical violence" in their works.

By "rhetorical violence," Sondergard means "the replication in language of the physical experience of pain: its causes, its consequences, its analogues in conflict and suffering, real and imagined" (16). In effect, "rhetorical violence" refers to the ways images of violence and violent language can induce in readers fear, anxiety, defensiveness, obedience, aggression, disgust, dissent, or several of these at once. This revisiting of the relationship between pen and sword would be interesting applied to any number of texts; it proves particularly incisive as a way to examine texts by early modern women.

For example, Sondergard demonstrates how Lanyer sustains "a discourse of rhetorical violence that equates cruelty to Christ with cruelty to women" (87). She invalidates the "archetypal Christian vehicle of female subjugation, substituting the crucifixion of Christ for the disobedience of Eve as the archetypal crime against God" (89). Demonstrating Lady Mary Wroth's savvy relationship to her male and female audiences, Sondergard elucidates episodes from her romance in which she exploits "the conflict between men's veneration of female chastity and their fascination with the exposed female body" (106). His readings here include a fine analysis of how the idealization of women "is simply one more devious, indirect form of bondage" (107). In his readings of letters, poems, and speeches by Elizabeth I, Sondergard demonstrates the Queen's mastery of paradox and fluency in rhetorical violence across several genres and through many crises. Her varied texts "secure a (perpetually renewable) rhetorical martyrdom without betraying any politically damaging weaknesses" (56). Her words can praise and threaten simultaneously, encourage and warn, and convey feminine vulnerability even as they assert her virility and absolute power. Meanwhile, Anne Dowriche uses particularly grim violent imagery in her French Histoire "as a warning to English readers against supporting a ... divisive and self-destructive course of action" (67) in response to recent threats on Elizabeth's life; she emphasizes the Queen must not move "too far in the direction of masculinized response" (83).

Sondergard reads Askew (in his first chapter) and Southwell (in his last) as triumphing in particularly personal battles, Askew in a public realm, Southwell in a private one. Askew's account of her arrest, torture, and examination "consciously eschews description of her personal suffering, and in refusing to employ rhetorical violence to elicit sympathy from her readers, models articulate argumentation and Christian stoicism as heroic behavior" (29). Southwell uses her self-conscious poetry to understand and contain her intense experiences of anger and anxiety and to maintain her faith in God--and in womanhood.

Sondergard's respect for his primary texts along with his clarity of argument make Sharpening Her Pen an excellent teaching resource as well as a rigorous study for scholars of the period. I would also like to note that it is not only as a professor of Renaissance literature but also as a professor of composition and critical reading that I find Sondergard's book useful--and sadly, timely. As I urge students in my writing courses to criticize the current rhetoric and representations of war in the news media, Sondergard's study has sharpened my own analysis of the varied complex powers at work in the language and imagery of violence.

ELIZABETH HARRIS SAGASER

Colby College