Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction.

Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction

Kent, Ohio and London: The Kent State University Press, 1999. x + 214 pp. bibl, append, index. ISBN: 0-87338-644-2.

Renaissance Fantasies is a study of a select number of early modern texts that align fantasy with femininity or effeminacy. The writers under study (Boccaccio, Pasquier, Nashe, Sidney, Shakespeare) practice what Prendergast calls a poetics of prodigality, an anti-patriarchal aesthetics that allows male class-aspirant writers to constitute themselves as original through the discursive appropriation of femininity. Key to Prendergast's thesis is the possibility that these male writers also seek to capitalize on new and growing audiences of women and female patrons and thereby promote their work. Their anti-patriarchal gestures do not, however, classify them as profeminist writers, as Prendergast carefully demonstrates; rather, the identification of the male author with the feminine or with effeminacy is both strategic and ultimately ambivalent.

An introductory chapter clearly sets out the terms of the argument and describes the book, making excellent and economical use of textual examples. Prendergast then goes on to introduce her central chapters with three treatises that condemn fantasy and femininity even as they enact the very discursive proclivities they repudiate. This technique has been noted in other Renaissance writers who praise a "manly" style, most notably Montaigne (see Patricia Parker's essay, "Virile Style," in Freccero and Fradenburg, eds., Premodern Sexualities [New York: Routledge, 1996]: 201-222), and establishes a model for both the discursive effeminacy and its association with fantasy that Prendergast examines and the ambivalence she generally locates in the prodigal authors in question. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 pair texts together to demonstrate how one author's rewriting of the other, "authoritative" text illustrates a convergence of anti-patriarchal prodigality, fantasy, femininity, and originality. Two figures sum up the poles of authority and prodigality in relation to the feminine: on one end, there is the Xeuxis story of the artist who constructs beauty by assembling the dismembered parts of a collection of women; on the other there is the myth of Orpheus, a castrated figure of artistic creation who is dismembered by women. Each author's method of rewriting and of establishing his effeminate and/or feminine prodigality differs. Prendergast reads nicely the governing poetic tropes of each work, whether they be strongly voiced feminine personae (as in Pasquier and Sidney), or defenses of prose and opposition to the classic oedipal triangle in appeals to a feminine audience (as in Boccaccio and Sidney), or, finally, celebrations of the effeminacy of drama and its vanguard literary status through the androgynous body of the boy actor (Shakespeare).

Renaissance Fantasies frames anew an observation that has been made with increasing frequency by feminist and sexuality scholars, that gender plays a multivalent and complex role in the creation of both male and female literary subjectivity and authority. Most pertinent perhaps to the present study is Juliana Schiesari's book, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), which makes precisely the point that Renaissance notions of masculine artistic genius, linked as they are to melancholia, make productive use of femininity as lack to create alternatives to traditional conceptions of chivalric manliness. It is thus a shame that Prendergast does not cite more frequently the work of some of these feminist critics, since their scholarly, theoretical, and historical projects are so closely aligned.

Overall, while there are illuminating and original readings of passages in the texts examined -- Pendergast interprets well several stories in The Decameron, for example -- this reader often wished for a lengthier discussion of the texts and authors in question. In particular the Italian authors in this primarily English literature-oriented study might also have been given more nuanced treatment. What is to be made, for instance, of the extremely Larinate syntax of The Decameron, which would militate against its purported female address? And how does the complexly dialogic format of The Courtier, framed by a nostalgic discourse of loss and impossibility, trouble its representation as anxiously suppressing the voice of feminine difference? A number of such questions pose themselves to the arguments of Renaissance Fantasies, which deploys these works more to illustrate an argument than to read their densities. Nevertheless the study sets forth a plausible and persuasively argued thesis about the gendered aspec ts of a particular masculine literary practice in early modernity.