The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne.

Shakespeare and Marlowe have been at the center of recent scholarship on male homoeroticism in English Renaissance literature; with The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same. Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne, George Klawitter extends the field to another canonical author. Klawitter argues that ambiguity of gender reference allows for homoerotic readings of Donne's poetry, readings which have been largely foreclosed by a heterosexist tradition of constructing Donne as a womanizing rake and a devoted husband. Fortunately, Klawitter himself does not leap from the texts to insupportable biographical claims about Donne's own sexual practices; the analysis productively focuses on the shifting poetic persona, or "enigmatic narrator."

Klawitter correctly argues that modern scholarship has suppressed the erotic diversity of early modern literature, and his insights will provoke critics into questioning their assumptions about gender and sexuality in Donne's secular poetry, especially the verse letters and the Songs and Sonets. It can be entertaining and enlightening to watch Klawitter working at the level of puns, pronouns, syntax, and textual history, as he reshuffles and regroups the various lyrics according to audience and tone, detects in the image of love's "centrique happiness" an anus where others have found a vagina (188), or observes that the famous "stiffe twin compasses" of "A Valediction forbidding mourning" are "more properly descriptive of male anatomy than female" (134).

Klawitter's attempts to demonstrate the presence of same-sex love in certain poems sometimes fail to convince, however. While I am as sympathetic a reader as Klawitter is likely to find for his "homoerotic perspective" on Donne, I balked at occasionally tendentious and strained efforts to disprove that a female pronoun refers to a female lover, and at tonally insensitive, literalistic, and banal explications that see in "The Dampe" a negotiation between the narrator and his male lover for the "active" role in anal sex, or in meditations on the "short" life of desire a reference to inadequate penis size. Indeed, as Klawitter suggests, "the danger is that we create what we want to see" (166).

Although Klawitter chastises other critics for not appreciating that Donne's enigmatic poetry can be read homoerotically, his own interpretations may rely upon reductive and self-serving assumptions. "To a Lady" (not Donne's title) cannot be read heterosexually, he argues, because then the poem's musical conceit would suggest a woman "playing" on a man. "Such was not done," Klawitter insists, since women were sexually passive (107). Thus we have to imagine a Donne who ingeniously manipulates and subverts erotic discourses, but who simultaneously adheres to his culture's most rigid notions about the "nature" of women and heteroerotic desire.

This blindspot is symptomatic of the central problem in Klawitter's book: its lack of historical and theoretical perspective on Renaissance gender and sexuality. Klawitter all but ignores relevant and indispensable lesbian, gay, and feminist scholarship. He inexplicably cites radical feminist Mary Daly as representative of feminist criticism, with its supposed suspicion of "a man's analyzing lyrics written to women" (27), and he offers Alfred Harbage's 1952 book as an authority on gender in Shakespearean drama, despite the innumerable studies on this issue produced by feminist Shakespeare critics since the 1970s. More damaging to his immediate project, Klawitter does not adequately historicize his major conceptual categories: he refers anachronistically to "homosexual" people in the Renaissance, and he uses the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey reports to explain seventeenth-century sexual response. Despite alerting us to the possibility of same-sex love in Donne's poetry, then, Klawitter's book finally illuminates little about the enigmatic place of homoeroticism in the social, ideological, and subjective realms of Donne's culture.

MARIO DIGANGI Indiana University