The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto.

In The Lady Vanishes Valeria Finucci applies insights and approaches from psychoanalysis and women's studies to two canonical texts from the Italian Renaissance, Il libro del cortegiano and Orlando furioso. By doing so with considerable intelligence and thoroughness, she opens up fresh vistas upon works that handsomely reward the conscientious study she has given them. Scholars with a commitment to either the methods or the texts she employs will be enlightened and challenged by her efforts. The clever title indicates her feminist concern with the fortunes of women represented in Castiglione and Ariosto, as well as the lively awareness of contemporary culture that animates her understanding of many aspects of her chosen subjects. Another of Hitchcock's films, Vertigo, could readily serve as a parable to illustrate the central argument: a system of representation that privileges male perspectives eradicates female alternatives. Kim Novak's fall from the bell tower signifies tellingly the ultimate fate that women's selfhood and experience undergo in the world of the Courtier and the Furioso, as Finucci reads them.

The denial of female subjectivity is the constant theme of her criticism of these texts, and she frequently illustrates this phenomenon in a persuasive manner. However, her own point of view entails a willful exclusion that reveals a recurrent shortcoming in her approach as she applies it to the Furioso in the longer portion of this two-part volume. We might fairly call this flaw in her method the denial of Ariosto's subjectivity and do so, of course, in full consciousness of obsequies recently offered to authors by Barthes and Foucault. Finucci herself is not unaware of this issue; her comments about "pleasurable connivance with the teller on the part of the female reader" (23) testify to the contrary. However, her readings sometimes founder precisely because of where she locates subjectivity and where she overlooks it.

For example, her response to the story of Isabella, as she acknowledges (196), turns into a reading of Rodomonte's character. Thus, her most sustained discussion of any male figure in the Furioso focuses upon the arch villain of the poem. This potential "prejudice" may be no more than a consequence of her "interest," a distinction poststructuralism routinely makes to convert apparent liabilities into assets. More generally, however, the suitability of character analysis as an approach to figures in Ariosto's poem warrants consideration. Finucci's response to the marriage of Angelica and Medoro illustrates some complications that arise in such readings. Finucci is upset that Carne-Ross claims that the Princess of Cathay is not even a character but rather a poetic image (109), whereas Finucci's own concern with this figure leads her so far as to speculate on Angelica's post-textual experience. Will she produce an heir? (143) Moreover, a preoccupation with Angelica's victimization by marriage beneath her station leads Finucci to overlook Ariosto's satire of the excesses of Angelica's aristocratic suitors inscribed in her husband's name, Medoro - the aurea mediocritas of sixteenth-century moral discourse that twentieth-century analyses of class and character obscure. Indeed, despite Finucci's engaging sensibility, which provides many fresh insights, her book sometimes labors under the weight of its theoretical apparatus. What euphemism nowadays might call "closely argued" analyses often are simply opaque; phrases like "the non-positions regarding libido of the pre-Oedipal, objectless bisexual" (217), which Finucci deploys without self-consciousness, are signs of professional discourse losing touch with the language of communities even slightly more capacious than the circle of initiates. However, both her focus on canonical texts and her lively intelligence save her from extended passages of murky theorizing; and the latter alone makes reading this book a rewarding experience.