The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton.

According to David Mikics, the epic works of Spenser and Milton record the "formation of a newly modern selfhood" (3). The self emerges within/against the providential structure of epic narrative, which strives but ultimately fails to subordinate the epic hero to the text's overt didacticism. Central to Mikics' argument, then, are sites of tragic and erotic pathos - scenes of inward temptation, despair, and sexual pathos - especially as they register the articulation of Protestant inwardness.

The limit of moralizing, to which the title of this book refers, pertains to "the way in which all forms of poetic affect, whether best described as delectare or movere (delight or turbulent emotion), strain against the efforts of both critics and poets to. convert affect to moral use (docere)" (27). "Affect" plays a major role in Mikics' attempt to reinscribe the self back into Renaissance criticism. By focusing on "affect," he offers a positive hermeneutic which aims at recuperating the "subjective event that occurs between reader and book" (8). Such a model of reading counters what he views as a tendency amongst new historicists (Cf. Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," 1986) to reduce the early modern self to an effect of discourse. Whereas new historicists see the subject produced by sociocultural discourses, institutes, and practices, Mikics follows Freud and Lacan in locating the formation of the self in opposition to social forces. Unfortunately, this engagement with new historicism is not sustained beyond his insightful introduction, where he challenges Greenblatt's effort to envision the Renaissance subject as merely a product of ideology.

The book's most serious weakness, evident in Mikics' reading of the final books of Paradise Lost, is the discrepancy between what he claims he will do with the text and his actual analysis. In the introduction he suggests that Milton's texts dramatize "the strife between the superego's authority and a resistant subjectivity" (6). What he sets up in his examination of Paradise Lost, however, is a binary opposition between Michael's "official" pronouncements on sacred history and Adam's individual pathos. According to Mikics, it is precisely Adam's authentic self, which "proves more truly poetic than Michael's grand theory" (21), that persuades the reader to identify with Adam's "lone pathos" rather than Michael's didactic morality. Throughout this book, subjectivity emerges as an uncritical valorization of the poetic self.

The value of this book lies in its attention to the role epic plays in the production of early modern notions of the self. Indeed, the author's claim that Spenser and Milton "define the English Protestant self as a product of genre" (4) reminds the reader of the constitutive power of literary texts. At times, however, this book is constrained by its privileging of pathos over history. In his discussion of the trial of Duessa (The Faerie Queene 5.9), for example, Mikics states that "Spenser praises Mercilla's conjoining of justice and pity, her 'piteous ruth' for her condemned opponent. . . . Mercilla's rule, we are led to believe, is morally justified by her feelings for its victims" (115). There are two problems with this statement. First of all, such a reading is made possible only if it elides the historical context informing this scene - Elizabeth's much criticized indecisiveness during Mary Stuart's trial. Secondly, the interpretation of "piteous ruth" as praise for Mercilla obscures Spenser's unsettling rhetoric: pleonasm, as Thomas Cain points out (Praise in The Faerie Queene, 1978), is a figure often used to alert suspicion in this poem. This analysis is indicative of a resistance throughout this book to acknowledge the sociocultural discourses underpinning Spenser and Milton's constructions of the Protestant self. Mikics' assertion that discursive systems do not determine individual subjects is important, but in maintaining this point he obscures the ways in which discursive systems inform the construction of early modern subjectivity. Perhaps Mikics could have supplemented his argument with such recent studies of early modern subjectivity as Patricia Fumerton's Cultural Aesthetics (1991) and Elizabeth J. Bellamy's Translations of Power (1992).

CHRISTOPHER IVIC University of Western Ontario