Theresa Ann Sears. Clio, Eros, Thanatos: The "Novela sentimental" in Context.

New York and Washington, DC: Peter Lang, 2001. x + 284 pp. index. illus. bibl. $59. ISBN: 0-8204-4993-8.

The subtitle of Professor Sears' study proves somewhat misleading, as it understates the work's scope. While the book's central (and lengthiest) chapter does indeed concern the fifteenth-century Spanish novela sentimental, Sears makes claims that go well beyond that genre of texts, delineating what she describes as a "unified theory of the sentimental mode of fiction" (23). For Sears, the sentimental mode comprises the novela and a large group of other works, dating back to the twelfth century and moving forward to at least the eighteenth, including such genres as "chivalric romance, ... the erotic novel, the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, and pornography," (9) all of which represent different manifestations of the sentimental mode.

She defines the mode through the issues raised in her title: death, desire, and history. In sentimental fiction, illicit desire is both condemned by society's ethical codes and aroused by that very opposition. The result, most frequently, is death, the ultimate narrative consummation. The presence of eros and thanatos in sentimental fiction as Sears understands it thus becomes clear enough; her reference to the muse of history, however, must be understood negatively--Clio's significance lies in her absence. The sentimental mode by its very nature resists socialization because it conceives of desire as necessarily and dangerously anti-social. Desire in this mode retreats from any kind of involvement in society, contemplating only itself; thus, "Eros and Thanatos, in effect, forestall Clio" (229).

These issues define a group of texts that Sears explicitly acknowledges are not normally considered together: Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot, Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de Amor, Diego de Rojas' Celistina, and Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves; in addition, she makes passing reference to Richardson, Laclos, and Fanny Hill. Her approach is pluralistic; she draws on gender-based and psychoanalytic criticism, especially the writings of Kristeva (Tales of Love in particular), in addition to acknowledging the shifting social and historical forces relevant to each text. Above all, however, Sears relies on a series of detailed, careful, and perceptive readings of the four central works.

Sears shows how in Lancelot chivalric romance loses its bearings through the devaluation of action as a "medium for obvious truth," which can be seen in Lancelot's willingness to abandon his knightly prowess to please his beloved. This undermining of action and desire as socially meaningful continues in the novela sentimental, which, she argues, plays a far more important role in the history of the sentimental mode than is commonly acknowledged. Carcel de Amor and Celestina prove essential because they introduce what Sears terms the "impossibility premise": not only does the hero find meaningful action impossible, the heroine's identity as a virgin is accentuated to such a degree that there appears no legitimate (that is, socially acceptable) way to express or even experience sexual desire. Desire is "lyric"--the impulse of the moment that cannot abide existence in narrative--and so leaves no room for a publicly sanctioned form of requited desire such as marriage. Death becomes "the only possible closure" (158).

This "impossibility premise" is further illustrated in La Princesse de Cleves, which Sears reads much more negatively than does most recent criticism. Instead of a self-determined heroine, she finds a character formed entirely by others and who repeatedly seeks to push her ethical responsibility onto those closest to her. The heroine is more Buddhist than feminist; she fears desire and all that it brings with it. Far from being the model of a new feminist heroine, the princess "searches out no new roles for heroines (or women); she simply does not possess enough of a self to invest it fully in any of" the conventional feminine roles available to her (224).

The considerable strengths of Sears' book lie in her detailed and careful readings of the four works that serve as the focus of her analysis. Time and again this reviewer was led back to those works with an altered and improved understanding of them and, even when disagreeing with her readings, a better sense of the works' complexity in their portrayals of desire. The value, however, of the book's overarching thesis--that these works open the way to a "unified theory of the sentimental mode of fiction"--will vary according to each reader and his or her own sympathy for genre criticism and its transhistorical claims.

V. S. BENFELL III

Brigham Young University