Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance and Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580-1640. (Reviews).

Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. xvi + 7 pls. + 284 pp. $54.95 (cl), $18.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8223-2602-7 (cl); 0-8223-2599-3 (pbk).

Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580-1640.

New York: Palgrave, 2000. xiv + 7 pis. + 290 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-312-23099-0.

Here are two books that make interesting contributions to ongoing fields of pursuit in the study of early modern England and English literature. Kathryn Schwarz, in Tough Love, positions herself as working in the tradition of "the enterprise of queering" (9) to be found in the work of Bruce Smith, Jonathan Goldberg, Valerie Traub, and others and also invokes psychoanalytic theory, "not to map our methodologies onto early modern texts, but to illuminate the ways in which those texts are themselves engaged in similar work" (11). Rebecca Ann Bach, in Colonial Transformations, invokes "the ongoing critical effort" (26) of New Historicism to read literary texts alongside other cultural productions as well as "a postcolonial lens" (28), which allows for the movement from baring the assumptions of the past to imagining "radically different histories for the future" (35).

Schwarz's subject is the depiction of Amazons in canonical literary texts of the period: Spenser's The Paine Qucene, Sidney's Arcadia, Shakespeare's histories and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's masques, and Raleigh's history of the discovery of Guiana. For Schwarz, Amazons are imaginary entities associated with the distant and marginal, who are conceived by central, canonical writers (the "domestication" of Amazons) in such a way as to reveal at least as much about the center as they do about the margin. Writing about Amazons unsettles the perceived norms and hierarchies of mainstream texts, calling into question, for example, the heterosexuality of homosocial power and the restriction of such power to men, revealing "the perversity of the inside" (9). Canonical texts manifest conflict and contradiction in such away as to undermine "a single body of unambiguous gender and uncontested sex" (39) and show how "such concepts as hegemony and normativity are not only under attack from without, but deeply mess y and contradictory on their own terms" (44). Schwarz writes: "if our ideas about patriarchal ideology in the early modern period derive largely from canonical literary texts, our sensitivity to the elements that trouble that ideology comes, at least in part, from the same source" (44). Thus Schwarz calls upon the notions of subversion and containment from New Historicist writing, but without the emphasis on containment that is stereotypically associated with that school.

Bach's subject is "colonial transformation," which she defines as "a process that redefined the territory and people the English encountered, but also importantly refigured the territory and people of the metropolitan center" (3). She argues that England's encounters with Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda were central to what it meant to be English in the period, and that consequently it is misguided, for example, to separate English literary and cultural history from early North American literary and cultural history. While Schwarz deals with the effect of imaginary others on the English center, Bach deals with English imagination and ideology on real others -- although both works complicate the relations between real and imaginary, center and margin. Although Bach makes much use of non-literary documents such as the records of the Virginia Company, she turns mainly to canonical literary texts remarkable similar to those examined by Schwarz: Spenser's Amoretti, Shakespeare's histories and Two Gentlemen of Vero na, Jonson's masques, Raleigh, Captain John Smith. Although Bach is concerned with revealing the complexities of identity in terms such as "colonizer" and "colonized," given her postcolonial perspective she is uniformly harsher in her analysis of canonical texts than Schwarz is. She writes: "Thus in this book, as well as attending to the complexity of 'the colonized' and 'the colonizers' as terms and as actual signified groups, I will carefully mark power differences that transcend hybridity to freeze difference in the interest of violent oppression -- all-too-common instances in which the colonizer and the colonists become real and significant constructed categories" (6). In this light, Spenser's Amoretti "depicts a male mastery that wards off the possibility of its author's transformation into a feminized barbarian" (31), and Smith's "Virginia Masque" is part of "a long and brutal history of transformation in which native art and culture have been appropriated and used for enhancement of white American heal th and lifestyles at the same moments when the majority of American Indians today live in debilitating poverty due to the U.S. governments appropriations of their lands" (34). This may be the moment to note that Bach's prose, if not her analysis, is somewhat less elegant than Schwartz's.

It is interesting how these two books transform the pedigrees they invoke, in particular New Historicism. Schwarz unsettles the relation of subversion and containment, while Bach brings a political critique and commitment that are not usually associated with someone like Stephen Greenblatt. These books appear as part of an ongoing and voluminous tradition, so that, while they do nor have the advantage of inaugurating new paradigms, they bring the sophistication of a matured approach to their specific contributions.