Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (review)

Abstract

Melissa E. Sanchez. Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 283. $74.00. As readers of early modern literature have long recognized, love discourse, with its rich vocabulary for describing desire, disappointment, and satisfaction, provided a useful vehicle for early modern authors to talk about politics. Historicizing love side of love-and-politics equation, Melissa E. Sanchez claims that early modern understanding of love was not rooted in contentment or other positive effects with which is now normatively linked but instead was characterized by irrationality, abjection, frustration, and other masochistic feelings drawn primarily from Petrarchanism and Protestant martyrology. Erotic Subjects traces, from Philip Sidney to John Milton, literary translation of these desires and fantasies that resist normalizing, rational structures into alternate tradition of political theory that stresses a perverse component of sovereignty (4). Sanchez complicates our understanding of pre- and post-Civil War politics by juxtaposing usual suspects, such as Milton, with literary texts less frequently considered in studies of politics of seventeenth-century literature. Showing that historicist and psychological methodologies can work in concert, Sanchez situates her close readings of texts in early modern political theory and examines masochism's psychosocial duality in which suffering can provide political subject with moral authority or with a pleasure that turns political subjection into a kind of Stockholm Syndrome avant la lettre. With gestures toward feminist and queer theory, Erotic Subjects attends to gendering of political resistance, includes women writers in political history, and recovers an early modern model of political subjection that is not based on familiar, heteronormative analogy of marriage and a monarch's rule. After a brief introduction, Sanchez begins to trace way that various post-Reformation political writers, such as John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, and John Aylmer, indicted equally idolatrous obedience of subjects and unbridled appetites of monarchs (14). Not only does monarch need to submit to good counsel and law, but subject has a moral responsibility to resist unlawful rule. When this contractual model of mutual responsibilities for good governance and its analogues in discussions of marriage bond went awry, Foxean martyrdom and Petrarchan courtship offered subjects ways to figure their resistance. In chapter two, then, Sanchez sees this evidence of martyrdom as empowerment in Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. She suggests we locate Sidney's articulation of political resistance not in his male characters but in female characters, such as Parthenia, Philoclea, and Pamela, because it is by inhabiting powerless position traditionally associated with femininity that male political subjects can resist monarchal authority without raising specter of anarchy often associated with armed rebellion (34). Nevertheless, as Sanchez demonstrates, these modes of resistance could be easily undermined by very subjects who embrace them. Martyrdom could signify virtue through suffering and ethical resistance, and English Petrarchanism could give voice to a lover/subject's complaints and frustrated ambitions. The experience of pleasure in pain, however, also produced the fear that subjects would find themselves psychologically unable to resist tyranny, or even drawn to it, especially during politically tumultuous seventeenth century (21). The rest of Erotic Subjects charts development of this fear and skepticism. Thus, trajectory of book's argument is one of falling away from or critiquing Sidney's model of resistance, an arc which helps Sanchez show how her authors anticipate conflicts of English Civil War as well as complicate royalist/republican rubric that usually governs discussions of late Tudor and Stuart politics. …