Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature (review)

Abstract

ROSS, JILL. Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. ix + 320 pp.This ambitious study analyzes the attitude of medieval Iberian writers toward the literary text metaphorized as a female body. Since antiquity, rhetoric has been associated with the corporeal, specifically, the female body. In the medieval period, the concern surfaces often in discussions of the allegorical integumentum. The conceptualization of figurae as the embodied, text saw such ornamentation as either protecting or debasing its meaning. In its focus on the conflation of female carnality and literary production/interpretation, Ross's book accomplishes for Iberia what Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1990) and Jane Burns's Bodytalk (1993) have done so brilliantly for England and France, respectively. It is also a worthy successor to John Dagenais's influential The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the de buen (1994).Ross carefully sets up her theoretical framework in the introduction and first chapter. She first summarizes the strategies feminist thinkers have used to free the body from oppressive masculinist notions (Butler, Moi). Chapter one lucidly charts the evolution from Plato through Nietzche to Derrida of the construction of figurative language as, on the one hand, a disruptive and deceptive feminine force requiring firm masculine control, and on the other, as a heuristic tool providing access to the truth. Seductive veiling and revelatory unveiling are thus properly seen as two sides of the same literary coin. Ross concludes that for both premodern and postmodern writers concerned with language, the trope of the feminized textual body both illuminates and calls into question the cultural and gender-based assumptions and conventions that condition the processes of textual composition and reception (48).One of the most provocative aspects of Ross's book is her choice of texts. The book's central chapters each deal with a canonical Castilian text: Poema de Mio Cid, Milagros de Nuestra Senora, and Libro de buen amor. But Ross frames these chapters with analyses of two decidedly uncanonical works, Peristephanon by Prudentius and a Hebrew debate poem by Shem ??? of Carrion (1345). Some Hispanists may disagree with Ross's inclusion of a Hispano-Roman and a HispanoHebrew text alongside more familiar masterpieces of Castilian literature. For this reviewer, the focus on Iberian rather than Spanish literature supports contemporary attempts to expand the peninsular canon by acknowledging the cultural exchange among Christian, Islamic, and Jewish writers that shaped its unique Middle Ages. More immediately, the inclusion of the two works casts interesting light on the better-known works.This is especially true of chapter two's treatment of Peristephanon (ca. 405), Prudentius's collection of fourteen martyrdom poems, six of which deal with saints from Hispania. Ross contextualizes the work within the early Christian opposition to classical rhetoric's emphasis on a disciplined, masculine oral performance. Instead, Prudentius transmutes martyrs such as Eulalia and Agnes into divine texts, identifying their wounds with words. The wounding of the martyrs' bodies is both an act of inscription and a sowing of a fertile field by Christ. The divine seeds planted in their mutilated bodies are highly productive, yielding spiritual fruit in the form of believers and salvation. On the one hand, the male author appropriates that feminine fertility to endow his own writing with a similar generative, salvific power. On the other, martyrdom - and especially female martyrdom - resists such masculine control as it overflows the boundaries of the text.The dynamic between the appropriation and resistance of the embodied feminine is carefully explicated in each of the following chapters. Ross is at her most persuasive when she traces the presence of the topos throughout a text, as in her masterful analyses of Libro de buen amor and Milagros de Nuestra Senora. …