Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690 ed. by Gordon McMullan, and: Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature by Mary Beth Rose, and: Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England by Susanne Scholz (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1,2004 155 scholar-poets alike are short on venues for the kind of analytical meditations that Post's book puts on offer. The closest alternative is the classroom, where English professors may lecture and model close readings of poems, explaining what they find astounding or brilliant or hilarious. Green Thoughts, Green Shades captures all the expertise, passion, and much of the spectacle that characterizes such teaching at its most inspiring and instructional. Le Moyne College J.Christopher Warner Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, i^8o-i6go. Ed. by Gordon Mo Mullan. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2001. xxiii + 263pp. ?16.99. ISBN 0-333-67666-1. Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature. By Mary Beth Rose. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002. xxii+139 pp. $35 (pbk $15). ISBN 0-226-72572-3 (pbk 0-226-72573-1). Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England. By Susanne Scholz. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2000. ix + 2o8pp. ?42.50. ISBN 0-333-76102-2. The three books reviewed here deal with female subjectivity and representation in the early modern period. Susanne Scholz charts the reciprocal relationship between the textual construction of body and of nation; Mary Beth Rose argues that the dominant conception of heroism changed during the seventeenth century to become more passive and more private; the essays in Renaissance Configurations focus 'on questions of gender, sexuality and politics in the relations of public and private, verbal and spatial, material and textual' (p. xv). Scholz argues that in the Elizabethan period the idea of the monarch's two bodies, and iconographical stress on her virginity,linked representations of body and of na? tion. However, this relationship was informed by the interplay between two corporeal paradigms. In the first,as elaborated by Thomas Laqueur, male and female bodies are imagined not as opposites, but as superior and inferiorversions ofthe same model (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)). The second, however, is an emergent discourse of bodily differencewhich Scholz, departing from Laqueur, dates to this period rather than the Enlightenment. In her firstchapter Scholz uses Spenser's description of the Castle of Alma in The Faerie Queene, Book II, to show how 'the ideals and configurations of body natu? ral and body politic are interdependent' (p. 30). The contained, compartmentalized Castle, governed by the mind, links the civilized body, which has shed attributes imagined as natural and female, with the absolutist nation. Ambivalence towards the courtly ideal in Book VI, however, derives from the anxiety that the fashioned body reflectsthe will not of the private self but of the sovereign. At the same time, a growing sense of the otherness of the female body, and that its boundaries must constantly be policed, coincides with emphasis on the territorial boundaries of the English nation, as Scholz shows in her reading of the 1581 entertainment The Four Foster Children of Desire. The grotesque alterity of the imagined female body also complicates the identification of Queen and nation: hence the increasingly disembodied representa? tions of Elizabeth as Gloriana and Cynthia that typifythe nascent imperial ideology. Uncertainty as to bodily difference parallels Ireland's ambiguous status (is ita colony or part of the kingdom?) and shapes Spenser's portrayal of its inhabitants in A View of thePresent State ofIreland: their supposed cannibalism, a corporeal manifestation 156 Reviews of their otherness, derives from their starvation by the English. In his Discoverie of Guiana, however, Ralegh makes more emphatic use ofthe idea that female otherness necessitates male government, in order to justify both colonialist rapacity and poten? tial disobedience of Elizabeth should she lack enthusiasm for the project. The question Scholz asks?in a discourse where body is a metaphor fornation, what happens when notions of the body are shifting??is a worthwhile one, and she displays a subtle awareness of different levels of analogy between the two. Partly because of her qualified acceptance of Laqueur's thesis, however, which tends to privilege scientific discourse, and partly because ofthe historian's inevitable confinement to the textual, lived experience ofthe body is sometimes marginalized. For example...