Transgressive Desire Research Articles

Michel de Certeau: a Jesuit Apologist

Abstract While recognizing that Michel de Certeau is not a Christian theologian, this essay argues for a way in which we might read his oeuvre as a mode of Jesuit apologetics. The basis for reading him as such is twofold. First, Certeau pays attention to the various movements of desire beneath the signs composing the discourses in the various fields of his enquiry. In tracing that transgressive desire, he is always to listening for the voice of the Other; an Other that transcends and subtends human language, but resists capture by it. Secondly, the style in which he writes allows for the ambiguities and ironies that must necessarily attend any attempt to give definitive voice to the Other. Examining these two aspects of Certeau’s oeuvre reveals a way, this essay argues, his work bears witness to the Unnamed in the secular world in which he works and the secular studies in which he engages.

Queering the Postcolonial: Desire in Chudamani Raghavan’s Yamini

Indian women’s writing from the mid-twentieth century that doesn’t fit the dominant tropes of resistance in postcolonial and feminist literary critiques have largely been untranslated and undiscussed. Especially neglected are narratives of native queerness, stories of transgressive desire and sexual alterity. In this essay, I explore Yamini’s complex desire in Chudamani Raghavan’s eponymous novella and its potential to complicate feminist and postcolonial discourses on women’s sexuality. Drawing on aspects of queer theory and poststructuralist notions of subjectivity, I examine how Yamini’s asexuality challenges and destabilizes cisheterosexist gender hierarchies and colonization. By examining language and silence in Yamini through the devices of Indian literary criticism and intertextuality, I locate Yamini’s queerness within the subcontinent’s long history of multivocal desire. I build on the precolonial notion that desire is not necessarily located in the body, and suggest that the transgressive desires of Yamini’s mind, the desire of ideas, is also a manifestation of queerness – capable of subverting hegemonic discourses of sexual and psychic normativity.

“The carnage in the woods”: Queerness and Interspecies Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

ABSTRACT Considerations of the queer thematics of McCarthy's work remain scant, and interpretations of the novels of the Border Trilogy—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—commonly elide the presence of queer affect. At the same time, theorizations of violence in McCarthy's novels are abundant. Through reading interspecies violence as an expression of queer desire, this article exposes the centrality of queerness to the function and production of violence in the Border Trilogy. I contend that the queer presences in the Border Trilogy produce new insights into our reading of interspecies violence and creates nuance in our understanding of the relationship between transgressive desire and violence in McCarthy's wider corpus.

Derrida’s Glas between Hegel and Levinas

Derrida’s Glas can be interpreted against the background of a confrontation with Hegel, after and with Levinas. Derrida’s position in front of the great shadows of tradition (see “Violence and Metaphysics”) becomes in Glas an exceeding of the limits, searching for the other than logos, for instance, remains or writing. Glas is interpreted on the background of Derrida’s reading of Levinas: against the archeologic totality of Hegel’s system, Glas does not oppose nevertheless the eschatological infinity of a metaphysical alterity, but rather the finite infinity of a transgressive desire for contingency. Language, art, and literature, much more than the ethical or religious dimension, are external phenomenological transcendence, against which Hegel’s system of absolute knowledge and Genet’s literary experiments are constantly measured.

Young Muslim Women, Willfulness, and the Honor Crime.

In this paper I suggest that Muslim women’s emotional and affective relation to ‘culture’, ‘honor’ and Islam, often evident in transgressive acts but also attributed to them to serve other interests, becomes elided in feminist rhetorical and discursive struggles over the interrelationship between colonialism, Islam, gender and culture in existing scholarship on ‘the honor crime.’ As a Pakistani–Canadian Muslim woman, I draw from experiences in my own classes to reflect on young Muslim women’s emotional responses to cultural and honor-related regulation. Conceptualizing Canada and Pakistan as culturally, politically and affectively entangled transnational sites, I consider a strategy to validate the emotions of my students in Toronto by describing, sharing and theorizing the story of young Pakistani Muslim women’s disruptive acts, as demonstrated in Aurat (Women’s) March. I draw on Sarah Ahmed’s concept of willfulness as one possible strategy for young Muslim women to understand their own – and other Muslim women’s – transgressive desires, emotions and acts, which may run counter to identitarian constructs of Muslim/Western, Islamic/unIslamic, good/bad women. In doing so, this paper draws upon, but also diverges from, postcolonial and critical feminist approaches that have responded variously to the dilemma of confronting honor-related violence against Muslim women, which is (always) intersected by colonialism, racism and imperialism.

Poesia colombiana contemporânea: poemas de Orietta Lozano traduzidos

Orietta Lozano nasceu em Cali, Colômbia, em 1956, onde reside até hoje. É poeta, ensaísta e novelista e apresenta uma produção poética expressiva iniciada na década de 1980. No entanto, mesmo tendo composto diversas antologias nacionais e internacionais, sendo uma delas brasileira, organizada pela poeta Lucila Nogueira e por Floriano Martins em 2007, a obra de Lozano ainda é pouquíssimo difundida no Brasil, sendo mais conhecida na Colômbia e no México, apesar de haver traduções de poemas também para o inglês, o francês e o italiano. Os poemas aqui apresentados e traduzidos, Danza e Despojada, integram a segunda publicação da autora, Memoria de los Espejos, de 1983, e podem ser considerados bons representantes da poética de Orietta Lozano, pois revelam imagens que evocam uma força sensitiva dos elementos, uma linguagem repleta de um desejo transgressor fundamentado num tempo mítico, num jogo místico.

Agonistic Reading: Kleist’s Aesthetics of Temptation

ABSTRACTThe anti-humanism of Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater — wherein the ideal of grace is supposed to make visible mechanical forces devoid of human self-consciousness — takes the form of a temptation. The text nevertheless has a poetological function inasmuch as temptation lies at the genesis of aesthetic experience for Kleist. The paper examines the potentialities of a form of agonistic reading in response to the challenges posed by Kleist’s aesthetics of temptation, and concludes by considering Die Marquise von O.... as an elaborate ritualistic manipulation designed to integrate transgressive desire into the ethics of civil society.

Gothic-Punk Utopia in Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah

Gothic-Punk Utopia in Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah Samantha Morse (bio) "Abandoned dreams reside here, unharnessed and unchanneled. Step over them in carefully avoided cracks in the pavement, feel them pulsating in the unsmiling eyes of the black cat" (Ford 2011, 4).1 The haunting memories and uncanny city spaces of early twenty-first-century London in Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (2011) evoke a Gothic ambience of temporal disturbance, spatial disjointedness, and transgressive desire. This Gothic, however, is uniquely enmeshed with the politics and aesthetics of the British punk movement in the 1970s and 1980s: I pass by the industrial estates, the Furniture world on Orient way and fall into some Wetherspoons called the Drum. I'm over the other side now, a different zone echoing provincial English towns in the early 90s. Acid hangovers float around, garish graffiti drug references in luminous yellow and day glow tangerine. We feel the place drift around us. BAD E in spraypaint over a bookmakers door, girls trapped in a post goth/pre rave sartorial dilemma. This isn't London and yet it couldn't be anywhere else. As I'm smoking my second cigarette it strikes me that I could hide out here in this place of forgetting. It would let me lie embedded within it. (4)2 The bizarre drift from familiar industrial estates to an echoing "different zone" and a "place of forgetting" that is somehow open to the smoker's being "embedded within it" is utterly Gothic. Yet the drugs, "sartorial dilemma," and overall attitude toward the lumpen are quintessentially punk. The Gothic, a literary genre that originated in England in the late eighteenth century in response to new loci of economic power and accompanying revolutionary anxieties, is marked by tropes such as live burial, the unspeakable, doubling, and reiteration, as Eve Kosofsky [End Page 125] Sedgwick cogently argues in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986). Although criticized by several contemporaries in the 1790s for its formulaic structure, the Gothic has been relieved of its hackneyed reputation by Sedgwick and numerous other present-day scholars. There clearly exists perennial significance in this popular genre; since its genesis in the three-volume romance form, it transmuted through the nineteenth century, pervading serialized fiction like the Newgate novel, the "penny blood," and the sensation novel, until its apotheosis in the harrowing ghost tales and novellas of the Victorian fin de siècle. The Gothic remains with us today in the vogue for vampire and zombie media. As Sue Chaplin asserts: "The Gothic is more than a literary 'genre': it is a cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical mode—perhaps the mode—of engaging with the 'disavowed ghosts' of modernity" (2). The Gothic dramatizes temporal disturbance, and its enduring appeal reflects an ongoing need to work through history—interrogating nostalgia and processing trauma—in order to make sense of the present. Although Savage Messiah explicitly implicates itself in anarchopunk cut-up aesthetics and violent radical politics, its uncanny encounters with the rejected specters of London's past and its unfettered representation of physical desire render the work a distinctly Gothic artifact. Savage Messiah thus participates in the Gothic punk milieu (GPM), or "a narrative environment which is aligned with a particular cultural climate that is defined by responses to technological and social transition during the twentieth century" (Moody, 168). Like Blade Runner (1982), the GPM of Savage Messiah "creates an aesthetics of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration" (Bruno, 62). These Gothic ruins, however, are not mourned but valorized, just as the socially marginalized are not victimized but rendered powerfully throughout Savage Messiah's pages. In this, Savage Messiah's Gothicism diverges from some of its eighteenth-century antecedents, which could, at times, be politically reactive. Though radical Jacobin novels in the Gothic mode also abounded in the 1790s, Savage Messiah's sympathy with the lumpenproletariat is more essentially constitutive of a "punk sensibility" than a Gothic one (Hollinger, 31).3 In what follows, I examine how Savage Messiah combines conventions from punk and the Gothic in its black-and-white collaged pages of photographs, sketches, typed paragraphs, and handwritten phrases representing different swaths of...

“That Flexible Flageolet”: Music, Homophobia, and Anti-Semitism in George Du Maurier's Trilby

Abstract Freud argued in Totem and Taboo (1918) that where there is taboo there is also desire; we might reverse this idea slightly with regard to Trilby to say that where there is conflicted desire there is, and must also be, taboo, in order to contain and manage the troubling aspects of desire. That is, the novel is willing to portray with sympathy women dressed as men, men obsessed with feet, and groups of men living, wrestling, and sleeping together, only when (and because) anxiety regarding and fear of gender transgression is displaced onto the scapegoat figure of the effeminate Jew Svengali. Du Maurier's novel is undoubtedly progressive in many ways, but its progressivism is carried on the back of its anti-Semitism. Trilby can express transgressive desires only by simultaneously displacing anxiety regarding those desires and particularly anxiety about masculinity onto the figure of the foreigner and the Jew. This displacement suggests something, not only about the personal psychology of Du Maurier, but about the reasons his novel appealed to such a large audience, and even suggests a new way of thinking about why racism and anti-Semitism were on the increase at the fin de siècle.

‘Think of the Children!’ Desire and Innocence in British Queer Fiction of the Early Twentieth Century

Nearly all relationships have power imbalances, none more so than age-dissimilar ones. Women writers of the early twentieth century addressed the issues of sexual innocence and ignorance in literary same-sex relationships with differing levels of perception and tangents of criticism. This article examines how innocence is portrayed, deployed and perceived in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1917), Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) and how the idea of queerness complicates the issue of childhood innocence. It explores to what extent characters cast as innocent become vehicles for their female authors to express sexually and socially transgressive desires at a time when feminism was publicly and scientifically linked to lesbianism.

Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire by Melissa Edmundson

MLR, .,   prostitutes or, in male fragrances from the s onwards, by those who flaunted their willingness to breach sexual decorum. Patchouli’s olfactory semiotics were elaborate, and Maxwell does an excellent job of explaining the scent’s significance in late Victorian fashion as well as literature. e book commences by explaining how Victorian perfume—soaps, bouquets, nosegays—was strongly gendered, with women encouraged to ‘favour light and floral fragrances’ rather than those containing ‘animalic extracts such as musk and civet’ (p. ). Male scents were initially governed by similar rules, but by the s, department stores stocked a wide range of masculine cosmetics which drew inspiration from India, China, and Japan. Using perfume catalogues, period advertisements , and etiquette books, Maxwell shows how perfume became as complex a Victorian language as flowers themselves. What follows moves seamlessly between accounts of the composition, manufacture, and usage of various perfumes (some now unable to be made because they contain illegal chemicals), their reputation, and their literary and artistic incarnations. Maxwell considers the relationship between perfumes and remembrance, before presenting insightful examinations of Swinburne, Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Lafcadio Hearn, a passionate advocate for Japanese culture who did much to popularize Far Eastern art. Elsewhere, Maxwell deciphers a hidden language of olfactory decadence, showing how homosexual and lesbian writers deployed perfume as an instrument for encoding transgressive desire. A chapter on Field offers exemplary readings of important poems; another on s dandyism is equally persuasive in exploring Wilde’s use of perfume in his self-stylization. e book concludes with responses to perfume in the modernist era, a section notable for a discussion of Compton Mackenzie’s once notorious Sinister Street (). Scents and Sensibility is written with clarity and verve and is mercifully free of jargon. Augmented with attractive colour plates (though lacking ‘scratch and sniff’ panels), it is informative and entertaining, its dandies, poets, and poseurs offering valuable lessons for today’s ‘metrosexuals’ and their ‘grooming products’. L U N F Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, –: Haunted Empire. By M E- . (Palgrave Gothic) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . x+ pp.£.. ISBN ––––. Melissa Edmundson’s study is an impressive volume that will probably prove in- fluential in the field of Gothic Studies. Across its eighty-year period and several continents, Edmundson demonstrates how women’s colonial Gothic ‘is oen a more sympathetic rendering of the negative consequences of imperialism’ than men’s (pp. –), referring to H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad as canonical points of comparison. She certainly succeeds in her attempt to ‘enrich and complicate the existing parameters of the colonial Gothic beyond the male-authored imperial literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain ’ through careful selection of ‘lesser-known women writers and women whose  Reviews works are not typically read as Gothic’ (p. ). Work on Katherine Mansfield, Mary Kingsley, Susanna Moodie, and Florence Marryat, whose contribution to vampire fiction—e Blood of the Vampire ()—has enjoyed recent critical interest, ensures that Edmundson’s volume will have wide-ranging appeal; simultaneously, Edmundson introduces several overlooked women writers whose literary outputs deserve scholarly scrutiny. Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing is structured geographically, comprising ten case studies that move from Canada to New Zealand via the Caribbean, Africa, India, and Australia. e first pair of chapters consider Canadian Gothic, focusing on Susanna Moodie’s multigeneric memoir and short stories, as well as works by the less familiar Isabella Valancy Crawford. e subsequent chapter, on Florence Marryat, is especially compelling, being informed by Marryat’s broader corpus of work; Edmundson also expertly contextualizes Marryat’s vampiric anti-heroine within Caribbean folklore. Chapters on the essays of Mary Kingsley and the short stories of Margery Lawrence follow, considering African Gothic: West Africa in Kingsley’s case; and, in Lawrence’s, Rhodesia, the East African island of Pemba, and Egypt. e next pair of chapters focus on Anglo-Indian Gothic in the works of Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin, on the haunted house motif, and Gothic animals (usually emblematic of India itself, such as tigers or cobras), respectively. Edmundson’s focus next moves to Australasia, with two chapters on Australian Gothic in the works of Mary Fortune (a detective fiction pioneer) and...

Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture by Catherine Maxwell

 Reviews (p. ); here Steinlight rethinks Gillian Beer’s enormously influential reading of Hardy’s fiction in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). e novels of Hardy and George Gissing, Steinlight contends, show how characters are ‘unfit to survive’ (p. ), unlike the earlier texts. e book concludes by looking forward, considering how the modernist novel becomes preoccupied with portraying consciousness, not society. Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. e argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. Steinlight’s book will soon become an indispensable reference point for academics and advanced students working in the area of literary biopolitics and beyond. U   W  E G B Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. By C M- . Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xviii+ pp.;  colour plates.£. ISBN ––––. e cosmetics industry struggles with a fundamental sensory conundrum: how can perfume be conveyed or understood in written or visual terms? is engaging study explores how writers responded to that challenge during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its punning title signalling a concern with the literature of perfume and its scientific and cultural context. Catherine Maxwell’s ambitious approach combines penetrative textual analysis with discussions of chemistry, botany , household management, advertising, fashion, and etiquette. is is genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship, though her primary concern remains the poetry of the mid to late nineteenth century. As Maxwell explains, poets were fascinated by the perfumes entering the market from the s because they were no longer mimetic. Instead of copying nature, perfumiers distilled and blended fragrances in ingenious ways, placing the nose of the olfactif on a par with the wine connoisseur’s palate. Unique interactions between perfumes and the bodies of their wearers produced still greater allure, and Maxwell provides revealing discussions of poems such as Arthur Symons’s ‘Peau d’Espagne’ (), which celebrates a fragrance notorious for mimicking the aroma of the female body. What makes this book so distinctive is less its impressive literary analyses than its intriguing engagement with perfume itself. e field of literary studies has generally privileged the interpretative over the instructive, but Maxwell sees no disjunction. Her method is exemplified by her use of Symons’s essay ‘Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’ to initiate an exploration of patchouli itself, an Indian plant used as a perfume and insect repellent. Heady and pungent, it proved too overpowering for ‘polite’ Victorian society but was popular in the demi-monde, favoured by MLR, .,   prostitutes or, in male fragrances from the s onwards, by those who flaunted their willingness to breach sexual decorum. Patchouli’s olfactory semiotics were elaborate, and Maxwell does an excellent job of explaining the scent’s significance in late Victorian fashion as well as literature. e book commences by explaining how Victorian perfume—soaps, bouquets, nosegays—was strongly gendered, with women encouraged to ‘favour light and floral fragrances’ rather than those containing ‘animalic extracts such as musk and civet’ (p. ). Male scents were initially governed by similar rules, but by the s, department stores stocked a wide range of masculine cosmetics which drew inspiration from India, China, and Japan. Using perfume catalogues, period advertisements , and etiquette books, Maxwell shows how perfume became as complex a Victorian language as flowers themselves. What follows moves seamlessly between accounts of the composition, manufacture, and usage of various perfumes (some now unable to be made because they contain illegal chemicals), their reputation, and their literary and artistic incarnations. Maxwell considers the relationship between perfumes and remembrance, before presenting insightful examinations of Swinburne, Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Lafcadio Hearn, a passionate advocate for Japanese culture who did much to popularize Far Eastern art. Elsewhere, Maxwell deciphers a hidden language of olfactory decadence, showing how homosexual and lesbian writers deployed perfume as an instrument for encoding transgressive desire. A chapter on Field offers exemplary readings of important poems; another on s dandyism is equally persuasive in exploring Wilde’s use of perfume in his self-stylization. e...

Marina Tsvetaeva and the Safic Discourse of women rock-poetry

This article is devoted to the specifics of the functioning of the Sapphic discourse in Russian female rock poetry during the stage of inculturation. At this stage, Svetlana Surganova, the leader of the rock band “Surganova and Orchestra”, a former participant of the rock band “Night Snipers” did not refuse the lesbian image, but it was not possible to represent it with the methods of queer strategy, relevant for the previous period. For Svetlana Surganova has become relevant cultural code associated with the name of Marina Tsvetaeva. In the methodological aspect, this article continues the attempts of the authors previously undertaken to combine the two methodologies: the methodology for analyzing the rock composition and the methodology for analyzing the female picture of the world, represented in the fictional text. The authors prove that the actualization of Marina Tsvetaeva's image has deep roots, connected not with the system of symbols of the lesbian subculture, but with the peculiarities of the work of the Silver Age poets. Based on the analysis of Svetlana Surganova's texts, the team comes to the conclusion that Marina Tsvetaeva's work attracts transgressive desire and opportunity to violate any prohibitions, go beyond strict limits and boundaries, which generally corresponds to the general attitudes and behaviours adopted in the lesbian subculture.

”Murderess of Two Husbands”: Female Agency as Female Loyalty in the History of the Nun

Abstract This work studies the behaviour of the protagonist of The History of the Nun: or, The Fair Vow- Breaker (1689) to investigate both what motivates her decisions (from pious woman to murderer) and what the objectives of her author may be. The conclusion reached is that female agency and the transgressive desire developed by Aphra Behn presented a new conception of femininity. Behn challenges the social contract and subverts seventeenth century conceptions of gender. Through Isabella’s behaviour Behn challenges established feminine morality, postulating a new role for women within society. The implication is that the act of breaking a holy vow, and the courage shown by a woman determined to take responsibility for her own life and make her own decisions in society, inevitably ends in tragedy and disaster.

An Ankle Queerly turned, or the fetishised bodies in Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library

This article takes as its point of departure a fetishistic scene from the 2004 ITV television adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in order to demonstrate (1) how fetishism itself is a form of adaptation and thus how adaptation functions fetishistically; (2) how the fetishism diaplayed in the 2004 adaptation of the The Body in the Library reflexively references a more primal fetishism at work in the ‘original’ text; and (3) how the body in The Body in the Library functions as a screen memory to disavow (both veil and reference) a primal, and otherwise purloined, body. Finally, it is argued that the diegesis proper of The Body in the Library is itself a screen memory, or adaptation, designed to mask the original, transgressive desire of Dolly Bantry.

Working on a failed research: promiscuity of wanting and doing both ways

By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop’s fable, “the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast.” In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting her postcolonial feminist subjectivity with the positioning of the bat in the fable, the author re-engages with the moral of the story that instructs exclusive loyalty, and highlights the promiscuous potential of the bat. Through this re-engagement, she examines how feminist researcher subjectivity, epistemology, and methodology can function both as the demand of exclusive loyalty and as the transgressive desire and move (of the bat). Then, how can she both refuse and take refuge in feminist research? The promiscuity of wanting and doing both is a contradiction that enables the author to re-visit her research with Korean working class parents in New York City schools, which she thought she had failed two years ago. Through three accounts of failure that involve (1) the divide between the condition of researcher employment and the needs of the field; (2) the divide between usable and unusable data; and (3) the divide between theoretical complexity and material simplicity, the author discusses how she promiscuously – persistently and patiently – re-engages with these divides in her failed research.

“Old Father, Old Artificer”: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home</i>

“Old Father, Old Artificer”: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home</i>

The Representations of Gertrude in Two Contemporary Adaptations of Hamlet

The elusive character of Gertrude in Hamlet has raised a range of conflicting issues among theatre critics and performers, and has been continuously interpreted as either ‘a whore’ guilty of incestuous sin or a nurturing, caring mother and wife. Although the contemporary representations of Gertrude have relied on the ‘avowal or disavowal of oedipal subtext,’ they have not swerved from this dominant good/evil dichotomy. Distinguished from other revisionist re-writings of Hamlet over the last couple of decades, Margaret Clarke's Gertrude and Ophelia (1987) and Howard Barker's Gertrude-The Cry (2002) break away from the stereotypical representations of Gertrude. Above all, in these adaptations, Gertrude is treated as a complex and coherent ‘central’ character while Hamlet is eliminated or reduced to a petty moralist. Clarke transforms Hamlet into the tragedy of Ophelia, describing Gertrude as an astute, even unscrupulous political manipulator, who struggles with the patriarchal social structures. Barker's Gertrude is reinterpreted as a symbol of transgressive female desire, which is embodied in her ‘cry’ from sexual fulfillment. These adaptations attempt to write back to Shakespeare's Gertrude, re-positioning her as an ideological product of male fantasies. However, their main concerns move beyond a simple revision or modernization of the canonical text. They are established as highly original works in their own rights, as Clarke and Barker use the canon as a springboard for investigating a series of critical contradictions embedded in contemporary theatre and society. The meta-theatrical frame in Gertrude and Ophelia engages with the politics of staging as well as a critical dilemma of the repression of women by women in recent feminist thinking. Focusing on the erotic nature of Gertrude's relationship with Claudius, Gertrude-The Cry explores the relationship between individual morality and eroticism. Upending Shakespeare's humanistic tragedy, Barker suggests his ‘theatre of Catastrophe’ as a remedy for the ‘age of social hygiene’ devoid of genuine tragic experience.

Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760

Reviewed by: Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 E.L. Devlin (bio) Toni Bowers. Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 320 pp. $110.00. At the end of Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), the eponymous hero, following the collapse (on religious grounds) of his engagement to the Italian Catholic Clementina della Poretta, marries the English Protestant, Harriet Byron. In a letter quoted by Toni Bowers in the coda of Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, Richardson concludes that Charles will forever be torn between his two sympathetic loves: “A divided Heart he must ever have” (301). This sentiment suggests the broader concerns of Bowers’s readings of seduction fiction against the background of James II ’s deposition in 1688, the Jacobite threat toward the succeeding Protestant monarchy, and the evolution of Tory political identities and ideologies in an era dominated by Whig preferment. In this reading the genre is highly political, and amatory narratives are used to delineate the ways Tories explored their compromised principles after the Glorious Revolution. Although the idea of “seduction fiction” seems attuned to commonplace assumptions about Charles II ’s court and its culture of sex and merriment, it was almost a century later, in Richardson’s Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1748–49), that the genre found its most enduring exemplars. Bowers traces that evolution from the writings of the Restoration court propagandist Roger l’Estrange (whose Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier [1678] is an epistolary account of a Portuguese nun’s doomed romance) through detailed readings of writings by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood as well as Richardson’s more famous works. Her book explores the connections between a genre preoccupied with the sexual, romantic, and matrimonial [End Page 123] dynamics of men and women, and broader political and social questions of authority, obedience, and subjecthood. Bowers’s book is extremely useful as an introduction to tomes with melodramatic plots that engaged enthusiastic contemporary audiences. The argument that they form a coherent genre of seduction or amatory writing is well made. They are usually epistolary novels that repeat narrative plot points, images, and ideas, and Bowers charts how their broader thematic concerns paralleled the evolution of partisan—primarily Tory—thought in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. As Bowers’s title suggests, Restoration and Augustan seduction stories were shaped by the tropes of “force” and “fraud,” terms frequently paired together to suggest that all men satiated their lust through violence or found wives through deception. Rape, or its contemplation, is a recurring motif in these texts, which are often freighted with images of men observing sleeping women whose provocatively arranged clothing heightens both potential threat and intense desire. These contemplative acts—men thinking about, but not necessarily acting upon, the possibility of violence, or women desiring men who will ultimately abuse them—are central to Bowers’s argument about evolving Tory ideas, and the shifting nature of victimhood they suggest. Early seventeenth-century texts could reflect the legal argument that seduction or rape was an assault, not on the daughter, but on the patriarchal father, and many instances of amatory fiction present the female victim of force or fraudulent seduction as complicit in her own downfall. The kernel of her own desire for the seducer denies her true and honest virtue, and this idea intertwines with authors’ representations of male sexuality. In Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709), Bowers argues that “the plot of besieged virtue turns out to be complicated by elements of complicity already resident in the victim” (108). As Bowers points out, these texts assumed it a truism that male sexual interest was intensified by womanly resistance. The conquest and defeat of this resistance is central to the heterosexual relationships of amatory fiction, whether the plot ends with marriage or more explicitly tragic consequences. Seduced heroines are a “paradoxical combination . . . of resistance and complicity, victimized innocence and transgressive desire” (71), and Bowers’s book raises many interesting points about the representation of gendered power...

Anality: News From the Front

“Anality: News From the Front” is a critical commentary on Jeffrey Guss's (this issue) paper, “The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject” and Stephen Botticelli's “Clinical Example.” In her analysis of Guss's argument, Sedgwick situates the dangerous potential of transgressive anal desire as “a revolutionary flash-point to be sought out and exploited” and highlights what she views as Guss's underlying assumption: that “danger is now altogether a thing to be decried and avoided.” Her response to Botticelli is a lively imagined relationship to Botticelli as a therapist, based on his clinical observations documented in “Clinical Example.”