Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples. by Jonathan GoldbergReview by: Sarah E. SkwireThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 912-913Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543759 .

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912 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 3 (1998)

and abusive husband, a shrill and jealous wife, brains spattered along the pavement leading to a courtesan's house, and a sense that these characters cannot be other than they are.There are few if any such grotesqueries in Certain Morall Relations.

In both volumes there are a number of stories whose lesson seems to be prudence, patience, and common sense.The most praised characters are lovers who wait years for resis- tant parents to die, leaving the lovers free to follow their hearts without upsetting the social structures around them. The most insistently mocked characters are old men who marry young women and thus cause jealousies among their heirs. Certain Morall Relations has a number of lustful widows who capriciously use and discard men, a notable braggart who is punished for damaging the reputations of marriageable maides, and an attitude toward vio- lence that warrants fuller analysis than is possible in this review.

Admirable Events and Certain Morall Relations add up to an engrossing portrait of an sophisticated Catholic bishop, and a dynamic, socially adept translator-or perhaps two, Du Verger's role in Morall Relations being subject to question.Translation is a demanding disci- pline, one which requires both creativity and imagination. DuVerger's achievement here is of a very high quality. Elizabeth Otten Delmonico ...................... Truman State University

Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples.Jonathan Goldberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 255 pp. $16.95 PB. $45.00 HB.

Goldberg's exploration of women writers and desire begins with a well-argued essay that addresses representations of early modern women writers. He points out that critics have created a "legend of good women," in which female authors are presented as moral, suffer- ing, and pure and as part of a sisterhood of similarly oppressed women. As Goldberg further notes, this approach has led to the elision of a variety of interesting episodes in the lives and works of women writers and has done nothing to facilitate study of these women, their works, or their desires. Through close readings and reevaluations of works by Aemelia Lanyer, Aphra Behn, Margaret Roper, Mary Sidney, Mary Shelton, and Elizabeth Cary, Goldberg promises to explore the complex interrelations of women, writing, and desire.

Unfortunately, despite this compelling beginning and the engaging introductions to each of the book's three sections, the book as a whole is uneven. Many essays are marred by read- ings that are, at best, eccentric. The discussion of Aemelia Lanyer begins well. Here Gold- berg neatly applies his idea of the "legend of good women" to a variety of critical presentations of her life story. Comparing those presentations to the actual details of her biography, he is able to demonstrate the frequent and intentional elision of Lanyer's sexual promiscuity as critics attempt to eliminate the dangerous notion of"desire" from her life and her work. Sadly, this strong beginning is followed by an unfortunate close reading of Lanyer's poem "To the Ladie Lucie, Countess of Bedford" which seems to carry Goldberg's interest in desire farther than seems justifiable.

Faced with an image of a personified, feminizedVirtue who holds the key of Knowledge and stands ready to open the Countess's locked breast in order allow Christ's entrance, Gold- berg is only able to read the scene as a sexual image. It may be, he suggests, a same-sex encounter, possibly one where Christ is presented "as a dildo, in short," or one whereVirtue acts as a panderer between the Countess and her lover, Christ.There are a variety of prob- lems with such a reading, such as the assumption that any penetration or entering is neces- sarily sexual, but perhaps the most offensive is Goldberg's assumption here, and throughout the book, that feminine desire is necessarily a desire for penetration. Indeed, Goldberg's

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Book Reviews 913

problems with penetration continue in his discussion of the poem's conclusion. Here a "lovely guest," whom Goldberg rightly notes may be Jesus, Lanyer, or Lanyer's poem, has entered the Countess's heart, bringing fresh flowers and "rich beauties" to please her. Gold- berg, however, chooses to read this pleasantly presented entrance as a "violation," a "scenario of sexual violence." It seems strained and reductionist in the extreme to limit the possible interpretations of images of penetration and entering to images of sexual penetration or images of sexual violence.

A later chapter on Margaret Roper also begins well, arguing for her participation on equal ground in conversation with Erasmus and other humanists and sensitively reading her letters and her translation of Erasmus's Precatio Dominica. However, once again, this essay is marred by eccentric interpretation. Discussing Thomas More's "one miracle"-the recom- mendation of the use of an enema to cure Roper of a life-threatening attack of sweating sickness-Goldberg finds himself fascinated by the penetrative aspect of the cure and by the coincidence that Roper and her husband eventually inherited from More a house called "Butclose."What Goldberg calls the "anal connection" between More and Roper is then re- examined to present Roper as a "boy penetrated anally," a pederastic, incestuous symbol of the desires of both Roper and More.Thin, unconvincing, and barely based on the text under discussion, this reading of Roper's work and desire damages an otherwise interesting look at Roper.

Despite these criticisms, the book contains good work, particularly in the valuable last section, "Writing as a Woman."The essay "Mary Shelton's Hand" is an excellent example of the scholarly precision and delicacy of which Goldberg is capable. Here, he performs some intriguing paleographic experiments, exploring the question of the authorship of the poem beginning "O Happy Dames, that may embrace / The frute of your delight." While Tottel attributed the poem to Surrey, Goldberg looks back to the Devonshire manuscript version of the poem to explore the possibility that Mary Shelton is the author. More important to Goldberg than the authorship of the poem, though, are the explorations of the importance of manuscript culture and of women's participation in that culture, which spring from the question of authorship. His considerations of these topics are well-crafted contributions to the discussion of Renaissance texts. In addition, his discussion of desire in this essay is more reasonable and more closely tied to his texts than discussions in earlier chapters. Here, he cleverly introduces the subject by noting that poems by unknown authors, even if written in a female voice, are not necessarily written by women.Then he moves to a discussion of the "unabashedly active" desire voiced in the poem, and considers the wide variety of possible voices for that desire a woman for a man, a man for a man, a man voicing a woman's desire for a man.

This section's second essay, "Graphina's Mark," is also worth notice. It explores the mean- ing of a minor character in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam and the meaning of women's writing as a whole. Goldberg carefully unpacks the variety of complications inherent in a woman author's naming a female character after the art of writing and then praising that character for her silence. In the process, he also ably explores the topics of friendship, mar- riage, and race in the play.

If the whole book were as insightful and penetrating as the final third, Desiring Women Writing would be an important text for any scholar interested in women and writing during the Renaissance. As it is, however, one must read through a good many dubious analyses before coming to the solid and important scholarship that enlivens the end. Sarah E. Skwire ........... University of Chicago

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