Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (review)

Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance. By Kathryn Schwarz. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 286. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

According to Kathryn Schwarz, the idea of the Amazon captivates our imagination as strongly as it fascinated early modern England. We thrill to Xena, Warrior Princess and Lara Croft Tomb Raider, launch archaeological quests for "real" Amazons, admire athletic "grrl power," read The Amazon Quarterly, and visit a plethora of Web sites dedicated to Amazon lore. A timely excavation of "an intensity of fascination and ambivalence akin to, and perhaps productive of, our own" (xiii), Tough Love integrates Renaissance texts and postmodern theory to challenge the tradition of the Amazon as the prototype of the unruly woman ripe for taming and the accepted opposition of Amazons and domesticity. Rereading early modern texts ranging from explorers' accounts and conduct manuals to Spenser's epics and Shakespeare's plays, Schwarz focuses on the sites of Amazonian participation in the homosocial structures that formally regulated relations between men and women, and the homoeroticism that covertly supplemented these relations.

Despite contradictory accounts of the reputed customs of the legendary warrior women who supposedly inhabited ancient Asia and flourished in the New World, communities of Amazons were commonly believed to invert patriarchal social relations--commandeering the masculine vocations of war and government, living out-of-doors and apart from men but using them to reproduce, educating daughters and disposing of sons, and sacrificing the breasts that signified domesticity but hampered their martial efficiency. However, framing her readings of Amazonian encounters with the Foucauldian distinction between categories of identity and categories of practice, Lacanian mirroring, Freudian narcissism and the uncanny, and the important recent work of Alan Bray, Gregory Bredbeck, Bruce Smith, Valerie Traub, Jonathan Goldberg, and Judith Butler, Schwarz persuasively argues that early modern narratives were less concerned with the Amazons' resistance to patriarchy than their participation in it. Stories about Amazons, she further asserts, functioned as "testing grounds for social conventions, playing out the relationships between homosocial and heterosocial systems of connection that produce an idea of the domestic" (2). Additionally, as both masculine and feminine, Amazons "generate[d] desire between men, between women, between women and men" (2); "'Amazon'" did not signify in a "singular or straightforward way" (23), but its meaning was "constituted out of an inappropriate relationship between sexed bodies and gendered acts, . . . and by a perception of that choice as inherently perverse" (3), with Amazonian "sexuality aggressively interven[ing] in the constitution of social hierarchies and bonds" (4).

Amazons may have been fantastic creatures residing in the long-ago-and-far-away, but they were domesticated, as Schwarz demonstrates, by their perpetual importation into familiar spaces. Part One, "Abroad at Home: The Question of Queens," focuses on "narratives in which women defined within familiar structures become recognizably amazonian" (37). In "Falling off the Edge of the World: Ralegh among the Amazons," Schwarz reads exploration narratives metonymically and domestically, complicating the traditional nexus of Amazons, gold, and land as objects of desire by focusing on the replacement of "the strange with the strangely familiar" as Amazons appear in the New World "in the social categories that structure the world at home" (60). "Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays" extends the Howard-Rackin analysis in Engendering a Nation (1997) of female agency in the Henry VI plays, emphasizing the doubleness of Frenchwomen Joan la Pucelle and Margaret as external and domestic threats to English patriarchy which reproduce the alternating estrangement and domestication characteristic of Amazon narratives. "Stealing the breech" from her husband as she plays the wife and mother all too well, Margaret, Schwarz argues, incontestably demonstrates the vulnerability of male homosocial structures. In "Stranger in the Mirror: Amazon Reflections in the Jacobean Queen's Masque," Schwarz engages the multiple implications of a festive genre in which the celebration of fictive female agency in the impersonation of masculine femininity both "pays tribute...