Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare by Theresa M. Krier (review)

JEMCS 3.1 (Spring/Summer 2003) Book Reviews Theresa M. Krier. Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xvii+266 pp. $42.50. Reviewed by Michelle Ephraim In Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare, Theresa M. Krier proposes a "vigorous alterna tive" (ix) towhat literary critics, reading through a Freudian and Lacanian lens, have long understood as "nostalgia for a lost merger with the mother" (4) inmedieval and early mod ern texts. In her ambitious reconsideration of the Song of Songs, Lucretius, Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Krier identifies a struggle to reject the inaccessible archaic moth er who inspires destructive cycles of loss, desire, and dread. At the basis of Krier's argument is British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's notion of a liberating "transitional" or "potential" space between mother and infant. Articulating Winnicott through Luce Irigaray's gynocentric figures of "contiguous lips, of metonymy, of fluids, of thresholds and intervals" (50), Krier contends that these writers represent birth not as a trauma of insatiable desire but as an entry into a space formutually affirming interplay. Drawing from Irigaray, Krier reads tropes of creation, fecundity, and endurance as expressions of gratitude for a mother who encourages the infant's impulse to survive. Irigaray proves essential in identifying the blazon catalog and lyric as poet ic forms that signify the space through which the infant pro tagonist/speaker moves from crippling dependence to dynamic self-reliance. It is in the texts' embrace of these poetic forms?and rejection of those that alienate, displace, and fragment the maternal body?that Krier finds affirma tion of her overarching "ethical challenge" (5): to call atten Reinews 167 tion to how these texts (with varying degrees of success) give due praise to the mother. In a lengthy first section, Krier refutes the common con tention that Winnicott sentimentalizes mothers as sites of unconditional plenitude. Instead, she contends, Winnicott emphasizes that the infant experiences immediate disillu sionment with regard tomaternal nurture, and it is this real ity that prompts the infant to come into being. It is ws-?-vis the close-yet-far mother that the infant learns to cultivate "aggression," or the active impulse to engage in attachments to both mother and others. Inmoving beyond what Melanie Klein argues is the infant's chronic wish to possess and destroy the desired maternal "object," Winnicott's infant, with the knowledge that the mother can survive this initial rage, gains self-confidence and joy from "object use" (41). Indeed, the experience of loss in birth, Winnicott argues, offers "promise rather than peril" (47). In the Song of Songs, Krier argues, the female speaker's role as infant becomes the tropological touchstone for her identity as a sexually mature adult. As the speaker describes her beloved, she "situates amorous stability" (60) in the site of her mother's house: "I held him, and would not let him go,/ Until I had brought him into my mother's house,/ And into the chambers of her that conceived me" (3:4). In Songs 8:1-2, the speaker imagines her lover also as a suckling at her mother's breast, and these condensed identities suggest that the maternal relationship generates a multiplicity of attachments for the infant. With these overlaps the speaker acknowledges her mother's autonomy as a "desiring subject" (60) while affirming her own ability to act as an adult with desires of her own. The contiguous incorporation of the maternal?as opposed to an economy of substitution in which daughter replaces mother?is echoed in the Song's blazon catalogs. Krier argues that rather than metaphor (a poetics of substitution), the blazon catalogs demonstrate m?tonymie relationships inwhich objects exist in fluid reci procity. As a corollary to her discussion of Songs, Krier iden tifies evocations of these blazon catalogs in Spenser's wed ding poems as sites of resistance to what is overall a Petrarchan narrative of a speaker's insatiable desire for an inaccessible lover/mother figure. 168 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies In what is the book's most compelling section, Krier argues that male figures in both TTie Parlement ofFoules and Love's...