The Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of Greek Romance by Elizabeth B. Bearden (review)

When I was invited to review Elizabeth B. Bearden's The Emblematics of the Self, I immediately accepted since it contains three of the most cherished topics which I have been researching over the last two decades: Cervantes, ekphrasis, and the art of memory. Her book covers a wide panorama of Renaissance texts from Sidney's Arcadia to Lady Mary Worth's Urania and from John Barclay's Argenis to Cervantes's Persiles and Segismunda, thus including English, Spanish, and neo-Latin texts. Aware of the many ekphrastic passages in the ancient Greek romances which are then echoed in Renaissance imitations, Bearden focuses her book on those moments which "invite both the reader and the characters within the plot to decode them" (5). Through these passages she delves into questions of identity and imitation. When turning to the characters' identity she prefers to use passability, that is, susceptibility or capacity to change, rather than agency or self-fashioning. This is a very apt choice, since in lives that are ruled by fate, agency may be less applicable; and since Bearden's book is dealing mainly with the subaltern, these characters may only be able to show a kind of adaptation and flexibility as they "navigate" the pressures imposed on them by society.

A clear, concise, and thoughtful introductory chapter provides a brief history of how the Greek romances became so popular in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, while at the same time showing the reasons for this. These include the privileging of chastity (although she does admit that racy and sexually divergent passages were at times erased from the translations and imitations); the assimilation of the travel narrative to the Christian pilgrimage; the superior narrative structure of these romances over the chivalric; the importance of a global perspective at a time of conquest and colonization; the echoes of epic structure that elevates them; the use of the far-away to include political and moral reflections; etc.

The second and third chapters then deal with imitations of Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon. Bearden begins with Alonso Núñez de Reinoso's Los amores de Clareo y Florisea (1552). Following the arguments made by Constance Rose, Bearden accepts that this Spanish romance expresses the feelings of loss and exile that typify a Spanish converso—and Núñez de Reinoso was indeed of Jewish origin, affected by the choice given to the Jews in Spain: exile or conversion. To this argument, Bearden adds a second of her own. The Spanish romance is told by a female narrator, Isea. This shift in narrator leads Bearden to analyze the first-person narrator in Leucippe and Clitophon. In a perhaps fanciful but well-argued and shrewd analysis she claims that the framing narrator at the beginning of Tatius's work, who sees a young man affected by a picture (a magnificent ekphrasis of Europa/Astarte is exhibited in words) and who is identified as Clitophon, is in reality the young Melite dressed as a man. The framing narrator thus misinforms the reader, who can reach the proper conclusion by looking at a number of elements in the novel, but particularly at the fact that it begins with the supposed Clitophon seeming woeful in Sidon, but ends with the happy pair of Leucippe and Clitophon happily married and traveling to Byzantium. Bearden furthers her argument through the uses of ekphraseis as points of "alternative focalization that expose gender ambiguity" (51). A dazzling interpretation of an ekphrasis of the Philomela myth is then provided, showing its many meanings (including the prophetic) and its link to Melite. In Reinoso, however, although the prophetic points to...