Donne's Idea of a Woman: Structure and Meaning in The Anniversaries (review)

Reviews 265 Tayler, Edward W., Donne's Idea ofa Woman: Structure and Meaning in The Anniversaries, N e w York, Columbia University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xiii, 190; R.R.P. US$47.50. Here is a book with attitude, which has been circulated for review by its pubtishers unusuaUy late. If the rather old-style terminology of the subtitle is not enough to alert the reader to Professor Tayler's critical position, the Preface makes his attitude to both literary theory and Donne's 'Anniversaries' resoundingly clear. In what he terms his 'mUd-mannered polemic' Tayler rejects 'theory' (he claims to have read 'a huge amount of it') as eisegesis and denies the usefulness of new historicisms, structuralism and poststructuralism to his enterprise of determining what Donne meant w h e n he said h e described the Idea of a W o m a n and not as she was'. Throughout the Introduction, Tayler reviews and resists the critical trend to view Elizabeth Drury as a symbol and, in the process, responds in detail to Barbara Lewalski's influential interpretation of the poems. Tayler presents Lewalski's m o d e of historicism as anachronistic, simplistic and not entirely logical. His critique is certainly sharp enough to upset Lewalski's conception of Donne's 'idea' as a symbol of 'the restored image of the regenerate Protestant soul' and to send this reader back to Lewalski's book with a keener critical eye. What emerges from Tayler's critique of her argument, and his aUgnment of himseU with the likes of first-rate older scholars such as Louis Martz, is very much a presentation of what he considers careful, honest, historical literary criticism as against less sound though more fashionable and politicised modern historicisms. Tayler asserts that the 'Anniversaries' have a particular, intended, correct meaning and require a particular, intended and correct manner of reading. Donne requires a virtuous reader with hetter eyes' w h o will employ the tripartite faculties of soul (reason, memory, wtil) to follow the path of ascent to the beatific vision of Drury. A key theoretical starting point for Tayler is the necessity of understanding Donne's o w n thought-world, structured as it is in what w e m a y n o w regard as the alien terms of Platonic, Aristotelian, Augustinian and Thomist traditions. Knowledge, for Donne, does not come with 266 Reviews objective observation of an object distinct from the observer, hut only by conforming his mind to the object, only by achieving union or "same as" with the object'. In the 'Anniversaries', Donne takes the reader from a Thomistic starting point of 'sense and fantasy' up into the realm of intelligible ideas and finally into union with the mind of God. Our comprehension of Drury begins with our sensual perception of her ('Fust Anniversary', 316) and progresses along 'entirely traditional' lines to the point where the active intellect Uluminates the sensory image to enable its impression upon the passive intellect, 'where it is actuatised as an expressed intelligible species. The object known and the knower are n o w identical: "it is both the object and the wit". The knower n o w possesses, in what Aristotle calls The Place of Forms, "The idea of a W o m a n and not as she was'". This point of arrival is the 'watch-tower' from which one can 'see all things despotied of fallacies' ('Second Anniversary', 292-305). The infinitude of particulars and the accidentals constituting Drury's individuating material properties, and present to the 'sense and fantasy', are strictly unintelligible to the mind and occlude our true vision of her essence which is our knowledge of her in reality. Furthermore, the 'Anniversaries' have a specific discoverable structure, the form of which Donne intends will contribute to our comprehension of the poems' meaning. Lewalski, Tayler contends, imposes a structure on the poems to suit her argument, while Tayler, foUowing Martz, works at interpreting the structure Donne has left for us. The less regular structure of the 'Second Anniversary' must be understood in relation to the strict proportion of the structure of the First 'as imitation to original, variation...