Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (review)

268 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) Rose, Mary Beth, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 2002; paper; pp. xxii, 139; RRP US$15.00; ISBN 0226725731. In general terms, this book studies ‘the ways in which normative gendered positions assume heroic proportions in early modern English literature as they are diversely modified, celebrated, undermined, scrutinized, and obscured’ (p. xvii). More specifically, it traces a dialectic between a masculine heroics of action and a feminine heroics of endurance. It also mounts a historical argument that, across a long seventeenth century (1588-1703), masculine heroics were displaced by feminine, though usually in a problematic and self-divided manner. Mary Beth Rose argues her thesis through four groups of texts. The first consists of plays by Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Here Rose is alert to dramatic situations and verbal tropes that position masculine protagonists in conventionally feminine circumstances. She argues that Tamburlaine’s determination to occupy every possible subject position includes assuming the feminine subject position, and that this gesture valorises the feminine. She demonstrates acutely that Faustus is unable to imagine himself as the (feminised) object of God’s desire, an inability that epitomises Faustus’s tragic situation. Rose makes a similar point about Volpone, whose trickery frequently places him in female subject positions, as ‘a grotesque parody of the beloved mistress in a Petrarch sonnet’ (p. 17). The result of this strategy is to ‘dramatize to himself how little he is cared for, how everyone hates him and wishes he were dead’ (p. 19). If these figures all appropriate the feminine, Macbeth totally expels it. (So, Rose argues, does Macduff, who is formally opposed to Macbeth in the play’s structure and contrasted with him in Shakespearean criticism.) Rose’s argument here is perhaps a little too schematic: she makes a dizzyingly rapid survey of masculine heroism in Shakespearean tragedy, and she neglects Macbeth’s resistance to his willed emptying-out of the feminine, an important element of his tragedy. Though there is much discerning commentary in this chapter, its broad-brush approach makes it less convincing than the following ones. Rose has recently edited the writings of Elizabeth I, and her distinguished work in this field shapes her more detailed and very satisfying chapter on Elizabeth’s speeches. Elizabeth too appropriates a wide range of gendered positions to create a heroic persona. Rose controverts the view that Elizabeth cultivated especially the roles of virgin and mother, problematic ones in Reviews 269 Parergon 20.1 (2003) Protestant England. She concentrates rather on Elizabeth’s use of her life experience, her suffering, her survival, to fashion a heroism of endurance, achieved partly by God’s grace, partly by her own wisdom. Rose brings to bear studies of Renaissance women’s rhetoric by Constance Jordan and Maureen Quilligan, which are based on texts doubtless known to Elizabeth and which discuss similar feminine rhetorics. Rose also analyses the language of reciprocity which marks Elizabeth’s latest speeches, and dares to question whether these feelings are authentic or politic. Her answer is persuasive as well as humane: the Queen’s gratification may be ‘neither a sentimental nor a mystified response, but a response to reality as she experienced it’ (p. 54). The third group of writings are examples of women’s secular autobiography. These texts exemplify the problems of conceptualising or representing the feminine self, and especially a feminine heroism, when ideology demanded that the feminine be subordinated or suppressed or silenced. Rose demonstrates cogently that her autobiographies were enabled by the social upheavals of the Civil War. She designates her writers ‘self-created heroines’, an apt gesture toward Richard Helgerson’s concept of self-crowned ‘laureate poets’. She distinguishes interestingly between the personae and social situations of her writers, such as the ‘oscillation between inner weakness and inner strength’ in Margaret Cavendish and the ‘prestigious affliction’ of Alice Thornton. She is especially adept at disclosing telling absences or subtextual tensions in these texts. This is perhaps Rose’s most intellectually nimble chapter. Finally, Rose brings together Samson Agonistes, Oroonoko, and Mary Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage in order to study the intricacies of heroism and...