Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature (review)

Reviews 167 comes into the world already gendered, socialised, and married'. Edwards continues to show how Chaucer discusses marriage in several of the tales, emphasising the differing interpretations scholars have given to these tales over the last century. H e concludes (p. 127) that 'The point is not that he [Chaucer] cancels out medieval marriage doctrine by showing that it is hopelessly, even perniciously constituted against itself. Rather the speeches like the stories claim a territory for our moral imagination where w e can judge the proscriptions of doctrine and examine human action, spoken and performed'. This collection of essays will be very useful for all scholars and most students working in the area of gender and medieval studies. All contributors are experts in their fields; all essays are well written, well edited, and copiously footnoted. The addition of an index and bibliography would have made this book considerably more useful. Increasing its length to a more usual two hundred pages would have enabled the contributions to include some of the omitted areas. Anne Gilmour-Bryson Department of History University of Melbourne Finucci, Valeria and Regina Schwartz, eds., Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994; paper; pp. vii, 273; R.R.P. $US$14.95. These ten essays on Renaissance writers reflect the current literary understanding of psychoanalysis in the United States, which is still dominated by Freud and where post-Freudian means, largely, Lacanian. The index has, for instance, one reference to Melanie Klein and none to Winnicott. The essays are grouped in four rather overlapping sections: gender definition, including feminine masquerade; voyeurism and the gaze; power struggles or 'the economics of subjection'; and, finally, dreams. Broadly speaking, the authors follow the now accepted procedures of analysing and indeed explicating texts as revelations or workings of the unconscious, not in terms of individual authors, but as case studies or collective fantasies. The editors forestall the accusation, levelled at earlier collections of this kind, that psychoanalytic criticism is ahistorical. The literature of psychoanalysis, they point out, has been from the first preoccupied with the literature of the Renaissance, while writers of the period were concerned with making 168 Reviews versions of that inner life which became the domain of psychoanalysis. Further, they claim that there can be a valuable triangular exchange between psychoanalysis, feminism and Renaissance studies. As the corpus of psychoanalysis has been reinterpreted by feminism, so it may also be fruitfully reviewed in the context of the Renaissance period, 'when the sense of the self was without doubt very different from that of the m o d e m subject' (p. 169). This historical awareness is only sporadically evident in the essays. Kerrigan's sensitive discussion offilialrelationships in As You Like It is admirably informed by reference to laws of primogeniture governing inheritance. In contrast, an account of Machiavelli's letter to Luigi Guicciardini describing a sexual encounter with an ugly crone lacks even a literary-historical context. It is left to the essay by Finucci on Ariosto to sketch that in. Schwartz's own essay, an absorbing discussion of 'seeing' in Paradise Lost in the context of theories of the gaze from Freud to Lacan and Mulvey, is a good example of how a Renaissance text can provide a ground for reviewing psychoanalysis and vice versa. A n unusual feature of this collection is its bringing together discussions of English and Italian writers. It embraces a double Renaissance canon, with Petrarch, Ariosto, Castiglione, Machiavelli and Tasso chiming with Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Rowley, as authors of The Changeling, and Milton. There is perhaps not so much chiming together as one would hope. The reader is left to make the cross references; and w e have the now familiar experience (probably inevitable in this kind of compilation) of reading through a book which it is clear that the individual authors have not been able to read. These are essentially specialist essays, but among them are some, notably Harry Berger's deft, witty discussion of the episode of the gardens of Adonis in Book III of The Faerie Queene, which draw on a very wide range of reading in the Renaissance, as well...