Quest for Eros: Browning and 'Fifine.' by Samuel B. Southwell (review)

BOOK REVIEWS73 atual ficcao brasileira, seus autores, obras e diretrizes. Mais do que isso, a leitura agradável e informativa de Moderna ficçao brasileira taz aguardar agora um segundo volume em que se complete o diligente e valioso trabalho iniciado tao auspiciosamente aqui. CARMELO VIRGILLO, Arizona State University Samuel B. Southwell. Questfor Eros: Browning and 'Fifine.' The University Press of Kentucky, 1980. 276 p. In Samuel Southwell's study, Fifine at the Fair (1872) at long last receives the serious attention it deserves. While acknowledging the poem's complexities and its flaws, Quest for Eros applies an exacting biographical and psychoanalytical approach to make this most difficult work of Browning's accessible as never before. Southwell's argument is that Fifine anticipates with remarkable daring of conception and style the twentieth-century belief that man can achieve "organic, psychological , and cultural unity" through a liberated unconscious. Although Browning's expression of such a subversive doctrine was necessarily indirect, even incomplete, Southwell contends that the poem embodies theclimactic development of the poet's intellectual experience and as such requires a radical rereading of his earlier work. Southwell places Elizabeth Barrett Browning squarely at the heart ofthe poem, representing in her dual role of Elvire and phantom wife the psychic inhibitions which must be overcome to experience the sexual freedom embodied in the gypsy girl Fifine. In a rigorous explication of the poem as quest for Eros reconciled to Aphrodite (i.e., world of flesh and world of God embraced simultaneously), Southwell brilliantly accounts for the elusive and discrete elements of the dramatic situation as necessarily subordinate to the linked symbolic elements: because the dramatic monologue strategy of rationalization was inadequate to convey unconscious drives, Browning boldly jettisoned consistent character development for resonant images of primitive vitality — sea and air, dolmen and menhir — to express the real source of man's integration and the insistency of his instinctual life. The quest for sexual fulfillment is thus seen as victorious but finally abandoned. In yielding to the phantom wife, Don Juan despairingly renounces — without repudiating — the vision, and in so doing betrays the author's impasse: "Browning's intellect had illuminated a realm which his temperament would not permit him to deny but which it could not assimilate." Thus locating the central tension in Browning has far-reaching, and unsettling, implications — from making Sordello's "semantic stutterings" symptoms of sexual repression to detecting a movement toward collectivity beneath the basic lovesociety antithesis of The Ring and the Book — and Southwell's schematized groupings of the earlier poems ("Patterns of Compromise and Passivity," "Patterns of Action") do not entirely satisfy, being at once too narrow to accommodate all of Browning and too broad to retain meaning. Questions arise with the biographical reading of Fifine, too: why, for example, is so much weightgiven to thelove-letters of twenty-five years before and so little to the recent Lady Ashburton affair — and none at all to the breach-of-promise imbroglio of Browning's father? And certainly Southwell overstates Fifine's uniqueness as an exploration of the psyche; he writes as though no poet before Browning had envisioned buried streams or caverns measureless to man. 74ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Such objections aside, however, Quest for Eros is a provocative and impressive study that no student of Browning can afford to overlook. MARY ROSE SULLIVAN University of Colorado at Denver Edmund Yarwood. Vsevolod Garshin. Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall, 1981. 147p. Twayne World Author Series 627. American teachers and scholars of foreign literatures have long been grateful for the wonderfully concise resource provided by the Twayne's World Authors Series. Where else can one find an author's biography, a critical survey of his or her works, and an annotated bibliography of other relevant criticism in so thin a volume? Each number in this series has quickly become a source of great practical value to us, and Yarwood's treatment of Vsevolod Garshin is no exception. Garshin was an extremely sensitive and sometimes morbid short-story writer who, before his suicide at the age of 33 in 1888, enjoyed great popularity for his works on war, art, and insanity, subjects with which he had an intimate personal...