Subjectivity and Women's Poetry in Early Modern England: 'Why on the ridge should she desire to go?' (review)

214 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) describes Siena as characterised by social cohesion, a sharing of values between painters and patrons, and remarkable cultural homogeneity. He has not found division because he has not looked for it by employing the neo-Marxist analytical terms of hegemony, counter-hegemony, and ideology. The entire purpose of the close control over art exercised by the Sienese state was to project an image of good government and social cohesion. That does not mean it was the actual state, and you would need to look to evidence outside of visual art to test whether it was. This argumentation will possibly form part of the third and final volume. Max Staples School of Humanities Charles Sturt University McGrath, Lynette, Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: ‘Why on the ridge should she desire to go?’, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. x, 295; RRP £45.00; ISBN 075460585X. This analysis of the construction of subjectivity through the construction of texts focuses on three women writing between the mid sixteenth and the mid seventeenth century: Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer. McGrath confesses to an ‘eclectic’ approach in reconstructing the Foucauldian ‘practices of the self’, placing herself, like her subjects, on a theoretical margin between cultural and post-structuralist feminism. Nevertheless, the book presents us with a unified exploration of some diverse texts, using cultural historicism to embed these writers in their socio-literary context and through a close analysis of selected writings using the frame of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. The book itself is divided into two equal sections. The first three chapters explore the background of women as producers and consumers of texts and their strategies for avoiding and subverting the gendered linguistic and cultural constraints attached to these activities. The following three chapters provide detailed explication of some of the poetry and drama written and published by three women who are recently becoming less marginalised in Early Modern studies. In a period crowded with writers who have been neglected due to the canonicity of Milton and Marvell, women have been gradually reinstated, if somewhat overshadowed by the promotion of Katherine Philips. In the last decade, however, the three writers chosen by McGrath have increasingly Reviews 215 Parergon 20.2 (2003) received critical attention in anthologies, at conferences, and can even be found on the useful website run by the University of Pennsylvania, ‘Voice of the Shuttle’. McGrath’s scholarly and thorough examination of the texts and the conditions of their production is therefore timely. The book is lavishly annotated and draws on a variety of philosophical and historical writings from a wide spectrum of writers. Renaissance conduct manuals (always a good source of indignation) augment some well-chosen black and white illustrations. The chapters are broken up into sections of five or six pages which makes this a very easy study to browse in. The content of the chapters dealing with individual writers, however, presumes some knowledge of their work and its reception. For a reader unfamiliar with Whitney, for instance, some early directions about her work and where it can currently be found would have been helpful especially as lengthy quotations from the poetry have not been included. McGrath also glosses over the paucity of information about Whitney’s circumstances such as her possible imprisonment. Whitney’s literary relationships are, however, used to deepen the analysis of her poetry, and to show how she responded to the dominance of male literary discourse. As she was an aristocrat, Elizabeth Cary’s life is better documented and there is more material on which to develop a feminist reading. The discourse of marriage revealed in her play, Mariam, is presented from multiple points of view, but one senses a determination to fashion Cary as writer who can subvert conventions and restrictions, in order to fashion her own subjectivity. The fate of women’s published material in the marketplace and on the stage receives less attention here, where I expected it, than in the introductory chapters. McGrath focuses not only on the heroine of Cary’s drama, Mariam, but also treats Cary’s own appearance in the biography written by one of her daughters, The Lady...