Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (review)

As readers of early modern literature have long recognized, love discourse, with its rich vocabulary for describing desire, disappointment, and satisfaction, provided a useful vehicle for early modern authors to talk about politics. Historicizing the love side of the love-and-politics equation, Melissa E. Sanchez claims that the early modern understanding of love was not rooted in contentment or other positive effects with which it is now normatively linked but instead was characterized by irrationality, abjection, frustration, and other masochistic feelings drawn primarily from Petrarchanism and Protestant martyrology. Erotic Subjects traces, from Philip Sidney to John Milton, the literary translation of these "desires and fantasies that resist normalizing, rational structures" into "an alternate tradition of political theory that stresses a perverse component of sovereignty" (4). Sanchez complicates our understanding of pre- and post-Civil War politics by juxtaposing the usual suspects, such as Milton, with literary texts less frequently considered in studies of the politics of seventeenth-century literature. Showing that historicist and psychological methodologies can work in concert, Sanchez situates her close readings of texts in early modern political theory and examines masochism's psychosocial duality in which suffering can provide the political subject with moral authority or with a pleasure that turns political subjection into a kind of Stockholm Syndrome avant la lettre. With gestures toward feminist and queer theory, Erotic Subjects attends to the gendering of political resistance, includes women writers in political history, and recovers an early modern model of political subjection that is not based on the familiar, heteronormative analogy of marriage and a monarch's rule.

After a brief introduction, Sanchez begins to trace the way that various post-Reformation political writers, such as John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, and John Aylmer, indicted equally the "idolatrous obedience" of subjects and the "unbridled appetites" of monarchs (14). Not only does the monarch need to submit to good counsel and law, but the subject has a moral responsibility to resist unlawful rule. When this contractual model of mutual responsibilities for good governance and its analogues in discussions of the marriage bond went awry, Foxean martyrdom and Petrarchan courtship offered subjects ways to figure their resistance. In chapter two, then, Sanchez sees this evidence of martyrdom as empowerment in Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. She suggests we locate Sidney's articulation of political resistance not in his male characters but in female characters, such as Parthenia, Philoclea, and Pamela, because "it is by inhabiting the powerless position traditionally associated with femininity that male political subjects can resist monarchal authority without raising the specter of anarchy often associated with armed rebellion" (34).

Nevertheless, as Sanchez demonstrates, these modes of resistance could be easily undermined by the very subjects who embrace them. Martyrdom could signify virtue through suffering and ethical resistance, and English Petrarchanism could give voice to a lover/subject's complaints and frustrated ambitions. The experience of pleasure in pain, however, also produced "the fear that subjects would find themselves psychologically unable to resist tyranny, or even drawn to it," especially during the politically tumultuous seventeenth century (21). The rest of Erotic Subjects charts the development of this fear and skepticism. Thus, the trajectory of the book's argument is one of falling away from or critiquing Sidney's model of resistance, an arc which helps Sanchez show how her authors anticipate the conflicts of the English Civil War as well as complicate the royalist/republican rubric that usually governs discussions of late Tudor and Stuart politics.

Chapter three analyzes books three through five of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene as showing that the pleasures of suffering can make subjects complicit in tyranny. Comparing the 1590 and 1596 versions of the story of Scudamour and Amoret, Sanchez finds that the latter version represents Scudamour as unworthy of Amoret's devotion, and her narcissistic investment in her figuration as a devoted, suffering lover prolongs the trials...