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Shakespeare Quarterly 54.2 (2003) 221-222



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Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare. Theresa M. Krier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. 283. $42.50 cloth.

Theresa M. Krier's Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare is a vibrant and learned book that brings together a variety of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance texts in order to interpret their representations of motherhood, or what the author construes as the maternal. Krier's conceptual framework is psychoanalytic, relying on what she interestingly terms the "literary thinking" of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Luce Irigaray. In choosing her texts and establishing their dialogue with these psychoanalytic thinkers, Krier's aim is transformative, even visionary. She views the Song of Songs, De rerum natura, The Parlement of Foules, Spenser's Amoretti and Faerie Queene, Love's Labor's Lost,and The Winter's Tale as sharing "interests in acknowledging and hailing their precursors as part of their meditation on maternity" (4). While each text recognizes "the lure of nostalgia for an archaic mother," all "urge alternatives to both longing for and dread of her" (4-5).

Krier offers her analysis as a corrective to what she seems to regard as the blindly disgruntledquality of some feminist and other contemporary scholarship, which has unfairly consigned to disgrace genres such as the erotic blazon or rendered unfashionable such forms as the medieval encyclopedia or the philosophical poem. To replace what she views as grouchiness and contempt, she offers gratitude and a heightened awareness of the poetic traditions of praise: "This book attends to the [End Page 221] poetic utterance of thanks, benedictions, glorias, and questions, and asks what these enunciations have to do with maternity" (xiv).

Some of Krier's assumptions are arguable in ways that she does not acknowledge. She accepts without nuance, for example, the near universality of the psychoanalytic conviction that a nostalgic sense of loss for the maternal and the sentimentality andbitterness it causes pervade Western literature, forming "the sacrifice that creates culture" (ix). In seeking to revise this assumption, she shortchanges the increasingly sophisticated historical research on both sexuality and gender in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as in the ancient world. If, as Krier argues, the texts she studies "belong to the pre-history of psychoanalytic thought and make possible the kinds of thoughts that psychoanalysts have" (xv), it is at least worth considering that psychoanalytic discourse arose from a modern culture in which the nuclear family was the central unit. This was not the case in medieval culture and only beginning to be so in the early modern centuries. "We have been telling ourselves the same story," she interestingly insists, "that texts replicate the phallic order, repudiate the mother, abject the feminine, and marginalize women. This is not an untrue story so much as just one story, mesmerizing to us because of the illusions generated by our own gender arrangements. . . . I hope for transformation of reading practices and gender relations alike" (52).

These are large and noble hopes, and much of Krier's effort centers on her critique of the conception of separation, particularly separation from the mother, as involving irrecoverable loss that leads inevitably to idealization of and contempt for the mother. She criticizes psychoanalytic discourse for promoting these asssumptions, citing the "slippage. . . from loss to lack, thence to castration and nostalgia. Mother and child, relieved of the burdens of lack, might well shape and sustain a space between them for fluencies of affect, thinking, and formal creation" (11-12). With the conceptual aid particularly of Klein and Winnicott and some of the more lyrical theoretical formulations of Irigaray, Krier develops her idea of this potentially creative "space-between" as the positive fulcrum of her analysis and, indeed, as her idea of the good. She has selected the poets she studies according to their ability, as she frequently puts it, to resist nostalgia and to recognize and gratefully praise the creative space that is opened to be occupied as a result of separation from the mother.

With texts judged according to...

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