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140 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies moting consumer capital. Mandell puts a gendered spin on Hirschman's argument: women were sacrificed in the process of rehabilitating greed and competition. Modernization stories are inevitably relentless in their vision of the drive of capital to colo nize everything, to commodity all desire. In MandelTs version, Anna Letitia Barbauld is the one heroic figure who resists sadis tic abjection, but perversely through a dissenting religiosity, which, forme at any rate, offers an unconvincing alternative. In the end, what ismost winning about this study is its sophis ticated theoretical model, forMandell draws upon an unusual and unpredictable combination of theorists?Julia Kristeva, Ren? Girard, Marcel Mauss, and Mary Douglas?to develop her auda cious and intriguing thesis, which is, in the end, similar to Zizek's claim that anti-Semitism is not an aberration in European culture but rather necessary to it. Overall, Mandell combines theoretical adventurousness with an admirable political agenda and literary deftness. If the application is very occasionally forced, that is a small price to pay forwhat amounts to a genuinely new way of thinking about eighteenth-century British literature. Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xxxi + 598 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Maja-Lisa von Sneidern This weighty book will quickly disabuse those who think that the bedtrick is an uncommon plot device; Doniger offers hundreds of instances primarily from classical texts?Hindu, Buddhist, bib lical, Greek, and Roman?but also medieval, early modern, opera, film, etc. As long as the book is, it is by no means exhaustive, and the author admits at the beginning that she has selected her "favorites." There are, it seems, two basic scenarios for the bedtrick: an individual impersonates someone else in order to copulate, or an individual sends a surrogate to avoid copulation. In breaking the scenarios down by sex, women are as likely as men to trick their way into bed, but men are far less likely to trick women with surrogates. Six hundred pages are a lot to read to come to this not-so-startling realization best exemplified by the "Appendix: Bedtricks in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index." And the disappointment (to borrow from Aphra Behn) is particularly vex ing for several reasons: the book "is about sex" (the act and the genitals), so the author's heart is not in offering historical or cul Reviews 141 tural context; the "Approaches" sections that follow each chapter are inadequate; and she left out my "favorites," those from the Restoration and early eighteenth century. That said, the book is entertaining. The prose is engaging, accessible, and larded with puns. For example, we get the pig/hog equivocation: "'Chi Chi the Pig is arrested by Monroe County [Key West] Animal Control after allegedly sexually assaulting a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The amorous pig caused $100 in damage during the tryst.' Animals, too, have their illusions. . . ." And some local reporter has pretensions to wit (by the way, the Key West Citizen documents a prodigious number of disguised pig sto ries). The book is a tease, and the author an unrepentant text trickster. This is the Professor Doniger who reviewed her own book, Splitting the Difference, under the cover of a pseudonym, Wendy CFlaherty, in a benign, transparent masquerade. Here, she introduces an elaborate classification system ("the double back, double-play, double-cross, double-back-cross, and double back-cross-play . . . double-cross-dress, double-back-cross-dress, double-back-cross-dress-play, and the double-cross-dress-back play") only to discard it in large part. She liberally, though not helpfully, employs an invasive cross-referencing system of a dag ger (t) to signal terms found elsewhere in this book arid a double dagger ($) to refer to her companion book, Splitting theDifference. Furthermore, Doniger notes with a dagger (t) various stories or scenarios that are summarized much later in the book. The most egregious instance of this practice is the story ofMartin Guerre, a sixteenth-century Frenchman who abandons his family and returns years later to discover an interloper has usurped his iden tity.This story ismentioned first in the introduction, provocative ly...

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