Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property by Patricia Parker (review)

HUMANITIES 115 alternative for sugar'). But these only demonstrate that the reviewer has read the book carefully; and I enjoyed it immensely. (L.E. DOUCETTE) Patricia Parker. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property Methuen 1987. 276. us $39.95; $13.95 paper This is a very smart book, a learned and useful book, but also, and not always in productive ways, an exasperating book. Its 'Retrospective Introduction,' like the x on the floor beneath a baroque illusionist ceiling, provides a putative point of coherence as it demands that the reader submit to an authorized focus that would organize and justify the repetitions, overlappings and retracings that result from the reprinting of occasional essays and conference papers. These share related preoccupations but tend as well to recycle themselves rather than move a complex argument forward. Parker acknowledges this; the essays are 'attempts,' 'interventions.' But why keep the original pieces essentially intact? Why not have written a new book? The problem is not merely a function of inadequate revision, so that the same definitions of tropes from Puttenham and Peacham occur several times, as do passages from Erasmus, as do entire sentences in the Wuthering Heights discussion -of names and boundaries. For keeping the original essays means that important questions get sidetracked. At the end of the quite wonderful discussion in 'Motivated Rhetorics: Gender, Order, Rule,' of the relationship between 'unruly women and unruly tropes,' of the link between order in language and social hierarchies of distinction, of transgressive tropes that 'call attention to the process of construction itself,' there is a remark in passing that locates the problem: 'It is not clear whether rhetoric is the model of a certain social ordering and gendering or the reflection of it.' This is similar to the comment in 'Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text,' that 'to follow through the reasons for the shifting relation between such textual bodies and the generation, and body, of a given text would take more space and more specific historic investigation than the present context allows.' That was true when I heard this chapter in the form of an exciting, funny, and demanding conference paper, but why isn't this book 'context' enough for such an investigation? The entire study is grounded on the important assumption that formalists and historicists need to learn each other's language, that in recovering the 'largely forgotten language' of the rhetorical tradition we will not only be 'better able to pose questions of politics, gender and ideology,' but able to uncover 'the culturally loaded paradigms informing the work of Lacan,' for example, or of Freud (who is placed after the discussions of Milton and Rousseau to suggest that he is less 'a starting 116 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 point for modem developments than an inheritor of a tradition he largely rewrites'). With her focus primarily on the Renaissance, but glancing at a wide range of texts from the Bible to the twentieth century, Parker explores the relationships between rhetorical and political control, the links between gender and ideology, the significance of place as the ground of discourse. Especially in its emphasis on the trope of dilatio and in its concern with narrative syntax, this study develops several arguments from Inescapable Romance, but here further dilated in an exploration of the opening of a closed text and of the ways in which 'wayward women and wayward and copiously fattened texts continue to figure and refigure each other.' There are skilful and subtle readings of Comedy of Errors, Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, the Henriad, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The RapeofLucrece. Indeed the sections on Shakespeare are excellent, as is much of the Bronte material; the Spenser chapter is suggestive as well, but its emphasis on the Bower of Bliss as a predominantly female space notwithstanding, it is less connected to the central thematics of the book. Although the rhetorical focus is her own, Parker depends a great deal on the work of others, for example on Vickers, Kolodny, Franklin, Fabricant, and Sedgwick in her nuanced readings of New World texts, and on Nyquist both for textual citations and their implications in her discussion of...