Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (review)

Reviews 233 Goldberg, Jonathan, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997; paper; pp. vii, 255; R.R.P. AUS$26.95. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press] This is not an easy book to review, since, while its actual cont and subject matter are not difficult to summarise, its general perspective is generally implied and only sometimes made explicit: more a frustration than a 'theme', and one which is for various reasons not fully articulated or systematically presented. 'Examples' is an operative word in the title, and the book is certainly not just another survey of Renaissance w o m e n writers. The subject matter is the current recuperation of women's writing in the Renaissance, in both possible senses of this phrase. The recuperation has been largely carried out by feminist critics and this process is traced through its different phases to the point where women's writing is n o w valued highly enough in its o w n right to merit chapters on individuals in books on Renaissance literature. But the perspective is less easy to encapsulate. Jonathan Goldberg has increasingly become k n o w n as a n e w historicist with a particular interest in issues of gay politics—witness Queering the Renaissance and Sodometries. His uneasiness in dealing with feminist criticism of female writing is partly carried in the deliberately ambiguoustitle,'Desiring W o m e n Writing'. O n one side the sense is the relatively conventional one nowadays that w o m e n have always felt desire, even if their situations and the writing genres available to them "(like translation) have stifled overt expression of i t , and this sense can n o w be openly debated and analysed. O n the other side is a more sardonic syntax challenging the feminist enterprise. 'We' as readers eager to show our conversance with up- 234 Reviews to-date principles 'desire' to find wherever w e can 'Writing Women'. At this level the book becomes a challenge to recent assumptions that w o m e n are special, that they are uniquely companionate, cooperative, sensual, victims, etc. The male homosexual in particular would question this uniqueness or exclusiveness. Although Goldberg never makes this point, it hovers behind his argument. What he does say, in a somewhat subdued way, is that even heterosexual readers, female or male, might take exception to a plea for special 'empowerment' of female agency. The strength of his own gender position is that if an enlightened heterosexual male were to make the same assertion he would be dismissed as merely 'jealous' of women's empowerment, whereas the male gay has a licence as a fellow sufferer in a marginalised position. Goldberg's critical stance is a rather oblique one, that of a fellow traveller w h o agrees with the basic premises and practices of feminist criticism but sharply questions some of its assumptions about privileging and prioritising of w o m e n as writers. H e treads a thin line between support for the contribution of feminist criticism, and a challenge to some of i t s underlying assumptions, but he also presents his case as one building upon the work of such feminists as Elaine Hobby, Denise Riley, Margaret Ferguson and others. The point of entry to the larger argument concerns the feminist 'desire' tofindeverywhere a coterie element of supportive companionship, a sorority, in w o m e n writing for each other in shared intimacy and understanding. In dealing with the works of Aemilya Lanyer, Goldberg argues that in fact w o m e n wrote and published with exactly the same awareness of 'market forces' as male writers, seeking patronage and audiences through the same channels, sometimes finding that female sponsorship was more accessible than male. Since the process of patronage is the same, there m a y be no fundamental difference in the product, or at least Reviews 235 no difference tracable to gender. The idea of the w a r m and close female coterie or writing cabal m a y be more of a desired myth than something based in reality. The challenge is...