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Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns . Valerie Traub. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+462. Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection . Edited by John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. x+271.

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/686992

1545-6951

James Grantham Turner,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+462. Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection. Edited by John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. x+271.James Grantham TurnerJames Grantham TurnerUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThomas Laqueur published Making Sex in 1990 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), when Foucault’s idea that sex was constructed-by-power rather than given-by-Nature was still relatively new in the Anglophone academy. My own Schooling Sex (Oxford University Press, 2003) took a much narrower time sample (“libertine literature and erotic education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685” rather than “body and gender from the Greeks to Freud”) and concentrated on British and European texts that wrote directly about the physical sex act and the feelings of its participants. Imagining Sex by Sarah Toulalan (Oxford University Press, 2007) went over the English subset of this material from a historian’s point of view. Now Valerie Traub gives us Thinking Sex. There is inevitably some overlap among these publications: Traub and Toulalan are both deeply influenced by the archive-based historian Laura Gowing, for example. But they look in different directions.Traub’s book is at once broader and narrower than the other three. Broader because of the extraordinary thoroughness with which she analyzes scholarly writing about queer sexuality, brings to light and interrogates the unspoken presuppositions that lurk within virtually every recent article on the subject, and poses searching questions about how and why sexuality has a history at all, or needs one. Narrower because, unlike my book or Toulalan’s, it proceeds not by gathering the largest possible group of relevant primary texts and building analysis upward from that base but by reviewing what I still call “secondary” criticism in great depth and exquisite detail, interspersing a few jewels of literary reading. This great inverted pyramid rests mostly upon small clusters of Shakespeare sonnets (chap. 10), brief exchanges between disreputable men and women in Ben Jonson (chap. 7) and Thomas Dekker (chap. 10 also), the character “Martha Joyless” in Richard Brome’s comedy The Antipodes (chap. 5), and copious lists of bawdy words sampled from other comedies and ballads. Brief literary quotations are almost invariably followed by much longer quotation and discussion of the scholar from whom the quote was mined—a splendid exception being Traub’s analysis of the “dildo” in ballad refrains (215–22).Though it often calls for “a more sustained engagement with the history of sexuality” (233), the book is largely metacritical rather than historical, and even meta-metacritical in the pages that discuss Traub’s own earlier writing about the same sonnets (241–43). A more accurate title would be Thinking Sex with the Early Modernists, with a subtitle identifying the material as Jacobean English literature. The focus is not really on the “early modern” past but on “the present future of lesbian historiography” (the title of chap. 4), the formation of new academic fields (chap. 5), and the conduct of the classroom.Formidable intellectual power is unleashed on this metahistoriography. In a brief review I cannot summarize the intricacies of each argument, but I should say that Talking Sex needs to be consulted by anyone wrestling with the methodology of research in this area. I wonder, though, whether too much docta ignorantia is lavished on suggestive images and would-be erotic puns that the common reader might find self-explanatory, as when Face in Jonson’s Alchemist instructs Doll Common to “firk like a flounder” (171). And does the writing need to be so dense, at times inert? One unfortunate consequence of challenging any claim for self-evidence and “any semblance of ‘lived experience’” (159) is to sever the relation between the tenor and the vehicle of metaphors. Figures float and coalesce free from any mental picture or, to put it less kindly, metaphors die. We read that “Joel Fineman’s influential gender-bifurcated reading of the sonnets enlarges this insight through a Lacanian filter that sutures gender and sexuality to signification” (237) or that “the horizon of queer possibility is not entirely open-ended. It is tethered, both now and in the past, to the specificities of social and discursive configurations of sexuality as well as to the tentacles of gender” (240).The title of an essay by Stephen Orgel famously asked, “How queer was Marlowe?” Traub’s relentless scrutiny of what it means to ask such questions opens up an infinite regress of further questions that make simple answers seem positively naive. I think some empiricism can help: “thinking sex” (used as a transitive verb, as in French) or “thinking thinking sex” consumes itself in an endless spiral unless we also ask, What would you need to know in order to answer such a question? How wise is it to stay within a monoglot English database largely composed of low comedy and ballads? Danilo Romei’s online anthology of Renaissance Italian homoerotic poetry runs to hundreds of pages, Pierre de Brantôme gossips at length about fricarelles and donna con donna sex, but literary historians who confine themselves to England have to scratch around for a double entendre here and a covert metaphor there—except in the Restoration, where Traub unearths and analyzes the poem “Fricatrices, or a She upon a She” (218–19).Sexuality and Memory is part festschrift and part conference proceedings. The dedicatee is Margaret Ferguson, whom the editors define as their mentor, and the term “re-membering” comes up often, echoing the title of an influential essay collection coedited by Ferguson. Some contributors refer to “this paper” (17, 43, 144, 164), and the writing style varies from formal to colloquial. The assumed audience fluctuates too, sometimes needing to be told the basic plot of Ben Jonson’s Volpone (33) or that Neptune is “a god to whom his brother Jupiter has given the reign of the sea” (105), at other times asked to read untranslated Latin without blinking (67). Space does not permit me to review the eighteen individual essays, regretfully, but the volume does come complete with its own review, since the afterword by Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. sums up and places each contribution expertly.The title defines the ambition: take two themes or areas of study and see how they connect. The preponderance of evidence cited here from “early modern England” (or more precisely from English literature, 1584–1611) suggests that sexuality and memory were antithetical, that base passions such as lust were thought to wipe out the memory, and with it higher consciousness and selfhood. The exceptions make for more interesting reading, however. All these papers try to juggle the two title concepts, and the most vivid and informative ones dwell on funeral monuments, wills (in several senses), and other objects that memorialize (in)famous lovers or seek to control the feelings of future generations. To these are added “Complaints” by wronged lovers or rape victims such as Lucretia, either in the style of Ovid’s Heroides (by George Peele and Michael Drayton) or in a grisly Jacobean tragedy (probably) by Thomas Middleton, where the ghost of a wronged lady appears alongside her own violated corpse. Necrophilia as “perverse commemoration” (145) is one of several ingenious conceptual twists that aim to braid sex and memory together, such as “the erotics of recollection” in the subtitle, or the idea that excited anticipation of a lover is “future-memory” (117, 122). There is even the “muscle memory” dear to dancers and gym rats, here applied to Marlowe’s Leander and to the impotent Tomalin in Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines, though the conceit deflates when the only so-called muscle in the paper is the erect penis (122). Appropriately, the last piece before the afterword is about worms.Apart from the “Complaints” (and the poem also known as Nashe’s Dildo) the focus is solidly canonical and Elizabethan: Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare (two essays devoted to one sonnet apiece), with one or two secondhand allusions to Marvell and Donne and no Milton at all. Several episodes come up multiple times and so become emblems of the volume as a whole: Florimel’s magic virginity girdle (Faerie Queene, bk. 3) represents the “intertextual web” of sexuality (87), and Eumnestes in the House of Alma (bk. 2) evokes the “places” and “images” of the Art of Memory, as conveyed by Frances Yates and studied by a number of contributors. Still, I am not sure that mnemotechnics have been properly understood here. Scenes involving visualizing description or ekphrases of erotic tapestries (such as those in the lecherous House of Busyrane in Spenser) are identified as “memory places” (105) and compared to a passage in Pietro da Ravenna’s treatise in which he rather sheepishly admits that images of beautiful women stick most effectively in his memory (181). But in “artificial memory” these images are selected arbitrarily as markers to help recall a folder of information or a point in a sequenced argument; they signify indexically and not iconically, whereas the tapestries depict the Loves of the Gods directly.The collective impact would have been stronger with more careful copyediting. The same work is cited by two different contributors without mutual awareness (for example, the fascinating passage by Pietro da Ravenna [181] or Peter of Ravenna [208], or the striking fact that the translator of Proust drew his title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 [45, 209]). Proofreading might have made quotes agree grammatically with the sentences in which they are embedded, or restored missing words, or caught malapropisms such as “imports” for imparts (36), “born” for borne (68), “haberdashers” for habergeons (107), or “Thomas Bowder” for the man who invented bowdlerizing (141)—my favorite being “virulence” for virility (113). Ironically, the memory of some writers plays them tricks, mixing up the tapestries and the “pageants” in the House of Busyrane (105) or placing Spenser’s Garden of Adonis at the end of book 2 of the Faerie Queene (103, in fact in the middle of bk. 3). When Guildenstern is plotting with King Claudius to do away with the lunatic Hamlet, he urges the need to protect the “many bodies … That live and feed upon Your Majesty” (3.3.9–10), a marvelous phrase to quote in a mostly excellent essay on worms but turned to nonsense by saying it is addressed to Hamlet himself (227).This volume is paved with good examples, packed with ingenious local readings and catchy titles such as “Slings and Eros” (160). But clever punning sometimes substitutes for canny analysis and weakens its overall effectiveness as a study of sexuality. Any suggestion of double entendre or erotic connotation, however faint, becomes incontrovertible proof, built into each argument as a fact upon which other facts then teeter: Adonis is raped by the boar (102), Antony feels “strange desire for” his dead wife Fulvia (when he only says that he had “desired” to be rid of her, 161), Spenser’s pilgrims enjoy “sex in the library” of Eumnestes because they fervently “desire” to read about their own ancestry there (178–79). There is a fundamental logical flaw here: all whisky is liquid but not all liquid is whisky, nor is all indignant refusal “erotic” because sex is being refused (199). In some ways, the underlying hermeneutic goes back to a pre-Foucauldian, even Victorian, era in which sexual “facts” or “phallic symbols” had to be excavated from layers of unmentionableness. In contrast to Traub’s insistent questioning of how we can know and think about sex, this volume—though it makes the usual claims to “decenter” received reality or to uncover “anxiety” and the “transgressive” (18, 130)—depends on implicit faith in the unitary truth of the sexual pun.On this let Valerie Traub have the last word. We need to “differentiate, in more nuanced ways, our understanding of how words and wordplay operationalized sex…. Words such as ‘will,’ ‘wit,’ ‘meat,’ and ‘fault,’ while used frequently as slang for body parts, may have carried sexual connotations only when embedded in particular contexts or only when surrounded by other words that brought out or endorsed their erotic potential; in addition to functioning polysemously as metaphors, they must veer toward, affiliate, and link with other words to activate sexual meaning. They must expand into something akin to a literary conceit” (202). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686992HistoryPublished online August 31, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.