The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare.

Jones, Ann Rosalind

Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2000

Lynn Enterline begins this book with an exhilaratingly intelligent and subtle reading of what she calls "misfirings" in Ovid's treatment of bodily violence, voice, and poetic composition in the Metamorphoses. Looking at what happens to figures such as Actaeon, Orpheus, and Philomela, whose experience of physical attack leads to a shattering loss of identity and speech, she argues that such episodes reveal the instability of any speaking self: we speak languages already given; our words fail to capture our states of mind; we can be only what other people see and hear us as being. Starting from this deconstructive and psychoanalytic assumption about the instability of any speaking subject, Enterline analyzes the ways that Ovid and later writers, including the Shakespeare of Lucrece and The Winter's Tale, identify with characters silenced by bodily trauma. She argues that poets, by speaking for and through female victims of violence and rape and through violated male figures such as Actaeon and Orpheus, reveal the fragility of their own gendered identity and the undependability of public eloquence.

According to Enterline's focus on wordlessness as the theme and situation linking Ovid to his followers, Petrarch provides obvious analogies to Ovid. Invoking Echo and Philomela, dramatizing his own frightening metamorphoses and paralyzed speech, he speaks through Laura even as he represents her silencing him. Enterline offers vivid readings of Petrarch as Actaeon, Pygmalion, and Orpheus, and argues that his fascination with Medea reveals an unconscious recognition of the feminine and maternal energies repressed but not finally contained in language. In contrast, she uses John Marston's Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image to exemplify a familiar and less complex shoring up of masculinity: Marston, silencing Pygmalion's statue by denying her even the name Ovid gives her, identifies with the manipulations and triumph of the sculptor as much as he satirizes them. And he establishes a homoerotic intimacy with his readers, inviting them to side with him against women in general from a rhetorical position structurally identical to the one Freud identifies as enabling the dirty joke: a male-male exchange excluding the woman at whose expense the story is told. Marston's satire of Pygmalion-like love poets, then, misfires because he is unconsciously and professionally implicated in the language and gender-affirming processes he shares with such writers.

Turning to Shakespeare's Lucrece, Enterline takes issue with critics who have argued that the poet, as narrator of the rape, occupies a position similar to Tarquin's. Rather, she argues, the poet shares Lucrece's lack of a language adequate to prevent or describe her rape. Like Lucrece and Petrarch, exiled from language as is Actaeon, Shakespeare can represent such suffering only by naming the inadequacy of language to express it ("sorrow ... blown with wind of words") and by calling, through Lucrece, upon heroines given voice by Ovid (Hecuba, Philomela). Enterline pursues this line in a strikingly original reading of The Winter's Tale, linking Hermione to Lucrece through her silencing by Leontes and her final address not to men at court but, Demeter-like, to her refound daughter Persephone/Perdita. However briefly, women call to women in a solidarity unavailable to male poets and heroes isolated by bodily and linguistic trauma.

Enterline's argument is sustained through persuasive close reading as well as a wide range of references to contemporary theorists such as Kristeva, Felman, and Zizek, as well as Derrida and Lacan. Shakespeareans will learn much that is new from her radically pessimistic view of "the English Ovid's" sense of language as repressive training ground and threat to autonomy in Lucrece and The Winter's Tale. Though her interpretations are complex, she presents them in clear, forceful prose, enlivened by a sense of discovery. And though the split subject central to poststructuralist theory seems to have no history (we are all always already exiled from any possible selfhood by the gendered strictures of language), Enterline glances in interesting ways at the training of schoolboys and poets in Shakespeare's England, siting her commentary on Lucrece and The Winter's Tale in a specific time and place.

One might take issue with her claim that these poets can be read in a feminist way: a male poet who ventriloquizes women may speak less in sympathy with them than with himself, and the dramatization of speechlessness can produce powerful alternative forms of speech. Enterline overuses the pedagogical imperative: she commands her readers to "notice," "recall," and "consider" to a degree surprising in a study so attentive to the coercive force of language. But her study breaks new ground in many ways. By challenging readers to recognize the misfirings of poetic intent as an inevitable consequence of writing in a culturally gendered body, The Rhetoric of the Body rewrites Ovidian literary history in an original and stimulating way.

ANN ROSALIND JONES is Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature at Smith College. She is the author (with Peter Stallybrass) of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000); and of Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (1990); and has edited (with Margaret F. Rosenthal) Poems and Selected Letters by Veronica Franco (2002).