Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples.

Butler, Judith

By Jonathan Goldberg Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997

A characteristically elegant work, Jonathan Goldberg's Desiring Women Writing offers what might be taken to be a lesbian reading of some writings by women, or writings whose authorship may or may not be a woman's. It is a wonderful work precisely because Goldberg takes up some of the most important questions about authorship, sexuality, and reading in a knowing and innovative way, not only asking the question of what women's writing is, or whether or not a woman wrote a particular text, but showing us, in his refusal to answer, the difficulty that makes any easy answer impossible. I'm nevertheless more than tempted to say that this is a great work of lesbian scholarship. Goldberg's approach to these questions not only permits me to say it, but challenges his reader to think more than twice about reducing readings to identity positions. If this is great lesbian scholarship, then that does not mean that Goldberg is a lesbian, or it does not mean that precisely. His writerly voice becomes, in the manner he describes in the Renaissance women writers considered here, an occasion and vehicle for cross-gendered identification and desire. That his text, his writing, can become the vehicle for desires that Goldberg may or may not have makes the point rhetorically as well as thematically--that writerly voice is not only equivocal, but productively so, and that it is not reducible to sociological position or presumed gender identity. To the degree that one is tempted, too tempted perhaps, to say that this is a lesbian text, the seduction is partly Goldberg's fault--or, indeed, his virtue. He can and does read for lesbian desire not as the secret or final content or cipher of any of the texts he carefully considers here, but as that which is conditioned and "vehiculated" by the peregrinations of voice and perspective in the text itself.

The "vehicle" is no simple matter here, since the vechicle is not an empty vessel, a form that is indifferent to what it carries. On the contrary, Goldberg's work shows how certain desires are staged precisely through taking on a vehicle that would appear to dissimulate them, but where the vehicle itself turns out to be more resonant and equivocal than usually thought. In an analogous way, his own text bears a set of desires that may or may not be "his," but more importantly, his text trains us away from the habit of trying to find a univocal truth for authorial desire. The vehicle or the articulation is not ancillary to the desires in question. There is no psychological truth to which the textual production is reducible. As a result, the vehicle for desire becomes part of the very constitution of desire. And in this sense, his text becomes an exemplary instance of lesbian desire itself, showing us in particular how desire itself is fashioned through mechanisms of substitution and displacement.

I am ill-equipped to judge the scholarship of the period here, since I am not a reader of English Renaissance texts. But I would suggest that the framework and the readings provided brought me into an engagement with texts I did not know, and produced in me a desire to know them better. I hope this serves as a sign of the importance of this book not only, clearly, to the study of Renaissance women writers which others have and will surely confirm, but of the theory and practice of reading gender and sexuality that Goldberg so deftly and persuasively provides. Although not a moment of apologetic self-consciousness is ever displayed in these pages, at some point the reader has to remark that Goldberg, a "man," spends page after page considering in detail the writings of contemporary women scholars who have tried to understand what status to accord to English Renaissance women writers and how the legible voice is related to the problem of desire. He offers no self-justifying moves in this reading, which comes as a welcome relief. On the one hand, I am tempted to say, "what an incredible work of scholarship by a man," and then, I have to stop myself--for what am I assuming about Goldberg the author? Surely, his voice is also a site of enunciation for a complex set of identifications and desires.

Goldberg probes judiciously and incisively the questions of whether one can know or presume the desires of women on the basis of what they write, whether one can assume their dispossession and erasure, what the writing itself signifies about their capacity to assume power through voice, whether they are readable within contemporary feminist frameworks, how and in what way these writings compel us to rethink the relation between gender, desire, politics, and writing. His approach to contemporary scholars in this area is enormously respectful, but it also assumes that no defense of his own "position" is warranted or necessary. This way of proceeding constitutes a significant breath of fresh air. The presumption is--and the thesis for which he argues explicitly--is that there is more "crossing" than is generally understood, and that we ought not to presume an equivalence between social position and the range encompassed by authorial perspective. He cautions us, for instance, against the great-woman approach not only because of its uncritical relation to canonization, but because "women" are represented in these texts in a highly complicated interaction with the canon and with presumptive male authority.

He makes this point concretely in Part Two of the text, which is concerned explicitly with translation and, in particular, the secondary status of women as translators. That section begins with Florio's introduction to his translation of Montaigne, "all translations are reputed femalls, delivered at second hand." The identification of femaleness with secondariness, however, is not an historical constant, much less the occasion for a transhistorical frame. As Goldberg argues, "the opposition between original and secondary or imitative works is a categorical opposition largely absent in the Renaissance, the notion of original ,writing became valorized only later" (83). Here he works effectively with Patricia Parker's early work, engaging as well some of the disputes that followed the publication of Tom Laqueur's Making Sex, in which he tracks the historical shift from the one-sex to the two-sex "system." Laqueur treats this shift as a straightforward historical transition, claiming that there was once one sex and then came two--or, at least, a medical vocabulary that permitted for the recognition of a "twoness" in which female was not simply a (failed) permutation of male. Goldberg builds on some of the existing criticisms of this transition to argue that "the one" was only retrospectively made possible by virtue of the emergence of the second, the female, as its own specificity. Similarly, given the identification of translation with femininity and feminine practice, the very emergence of the "one" and its primacy is an effect made possible by the latter emergence of the "two." The "one" was, then, always a certain effect of doubling, in which case what takes place historically "later" becomes the ground for what is posited as earlier. In the same way, the degraded status of translation only came about once original writing was valorized, but the modes of authorship in the English Renaissance did not valorize the single author, according to Goldberg. As a result, the historically later valorization of single-authored literary production emerges against the background of an historical field it denies, one in which, we might speculate, translation is not only the norm of authorship, but the very means by which texts are produced by several hands.

When Florio makes his claim about translations reputed to be female, he is also reputing himself, as a translator, to be female in some sense or, rather, to function as a passage between male and female, a labile form of identification that in some ways belies the fixity of the gendered terms in question. In this sense, translation, and cross-identification, are the condition of the binary between male and female, its presupposition, preceding and exceeding male and female precisely by being the passage between them.

Goldberg takes the text as "vehicle" for identification and desire quite seriously, offering both a theoretical elaboration of a point made elsewhere by Eve Sedgwick and a host of engaged and detailed readings that rewrite the theory for him. If Sedgwick showed in unprecedented ways that male-male desire could and did take place through an apparent depiction of a heterosexual scene, with the woman, as it were, functioning as the conduit or vehicle for homoeroticism (the "sign" in the Levi-Straussian sense), Goldberg shows us how women's desire in its equivocity--its hetero- and homo- possibilities--makes use of masculine narrative voice and structure as its vehicle. Over and against those who would consider the substitution of the male voice or figure for the feminine to be the sign of a sure and fatal effacement, Goldberg shows, persuasively, how substitution and displacement become the vehicle for a range of desires, not all of which are commensurable with one another or fully discrete from one another.

In the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, for instance, he writes that "it is virtually impossible to separate hetero- and homoerotics in the bedroom scene" (39)--these crossings become the vehicle for class crossings as well. He considers at length the scholarly, mainly feminist, readings of her poem, "To the Ladie Lucie, Countesse of Bedford," and notes that the figure of Christ offered up by Lanyer is clearly feminized, and further suggests that this is an instance of cross-identification worth reading. In Goldberg's argument, extending and revising (if not radicalizing) the readings of Wendy Wall, Lorna Hutson, and Suzanne Woods, "some of the similes used to describe [Christ] are attached to the body of the bride in Canticles. ... The dark lady in this poem is Lanyer's Jesus" (34).

In his reading of Aphra Behn, Goldberg shows us that there is no reason to think that gender was any more stabilized in Behn's time than it is now. On the one hand, he disputes those who would find lesbian desire to be the unspeakable and the deep truth of the poem (60). On the other, he argues vigorously that for Behn, multiple gender and sexual possibilities exist simultaneously. The poem to Clarinda, for instance, juxtaposes hetero- and homosexual desire in such a way that neither is figured as free from danger. It makes no sense to try and discover or fix the "true" mode of address here, since the simultaneous existence of the incommensurable seems to be the measure of the text's desire. Goldberg usefully cites Margaret Ferguson in this regard, who underscores the necessity of paying more attention to "modalities of identification and difference." With respect to the controversial place of Behn's gender and racial politics, and the question of their reconciliability, Goldberg advises us to live with the incommensurability. Over and against a feminist framework that would presume the asymmetrical heterosexuality of desire and situate the positions of dominance and subordination within that frame, Goldberg offers feminism a more nuanced framework in which the representation of heterosexuality is read with reference to its site of enunciation. Hence, when Behn desires the ravishing of Imoinda, "he omitted saying nothing to this young maid, that might perswade her to suffer him to seize his own ... she was not long resisting those Arms," Goldberg asks a key question: "where is Behn in this moment?" (66).

Behn's narrator hosts the "enunciation of `male' desire as her own, an identification across gender that allows for the vicarious enjoyment of Imoinda." Indeed, it is not possible to "fix" Behn or, indeed, the narrative perspective there, for the narrator, in Goldberg's view, participates vicariously from both positions, at once subject and object of desire. But here a question is raised for me, from the perspective of gender theory perhaps, is cross-identification what charts the mechanisms of displacement and substitution in desire? Or is it also the mechanism by which gender is assumed? If we make sense of cross-identification through referring to gender as what we know and can assume--a woman cross-identifies as a man, for instance--then do we stabilize gender in order to destabilize and render equivocal desire? What if the mechanism by which desire is constituted, through substitution and displacement, is also the mechanism by which gender itself is assumed? Does Behn, for instance, exercise the textual possibility of lesbianism when she takes up the position of the ravisher within the text? Or does she also become a man? The risk here is that we will think that if desire for a woman is articulated, that a man must be its object, and so ratify the heterosexual presumption that seeks to lay claim to sexual desire. That would clearly be a mistake. But perhaps some separation of these issues, the formation of desire, the formation of gender, might be worth more theoretical attention, especially as the two work to render each other equivocal.

In Part Two of the text, Goldberg offers a chapter entitled "The Countess of Pembroke's Literal Translation" in which he considers the conflicted scholarship that seeks to give an account of Mary Sidney's accomplishments. Her literal translations of Petrarch call to be read somehow (118). If she was a woman writing as a man, that must mean some fundamental betrayal of and to her gender? Wouldn't such conclusions ascribe to the original a determinate power that might itself fall into question even in this most literal of translations--if, that is, one were to argue that even literally to rewrite the poem could locate the countess's hand at a site of original duplication?

For Sidney to have written again Petrarch's poem, to write it faithfully word for word is "to take up the position of writing her own demise, to find voice only at the point of death." Relying on Wendy Wall's similar reading of Isabella Whitney's "Wyll and Testament," Goldberg makes a distinction between representing a site of dispossession and identifying with it. This site, he elaborates, "is moreover so riven with contradictions about person, place, and time--since one speaks, and yet is dead, since one takes possession at a moment of dispossession, since one occupies a temporary split between a future that one will never occupy and a present one is evacuating--that the contradictions, rather than being annihilative, are productive" (119). He makes this very clear when he considers the instability of the "I" in this text, and the way this very instability conditions desire: "lines of cathexis are opened up here that heighten a female-female erotics to be found from the very opening lines of the poem in which the "I" of the poem may be read as a woman speaking of and to other women as her "chosen mates." This displacement along the lines of same-sex identification furthers the scandal of crossing and cross-identification that the poem undertakes" (128). Goldberg clearly wants to insist on the capacity of the pronoun to elude gender fixity when he writes, redoubling "insistence" in his own sentence: "It gets marked again, insistently so, as the second part opens, when the `I' of the poem refuses to call itself man, but is insistently and only `I.'"

Section Three is titled playfully, perhaps self-consciously, as "Writing as a Woman." This is Goldberg's title and, hence, according to his own critical framework, his enunciation. In the chapter he is at once speculative, theoretical, and programmatic, having clearly earned the license to all of these through his painstaking readings. He writes, for instance, and rightly: "what is needed is first of all to break the deadlock between the construction understood as an evaporation of lived reality and essentialism as rooted in the supposition of a transhistorical and universalization of gendered inequity and female suffering" (137). This is surely the task for both feminist and sexuality studies, as well as one site for the potential and productive alliance. He cautions us against relying on "sexual difference" as an assumed framework, since so often it not only encodes a nonproductive essentialism but constrains desire in heterosexual directions by virtue of its logic. He asks us to consider, for instance, that when a woman writes, in a text, "we men," she may not be performing her self-erasure but facilitating, through substitution and displacement, a new trajectory for desire (139). His insistence that we begin to approach questions of politics, gender, and sexuality without assuming the marital bond as the constraining context for desire is crucial and timely.

In his elegant chapter, "Mary Shelton's Hand," Goldberg shows how reading for desire can and does take place when the "I" cannot be fixed in terms of its authorial referent. Whether or not Mary Shelton wrote the text "O Happy dames," Goldberg argues, "the presumed hereto desire in the poem also vehiculates male-male desire" (156). Indeed, to show what a text "vehiculates" does not require access to the author precisely, for what is produced here is a text with its own sets of possibilities. Whereas Jonathan Crewe sees Shelton as performing her own self-erasure by assuming the voice of a man, Goldberg suggests that substitution is not reducible to negation (and, in this sense, he coincides with the psychoanalytic readings for which substitutability is a condition of desire). She is placed, in Goldberg's view, "in a locus of substitution that is not the same thing as the erasure of difference" (162).

In his final chapter on Elizabeth Cary's "Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry," Goldberg offers his most deconstructive reading. If, in the previous chapter, Mary Shelton, the presumed author, could not be secured referentially, then here, the figure at issue, eludes referentiality more radically as the unspoken and unwritable region that becomes the source of transgression. He finds utopic and egalitarian desires, for instance, in the play's character "Graphina," a name that functions effectively as a signature for women's writing generically. According to Goldberg's reading, Graphina's mark, he calls it, designates a region in ,which gender hierarchies are transgressed through a move that reoccupies the conventionally masculine domain in order to resignify female-male equality through the position of male-male friendship (181).

Here again, substitution is not simply erasure but vehiculation. And we see that complex negotiations are made possible through instantiating narrative voice and character as fundamentally equivocal. This is not a reading for the sake of a celebratory equivocity, but one that proceeds from a complex understanding that to read gender, desire, politics, and writing together, as they are implicated in class and race as well, is to regard the text as a dense site of multiple articulations. It is because the map of desire and power are so complex, and demand nonreductive readings from us, that we are asked to become alert to the incommensurable and multiple directions for desire that can follow from the simplest pronoun. It is Jonathan Goldberg's singular brilliance to cast his net so widely and to come up, always, with something so indisputably fine.

JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on philosophy and on feminist and queer theory. Her most recent book is Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000).