Textual Harassment of Marvell's Coy Mistress: The Institutionalization of Masculine Criticism

Textual Harassment of Marvell's Coy Mistress: The Institutionalization of Masculine CriticismAuthor(s): Bernard DuyfhuizenSource: College English, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Apr., 1988), pp. 411-423Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377620 .

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Bernard Duyfhuizen

Textual Harassment of Marvell's Coy Mistress: The Institutionalization of Masculine Criticism

In challenging the adequacy of received critical opinion or the imputed excellence of established canons, feminist literary critics are essentially seeking to discover how aesthetic value is assigned in the first place, where it resides (in the text or in the reader), and most important, what validity may really be claimed by our aesthetic "judgments." What ends do those judgments serve, the feminist asks; and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances do they (even if unwittingly) help to perpetuate?

Annette Kolodny

Feminist criticism often asserts that reading is both a learned and a gender- oriented activity that male readers have long controlled by expounding, consciously or unconsciously, a masculine perspective of literary value and interpretive significance. Feminist critics have called for a thorough re-vision of the traditional canon and the processes of reading that established it. The result has been an exciting debate that has re-opened literary history and re-shaped our un- derstanding of the assumptions that underwrite not only literary criticism but also the epistemological foundations of human culture. But despite some gains in the last fifteen to twenty years, feminist approaches are still only slowly reach- ing classrooms, especially undergraduate and high school classrooms, because of a lack of suitable texts available to teach critical theory in accessible and un- derstandable ways.

Traditionally, undergraduate courses in literary criticism, when they existed at all, focused on the "Great Critics," usually starting with Plato and Aristotle and stopping somewhere around T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Tal- ent"-and if time remained, a practical demonstration of New Criticism was thrown in. As Susan Lanser and Evelyn Beck have observed, anthologies of the "Great Critics" have been almost exclusively composed of statements by men,

Bernard Duyfhuizen is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. His essays have appeared in such journals as Comparative Literature, Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature; his essay, "Deconstruction and Feminist Literary Theory," will appear later this year in the book Gendered Subjects: Theoretical Dialogues on Sex, Race, Class, and Culture from Basil Blackwell.

College English, Volume 50, Number 4, April 1988 411



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statements that time and again reinforce the assumption that the "poet" is "a man speaking to men." They found in surveying twenty-four anthologies of literary criticism that "of a total of 653 essays, only 16 (2.4 percent) represent the work of women" (79). Clearly many found such courses and texts restrictive, and often replaced or paired them with courses and texts concentrating on the expanding variety of "practical" critical approaches. Practical criticism has al- ways provided the opportunity to teach a wider array of approaches, but the published guides to literary analysis are not only limited and limiting but also tend to transmit a clear cultural bias that excludes women (see Staton for an exception).

One such text, and my subject here, is A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature by Wilfred L. Guerin, Earle G. Labor, Lee Morgan, and John R. Willingham. The Handbook was first published in 1966 and in a second edition in 1979 (now in at least its twelfth printing), and a third edition is planned for 1989. The Handbook's core is a set of five approaches: traditional (which includes biographical, historical, moral, philosophical), formalistic, psychological, archetypal, and exponential-this last synthesizing earlier approaches around processes of organizing textual images as evidence for a critical reading. In the second edition, the authors added an introduction on the "Precritical Response" to literature and expanded their concluding chapter on other approaches from six to eleven-one of which is feminist criticism (four pages out of 350). The book suc- ceeds because it uses four example texts that are examined with a deliberate care and clearness appreciated by students frightened of criticism. Indeed, the Handbook's persuasiveness by example leads many students to become more competent in their critical practice. But are these examples only monologically useful to illustrate New Critical irony or a Jungian archetype in action, or does a second text operate subliminally in the Handbook's lessons?

The Handbook's examples are Hamlet, "Young Goodman Brown," Huckleberry Finn, and "To His Coy Mistress." The authors chose these "four major works" because of genre and national distribution and "because they are generally important in introductory courses in literature" (xv, xvi).' From the outset it is obvious what is missing in this attempt at democratic distribution- none of the texts is by a woman or a minority writer. More significantly from a feminist perspective, the stories they tell are exclusively male plots in which women-Gertrude and Ophelia, Faith Brown, Miss Watson, and other females- either do not fare well or are stereotyped in ways that let masculine culture dis- miss their stories as insignificant. If an exception exists, it is Marvell's Coy Mis- tress, but to see her subversive force in the Handbook will require a reading I must defer until I have demonstrated some aspects of the Handbook's masculine perspective-a text we might appropriately rename A Portrait of the Critic as a Young Man.

1. In 1966 the Handbook's authors believed their text would lend "itself particularly well to introductory literature courses on either the freshman or sophomore college level" (xiii). In 1979, they had found that "the book was being used at upper division levels and even in graduate classes" (xiv; all further references in the text are to the second edition). Significantly, rather than merely "introducing" criticism, the Handbook is a basis for advanced critical teaching.



Textual Harassment of Marvell's Coy Mistress 413

Indeed, Elaine Showalter observed sixteen years ago in College English, when she examined the absence of women in the literary curriculum, that Ste- phen Dedalus was often the ultimate model projected to beginning students. After postulating "a woman student entering college to major in English literature" and cataloguing a series of freshman texts that focus on male experience, Showalter comments,

And whatever else she might read, she would inevitably arrive at the favorite book of all Freshman English courses, the classic of adolescent rebellion, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

By the end of her freshman year, a woman student would have learned something about intellectual neutrality; she would be learning to think like a man. And so she would go on, increasingly with male professors to guide her. (855)

The male professors who wrote the Handbook, recognizing during the 70s perhaps a decline in cultural literacy that would make a model such as Stephen De- dalus ineffective, choose a different analogy to begin exploring some basic con- ventions of criticism. The analogy used to explain the "Precritical Response" is that of the "amateur" and the "knowledgable" spectator at a college football game, an event the authors label a "titanic ritual" (9).

Football is clearly a sexist sport on so many levels that there isn't time to cat- alogue all the reasons why this analogy is inappropriate for a class of students that, today, is likely to be sixty to seventy percent female.2 If a sports analogy had to be used, tennis would have served the authors just as well to discuss how the precritical reader, like the spectator, attends to matters of setting, plot, character, structure, style, and atmosphere. But, as it does for the authors of the Handbook, the analogy "begins to break down when we come to theme, the often rich and varied underlying idea of action. In the football game, theme may be no more than 'Win at all costs,' 'We're Number One,' or 'These gladiators are better than those'" (15). Even though women play tennis as brilliantly as men, like football it perpetuates a male theme and plot of conquest, a plot Annis Pratt, citing Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, shows is also at the origin of the many rape stories found in mythology: "such rapes are explanations of Indo-Eu- ropean incursions into territories previously revering goddesses, elements of a widespread and traumatic replacement of agricultural settlements by warlike hordes dedicated to a 'phallic moral order' " (8).

We can see the football analogy's thematic force in the Handbook if we examine how it echoes in some of the precritical responses to Marvell's poem, whose hyperbolic plot is "Will the young Cavalier prevail with his Coy Mistress to make love before they are crushed in the maw of Time?" (11; emphasis added). Reactions to its characters "will no doubt vary with the degree to which the reader subscribes to situation ethics or adheres to a clearly articulated moral code.... Women's libbers will deplore the 'male-chauvinist-pig' exploitation that is being attempted" (11). (This dismissive comment, by the way, is as close

2. Statistics released by the U.S. Department of Education Center for Statistics for earned degrees conferred in 1984-85 and 1985-86 list women receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees in Letters as outnumber- ing men by nearly two-to-one (at the Ph.D. women outnumbered men by a six-to-five ratio in 84-85, and a five-to-four ratio in 85-86).



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as the Handbook comes to a feminist reading of the poem.) "A precritical response to the structure of 'Coy Mistress' could certainly involve recognition of the heightening in intensity stanza by stanza, of the lover's suit-from the proper and conventional complimentary 'forms' of verbal courting to more serious 'arguments' about the brevity of life and finally, to the bold and undisguised affirmation that sexual joy is 'what it is all about' " (12). Clearly, this account of the poem's structure underscores its androcentric plot and the desired out- come-which is defined as "proper," "conventional," "serious," "undisguised affirmation," and "sexual joy"; we might ask whether the seventeenth-century virgin female listener-in-the-poem would have agreed that this male plot is "'''what it is all about.'"

The Handbook continues to build an image of the poem by turning to its "atmosphere" although the authors admit there are "fewer overt atmosphere-pro- ducing elements" in the poem. This detail hardly deters their speculation:

The atmosphere results from the diction and the tone the speaker employs. The formal honorific "Lady" and its implied politeness create, if not a drawing room atmosphere, a stylized one where there is romantic bandinage, where gallants wax hyperbolic in a formulary way, and where fair maidens drop their eyes demurely or, if hyperbole becomes too warm, tap male wrists with a delicate fan. It is a man- nered, controlled, ritualistic atmosphere. (14; emphasis added)

This fantasy imagined by their precritical reader is merely a superficially polite repetition of the "titanic ritual" of their football analogy. Moreover, we also see here how their speculation accords with the sexual gaze that gives the power of looking to the male while the female drops her eyes in what he reads as embar- rassment but might just as likely be a resistance to the "formulary" and "man- nered" objectification of her body in the opening stanza. "But in the second stanza," she is verbally punished for her act of resistance as "compliments give way to professorial lectures as the aggressive and more intellectual male grows impatient with coyness carried too far. . . . Finally in the third stanza, the atmosphere becomes electric and potentially physical as the diction becomes ex- plicitly erotic" (14; emphasis added). "'What it is all about.' " And to see how the authors envision the text's "physical" and "erotic" denouement, we can turn to their later discussion of the poem's "historical" grounding:

However pronounced courtly love may be in the opening portion of the poem (the first part of the argument), by the time the speaker has arrived at his conclusion, he has stripped the woman of all pretense of modesty or divinity by his accusation that her "willing soul" literally exudes or breathes forth ("transpires") urgent ("in- stant") passion and his direct allusion to kinesthetic ecstasy: "sport us," "roll all our strength," "tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life" (the virginal body). (35; emphasis added)

Whether embodied in Marvell's seductive verse or the Handbook's football analogy, the male plot of domination, control, power, conquest, violent appropria- tion if not rape of the woman's autonomy-the bracketed afterthought of her "virginal body"-is fully articulated.

I will return to other passages that show how the authors attempt to divert our attention so we do not recognize their coy adversary; however, to put what I




have read so far into a context, I must speculate on a female reader's precritical response to Marvell's poem and by metonymy to the Handbook itself. Clearly a female reader of "To His Coy Mistress" might have trouble identifying with the poem's speaker; therefore, her first response would be to identify with the listener-in-the-poem, the eternally silent Coy Mistress. In such a reading she is likely to recognize that she has heard this kind of line before although maybe not with the same intensity and insistence. Moreover, she is likely to (re)experience the unsettling emotions that such an egoistic assault on her virginal autonomy would provoke. She will also see differently, even by contemporary standards, the plot beyond closure, the possible consequences-both physical and social- that the Mistress will encounter. Lastly, she is likely to be angered by this poem, by her marginalization in an argument that seeks to overpower the core of her being.

Yet the Handbook never considers this reader. If reading, and by extension criticism, involves, on one level, an identification of the self with some textual element (character, plot, or ideology for instance), then the Handbook privileges the process of masculine identification. In Hamlet, "Young Goodman Brown," Huckleberry Finn, and "To His Coy Mistress," the male reader easily finds identification while the female reader must take herself out of herself to think like a male if she is going to "read" these "major works" and learn the lessons of the Handbook. Such a process Judith Fetterley calls "the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values" (xx). Patrocinio Schweickart, citing Fet- terley, observes,

The process of immasculation does not impart virile power to the woman reader. On the contrary, it doubles her oppression. She suffers "not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one's experience articulated, clar- ified, legitimized in art, but more significantly, the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequences of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male-to be universal- . . . is to be not female." (42; emphasis original)

That the Handbook, consciously or unconsciously, engages in this process of immasculation can hardly, I think, go unquestioned.

Schweickart extends Fetterley's concept of immasculation when she suggests that the "woman reader, now a feminist, embarks on a critical analysis of the reading process, [during which] she realizes that the text has power to structure her experience. . . . However, her recognition of the power of the text is matched by her awareness of her essential role in the process of reading" (49). This dialectical model of the power relationship that occurs during the act of reading androcentric texts leads Schweickart to propose that femipist readers must take "control of the reading process"-they must "[read] the text as it was not meant to be read, in fact, [read] it against itself" (50). By the empowering nature of this process, the feminist reader can overturn the androcentric text and thus validate the female story. This becomes, then, our project: to re-read the al-



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legories of immasculation in the Handbook, especially in its readings of "To His Coy Mistress."

We can see the Handbook as an allegory of initiation to masculine criticism that conveys its messages through a set of embedded allegories-its exemplary texts. "Young Goodman Brown" represents the allegorical struggle of man with his faith, with his God; Hamlet represents the political struggle for succession, the allegory of the son seeking his rightful place in the patriarchy; and Huckle- berry Finn represents the struggle of man and society, the triumphant allegory of a boy coming to manhood through his discovery of true brotherhood with another male. In addition, all three of these texts present plots that depend on in- trospection and a recognition that the characters' universe is like a text that must be interpreted and negotiated. Experience becomes an act of reading that carries the hero, sometimes tragically, to a point of full self-identity through a re- current plot of development-often through an archetypal journey from inno- cence to maturity. The young male critic learns from these texts the power of interpretation and also its danger, but the young female critic must either lose herself while acknowledging her non-access to these paths of power or seek an alternative route.

In a classic double bind, she must turn to Marvell's Coy Mistress, who is at once the image of capitulation and the ghostly figure of the feminine who haunts the Handbook. She is the archetype of the "resisting reader" who can only discover self and critical authenticity through a radical re-reading and displacement of the Handbook's masculine fantasy of hter submission. Still, her journey to critical authenticity is doubly complicated. Indeed, the embedded allegory in Marvell's poem is of conquest played out in a sexual politics of seduction and a dialectics of desire that is both attractive and dangerous. But, whereas the other example texts stage moments of interpretive doubt, the Handbook sees Mar- vell's poem speaking with seeming assurance and confidence in its argument's intellectual and physical rigor. The Handbook refers to the poem by the short title of "'Coy Mistress,' " thus framing the Mistress' objectification in the poem. By metonymy "she" becomes a "text" the male critic must gaze upon, overpower, and disrobe through interpretation to reveal and ultimately replace her with a second interpretation that reads the poem as a philosophical comment on the transitory quality of life.

Moreover, the female reader must see that by resisting the Handbook she too becomes a coy mistress whom the authors are trying to seduce into reading like a man. But does she have to be seduced? Does the story of critical initiation al- ways have to end the way the patriarchy writes it? Can the Handbook be read against itself? To do this we must consider each approach covered and the readings produced to see how the Handbook generates its readings out of gender bias and where in those readings a seam offers itself for feminist unraveling. My pur- pose here is not to provide a fully articulated reading of Marvell's poem, but instead to pose some points of access ignored by the Handbook's readings.

In approaching Marvell's poem through the traditional questions of its genre and its biographical, historical, moral, and philosophical backgrounds, the Handbook reads the text as first belonging to the genres of both the lyric and




argument, which are used to convey the poem's "'proposition,' that is, an offer of sexual intercourse" (33). The Handbook then, as typified by the passage quoted earlier, examines the poem in the "tradition" of "courtly love" poetry, emphasizing in particular Marvell's background-"an educated man (Cambridge B.A., 1639), the son of an Anglican priest with Puritan leanings" (34). Marvell's mother goes unnoted as the authors focus on the son's "classical education" ("the poet was undoubtedly steeped in classical modes of thought and literature" [34]), his inheritance of a patriarchal tradition. Although they also see the poem in the tradition of "erotic poetry" and especially the carpe diem variety, they begin to recuperate the text as an evocation of a deeper, philosophical argument:

The paradox of the poem consists in the question of whether the speaker is hon- estly reflecting his view of life-pessimism-and advocating sensuality as the only way to make the best of a bad situation or whether he is simply something of a cad-typically male, conceited, and superior, employing eloquence, argument, and soaringly passionate poetry merely as a "line," a devious means to a sensual end. If the former is the case, there is something poignant in the way the man must choose the most exquisite pleasure he knows, sensuality, as a way of spitting in the face of his grand tormentor and victorious foe, Time. (37-38)

The latter case is a reading they dare not consider because even the patriarchy needs noble purposes to cover its "devious" actions.

A curious feature to note in the Handbook is that certain images or issues that could disrupt a given reading are often displaced to other approaches where their signification can be redirected in ways that serve the Handbook's interpretive politics. Thus it would be a misrepresentation to say the Handbook completely overlooks the Mistress' biographical and historical background; however, it is overlooked in the chapter devoted to those approaches. Instead, the matter is al- luded to dismissively in introducing the formalistic approach: "We can forget about trying to discover the identity of the woman or doing research on seventeenth-century standards of courtship and seduction; instead, we can concen- trate on what the poem says and how it says it" (85)- "'what it is all about.'" Of course tracing the biographical and historical background is precisely the move a feminist reader would make with Marvell's poem; moreover, she would realize that the Mistress' coyness is her only means of protecting what seventeenth-century society defined as her moral and economic value-her virginity. The momentary sensual ecstasy extolled by the speaker carries for the listener the cost of social "ruin" and possibly pregnancy out of wedlock. Both of these were punishable sins in her highly patriarchal culture. And even if the Cavalier did the right thing by her and married his Mistress, is her life likely to be fulfilled by the philosophic argument of her seduction? Hardly-she will become her hus- band's property and be subjected to the tyranny of English law that sanctioned her powerlessness. As long as she is "coy," she has power.

But because "coyness" marks a narrative movement of delay, it presents a countertext (only traced in the poem) to the one desired and argued for by the speaker. He tries initially to deconstruct this countertext with the first stanza and its subjunctively worded opening paradox: "Had we but world enough, and



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time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime." This paradox is one of many de- vices the Handbook examines to characterize the "Formalistic Approach" (ch. 2) to Marvell's poem, which is here read as "an argument addressed to a reluctant woman who has denied logic and reality in her zeal for conventional coyness." The reading produced, however, is blatantly misogynistic in its char- acterization of the Mistress. She is seen as exhibiting a "folly of unnatural coyness," an "unrealistic coyness"; the speaker's "honesty [in stanza two] . . . , by implication and by shrewd strategy, makes the lady's reluctance to enjoy fully the pleasures of love in their allotted season seem foolish, il- logical, perhaps even perverse"; he becomes "like a schoolmaster lecturing a not-so-bright pupil" to make "the lady's shrinking from surrender to an ardent lover seem grotesque and unnatural"; especially since "her inner and true self obviously, even physically, betrays what she cannot bring her face or her voice to consent to-that she is as strongly impelled toward sexual gratification as he is." But again, "the poem is more than a witty and realistic confrontation with a conventionally coy lady .... [Its] ultimately more pervasive theme of defiance toward mortality constitutes a second motif that plays against the first theme" (87-89; emphasis added).

The metaphysical conceit once more comes to the rescue to raise this de- meaning seduction to the level of high seriousness as a universal construct of man's desire to conquer his own mortality. Yet this clearly gender-coded reading is blind to the source of its gender codes-the male plot. To re-read the Hand- book's reading we must focus on the formal nature of plot as it functions in this lyric poem. By crossing the genre boundary, we can stage the narrative of the poem's speaking and see that for all its concern with time and finality, the plot of "To His Coy Mistress" is left unresolved despite the gendered endings we might infer from the text. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has suggested that women's writing has moved beyond the conventional endings postulated by the male plot (e.g., the marriage ending of the nineteenth century is being radically re-written in the twentieth). She suggests that women writers must break both the "sentence" and the "sequence" perpetuated by the dominant masculine literary tradition. For the woman writer the result is a "double consciousness" that empowers the writer's "movement between complicity and critique" (33). DuPlessis' conception of writing can be transferred to a conception of feminist reading that also seeks to break the sentence and the sequence of masculine texts.

Such a move in the reading of Marvell's poem clearly uncovers the conflict and intersection of the male and female plots signified by the speaker and listener. All the liberating qualities of the speaker's call to the free will of sexual desire at this intensified moment mask a determinism-a phallic causality-that merely re-writes rather than frees the Coy Mistress. We come to recognize, as Nancy K. Miller observes, "that the fictions of desire behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal constructs[,] ... that the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience, and the encoding of that experience in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture" (357). If we learn to read the Mistress' plot, her "coyness [is] no crime," nor is it "unnatural" or "unrealistic." Contemporary feminists might




read her guarding of her virginity as an earlier capitulation to the father's plot of daughterly chastity, and my own reading may be seen by some as reinforcing this patriarchal plot; this is certainly not my intention. Instead, I postulate the Mistress' coyness strictly as a symbol of her own power over her body even though her plot may coincide with another patriarchal plot of control. The plot of her refusal of love is powerful in its own terms and demonstrates her convic- tion to love only on her own terms. As Miller puts it, referring to Mme de Lafayette's 1678 novel La Princesse de Cleves: "Should the heroine's so-called 'refusal of love' be read as a defeat and an end to passion-a 'suicide,' or 'the delirium of a precieuse'? Or is it, rather, a bypassing of the dialectics of desire, and, in that sense, a peculiarly feminine 'act of victory'?" (345).

The plot of desire, however, leads us to the "Psychological Approach" and the Handbook's conception of Freudian criticism. Within this chapter, the authors make their lone reference to "her" as reader of the text (122), and they also note, citing Ernest Jones, the "strong misogyny that Hamlet displays" (131). However, the summary they provide of Freud's concepts eventually leads to the Oedipus Complex, and exclusively its masculine formation-Freud's problematic ideas about female sexuality are overlooked. When they turn to Marvell's poem (last in the chapter), they examine the sexual imagery of the poem, noting the images of fecundity ("vegetable love") and flying ("Time's winged chariot") used to encode passion and sexual activity. However, the poem counters these images with "thy marble vault" in the second stanza. "The 'marble vault,"' the Handbook tells us, "is a thinly disguised vaginal metaphor suggesting both rigor mortis and the fleshless pelvis of the skeleton" (149). Inter- estingly though, as the authors point to how the speaker "achieves a sublimation of sensual statement through the bold sincerity of his passion and through the brilliance of his imagery" (149), they fail to consider the final vaginal metaphor in the poem: "the iron gates of life." Instead, this reading ends by again re- cuperating the poem: "To read Marvell's great poem as nothing more than a glorification of sexual activity is, of course, a gross oversimplification" (150).

So much feminist re-vision of Freud has been done, that this chapter could be the subject of a paper in itself; however, there are some obvious problems in the Handbook's psychological approach to Marvell's poem. First, the questioning of coyness as "crime" in the opening lines echoes the politics of repression that marks patriarchal attitudes toward female sexuality. The speaker's semantic play seeks to unsettle the listener and awaken desire by confusing the conventional definitions of proper behavior. Second, as the Mistress resists, the speaker changes tack with the images of the marble vault and the worm-tried violation of "That long preserved virginity." But are we only confronting a "vaginal metaphor" of death and a grotesquely phallic worm here? Could the speaker's "bru- tal" turn from the highly visual first stanza to the grotesque images of the second indicate a fear that his Mistress may be also a Medusa? Could her "marble vault" be "echoing" his own stiffening?

As Freud suggested in "Medusa's Head," the "sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair," convince the young boy of the threat of castration. This threat of castration Freud claims essential to the



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Oedipal process. He then attempts to show how in mythology and art the terror of Medusa represents a terror of castration:

The hair upon Medusa's head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a re- markable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the tech- nical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.

The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. (273)

Clearly Marvell's worm-laden vaginal image can be read as a Medusa image that the speaker wants to subdue by his "echoing song":

Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserved virginity.

The speaker's anxiety over castration is symbolized even further through trans- ference by the death that will turn the Mistress' "quaint honor . . . to dust, / And into ashes all my lust." The fires of passion again assert themselves in the last stanza and culminate in the violent rape imagery of the penultimate couplet: "And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life." But with this last vaginal metaphor, does the listener see a vision of pleasure or of confinement?

My use of a Freudian text other than the conventional Oedipal story used by the Handbook opens our interpretation of the poem to the play of chiasmus-the

figure of inversion, reversal, and exchange. At this moment in the poem the central image of the marble vault becomes unrepresentable, doubled in a regress of

significations and underscored by a logic of absence and lost transcendence. For the Coy Mistress, this chiasmus marks the impasse of female roles defined by her sexual status, yet the narrative urged upon her is rigidly teleological and closes off all possibility. Within this logic of the chiasmus, we might speculate on whether the Coy Mistress raises her eyes at this point in the speaker's argument. Is her look one of horror that seeks protection, enclosure, submission to the male plot; or is it a look of defiance (which by the logics of chiasmus and

metonymy would be a highly eroticized look as well) that forces the speaker to

adjust his argument one more time to head off the laugh of his Coy Medusa? To begin to answer the questions prompted by the figure of Medusa requires

moving beyond the personal psychology of the Freudian approach and to the

"Mythical and Archetypal Approach" of the Handbook's fourth chapter. At this

point the authors stress the poem's "deeper," "universal" set of meanings:

Because of its strongly suggestive (and suggested) sensuality and its apparently cynical theme, "To His Coy Mistress" is sometimes dismissed as an immature if not immoral love poem. But to see the poem as little more than a clever "proposition" is to miss its greatness. No literary classic survives because it is merely "clever," or merely well written. It must partake somehow of the universal and, in doing so, may contain elements of the archetypal. ...




Superficially a love poem, "To His Coy Mistress" is, in a deeper sense, a poem about time. As such, it is concerned with immortality, a fundamental motif in myth. (173-74)

With this move, the sexual politics of the poem are subordinated to its philosophic metaphors of transitory existence. The poem thus becomes serious literature as its plot takes on universal implications. However, it is still a male plot that cannot fully account for the female. The final vision for the speaker and the Handbook's authors is of pleasure and philosophic triumph:

If life is to be judged, as some philosophers have suggested, not by duration but by intensity, then Marvell's lovers, at least during the act of love, will achieve a kind of immortality by 'devouring' time or transcending the laws of clock time. ... Thus we see that the overt sexuality of Marvell's poem is, in a mythic sense, suggestive of a profound metaphysical insight, an insight that continues to fascinate those philosophers and scientists who would penetrate the mysteries of time and eternity. (175)

Even in this final image of "penetration" one hears the male plot's "echoing song."

As I've been suggesting, the Coy Mistress is empowered as long as she re- mains reluctant. The Handbook clearly implies that the speaker will convince his Mistress, but the poem does not end with the triumphant defeat of time. Instead, we might apply a second set of archetypes to define the poem's "universal" image of the "Coy Mistress." Literature and society have long made use of the virgin/whore opposition to define the female role, often using both sides of the opposition as mere stereotypes without exploring their "deeper" archetypal or social nature. The Mistress is a virgin, and we might read her archetypal condi- tion with relation to her anatomical clock, her menstruation, which will not, despite the speaker's claims, be transcended by a moment of passion. Indeed, for that moment of passion she might have time doubly imposed on her through pregnancy. "The iron gates of life" represent the hymenal barrier the speaker seeks to break, but it also represents the birth canal that may give issue to a second edition. In the male plot the gates are thrown open to welcome lust and life, but in the female plot the gates may be slamming shut-the symbolism of "iron gates" and its prisonhouse echo cannot be read out of the poem although it con- tradicts the male fantasy of penetrating the mystery of immortality. Because the poem ends unresolved, it opens itself to feminist reading and to the noncapitula- tion of the Coy Mistress to her ardent Cavalier.

The Handbook's "Exponential Approach" is not really a genuine critical approach (more of a synthesis of approaches around the use of images to produce a reading), and it covers many of the same points already discussed. Nevertheless, this section does provide a(t) last (a) gloss on the image the "iron gates of life": "The phrase 'thorough the iron gates of life,' though it has more important meanings [never clearly specified in the Handbook], also may suggest the pass- ing from temporal life into [a] not so certain eternity" (206). And the authors return to the line once more: "Once the coy lady's virginity is torn away, the lover will have passed not through the pearly gates of eternity, but through the iron gates of life. Thus the lover's affirmation of life, compounded of despair and de-



422 College English

fiance, is made by his suggestion that the birth canal of life and procreation is preferable to the empty vault and to deserts of vast eternity" (208; emphasis added). Obviously, the tone of these passages and their exclusively masculine perspective echo the earlier points I have been trying to make. This final image of the "birth canal of life and procreation" is less an affirming and more an ap- propriating of the woman's private space. In the end, the patriarchy knows (and historically legislated accordingly) that Man only defeats time by the genealogi- cal narrative of transmission-from father to son. The pun on "sun" in the final couplet suggests the speaker's vision of his love's goal, and as the Handbook implies through its story of Marvell's hereditary inheritance: the mother is of no account. One last time the Mistress must resist, and the female reader of the Handbook must reclaim her text.

At each turn the Handbook's reading of Marvell's poem can be countered with a feminist alternative, proving that the question of gender must be posed to every critical approach. In a general way the authors pose such questions in the brief overview on Feminist Criticism in the chapter on "Other Approaches." Significantly, however, these questions assert no pressure on the central readings contained in the Handbook, and, by being safely buried among other approaches, they are little threat to the main readings. The Handbook's readings are not invalid by traditional criteria for criticism, but they are incomplete, limited by the masculine assumptions structuring the Handbook's approach to criticism. The female reader I've postulated is a construct that can help us to see the deficiencies in the Handbook and to devise strategies around them. A strategy for the presently available edition is to read and teach the Handbook against itself and within a feminist critique of phallic criticism. Additionally we should call for a thorough re-vision in the forthcoming third edition-the mere tacking on of an extra chapter on feminist criticism is an insufficient solution to the sub- text of misogyny in the remainder of the book. These strategies should be ex- plored and implemented so teachers, students, and the Handbook's authors can construct An "Other" Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature.

Works Cited

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

"Fact File: Earned Degrees Conferred in 1984-85 by U.S. Colleges and Univer- sities." Chronicle of Higher Education 15 July 1987: 34.

"Fact File: Earned Degrees Conferred in 1985-6." Chronicle of Higher Educa- tion 13 Jan. 1988: A36.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fic- tion. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. "Medusa's Head." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy- chological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1955. 18: 273-74.




Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches. New York: Harper, 1966.

•- . A Handbook of Critical Approaches. 2nd ed. New York: Harper, 1979.

Kolodny, Annette. "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of Feminist Literary Criticism." Showalter 144-67.

Lanser, Susan Sniader, and Evelyn Torton Beck. "[Why] Are There No Great Women Critics: And What Difference Does It Make." The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge. Ed. Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1979. 79-91.

Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress." Guerin, et al., Handbook. 2nd ed. 299-300.

Miller, Nancy K. "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fic- tion." Showalter 339-60.

Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. Brighton, Sussex: Har- vester, 1982.

Schweickart, Patrocinio P. "Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading." Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 31-62.

Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Liter- ature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

------. "Women and the Literary Curriculum." College English 32 (1971): 855-62.

Staton, Shirley F., ed. Literary Theory in Praxis. Philadelphia: U of Pennsyl- vania P, 1987.



Documents

Textual Harassment of Marvell's Coy Mistress: The Institutionalization of Masculine Criticism