Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare. Theresa M. Krier
Theresa M. Krier, Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xvii + 266 pp. Bibl. Index. CL $42.50. ISBN: 08014-3893-4. Psychoanalytic/feminist literary criticism, writes Theresa Krier, has too repetitively seen the male-authored canon as driven only by desire for and dread of the maternal body. In her Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare, she delineates an alternative tradition in some literature that deals with sexuality and generation, a tradition that, she argues, resonates with the theories of child development offered by D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and Luce Irigaray. She discusses in detail the Song of Songs, Lucretius' De rerum natura, Chaucer's Parlement ofFoules, Spenser's Amoretti and Faerie Queene, book 4, and Shakespeare's Love's Labors Lost and Winter's Tale. While she agrees that ambivalent nostalgia for an archaic mother is part of the culture in which these works were written, she argues that they criticize the constrictions of such nostalgia and open up other perspectives. Her literary tradition is about gratitude, of all things — gratitude to literary predecessors and to possibilities of creation and procreation. Yet it is not sentimental gratitude.