B. Diane Lipsett has set for herself the task of exploring the function of desire in three loosely related early Christian narratives of “conversion”—The Shepherd of Hermas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Joseph and Aseneth. While noting with care the distinctions among these three works, Lipsett studies the tropes they share in common: all speak of identity transformation as a process of masculinization, all focus on virgins as liminal figures, all are preoccupied with cultural codes for marriage and chastity, and all of them raise questions of desire and deferral.
Each text contains erotic episodes that defy verisimilitude. For example, the Shepherd begins with Hermas viewing a Roman matron bathing in the Tiber and continues on to narrate his overnight dalliance with seven praying virgins; Thecla enters Paul's prison and spends the night sitting at his feet to hear the word of God; Aseneth invites a heavenly man to sit on her bed in her cloister so that she might feed him. The feature distinguishing Lipsett's argument from much previous scholarship is that rather than dismissing these erotic elements as gratuitously titillating, or as simply as too bizarre to explain, she reads them as integral to each plot. Her aim is to provide a window onto the ancient cultural poetics of desire, and her overarching thesis is that in each case, the text contains a coherent view of the constructive, if paradoxical, role of desire in transformation. She concludes, “each in the end represents desire, not as an antithesis to, but as an expressive mode of self-restraint . . . [each] variously involve their readers in the embrace of renunciation and the conversionary seductions of self-control” (126).
Her method involves a thorough-going and astute traditional historical-critical and literary analysis (she is conversant with theories of redaction in each instance, but adheres largely to the final form of the texts in question), enriched by her engagement with three (rather disparate) theoretical approaches to the study of desire: aside Hermas she places a Foucauldian analysis of discursive strategies for disciplining desire; aside Thecla she places psychoanalytic interpretations of desire (including the work of Kristeva, Lacan and Bulter); aside Aseneth, she places the ancient critic Longinus and his exploration of the sublime.
Lipsett is careful to insist that she is employing her theoretical apparatus lightly, aiming not to “apply theory as an overlay but to place theoretical considerations alongside the text to see what kind of reciprocal insight, or perhaps interference, results” (16, cf; 89). For this reader, the result was a good sprinkling of original and useful (if sometimes teasingly abbreviated) insights into the workings of these three early Christian narratives. She notes that Hermas serves as a sub-elite example of the sort of self-scrutiny Foucault identified as characteristic of early Christian hermeneutics. She elucidates the role of Tryphaena in protecting Thecla through reference to Kristeva's analysis of the discourse of maternal desire; accounts for Thecla's infatuation with Paul through Roland Barthes reflections on ravissement; and tracks the endless deferral of desire in the narrative through Judith Butler's analysis of the relationship between desire and identity. Longinus helps Lipsett to make sense of the hyperbole in Aseneth, the excesses of language that serve to transport both Aseneth and the reader into the realm of the sublime.
Each chapter also provides a useful review of the secondary literature, which Lipsett evaluates and utilizes judiciously, as she works us through her texts. The book is elegant, lucid, and persuasive, and will be welcomed by anyone interested in these ancient texts, or in the broader question of the poetics of desire.
My only criticism of the work is that it is quite compact. As Lipsett herself describes the project, she is offering only “‘three glimpses through peepholes’ into the large and ongoing construction project of a cultural poetics of desire (17),” and it is true that we get glimpses here, rather than a large vista (Here, alluding to the work of David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990]). But this criticism is really only an invitation to the author. Lipsett is obviously a gifted scholar with a wealth of critical tools in her possession. Her light, but apt, use of literary theory suggests, in fact, that she has a deep grounding in all of the critical theorists whom she brings into play in this book. She would do a service to the profession were she to continue to employ those tools in more ambitious projects in coming years.
