...sexual conquest, steels himself to take a kiss, assuring himself that "who will read must first learne spelling" (Second song, line 24). The metaphor, comparing sexual assault with learning to read, is odd. How, for Philip Sidney, did literacy education get tangled with desire, sex, violence, and masculine anxiety?

This essay traces an early modern "literacy affect" from Sidney's schooling and early correspondence through Astrophil and Stella. The sonnets record conflicted responses to writing, reflecting simultaneous hope that it can unify people, and fear that it will fail. On the positive side, writing is thought to convey the voice and spirit of another person over distance, and inspires joy in an almost mystical presence. It promises identification and ultimately union with what this essay terms the alma pater, a pedagogical patriarch who appropriates to himself maternal roles. Formal literacy education teaches boys to repeat, identify with, and assimilate paternal language, and thereby to become themselves. Yet literacy instruction also has its difficulties, for, like Stella, writing is an "absent presence" (106.1). Inscribed language is susceptible to misinterpretation, and its frustrating failure to communicate intentions reveals that its absences may overpower the presence ascribed to it. Full literacy, that moment of mastery that will license acceptance by and reunion with the alma pater, never arrives, catching the student in a cycle of educational and emotional deferral. At the same time, repressed maternal figures return to threaten school-based literacy's homosociality. Finally, although reading and writing promise to teach self-knowledge, they also threaten self-loss when their lessons are unlearnable or the writer loses control of his writing. A communication that both promises and withholds communion, writing is the center of affective conflicts appearing in Sidney's youthful correspondence, including schoolboy letters from his parents and his Continental mentor Hubert Languet. This early correspondence prefigures Astrophil and Stella's literacy affect, revealing in the sonnets' imagery of writing, reading, and teaching a refracted psychic literacy narrative.

The idea that writing excites fantasies of union with a grandiose other has affinities with psychoanalytic theorizing about orality. Indeed, as Joseph Loewenstein points out, "suggestions of a loss of primal nurture haunt" Astrophil and Stella, a loss he ties to an "oral eroticism" that typifies "the erotic regressions of early adolescence." (2) One is reminded, however, of Julia Kristeva's assertion in Tales of Love that language acquisition "lets one hold on to the joys of chewing, swallowing, nourishing oneself ... with words. In being able to receive the other's words, to assimilate, repeat, and reproduce them, I become like him: One. A subject of enunciation. Through psychic osmosis/identification. Through love." (3) Astrophil and Stella hovers between anxieties attendant on loss and the comforts of union and identification. Nonetheless, affect often associated with orality is in Sidney's sonnets mobilized for writing, a cultural domain often presented by Great Leap theorists as orality's opposite. According to the great leap theory, alphabetic writing universally transforms individual cognition and human societies by elevating the visual over the oral/aural, by cultivating abstraction, logic, and universal ideas rather than concrete, formulaic, and situational thought, by preserving a sense of linear history that can be extended toward future goals as opposed to a conception of unchanging linear cycles, and by promoting individual rather than collective identity. It also introduces a powerful social dynamic between the literacy haves and have-nots. (4) Responses to this insistence that the transition from orality to literacy is a momentous cognitive and cultural achievement often criticize the ahistorical and asocial abstraction it demands. (5) Instead, as a "social and cultural achievement," literacy "is closely tied to specific relationships and specific social and cultural contexts and activities." (6) Warnings against rounding "literacy" to a transhistorical integer are also apt for narratives of psychic development, whose calculus is likewise surest when differentiated for "specific social and cultural contexts and activities." (7)

In recognizing how literacy is socially embedded, this essay supplements the lively debate over literacy's cognitive impact by focusing on affect. Rhian Jones's case studies of emergent literacy use an object-relations approach to suggest that picture books are like transitional objects (such as security blankets or teddy bears), and that their object cathexis is gradually diffused as it shifts to mastery of alphabetic inscription. Both prewriting and later alphabetic writing inspire the kinds of contradictory affect--love and hate--witnessed for other transitional objects. (8) Kristeva characterizes analogous contradictory feelings for a writing that similarly functions as a transitional object: "writing is memory regained from signs to flesh and from flesh to signs through an intense identification (and a dramatic separation from) an other who is loved, desired, hated, and rendered indifferent." (9) Here, Kristeva's "writing" borders on a typically oral relationship between the developing self and the "mother" who both loves and threatens, and from whom separation is a traumatic step in the developing sense of independent selfhood. When placed within the Renaissance schoolhouse--and many recent scholars have found pre-Oedipal and object-relations dynamics especially salient for early modern men--such understandings suggest explanations for the attachments, frustration, and even trauma that literacy education might entail. (10)

Changes in child rearing, schooling, and literacy shaped in Sidney, as a member of a nascent administrative class, contradictory emotional reactions to inscribed language. Astrophil and Stella's overlapping images--reading and schooling, violence, desire and writing--appear in a culture where literacy was transforming gender roles and social networks. (11) For example, Lorna Hutson has shown how Renaissance humanism switched the pledges of male friendship from tokens to texts. Because texts bonded men by suasively articulating the terms of friendship, they introduced rhetorical instability into social relations, which also generated anxiety about women's agency as similarly speaking objects of exchange in a homosocial economy. (12) A burgeoning "writing class," in Margaret W. Ferguson's coinage, increasingly sought to portray literacy as wholesomely masculine and speech as dangerously feminine. (13) In ushering boys into a homosocial world, Renaissance literacy education both offers and defers union with an alma pater, a paternal figure who attempts, without decisive effect, to pry language education from the hands (and mouths) of women while appropriating to himself traditional maternal roles. (14) Rebecca W. Bushnell sees status and gender confusion in the relationship of humanist pedagogues to parental authority. As surrogate fathers, they offer the discipline that supposedly lenient mothers could not. And yet, they also provide a "vaguely eroticized ... 'allurement,' or motherly affection" to distinguish their compassion from the tyranny of harsh parents. (15) Such confusion suffuses the alma pater, whose pedagogical proxies famously projected on women a corrupting indulgence--of the kind Janet Adelman finds propagating in Shakespeare's imagination--to justify appropriating nurturance to the scriptive masculine regula of the schoolhouse. (16)

Sidney boarded far from his parents' residence to attend Thomas Ashton's Shrewsbury grammar school, and, with...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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