SOURCE: Swann, Marjorie. “Cavalier Love: Fetishism and Its Discontents.” Literature and Psychology 42, no. 3 (1996): 15-35.

In the following essay, Swann examines how Cavalier poets fetishized women in their works and discusses what this reveals about masculine anxiety.

Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the critic who examines Renaissance literature through the lens of psychoanalysis has gone badly astray. Greenblatt maintains that the mode of subjectivity, the “continuous selfhood” of the individual assumed by psychoanalysis was unavailable to men during the Renaissance. In Greenblatt's early modern world of hegemonic power, the community acts as subject, shaping and controlling the individual as object. Identity originates not in the “unique biology” of the individual, but in “the community's determination that this particular body possesses by right a particular identity and hence a particular set of possessions.” Rather than perceiving himself as subject, then, Greenblatt's Renaissance man would consider himself first and foremost as...