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Analysts, in listening to their patients, hear and must interpret metaphoric speech.* They do so, however, with metaphors of their own—metaphors valorized, moreover, by inscription as theory. What sort of metaphors has psychoanalytic theory provided for the female body? To quote Catharine R. Stimpson, editor of the series Women in Culture and Society, to which the book under review here belongs, psychoanalysis has constructed its picture around a notion of lack: It has provided an “ahistorical picture [that] represents sexual difference as a tragic difference between fortunate men, who carry the plenitude of the phallus with them, and unfortunate women, who lack that boon and bounty” (p. xi). While this formulation is itself, however, only partially valid, yet that it is indeed partially valid is central to the thesis of Sowing the Body.
Classicist Page duBois, in this fascinating book, instructs us that such metaphors (of lack), while prevalent in antiquity and well-known to Freud, did not exhaust the universe then, nor do they now. Historically, they have been supplemented with others and can be so supplemented today—particularly with others that restore to the female body its plenitude and accord to it as a priority its fertility. The agenda of this book is thus to reexamine ancient metaphors and to correct an imbalance in our views of not only the