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PARTISAN REVIEW
physically attracted to Greek women, or that the ancients wrote
about their dreams and themselves in the frank, confessional way
that autobiographies might be written now. However much we may
feel ourselves drawn to ancient writing, and see ourselves in them,
any treatment of the ancient world that intends to be informative
must acknowledge that the ancient writers were not only not naive
but often disingenuous, and because Foucault could not see what is
written between and behind the lines of ancient theory, Volumes
Two and Three tell us relatively little about the nature of sexuality in
the ancient world.
Nor is it clear that the history of sexuality in the remote past ,
even if it were more comprehensively studied, could provide that
"genealogy" of ourselves that Foucault sought to recover. Like
Lacan, who thought that phenomena as complex as human emo–
tions could be described in terms of null sets or Borromean knots ,
Foucault seems to have come to believe in the reality of his
metaphors. But earlier attitudes cannot be reconstructed simply
through current ones; opinions are shaped by many "outside"
developments. Foucault might have been justified in designating us
"Other Victorians," if, in our time, moral restraints had not been
made superfluous by the widespread use of mechanical contracep–
tives and the Pill.
MARY LEFKOWITZ
MORE ON BLOOMSBURY
VANESSA BELL. By Frances Spalding.
Ticknor
&
Fields. $22.95.
JULIA: A PORTRAIT OF JULIA STRACHEY. By Herself and Frances
Partridge.
Little, Brown, and Co. $16.95.
Whatever the actual desires of the reading public may be,
publishers seem convinced that the appetite for Bloomsburiana is
bottomless . The letters and diaries of Virginia Woolf alone give us
as much information on Bloomsbury as we could possibly wish to
have, but the books keep coming, telling familiar anecdotes from
slightly new angles, filling in gaps we didn't know were there. As the
archive swells, so does Bloomsbury, expanding to include figures
whose membership in the group was equivocal or even nonexistent.
