Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics (review)

larger issue of what’s at stake in the “rhetorical drag” practiced by male editors can become attenuated or obscured. This lack of clarity may, of course, be intentional, but toward the end, it seems as if every contradictory detail in the Johnson or Howe texts must correspond to something historical/political/social, but just what that something might more concretely be seems continually deferred, not only by the impersonators, but by Carroll. This quibble may simply be an issue of better editing, but it may, I suspect, also have something to do with the theory of “rhetorical drag” itself. When his historical desire becomes not only rhetorically unreachable, but more signifi cantly, unstable to the gender impersonator, it seems that “s/he” falls into a circular game in which the rhetoric of the drag becomes its own unsolvable end. Rather than the critic’s seeking out some fi xed historical or social interpretation of the drag revealed in a given captivity narrative—that is, its success or even its failure as “drag”—the theoretical question now becomes how to analyze the desire at stake in the attempt to keep the drag’s disparate meanings in play. At this point, Lorrayne Carroll’s interesting book points us away from Judith Butler’s early performative theory as such and towards a quite different theory, a theory that it engages in its discussion of identifi cation in Thoreau but elsewhere does not develop—the psychoanalytic.