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GENDER AND ENVY. Edited by Nancy Burke. New York: Routledge, 1998, 328 pp.
Gender and Envy is a book about penis envy and its inevitable intellectual legacy of conflict and controversy. This volume consists mostly of articles that have been published previously in a wide array of venues, including two chapters of Freud's writing. It is ably edited by Nancy Burke, whose introductions to the material are extremely clear and well-written and serve as a concise guide for the reader. She integrates the papers and comments on their unique contributions to the penis envy dialogue, helping the reader to better understand and appreciate the material. She logically places Freud at the beginning, because all of the articles that follow are essentially responses to his famous dictum of 1925, which stated the following about girls: "They notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis" (p. 25). Understandably, many male and female psychoanalysts, and feminists, have responded emotionally and intellectually to Freud's not-so-subtle declaration of the inferiority of women. Gender and Envy does an outstanding job of documenting the theoretical responses that have followed, both in psychoanalytic and cultural theory. The last section of the book aims at taking the dialogue further by adding original papers that offer current perspectives.
In her introduction to Gender and Envy, Burke quotes a student in a class she is teaching, who asks, "Does anyone still believe in penis envy?" Burke goes on to say that concepts are refined through conflict and that this volume represents the continuing discussion of the relevance of envy, particularly penis envy, in gender theory. Nonetheless, her student's lack of initial interest in the topic at hand may also represent the views of some readers. Because Gender and Envy is a volume devoted to the discussion of penis envy, including theorists who have departed from Freud's original conceptualizations, the question remains whether the topic holds sufficient interest for today's readers of analytic and gender theory to warrant such an in-depth pursuit of the subject. For those who find Freud's original concept...