ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the control of space and time to the important question of 'the problem of woman' for John Donne. Woman, as an 'other space' or 'elsewhere', as it were, presents Donne with some outstanding problems. Just as woman is, in the poetry and its ideology, archetypally adulterous'. Fixity of meaning and 'successful' communication become translated in the poetry into the terms of fixing or stabilizing the woman, imagined as the locus of promiscuity and uncertainty. Donne's text resolutely refuses to ignore woman. The woman 'described' in 'The Anagram' is, potentially at least, a microcosmic version of a revolutionary land, a society where interchange of social place is the norm. The notion of Donne assuredly running after clearly identified object-women and then actually discovering or knowing the women before himself moving on and discarding the women is not at all borne out by the texts.
