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Heterosexuality and its Discontents

Sylvia Huot

in Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost

This chapter examines literary treatments of madness in connection with love and sexual desire, with a focus on the male heterosexual subject. Analyses trace the tension between erotic desire and ... More

This chapter examines literary treatments of madness in connection with love and sexual desire, with a focus on the male heterosexual subject. Analyses trace the tension between erotic desire and misogynistic revulsion, as well as that between heterosexual desire and homosocial bonding, in a series of texts. The spectre of homoerotic desire that haunts many medieval romances is also examined. Negotiating these conflicting demands and emotions can result in both feigned and genuine madness for many heroes of chivalric romance. Examples include Amadas et Ydoine, Ipomedon, the prose Tristan — focusing on the interplay between Tristan, Mark, Palamedes, and Kahedin —, Marie de France’s Lanval, and the episode of the sodomitic king Agriano in the romance Bérinus.Less

Madness and Love: A Living Death

Sylvia Huot

in Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost

Drawing on the theories of Lacan, Kristeva, Žižek, and Butler, this chapter examines the treatment of lovesickness as a living death in Bérinus, Amadas et Ydoine, the prose Tristan, and Guillaume de ... More

Drawing on the theories of Lacan, Kristeva, Žižek, and Butler, this chapter examines the treatment of lovesickness as a living death in Bérinus, Amadas et Ydoine, the prose Tristan, and Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Navarre. In these texts, madness is associated with different forms and degrees of ‘living death’ — the state of inhabiting the ‘zone entre-deux-morts’ — as characters undergo bodily deterioration and disease, mental dissolution, or the loss of a symbolically constructed social identity. The role of gender is shown to be paramount, as male and female experiences of love, desire, and madness are shown to be carefully differentiated in all texts under discussion. In general, women are depicted as suffering bodily illness or death, while men are shown as undergoing the ‘symbolic death’ of madness.Less

Ovid’s Ghosts: Lovesickness, Theatricality, and Ovidian Spectrality on the Early Modern English Stage

Lisa S. Starks

in Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness ... More

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”Less

Comic Symmetry and English Melancholy

J. F. Bernard

in Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy

The chapters attest to the mutual transformation of comedy and melancholy that Shakespeare develops. considers the ways in which early Shakespearean comedies interrogate established conceptions of ... More

The chapters attest to the mutual transformation of comedy and melancholy that Shakespeare develops. considers the ways in which early Shakespearean comedies interrogate established conceptions of english melancholy such as lovesickness, mourning and interiority. Both The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost apply pressure on these melancholic expressions by developing them within explicitly comedic settings. The chapter underscores the critique that Shakespearean comedy performs in reworking such philosophical notions, which culminates in the ambiguously happy resolution put forth. In both plays, there exist parallel efforts to neutralise and rehabilitate melancholic characters. The humour is not easily purged away through medical expertise, nor is it ultimately celebrated as a sign of interiority. There remains a perceptible sense of doubt as to whether characters eventually do away with the melancholy they express. Love’s Labour’s Lost in particular, with the jarring announcement of the King’s death, suggests that the melancholy of early comedies shatters established classification. In its initial form, the chapter suggests, Shakespearean comedy already rejects traditional definitions of melancholy.Less

From Amor hereos to Love-Melancholy: A Medico-Literary History

in The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

In De amore, Marsilio Ficino's seventh and final speech, considers the kind of love that is the “opposite” of Socratic love, a form of insanity rather than the “divine madness” praised by Plato as a ... More

In De amore, Marsilio Ficino's seventh and final speech, considers the kind of love that is the “opposite” of Socratic love, a form of insanity rather than the “divine madness” praised by Plato as a means to knowledge. Ficino insists that this “insanity” is a form of love while delineating the features of what he also calls “vulgar love.” The opening stages of the seventh speech, which purports to interpret the poem Donna me prega by Guido Cavalcanti, show Ficino's unease with the implications of the medical treatment of love-melancholy. In his speech, Ficino is indebted to Dino del Garbo's commentary but nevertheless transforms Cavalcanti's poem into a vehicle for his own version of Platonic love. In his commentary, del Garbo names this form of love amor ereos (“lovesickness”). This chapter examines the complex medical history that makes possible Ficino's commentary on love-melancholy in De amore, and shows that the medical/philosophical tradition of love-melancholy engages in complex ways with a Platonic view of love.Less

The “Love-sicke Hart”: Female Love-Melancholy and the Romance Quest

in The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

This chapter examines Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, its depiction of the mutual influence of her “bleeding bowels” and mental suffering, and the implications of this gendering of ... More

This chapter examines Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, its depiction of the mutual influence of her “bleeding bowels” and mental suffering, and the implications of this gendering of love-melancholy as a form of hysteria for the poem's broader revision of romance. Here Glauce invokes the inward space of Britomart's body as the invisible site of a mysterious suffering, trying to conceal the real cause with obfuscating rhetoric. Spenser provides a more precise reference to the source of Britomart's suffering as her “love-sicke hart,” because Britomart is suffering from the female form of lovesickness or love-melancholy. This chapter analyzes the cultural and poetic significance of Britomart's “love-sick hart” by juxtaposing Spenser's descriptions of Britomart's psychosomatic suffering with contemporary medical accounts of female love-melancholy (also termed “uterine fury”) and its treatment. Finally, it looks at the house of Busirane as a complex allegorization of Scudamour's atra voluptas—a willfully indulged erotic suffering that holds the beloved (Amoret) prisoner by stripping her of any reality outside her lover's obsessive mind.Less

Lovesick

William C. Carter

in Proust in Love

This chapter tells the account of Alfred Agostinelli's later influence in the life of Marcel Proust. In the spring of 1913, Agostinelli sought and appealed to Proust for work. But as Proust had ... More

This chapter tells the account of Alfred Agostinelli's later influence in the life of Marcel Proust. In the spring of 1913, Agostinelli sought and appealed to Proust for work. But as Proust had already hired Odilon Albaret as his regular driver, Agostinelli was instead given the position of Proust's secretary, aiding in the preparing the typescript of Swann's Way. The chapter recounts how Proust showered Agostinelli with money, and of how the two confided in one another, and of Proust's eventual fall for the young, athletic Italian. The chapter then links Agostinelli to Proust's writing of Albertine. The chapter also talks about the lovesickness that Proust would experience, especially in the eventual publication of Swann's Way, where in a letter to his literary friend Louis de Robert, Proust would mention this lovesickness over Agostinelli.Less

Propertius

Julia Dyson Hejduk

in The God of Rome: Jupiter in Augustan Poetry

While Augustus in Propertius stands for Roman military power, Jupiter’s additional association with sex makes him a far more complex figure. The erotic rivalry between Jupiter and Propertius ... More

While Augustus in Propertius stands for Roman military power, Jupiter’s additional association with sex makes him a far more complex figure. The erotic rivalry between Jupiter and Propertius throughout book 2, the lovesickness book, would devolve into even greater absurdity if Jupiter were metonymy for Augustus. Whether or not Augustus is on his way to becoming a “Jupiter figure,” the four poems in which he and the god are juxtaposed make clear the increasing concentration of power in the hands of one man. In book 2, Jupiter’s unsung Gigantomachy, followed immediately by Augustus’s unsung Aeneid, creates a connection; the inability of either Jupiter or Caesar to separate devoted lovers strengthens it. Book 3 floats the idea—playfully, one hopes—of an opposition between the chief man and the chief god, as the poet claims that Rome should not fear even Jupiter while Augustus is safe. By book 4, Jupiter has been further upstaged by Augustus, merely sitting in the audience while Caesar’s victory at Actium is sung. On the other hand, the rise and fall of Jupiter the Lover throughout Propertius’s poems does tell us something about the changing mores of Augustan Rome. The absence of this figure from book 4, and his replacement with the censorious persona who refuses to “suffer” Tarpeia’s love-wounds, may reflect the moral climate that Augustus’s marriage and adultery legislation sought to foster. Yet like the revenant Cynthia of 4.8, combining Juno’s wrath with Jupiter’s might, amor cannot really be killed.Less