The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0540 Thursday, 29 October 2009
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2009
Subject: SBReview_5: Lovesickness and Gender
SBReview_5:
Lesel Dawson. _Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English
Literature_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN:
978-0-19-926612-8; 244 pp. £50 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Eric Langley, University College London
Reading representations of melancholia, hysteria, or erotic sickness in
the context of period medical conceptions of disease, Lesel Dawson's
_Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature_ offers an
authoritative and scholarly account of an absorbing subject. At times
wryly ironic, brutally direct, or overtly relishing her unwholesome
quotations, Dawson combines an engaging and lively candor with
diagnostic precision, offering directed and illuminating readings of
texts by major dramatists, medical practitioners, and period
commentators. Situating the discussion within a critical lineage, Dawson
receives support from, as well as offers alternative positions to, the
work of Mary Wack, Carol Neely, Helen King, Juliana Schiesari, and,
importantly, Elaine Showalter.
Dawson negotiates the period's permeable distinctions between mental and
physiological illness, charting the complex relationship between the
somatic and the psychological to allow female lovesickness to be
diagnosed as much more than a merely uterine disorder and diagnosis
itself to be much more than uncomplicatedly empirical. A real success of
this study is that although depictions of a troubled early-modern
interior can be described in terms inflected by psychology and even
occasionally psychiatry, the discussion is characterized by precise
employment of specific early modern terminology, couching textually
analytic reading amongst graphic, impassioned, bloody, and lascivious
period voices: "a gamesome bedfellow," we hear, is the "sure[st] physician."
Dawson undertakes a detailed anatomization of gendered medical and
cultural assumptions concerning erotic sickness. So after suggesting
that "whereas male lovesickness is classified as a form of melancholy --
a malady associated with creativity, interiority, and intellect -- the
female version is considered a disorder of the womb"; Dawson further
complicates this distinction by showing how the role of erotic
melancholic is appropriated by women, requisitioned to claim an
intellectually and artistically sensitive identity. Uncovering and
thereby demystifying "gender-based dichotomies" concerning male and
female models of lovesickness, Dawson suggests that a condition "that we
often think of as overwhelmingly debilitating can function, at times, as
either [a] site . . . of pleasure or form . . . of empowerment."
Chapter One considers period medical conceptions of desire, diagnosing
the "disease of love" and exploring its symptoms and cures from
phlebotomy to clysters, vomiting to astrology, taking characteristic
care to distinguish between competing etiologies of lovesickness. We
hear of visually infected lovers and suicidal mania, of phantasmal
visions and insatiable sexual appetites collated from literary, medical,
and historical sources, as Dawson describes a complaint understood both
as a genuine corporeal condition, and as a carefully constructed
performance; a particularly fascinating section considers the strategic
employment of lovesickness, aggressively enacted in avoidance of
unwanted matrimony. Here, as throughout this study, lovesickness is
shown to be far more than a merely passive complaint, potentially
excusing freedom of expression and allowing the articulation of
otherwise unspeakable desire. Here, as elsewhere, Dawson mediates
between the lived corporeal experience of lovesickness and the social
affect of its pose.
Further evidencing cleanly articulated distinctions between different
forms of erotic melancholy and the love disease, Chapter Two offers
diagnostic reading of the symptoms of gendered erotic maladies. Dawson
demonstrates how period medics and contemporary critics alike can --
potentially misleadingly -- conflate distinct but not discrete diseases,
acknowledging the thin diagnostic distinctions between them. Here, one
of the more vicious ironies of this often witty study emerges: that the
diagnosis of green-sickness would often be strategically misapplied to
illicitly pregnant women, proscribing sex as a cure for an "illness"
already sexually transmitted. Dawson offers set-piece discussion both of
Shakespeare's Ophelia and the jailor's daughter from _The Two Noble
Kinsmen_, questioning critical consensus, and, as the study progresses,
demonstrating the influence of these Shakespearean figures on later
literary and non-literary texts.
Chapter Three's discussion of intellectual female melancholy turns to
Beaumont and Fletcher's _The Maid's Tragedy_ and John Ford's _The Broken
Heart_, alongside a wide range of contemporary dramas, juxtaposing the
earlier discussion of Ophelia with consideration of two heroines whose
willful, if self-destructive, manipulation of their maladies is typical
of a more assertive enactment of cerebral melancholy. Aspatia of _The
Maid's Tragedy_ in particular is shown to "fus[e] the role of Ophelia
with that of Hamlet" as she accepts the twin roles of "faithful, devoted
mistress and . . . angry [melancholic] avenger": her ability to exert
control over her complaint, Dawson concludes, "provide[s] a
proto-feminist commentary on the misogynistic cultural tradition from
which she derives, revealing how lovesickness can operate as a complex
strategy for self-assertion."
Addressing a continental Neoplatonic vogue in Chapter Four, Dawson
describes the cautionary employment of lovesickness, offered in reproof
in order to temper the heat of courtly romanticism; conversely, it seems
"Platonic love inverts much of the medical advice for what Renaissance
doctors hold to be healthy in love," advocating a regime of abstinence
and spiritually inflected adoration that would leave the lovelorn
dangerously susceptible to sexual frustration and erotic constipation.
Elsewhere in the chapter, describing how the figure of Narcissus
surfaces in erotic texts, Dawson demonstrates the inherent proximity of
neoplatonic and narcissine desire discussed in relation to Ford's _'Tis
Pity_, before concluding, perhaps with more optimism than might have
been expected, that "Platonic love was beneficial to women" in
"justif[ying] a prolonged period of courtship," "grant[ing] the female
beloved an elevated spiritual significance, . . . endors[ing]
flirtation as morally educative," and "offer[ing] women a new way of
envisaging love, in which one was encouraged to find, not a lord and
master, but a second self."
If Chapter Four's conclusion is generous in its evaluation of arguably
oppressive Platonic idealism, the remaining two chapters -- on remedying
both lovesickness and love itself -- respond with earthy pragmatism,
concluding that "the female beloved can be damned, as well as exalted,
by exaggerated praise": firstly, exploring the dramatic and medical
implications of blood-letting in some of the more brutal plays of the
early seventeenth century; then, the purgative function of copulation
which, in the words of William Vaughan cause "the vaporous fumes of the
seede [to be] taken away from the Patient, which [otherwise] doe infect
his braine, and lead him into melancholy"; before discussion of the
restorative power of humiliation, which entails the kind of misogynist
vilification of the beloved as can be found in Donne's notoriously
"rank" and "defile[d]" in "Elegy 8." The final chapter, elaborating on
the theme of humiliation and disgust, offers extraordinary material on
the utilization of menstrual blood to cure, through repulsion, the
erotic fixation of the male lover that brings this energetic study to a
suitably unflinching conclusion.
Eric Langley lectures on Shakespeare at University College London and
his book, _Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries_
(OUP), will be published in November 2009.
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