Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

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Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature

Bernadette Höfer

Psychosoma tic Disor ders in S eventeenthC entur y French Litera

ture

Literary and Scienti.c Cultures of Early Modernity Series editors: Mary Thomas Crane, Boston College, USA Henry Turner, Rutgers University, USA This series provides a forum for groundbreaking work on the relations between literary and scientific discourses in Europe, during a period when both fields were in a crucial moment of historical formation. We welcome proposals for books that address the many overlaps between modes of imaginative writing typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – poetics, rhetoric, prose narrative, dramatic production, utopia – and the vocabularies, conceptual models, and intellectual methods of newly emergent “scientific” fields such as medicine, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, psychology, mapping, mathematics, or natural history. In order to reflect the nature of intellectual inquiry during the period, the series is interdisciplinary in orientation and publishes monographs, edited collections, and selected critical editions of primary texts relevant to an understanding of the mutual implication of literary and scientific epistemologies.

Other titles in the series: Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 Rebecca Laroche Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture Leah Knight Milton’s Secrecy And Philosophical Hermeneutics James Dougal Fleming Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge Kevin Killeen


Bern adette Hö fer The Ohio State University, USA

© Bernadette Höfer 2009 All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Bernadette Höfer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 Wey Court East Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Höfer, Bernadette. Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature. – (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity) 1. Mind and body in literature. 2. French literature – 17th century – History and criticism. I. Title II. Series 840.9’3561’09032–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Höfer, Bernadette. Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature / Bernadette Höfer. p. cm. – (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity) Includes bibliographical references 1. French literature – 17th century – History and criticism. 2. French literature – Psychological aspects. 3. Mental illness in literature. I. Title. PQ245.H55 2009 840’.9’353–dc22 2009015702

ISBN 9780754666219 (hbk) ISBN .V)

To my parents Bruno and Marie-Thérèse Höfer

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Note on Translations Introduction

ix xi xiii 1

1

The Relational Conception of Mind and Body in the Seventeenth Century

13

2

Possession, Exorcism, and Madness: The Context of Jean-Joseph Surin’s Illness

59

3

Melancholic Subversions in Molière’s Le misanthrope (1666) and Le malade imaginaire (1673)

95

4

Psychosomatic Fiction in Madame de Lafayette: The Enigma of Illness

139

5

The Theater of Melancholy: Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677)

175

Conclusion Works Cited Index

211 219 237


List of Figures 1.1

Detailed view of “Le Melancolique” in Cesar 3.1 ‘Les quatre complexions de l’homme,” in Cesar Ripa, Iconologie, Ou Nouvelle explication de plusieurs images, emblemes, et autres .gur es hyerogliphiques des vertus, vices, arts… Paris: Louis Billa

28

1.2

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6th edition. London: Crips & Lodo (1652), Frontispiece

31

1.3

Jacques Ferrand, Erotomania or A Treatise Discoursing on the Essence, Causes, Symptoms ….of Love or Erotique Melancholy. Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1640. Title Page

35

3.1

‘Les quatre complexions de l’homme,” Cesar Ripa in Iconologie, Ou Nouvelle explication de plusieurs images, emblemes, et autres figures hyerogliphiques des vertus, vices, arts… (1637) (p. 61)

106


Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to three professors in particular to whom I owe a great deal and who guided the course of this study: Louise Horowitz, who gave me the passion to pursue this subject and whose confidence and indefatigable investment have spurred me on throughout the long period of researching and articulating my thoughts; Harriet Stone, for her tireless and kind encouragement; and Michael Koppisch, who agreed to devote some of his precious time to rereading parts of this book and whose advice has never failed me. Thanks as well to my dissertation committee at Rutgers University, who saw the first drafts of this book, and to all those whose sagacious advice has been a great inspiration to me, especially Faith Beasley, Janet Beizer, Tom Conley, Katherine Dauge-Roth, Anne Harrington, Winfried Herget, Jeff Peters, David Lee Rubin, Domna Stanton, Richard Serrano, and Rainer Zaiser. I am grateful to Harvard University for providing me with a Milton Fund in order to support my project. My thanks also go to the staff at Harvard’s Widener and Houghton Libraries. My personal thanks go to my mother and my sister, Vernon S. Goertz and his family, my three research assistants at Harvard, Victoria Ebiana, Brenton Hobart, and Léandra King, and my friends at Rutgers and at Harvard University, who supported me through the process. And a very special thanks to Jane Marie Todd, who expertly translated my book into English. Parts of Chapter 2 of this book originally appeared as “Different Visions: Secrecy, Insanity, and Autonomy, or Surin and Things from the Other Life,” in Dalhousie French Studies 79 (Summer 2007); “Psychosomatic manifestations of pain in Jean-Joseph Surin’s La Science expérimentale,” in Papers on SeventeenthCentury French Literature 34.67 (2007); and “De l’expérience affective au corps matériel: La Science expérimentale de Jean-Joseph Surin,” in Formes et formations au dix-septième siècle. Actes du 37e congrès annuel de la North-American Society for the Study of Seventeenth-Century French (University of South Carolina. Tübingen: N arr, 2006). They are reprinted here in revised form. Parts of Chapter 3 were published as “Du corps souffrant au corps pensé: Le Malade imaginaire” in Symposium 61.3 (2007) and as “La (re)présentation de l’hypocondrie dans Le Malade imaginaire” in L’âge de la représentation (Tübingen: N arr, 2007) and have been revised in their current form. An earlier version of parts my Lafayette chapter appeared as “Une insubordination clandestine, ou la relation entre l’esprit et le corps chez Lafayette et Surin” in Cahiers du dix-septième 10.2 (2006). The book was originally written in French as Les maladies psychosomatiques au siècle classique. It was translated into English by Jane Marie Todd


N ote on Translations Most of the translations from French in this book were done by Jane Marie Todd. Primary French sources are quoted in English translation in the text, and in the original French in the notes. In Chapters 3 and 5 dealing with theater in verse form, I have used existing English translations in order to render the rhymes and rhythms of Molière’s Misanthrope and Racine’s Phèdre. As the English translation slightly diverges from the French original, I have included quotes in both languages in the text.


Introduction With the publication of L’honneste-homme ou L’art de plaire à la court (T he proper gentleman, or, The art of pleasing at court; 1630) by N icolas Faret (1596?– 1646), a new social etiquette took root in seventeenth-century France, one that prescribed a vigilant self-monitoring of the courtly subject through the use of his judgment, understanding, virtue, and reason. In particular, Faret’s precepts insisted on the regulation of the body: the courtier must never passively submit to the intemperance of his humors or the disorder of his passions: “One of the most important and most universal maxims that must be followed in this company is to moderate the passions… . And certainly, when a mind is thus tainted with these lethal seeds, what likelihood is there that it can produce anything but bitter fruit, and that those who have recognized it do not attempt to flee at its approach, as from a person taken unexpectedly by some contagious illness? Let us therefore be masters of ourselves, let us know how to command our own affections if we wish to win those of others.” Faret erected the need to be “master of oneself” and of one’s body, to control one’s humors and affects, into the guiding concept for the individual seeking to be integrated into the royal court. That important precept governed the social model of the age known by the term honnêteté. The disorders of mind and body that I propose to bring to light in this book speak instead to the pathological consequences that restrictive and even oppressive codes of conduct may entail. My primary focus is on the representation of illness as a clandestine, indeed repressed, challenge to the hierarchical split between body and mind, both in the philosophical groundwork of Cartesian philosophy and under the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Absolutism expressed a desire for unity collectively, in the form of principles and social norms, at the expense

N icolas Faret, L’honneste-homme ou L’art de plaire à la court (Paris: Du Bray, 1630), pp. 163–165. According to Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1980), honnêteté is a secular ideal, the marker of the leisured existence of the artist-aristocrat who studies symbolic rites, manners, forms of etiquettes, and so on, all the “languages” of a complex system disseminated through literary handbooks and in salon culture (p. 9). “The honnête homme, polite, modest, natural, reflects such expressed values of the age of Louis XIV as reasonableness, discretion, decorum” (p. 7). Although not necessarily of noble birth, he is an ideal aristocrat, a “living work of art” (p. 16), a patron of letters, practicing the art of sociability, cultivating modes of speech and dress and proper manners (pp. 14–15), always seeking self-perfection (p. 20).


of the subject’s individuality. The courtly subject was expected to practice selfrestraint, “train” his or her body, desires, and humors, and follow the demand for moderation and firm judgment, qualities that made the courtier what was called an honnête homme. This appeal to the ideal of “moderation” can be understood as a conscious attempt to move beyond the traumatic memory of the violent dynastic and religious wars that had just battered the French kingdom. But paradoxically, as Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Mitchell Greenberg, John Lyons, and Louis Marin have observed, this desire for unity led to the loss of the aristocracy’s autonomy and of the freedom it had previously enjoyed. Instead, these aggressive social doctrines systematically ruled out the formation of an autonomous identity and obliged courtly subjects to docilely follow precepts arbitrarily imposed by the king and his advocates. Physical coercion was used against any unwelcome bodily manifestation, any unpleasant affect. The courtly subject continually strived to control himself. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, recounts in his Mémoires (Memoirs) that melancholy, grief, and illness were not tolerated at the royal court and that the monarch obliged his subjects to control or camouflage any spell of sadness or despondency. N othing was allowed to interrupt the continual diversions of his entourage, who on the surface appeared joyful and carefree. Moderation, the overt display of health, and the exercise of firm judgment had force of law under the successive reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, granting their rule coherence and stability, placing the healthy and glorious royal body center stage, and compelling courtiers to train and subordinate their individual, subjugated bodies. In the range of authors who rose up to challenge these precepts of physical subjugation and control through the power of will, we could single out those

“Life at court entailed a constant observation of the actions of others as well as one’s own. Hence, the emergence of the courtly ideal of self-observation, intimately linked to that of self-mastery, notably in the areas of body and verbal language.” Ralph Albanese, “Aristocratic Ethos and Ideological Codes in La Princesse de Clèves,” in An Inimitable Example: The Case for the Princesse de Clèves, ed. Patrick Henry (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), p. 91. See Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le prince sacrifié. Théâtre et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1985), and Le roi-machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Mitchell Greenberg, Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2001), and Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN : Purdue University Press); and Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981). Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, ed. G. Truc, vol. 1 (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), p. 911. We know, however, that Louis XIV was himself a melancholic and that he deplored silence and emptiness so much that life at court was organized to expel his black bile through countless diversions.

Introduction

who embraced their “otherness” in the form of melancholy (Duc François de La Rochefoucauld, for example) and those whose studies reveal (alongside the harm mind/body dualism could cause) a critical interrogation of hierarchical binary thinking. I concentrate on the latter group and, in the following chapters, I shall show how four authors—Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–1665), Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, called Molière (1622–1673), Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de Lafayette (1634–1693), and Jean Racine (1639–1699)—conceived of illness as an “idiom of distress” and questioned the sociopolitical and philosophical context that compelled the “training” of the emotions, feelings, and passions and that refused to listen to the body’s needs. Physical disorders are related to constraints inherent in society and express unresolved tensions between an individual engaged in a process of self-definition and the constraining, even oppressive, sociopolitical doctrines. These tensions may take a somatic form, that is, they may be “converted” into a malady that thereby serves as an outlet for profound frustration. Through the construction of a pathological “map” of seventeenth-century society, Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine clearly voiced the repression inherent in the cultural codes of absolutism, under which “the aggressive tendencies of its members were attenuated and controlled.” I borrow this expression from Lilian R. Furst. See her Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 2003). Such an epistemology opens the way for a discourse that literary criticism has classified as “male,” which aims at a rift between mind and body, reason and affect, and goes hand in hand with the sexualization of substances. According to Valerie Traub, “the classical body was overwhelmingly associated with what were presumed to be male powers of agency, rationality, and impermeability. The female body, on the other hand, was represented in political theory, conduct books, humoral theory, and stage plays as naturally grotesque—permeable, transgressive, always in need of enclosure and containment” (“Gendering Mortality in Early Modern Anatomies,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, (ed.) Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], p. 54). Whereas mind is attributed to the male sex, male discourse distances woman from the public structures by discarding her as the emotional “body,” hence as hazardous to reasonable (virile) functioning. Michel Foucault classifies this form of dualism as the “hystericization of the female body” (Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1 [Paris: Gallimard, 1994], p. 137). The word hystericization implies an illness in which “the body, qualified and disqualified by doctors and by the political and social structure, is identical to the negative image and the blameworthiness of the ‘nervous woman’” (Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:137). The “sick” sex is the clear product of male hegemony. That insight raises questions and may give rise to a particular study of the relation between the sexes in absolutist society. In addition, it is striking to observe the extent to which the “desire” of female protagonists in seventeenth-century literature is subject to the law of the father and/or the husband, both substitutes and mouthpieces for the monarchical will. Robert Muchembled, La société policée. Politique et politesse en France du XVIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1998), pp. 156–7. On literature and gender in the seventeenth


During the same period, René Descartes defined the soul’s power over the body. He declared that man has the capacity to act against the excesses of the passions and recommended remedies that would give individuals mastery. In his view, we can change the course of our actions by the force of will and through an understanding of their causes, and thus put an end to the harmful processes undermining our health. Descartes did not condemn the passions in general, only those that overwhelm the human being or find confused expression within us. In Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul; 1649), he argued that they ought to be trained: “Even those who have the weakest souls could acquire a very absolute control over all their passions if enough industry were used in training and guiding them.” In suggesting that the will has power over the body, he intimates that even the “weakest” human being can be guided toward a “generosity” of the soul, toward control by the reason.10 The task of the chapters to follow will be to analyze how a set of literary authors of the seventeenth century rejected the mind/body dichotomy of their time, its insistence on the primacy of reason, its conviction that autonomous will may successfully subdue and control corporeal function, and rejected as well the Cartesian disjunction that placed consciousness and affect, thought and feelings, internal experience and external experience in opposition. Mental health and bodily health are never separable in their works. How are we to understand this literary journey toward the “psychosomatic,” that is, toward an integrated, or holistic, conception of the human being? These explorations of the causes and manifestations of disorders were placed within the context of philosophical, medical, and ethical preoccupations about the human constitution and the notion of the “I.” Seventeenth-century Europe became the arena for a passionate debate focusing on whether mind and body formed a single substance century, see Faith E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006) and Julie Campbell, Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). “Ceux même qui ont les plus faibles âmes pourraient acquérir un empire très absolu sur toutes les passions, si on employait assez d'industrie à les dresser et à les conduire.” René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (ed.) Pascale d’Arcy. (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), art. 50. 10 Although Descartes did not consider monarchy the perfected state he sought to promulgate, absolutism under Louis XIV used his philosophical and scientific ideas stemming from the rationalist tradition. As several critics have argued, rationalism was appealing because of the priority it assigned to reason and its faith in the power of the will and in the subjugation of the body; it was put to use by the “male” power elite to advance their own nationalist and imperialist goals. See, among others, James Gaines, Social Structures in Molière’s Theater (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984); Greenberg, Baroque Bodies and Subjectivity and Subjugation; Michael Koppisch, Rivalry and the Disruption of Order in Molière’s Theater (Madison, N J: Dickinson University Press, 2004); and Larry Riggs, Resistance to Culture in Molière, Laclos, Flaubert, and Camus: A PostModernist Approach (N ew York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992) and Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births (Charlottesville, VA: Rockwood Press, 2005).

Introduction

or whether, conversely, they constituted two distinct substances, whose interaction became the subject of another discussion. It is in terms of this debate, which, more precisely, opposed Descartes’s views to the thinking of the Dutch philosopher Baruch (or Benedictus de) Spinoza, that we must understand the seventeenthcentury interest in the nature of illness and in the relational constitution of substances. Let us turn, then, to the current definition of “psychosomatic,” or rather, of the term that has replaced it in the medical world over the last two decades: “somatoform.”11 The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMIV), published by the American Psychiatric Association, describes “somatoform” disorders as “the presence of physical symptoms that suggest a general medical condition (hence, the term somatoform) and are not fully explained by a general medical condition, by the direct effects of a substance, or by another mental disorder (e.g., Panic Disorder). The symptoms must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning … [and] the physical symptoms are not intentional (i.e., under voluntary control)… . There is no diagnosable general medical condition to fully account for the physical symptoms.”12 T he DSM-IV divides somatoform disorders into several categories (somatization disorder, undifferentiated somatoform disorder, conversion disorder, pain disorder, hypochondria, and so on). Any organ and any bodily function can 11 This change in terminology is striking and merits a comment. The term psychosomatic emphasizes the psychological factors underlying mind/body disorders, whereas somatoform entails a reversal of perspective: it posits the strong presence of the body. Lilian Furst explains this change as an attempt to attenuate the “importance of the Freudian unconscious and of emotions” and to demonstrate the prevalence of physiological disorders, since psychiatry first studies the visible symptoms displayed and then cautiously proceeds to link them to psychological factors (Idioms of Distress, p. 45). I would add that this modification suggests a return by contemporary medicine to the biochemical aspect of mind/body illness, an explanation that, interestingly, was already at the heart of the medical tradition in the seventeenth century. This shift is telling because it raises issues about the nature of mind/body illness that were already addressed in the early modern period. Richard O. Halgin and Susan Whitbourne maintain that the shift away from the word “psychosomatic” was brought about by the negative connotations of the term, for example, the idea that physical manifestations were merely “in the person’s head” (Richard O. Halgin and Susan K. Whitbourne, Abnormal Psychology: The Human Experience of Psychological Disorders [Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993], p. 247). N evertheless, the term “psychosomatic” is more common in everyday usage, which is why I have decided to retain the term. I endorse Zbigniew Lipowski’s definition of it. He shows that we do not need to use the term narrowly but can respect its dynamic complexity: “‘ Psychosomatic’ is a term referring or related to the inseparability and interdependence of psychosocial and biologic (physiologic, somatic) aspects of humankind.” See his Psychosomatic Medicine and Liaison Psychiatry: Selected Papers (N ew York: Plenum, 1985), p. 133. 12 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th edn (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), p. 450.


be affected, and the intensity of the symptoms varies from one patient to another.13 These symptoms may include motor function disorders (paralysis, local weakness), sensory disturbances (pain, double vision, hallucinations, blindness, deafness), convulsions, or a combination of symptoms. Somatization may be conscious or unconscious, but in any event a form of translation occurs, with states of minds being expressed via the body. Let us single out conversion disorder as one of the ailments that bears witness to internal distress through physical symptoms such as paralysis, deafness, blindness, headaches, and pain. I shall show that the idea of conversion is rooted in the seventeenth century, though of course the terminology of the authors being considered corresponds to usages specific to their time. My main argument is that even though the terms psychosomatic and conversion did not exist in the seventeenth century, psychic distress and physiological dysfunction are intrinsically intertwined, and my primary intention is to show the consistency and reappearance of the “conversion” process in seventeenth-century texts. The mental component of “psychosomatic” disorders is clearly expressed by Surin, Molière, Lafayette and Racine, who grasp the connections between sorrow, despair, anger, withdrawal into the self, imagination, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety, and physical suffering. My choice of texts, which is in no way exhaustive, is determined by the common factors coming into play, such as increasing sorrow, despair, melancholy, an overactive imagination, the abyss, repression, and above all conversion. These factors form a continuum from Surin to Racine. The first chapter identifies the dominant philosophical, medical, and moral discourse of the seventeenth century regarding the relation between mind and body and includes references to matters of contemporary concern and the special “dialogue” between the classical age and our own; the four following chapters undertake a detailed analysis of the somatic “conversion” of disorders, conflicts, and internal schisms as they are depicted in literary texts. I have limited my study to the classical period, but the continuum of relationships thus produced suggests the possibility of a larger investigation that extends virtually uninterrupted from the early modern period through the present time. My analysis will focus on different disorders—melancholy, demonic possession, hypochondria, raging fever—as expressions of conflicts and mental disturbances through the body and in the body, as they are depicted in various literary genres (autobiographical narrative, comedy, tragedy, novel, short fiction). Each of the four authors deals with a particular somatic disorder, based on his or her conception of how internal distress affects the outbreak and manifestation of illness. There is no question here of attributing the disorders studied to a single cause; rather, each chapter will focus on studying their particular manifestations. “Conversion” and distress are articulated differently in each chapter. Although “melancholy” is the main illness underlying their writings (if we take into consideration the multifaceted way it was described over the course of the century), it adopts different nuances and manifestations in every author I discuss. 13

Ibid., p. 454.

Introduction

What ties the subsequent chapters together is the “psychosomatic” relationship between body and mind, one in which physiological distress places the body at the center of elusive, mysterious but nevertheless real psychological claims. Each author presents a “biopsychosocial model”14 of distress and reveals how his/her literary patients are enmeshed in a particular environment. Just as important, what unifies the chapters is the authors’ full commitment to monistic thought stemming from their intrinsic belief in the inseparability of body and mind. The four authors engage with rationalist thought and question the mind/body binary and the subjugation or repression of one’s body, which Descartes seemingly proposed as a psychological and physiological “conditioning” of the human being. I intend to reveal how each individual author enters into a dialogue with dominant Cartesian assumptions. The link among these authors is thus of less importance in this book than the individual form the dialogue takes, through different but related portrayals of illness. I further argue that the authors discussed in this book offer a remarkable understanding of the interplay between mind and body, which makes them clear precursors of modern thinkers in the fields of psychosomatic medicine, neurobiology, and psychoanalytic thought. I situate my study within the context of research on the link between seventeenth-century views and contemporary knowledge of mental and bodily ailments—their symptoms, causes, and treatment. While the literary-historical span extending from the seventeenth century to the modern period is no doubt important, the primary intention of this book is not to follow the course of that history. My purpose is less to establish a historical bridge extending from the classical era to the twenty-first century than to reveal the obvious dialogue taking place specifically between the seventeenth and twentyfirst centuries. For example, the titles of the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio’s recent works, Descartes’ Error (1994) and Looking for Spinoza (2003), both pointedly suggest the contemporary interest of seventeenth-century thinkers. It was Freud who, having trained as a neurologist, valued somatic approaches and suggested a new framework for understanding the interdependence of psyche and soma based on “conversion.” Since his time, biomedical science has begun to explore the role of the emotions and feelings as manifestations of the body/mind interplay, the influence of joy and sorrow on the body-proper and the disruption of our organism by stress, anguish, and suffering. Efforts to redefine how body and mind mimic each other in correlated processes reveal the theoretical implications of the seventeenth century that have not been yet been fully digested or established.15 The neurobiological theory that concerns us today and its preoccupation with seventeenth-century thought justifies a deliberate and purposeful reconstruction of Europe in the classical age.

Furst, Idioms of Distress, p. 50. See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), p. 217. 14

15


A few words need to be said about how repression during Louis XIV’s time contributed to the psychological malaise of the period. We know that the king insisted on “conformity” and used legal, financial, and artistic controls to impose his authority. The “oppositional dualism”16 of hierarchical distinctions at court is manifest in the methods of control that absolutism used to rationalize its power, such as the patronage system, a network of personal, professional, and artistic ties under Louis XIV. Shortly after the establishment of the Académie française in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIV and the French minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), reorganized the arts on the principle of patronage and created academies for art, dance, and architecture. In 1663 Colbert established the Petite Académie, naming five members of the Académie française to “supervise the creation of the king’s public image.”17 The system of academies and the increasing use of committees and officials employed to administer the arts point to the centralization of the arts during that period. According to Gretchen Elizabeth Smith, by 1672 Louis XIV had created a way to “control the manufacturing and meaning of words” and had placed the arts under his purview and control, a method for manipulating the artist and reducing the threat to his regime. “In this first decade of his personal rule, Louis and Colbert established a network of artists, scientists, and writers whose work was in part focused on recording the events of the state and its king; the result was a variety of official, sanctioned iconography and documentation that validated Louis’s aesthetics and politics simultaneously.”18 While the system fostered the advancement of the arts, it also forced writers to subject themselves to Louis’s demands, made their careers dependent on protection by their patrons, and subjected them to the social, legal, financial, and artistic pressures of the crown. “Overtly, the purpose was to benefit the king’s subjects; perhaps less openly, academies could dominate and shape artistic products and cause a uniformity of thought.”19 Louis XIV himself presided over the works and handed out pensions to writers, including Molière and Racine, but also withdrew his favors when his interest in the collaboration ended. Colbert and Louis’s artistic “repression” has been studied in all its ambivalence and implications. Critics have underscored the great investment in the arts that the system created but have also pointed out the control, the uniformity, and the limitations it entailed.20 Molière and Racine (both an artist and the royal historiographer to the court of Louis XIV) saw their relationship to the crown Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 13. 17 Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 58. 18 Gretchen Elizabeth Smith, The Performance of Male Nobility in Molière’s Comédies-Ballets (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), p. 50. 19 Ibid. 20 See Burke, Fabrication, which claims that Colbert took his task seriously, “controlled” his officials closely, and commissioned and regulated as he liked. 16

Introduction

shift in the course of their long-term association. We can interpret the frustration manifest in their works and the disorders portrayed in them as reflecting the tensions and ambivalence inherent in the relationship between the artist and the king. Illness can be read as the refusal to be “authorized” or “controlled” by any master model. We can also understand illness, especially as it appears in Molière’s and Racine’s plays, as an overt suffering alluding to the altered relation between subject and monarch.21 We might thus speculate that the disorders depicted in these works are not “apolitical” but clandestinely allude to the rupture in the emotional bond between monarch and writer and to the rejection and counterdiscourses that the rupture produced.22 The multidisciplinary aspect of my study, which includes philosophical, medical, and sociopolitical theories, is grounded in the idea that literary texts are influenced by the context of their real social and political environment. Through the “detour” of fiction, that environment comes to permeate literature. We would do well to remember Zbigniew Lipowski’s connection between philosophy, culture, and literature23 and to recall the Aristotelian idea that the stage assumes a mediating function between the individual and the collectivity. It is appropriate to study literature in considering mind/body illness, since it is situated within a social environment and reflects on the cultural discourses of its time. Lilian Furst makes a captivating case for the humanistic vision of literature, which has the capacity to offer an in-depth representation of illness “by exploring how the patient comes to be driven to speak through the body.”24 In other words, literary texts allow us to study the full social context and psychological implications of mind/body disorders. Joyce McDougall explicitly situates her psychoanalytical studies, Theaters of the Mind and Theaters of the Body, within the genre of drama and charts the mutual interdependence of theater and psychoanalysis. The exploration of psychosomatic phenomena claims “different places in which the mind’s ‘I’ plays out its hidden drama, along with the accompanying scenarios, and characters, that make up the

21 Theater was the arena most affected by Louis XIV’s turn to religion upon his second marriage (to Mme de Maintenon). In A Lust for Virtue: Louis XIV’s Attack on Sin in Seventeenth-century France (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), Philip F. Riley studies the decline of the theatrical arts during the second half of Louis XIV’s reign and the king’s moral reservations about all aspects of the performing arts. Racine’s Esther, for example, was not performed in Paris until 1721. 22 We must also understand the “passionate” nature of the relationship between the artist and the king. N annerl Keohane has elaborated at great length the concept of the French king as a paternalistic, benevolent monarch whose ties with the subject were “emotional” in nature. See his Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 58. 23 Lipowski, Psychosomatic Medicine and Liaison Psychiatry, p. 14. 24 Furst, Idioms of Distress, p. 18, emphasis mine.


10

psychic repertory.”25 Furst tells us that “novels, short stories, and plays normally show the context of the action, the circumstances that lead to the choice of one course over another, and the motivation for behaviors. Their spatial and temporal expansiveness creates a forum for the portrayal of interpersonal relationships as they develop over a period of days, months, or often years.”26 It is precisely by incorporating the interlocking network of individual and society that literature articulates illness with a density that allows us to perceive the characters as “real” “through our constructive acts of reading,” and these characters exemplify “a common fate under the circumstances of that particular time and place.”27 N ovels and autobiographical narratives provide us with the exhaustive temporal, spatial, and social dynamics that allow the reader to examine the “literary patients” in their full development, to study how the malady unfolds and the chain of events that leads to conversion. In the phenomenon of conversion, the reader is confronted with a twofold process, conversion “from the fictional character’s mind into his/her body and also into the linguistic medium of the text.”28 Heteroglossia, or a mix of voices, is an underlying principle in Surin’s narrative, where the reader has to choose between and absorb various perspectives that embed the event within a matrix of pluralistic and subversive discourses. How elusive this linguistic discourse can be is clear in Lafayette’s work, where instead of telling us, the author shows the circumstances and the moment of crisis that erupts. The chronological sequence of Lafayette’s and Surin’s narratives allows us to study the moments of tensions, the changes and ruptures in relationships, and the relation between time and space that leads to conversion disorders. Classical theater as well, as Mitchell Greenberg suggests, “was not excentric to the sites of power … [and] surely the metaphysical role of the theater [functioned] as a mediating locus of conflicting and contradictory discourses.”29 Since Aristotle, critics have studied the cathartic, therapeutic effects of theater, which “speaks out” the relation between individual and collectivity. Classical theater, more restrained than prose narrative in its notion of time and space, instead of telling or describing, shows us internal and external ruptures and allows the spectator to watch its effects.30 According to Anne Ubersfeld, theater “appears to be a privileged from of art of capital importance since it demonstrates better than

Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (N ew York: N orton, 1989), p. 2. 26 Furst, Idioms of Distress, p. 17. 27 Ibid., p. 55. Furst nevertheless mentions that the elusiveness of the reading process parallels the elusiveness of psychosomatic disorders (p. 60). 28 Ibid., p. 60. 29 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 25. 30 Colin Counsell, “Signs of Performance,” in The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, (ed.) Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gray (London: Routledge, 2000), 204– 7. 25

Introduction

11

other forms of art how the individual psyche is invested in a collective relation.”31 Plays, novels, short stories, and autobiographical narratives share a common ambition to represent and express a biosocial model of human interaction, in which individual predicaments, interpersonal relationships, and cultural and political ideologies are addressed critically. The paradox intrinsic to classical writing is that it both hides and reveals, represents and camouflages, in a dual and ambivalent gesture whereby acknowledging the presence of illness still entails uncovering how “dominant culture is limited, challenged, or modified”32 by the crises spoken through the body.

Anne Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre 1 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978), p. 15. Stephen Mullaney, The Place of Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 130. 31 32


Chapter 1


To the question of whether melancholy is a malady of the soul or of the body, we must reply that it is a malady of the relationship between the soul and the body; that is, moreover, what contributes to its extraordinary history. – Jackie Pigeaud, La maladie de l’âme

In 1637 René Descartes published his Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences), in which he argued for the indisputable supremacy of reason. His famous proclamation “I think, therefore I am” disassociated the soul from the body and gave the body a secondary role in the acquisition of self-knowledge, which was attributed primarily to the soul. Hubert Tellenbach observes that the Cartesian cogito has long alienated us from the knowledge of the Greeks. He sums up the influence over the last three centuries of the changes inaugurated by Descartes regarding the question of substances and their connection to each other – changes coming at the expense of holistic ideas articulated in the medico-philosophical tradition of antiquity. The conviction that there is a radical split between the automaton-body and the self-reflexive mind, and the belief that the exercise of reason is the secret of (self-)empowerment, sparked a heated controversy in seventeenth-century Europe. Descartes’s philosophy, as we know, triggered as many objectors as “followers.” As Tad S. Schmaltz reminds us, the period between 1650 and 1680 constituted the first wave of a state-sponsored campaign against Cartesians in French universities and religious orders. Others, instead of decrying him, rose up to follow him – including Robert Desgabets (1610–1678) and Pierre-Sylvain Régis (1632–1707) – or to “correct” his thinking: Baruch Spinoza in the N etherlands, Antoine Arnauld, Hubert Tellenbach, Melancholie. Zur Problemgeschichte. Typologie, Pathogenese und Klinik (Berlin: Springer, 1961), p. 14. See Jackie Pigeaud’s exhaustive study of the holistic philosophy of antiquity, La maladie de l’âme: Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989); Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (N ew York: Basic Books, 1964); and Jean Clair, (ed.), Mélancolie, génie et folie en Occident, exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). Tad M. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 21.

14


Marin Mersenne, and N icolas Malebranche in France. In his Ethics (1677), Spinoza attaches great importance to reconceptualizing the relationship between soul and body, no longer restricting cognition to the faculty of the mind. Malebranche too was quick to redefine the connection between kinds of matter and even claimed that we lack access to clear ideas, turning Descartes’s conclusions upside down. Conversely, Erica Harth’s important work on “Cartesian women” demonstrates that women were generally attracted to Descartes’s dualism, since it endorsed the liberating message that the mind has no sex. Yet educated women of the seventeenth century also offered a sound critique of Cartesian rational discourse. Three women in particular, Catherine Descartes – the philosopher’s niece – Marie Dupré, and Anne de la Vigne, whose little-known works are representative of the thinking of the salons, stood at a critical distance from Descartes’s philosophy on feelings and emotions and sought to rescue the body from oblivion. Let us also mention the importance of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, living in exile in Holland, who in her correspondence with Descartes launched a thorough critique of the ontological distinction between substances and probed the mind/body interaction as he described it. The various responses the mind/body relationship produced during the seventeenth century and the domains it encompassed (academia, religion, philosophy, ethics, salon culture, and so on) show the reach of Descartes’s work and the era’s familiarity with it, as well as with the persistent questions it generated. Although, as Daniel Garber would have it, Descartes’s publication of the Discours was “the revolution that did not happen in 1637,” the magnitude of his philosophy is immeasurable and radically redefined the Western world, founding the modern era. Judging by its rapid spread and the long history of its reception, we may affirm that Descartes remains a philosopher “on whom we can never close the book.” Descartes’s most influential legacy has been the division he introduced between two substances, one material (res extensa), the other immaterial (res cogitans), and the interaction he posited between them, what has been called the “mind/body problem.” In distinguishing between these two substances, Descartes also made a judgment about their relative value. In the Discours, Descartes argues: “The soul, by virtue of which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body” (p. 102). He not only adopts the Christian principle that the immortal soul outlives Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 78–98. Daniel Garber, “Descartes, the Aristotelians, and the Revolution that Did N ot Happen in 1637,” Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry 71 (1988): 471–486. Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 2. “L’âme par laquelle je suis ce que je suis, est entièrement distincte du corps.” René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, (ed.) J.-M. Fataud (Paris: Bordas, 1996). All references to this edition will be cited in the text.


15

the perishable body but also assumes there is a categorical distinction between two substances of different value, which leads him to observe that human existence depends primarily on the principle of thought: “I thereby learned that I was a substance whose entire essence or nature is only to think and which needs no place in order to think and depends on no material thing” (p. 102). The human being becomes aware of himself by thinking, and it is in the faculty of reflection and reason that his dignity resides: I am “a thing that doubts, that conceives, that affirms, that denies, that wants, that does not want, that imagines as well, and that feels” (p. 81). Conversely, Descartes indicates that the material body does not have the capacity to affirm its existence. The methodology of doubt reveals that, unlike the rational faculty, “the body, figure, extension, motion, and place are [perhaps] only fictions of my mind” (Méditations pp. 72–3). The “I” that thinks is differentiated from the human body, which cannot be conceived independent of thought: “We conceive bodies only through the faculty of understanding that is within us and not through the imagination or the senses, and … we know them not because we see them or touch them but only because we conceive them through thought” (Méditations p. 91).10 The body, a principle of motion, is by its very nature a natural automaton comparable to “clocks, artificial fountains, mills, and other similar machines which, being made by men, nevertheless have the power to move on their own.”11 God, then, fashioned the body, which, like a clock, is composed of a system of moving parts; he created “a machine that moves on its own.”12 H ence Descartes considers the body a freestanding mechanism operating entirely apart from the mind but devoid of any self-reflective capacity. “Je connus de là que j’étais une substance dont toute l’essence ou la nature n’est que de penser, et qui, pour être, n’a besoin d’aucun lieu ni ne dépend d’aucune chose matérielle.” “Une chose qui doute, qui conçoit, qui affirme, qui nie, qui veut, qui ne veut pas, qui imagine aussi, et qui sent.” René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, (ed.) Jean-Marie Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 81. All references to this edition will be cited in the text. “Le corps, la figure, l’étendue, le mouvement et le lieu ne sont [peut-être] que des fictions de mon esprit.” 10 “N ous ne concevons les corps que par la faculté d’entendre qui est en nous, et non point par l’imagination ni par les sens, et que nous ne les connaissons pas de ce que nous les voyons, ou que nous les touchons, mais seulement de ce que nous les concevons par la pensée.” 11 “Des horloges, des fontaines artificielles, des moulins et autres semblables machines, qui n’étant faites que par des hommes, ne laissent pas d’avoir la force de se mouvoir d’elles-mêmes.” René Descartes, Le monde, l’homme, (ed.) Annie Bitbol-Hespériès and Jean-Pierre Verdet, intro. Annie Bitbol-Hespériès (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 199. 12 “Une machine qui se remue de soi-même.” René Descartes, “Lettre au Marquis de N ewcastle,” N ovember 23, 1646, in Œuvres et lettres, (ed.) André Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 1255.


16

As Pierre Guenancia observes, the soul theoretically “is not responsible for guiding the body and therefore does not have to know what is necessary for its operation.”13 But in practice, it is clear that for Descartes the duality of matter cannot always be reduced to a separation and that, in observing real life, he also demonstrates that the soul and body constitute a whole. Since the soul is lodged in the body, it must by necessity interact with it, but not on the simple principle of verification: “It is not enough that it be lodged in the human body like a pilot in his craft, unless perhaps it is to move its members, but must be joined and united more closely to it, so that it may have feelings and appetites similar to our own, and hence compose a true man” (Discours pp. 136–137).14 The logical argument is: “I conceive of myself as a single and complete thing” (Méditations p. 201).15 It is because of that interaction between substances that man feels sensations of pain, hunger, and thirst. In Les passions de l’âme, Descartes considers the reciprocity of that relationship, in which “the soul is truly joined to the entire body, and … one cannot properly say that it is in one of its parts to the exclusion of the others” (art. 30).16 The soul is united and merged with the body. Seeking for a center or material connection for that union, Descartes postulates that it is found in the pineal gland, in the middle of the brain, and that this gland acts with the body through the nerves, blood, or animal spirits (art. 31). This point of connection may explain how an immaterial substance and a material substance can enter into contact with each other. The philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612– 1694) and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1616–1680) were not at all satisfied with this explanation. For Descartes, the separation between body and mind operates only theoretically, and a practical view seems to take its place. His theory of the passions also conceives of the connection between the two substances. In his correspondence with Elizabeth, he defines the passions as “all thoughts that are stirred up in the soul without the cooperation of the will (and as a result, without any action from it), merely through the impressions that are in the brain.”17 In theory, the passions are emotions of the soul that owe nothing to our will. But in Pierre Guenancia, L’intelligence du sensible. Essai sur le dualisme cartésien (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 231. 14 “Il ne suffit pas qu’elle soit logée dans le corps humain ainsi qu’un pilote en son navire, sinon peut-être pour mouvoir ses membres, mais qu’il est besoin qu’elle soit jointe et unie plus étroitement avec lui pour avoir outre cela des sentiments et des appétits semblables aux nôtres, et ainsi composer un vrai homme.” 15 “Je me conçois comme une chose seule et entière.” 16 “L’âme est véritablement jointe à tout le corps, et … on ne peut proprement dire qu’elle soit en quelqu’une de ses parties à l’exclusion des autres.” René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). All references to this edition will be cited in the text. 17 “Toutes les pensées qui sont excitées en l’âme sans le concours de la volonté (et par conséquent sans aucune action qui vienne d’elle) par les seules impressions qui sont 13


17

practice – as James Averill claims – “[they] are thoughts impressed upon the soul through interaction with the body.”18 That is, the passions stirred up in the soul have a physiological origin: they are “perceptions or feelings or emotions of the soul, related to it particularly, and which are caused, maintained, and strengthened by some movement of the spirits” (art. 27).19 These animal spirits thus become the driving force of the passions. N evertheless, Descartes is above all interested in “states of mind” (états d’âme) created by the passions and understands pain, for example, as a manifestation of the soul and not the body. Deborah Brown and Calvin N ormore declare: “The passions belong firmly in the category of ideas for Descartes and fulfil their function of strengthening the will and directing the soul to perfect the body.”20 That is also the point of view of Gordon Baker and Catherine Morris, who argue: “Descartes treated pain, colour etc. as mental entities or objects in the ‘inner world.’”21 That idea prevails when Descartes writes that love, a nonrational passion, is “a confused thought stirred up in the soul by some movement of the nerves.”22 In theory, love is produced by a corporeal principle, but it is primarily a state of mind characterized by confusion and one must be wary of it. One must use one’s reason to neutralize that involuntary mechanism and exercise the will to break it. At the same time, the five principal passions (love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness) “are given to the soul only insofar as it is joined to [the body]: so that their natural purpose is to incite the soul to consent and contribute to the actions that can serve to preserve the body or to make it more perfect in some way” (art. 137).23 The passions thus dispose the soul to will dans le cerveau.” René Descartes, “Lettre à Élisabeth,” October 6, 1645, in Bridoux, (ed.), Œuvres et lettres, p. 1212. 18 James R. Averill, “An Analysis of Psychophysiological Symbolism and its Influence on Theories of Emotion,” in The Emotions: Social, Cultural, and Biological Dimensions, (ed.) Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott (London: Sage, 1996), p. 213. 19 “Des perceptions, ou des sentiments, ou des émotions de l’âme, qu’on rapporte particulièrement à elle, et qui sont causées, entretenues et fortifiées par quelque mouvement des esprits.” 20 Deborah Brown and Calvin N ormore, “Traces of the Body: Cartesian Passions,” in Passion and Virtue in Descartes, (ed.) Byron Williston and André Gombay (N ew York: Humanities Books, 2003), p. 100. 21 Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris, Descartes’ Dualism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 131. 22 “Une pensée confuse excitée en l’âme par quelque mouvement des nerfs.” René Descartes, “Lettre à Chanut,” February 1, 1647, in Bridoux, (ed.), Œuvres et lettres, p. 1258. Let us note that Descartes does not condemn the passions in general. On the contrary, he explains in Les passions de l’âme that they are useful to our health and express the things that nature dictates to us (art. 52). All the same, one must make good use of the passions and not be swept away by them. Man ought to control them. 23 “N e sont données à l’âme qu’en tant qu’elle est jointe avec [le corps]: en sorte que leur usage naturel est d’inciter l’âme à consentir et contribuer aux actions qui peuvent servir à conserver le corps, ou à le rendre en quelque façon plus parfait.”


18

specific actions, with the aim of preserving the body and guiding us toward wellbeing. The preeminent soul, judged superior, is revealed to play an almost moral role in relation to the subordinate body. In recognizing our power to use reason and resolution to regulate those passions that do not lead to the contentment of the soul but bring about a disruption stemming from excess, Descartes urges us to perfect ourselves morally. When the soul intervenes through volition and reason to guide and perfect the body’s movements, we move toward what Descartes calls “generosity.” In Les passions de l’âme, Descartes elaborates his theory of the will’s power over strong passions. He reveals to his readers “the influence we have over our desires” through free will (art. 152) and invites us to form “a firm and constant resolution to use them well” (art. 153).24 The will is the quintessential tool possessed by every individual in the struggle against the nefarious influence of strong passions, and it disposes the body to take the long view and act virtuously. Descartes’s theory of the passions asserts that “the will … can never be constrained” (art. 41) by the body.25 Descartes proposes a moral and ethical blueprint for stifling the involuntary movements to which excessive passion incites us. His rationalist epistemology reveals a key concern: to create a form of “therapy” that will lead us to a tranquil life through the cultivation of our reason and to teach us how to use our judgment to set aside pain and sadness. His concept of generosity plays an important role in his system in that the generous soul is someone whose will asserts its control over the body at every moment, someone who does not give in to violent passions, a self-mastery that saves him- or herself from distress. For such souls, “reason remains ever … the master, and arranges thing so that even afflictions serve them and contribute to the perfect happiness … [they] enjoy in this life.”26 But even those “who have the weakest souls could acquire a very absolute control over all their passions if enough industry were used in training and guiding them” (art. 50).27 Hence even afflictions, illness, or violent passions can be suppressed or transcended since man has the power to act on them, and the therapy Descartes recommended to the princess speaks to his belief that the body can be cured by the soul. Elizabeth’s melancholy, produced by ill fortune in her family line, sparked the philosopher’s interest in learning how the mechanics of will can control passions;

24

“L’empire que nous avons sur nos volontés,” “une ferme et constante résolution d’en bien user.” 25 “La volonté … ne peut jamais être contrainte.” 26 “Raison demeure toujours … la maîtresse, et fait que les afflictions même leur servent, et contribuent à la parfaite félicité dont … [ils] jouissent dès cette vie.” Descartes, “Lettre à Élisabeth,” May 18, 1645, p. 1183. 27 “Qui ont les plus faibles âmes pourraient acquérir un empire très absolu sur toutes leurs passions si on employait assez d’industrie à les dresser et à les conduire.”


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their friendship led to a correspondence that lasted from 1643 until his death.28 Descartes began by teaching her the concept of generosity and contended that one has only to think positively because the soul has the power to heal bodily ills. The best remedies are “those of the soul, which no doubt has a great deal of power over the body.”29 Yet the princess required a more effective remedy from him, since neither her symptoms nor her ills were alleviated by the intervention of her will. “Elisabeth’s continuing debility and family problems lead her to pursue the subjectivist alternative. To Descartes’s emphasis on the will, she counterposes the power of the involuntary: what happens to will and reason when they are eroded by disease or distracted by personal cares?”30 She even expatiates on the fact that she felt equally affected in her body and in her mind, as if they were a single organism. N or does she hesitate to counter his views with an understanding of body and mind that we could characterize as holistic, since it grounds the thinking subject in the materiality of the body.31 Elizabeth staunchly challenges Descartes to search for a more effective remedy based on the body, but he remains steeped in ideas advocating the power of thought, will, meditation, and reason.32 Although it is generally accepted that Descartes believed in the interaction between substances, the nature of that interaction remained obscure and incomplete, and it was the object of criticism from his contemporaries and successors. Early on, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) remarked on the inadequacy of Descartes’s description of that union: “But he conceived the mind to be so distinct from the body that he was able to assign no single cause of this union, nor of the mind itself, but was obliged to have recourse to the cause of the whole universe,

Stephen Gaukroger notes that Descartes dedicates not only Les passions to Elizabeth—a work that came out of their correspondence—but also Les principes de la philosophie. See Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 385. 29 “Ceux de l’âme, qui a sans doute beaucoup de force sur le corps.” Descartes, “Lettres à Élisabeth,” July 1647, p. 1280. 30 Harth, Cartesian Women, p. 76. 31 Whereas Harth remarks in passing that “gender intervenes as an issue only rarely and subtly in the correspondence” between Descartes and Princess Elizabeth and writes that their “epistolary relationship is marked by a tone of complicity” (p. 71), Rebecca M. Wilkin revisits the relationship between the two in chapter 5 of her Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). In her examination of the extent to which Descartes’s rationalist epistemology was egalitarian and of whether Cartesian philosophy sanctioned the reform of sexist institutions (p. 294), she writes that “Descartes’s stated desire to shield feeble-minded women” from the dangers of accessible doubt “cannot be taken as evidence that he was determined to relegate them to the sidelines of the search for truth” (p. 310). She explains that Descartes acknowledged Elizabeth’s intellect, treated her as if she were similar to himself (p. 320), and encouraged her to use her intellect (p. 328). 32 On how to provide distractions for the mind, see ibid., pp. 328–31. 28

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that is to say, to God” (p. 254).33 N ot knowing how to explain that connection, Descartes merely concluded that only God has an exact understanding of it. According to the modern critic Mark Bedau, Descartes never clarifies the union of body and soul: “N othing in what Descartes has told us about mind and body can explain their ability to interact. Although Cartesian interaction is conceivable, it is still not explainable.”34 Descartes is also imprecise about the role of the will, sometimes seeming to imply a link between mind and body but never elucidating its mode of operation. Pierre Guenancia argues that the “body is thus given to the soul … [and] one may believe that this is a shortcoming of Cartesian reason, an avowal of its powerlessness or its failure to unite separate substances through a mental abstraction.”35 Stephen Wagner summarizes the three aspects that remain unsatisfying in Descartes’s relational conception: Descartes implies that there are two absolutely distinct substances; his own restrictions on the causal relationship do not allow for a union between them; and the predominance of free will makes any interaction doubtful.36 We should of course not forget the circumstances that led to Descartes’s reliance on “reason.” “Reason” and a new concept of “progress” went hand in hand, since the philosopher lived and wrote at a time of intense cultural and political crisis and sought to take precautions against the ills he had witnessed. Timothy Reiss situates “the philosopher in the more general political and cultural crisis characterizing an increasingly ‘self-conscious’ Europe in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century” and examines how the events of the Thirty Years’ War influenced his philosophy as a whole.37 As a soldier in the army of Prince Maurice of N assau and in his extensive travels in Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland, and Italy, Descartes had seen how humanity suffered constantly from the vicissitudes of nature and war. He had experienced how the Thirty Years’ War left the country beaten and saw the fear of social breakdown resurface again in 1648 with the outbreak of the civil war known as the Fronde.38 33 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, (ed.) James Gotmann, trans. William Hale White and Amelia Hutchinson (N ew York: Hafner, 1949). All references to this edition will be cited in the text. 34 Mark Bedau, “Cartesian Interaction,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1986): 495. 35 Guenancia, L’intelligence du sensible, p. 214. 36 Stephen Wagner, “Mind-Body Interaction in Descartes,” in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, (ed.) Stephen Voss (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 115. 37 Timothy R. Reiss, “Descartes, the Palatine, and the Thirty Years War: Political Theory and Political Practice,” Yale French Studies 80 (1991): p. 109. 38 Although Descartes “had seemingly wanted to quit Holland for a more peaceful Paris, he was thus disappointed” (Reiss, p. 109). He went to Sweden instead when the Fronde broke out. Stephen Gaukroger writes that Descartes had received a royal pension, which served as an incentive to return to France in 1648. N evertheless, times could not have


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He had moved to Holland in 1630 for a life of solitude and peace, as he explains at the end of part 3 of the Discours. Timothy Reiss has argued that the Discours grew out of knowledge, raw experience, and a position of impotence, that it sought a method for achieving empowerment by any means possible, including state reform.39 John Cottingham adds that “because of the weakness of our nature (a recurrent theme in Descartes), we can easily be led astray, failing to focus on the light of truth and goodness, and allowing the false allure of lesser or specious ‘goods’ to attract our attention.”40 And it was this lesson he had learned, having seen the body defenseless and human suffering beyond control. It was his strong determination to help humanity move forward.41 Descartes’s reliance on reason’s control is most certainly an attempt to provide society with a method that would create order and help humanity improve its condition.

Descartes Revisited and Transcended: Malebranche and Spinoza According to N icolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a disciple of Descartes, our knowledge of nature depends on God, who originates every thought. In fact, we do not even need the material body. In Schmaltz’s view, that idea “undermines the claim to Elisabeth [of Bohemia] that mind-body union involves the operation of mental and bodily powers.”42 In book 2 of De la recherche de la vérité (The Search after Truth; 1674–1675), Malebranche adopts the Cartesian division of the human being into two substances and explains that “the entire alliance of mind and body … consists of a natural and mutual correspondence between the thoughts in the soul and the traces in the brain, and between the emotions in the soul and the movements of the animal spirits.”43 But unlike Descartes, Malebranche believes been worse and the city was in a state of near-revolution. He never received the pension. See Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, pp. 182–201. 39 Reiss, “Descartes, the Palatine,” p. 121. 40 John Cottingham, “Descartes as Sage: Spiritual Askesis in Cartesian Philosophy,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, (ed.) Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 200. 41 It is also worth remarking that the personal voice, which is strong in his narrative, underscores his own search for truth. In the Discours, he feels the need to communicate to the public his method to make the world intelligible and to provide his readers with effective tools that will lead them to happiness. 42 Tad M. Schmaltz, “Descartes and Malebranche on Mind and Mind-Body Union,” Philosophical Review 101, 2 (1992): 303. 43 “Toute l’alliance de l’esprit et du corps … consiste dans une correspondance naturelle et mutuelle des pensées de l’âme avec les traces du cerveau, et des émotions de l’âme avec les mouvements des esprits animaux.” N icolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité (hereafter RV), II, III, § V, in Oeuvres, (ed.) Geneviève Rodis-Lewis and Germain Malbreil, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).

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that the link is caused by a divine act: “Our soul is united to our body, and through our body to all visible things, by a hand so powerful that it is impossible to separate ourselves from them on our own.”44 That is, Malebranche does not make the cogito the starting point; rather, he declares that the union between mind and body is instituted by God as the cause of their correspondence and that it is the Deity as principle of truth that produces clear ideas in us. He takes an interest in medical questions and does a subtle analysis of the communication between substances as manifested between the nerves and the brain. The brain is the link between the soul (which resides in the brain center) and other parts of the body. But whereas for Descartes the senses are modalities of union between mind and body, Malebranche makes them modalities of the mind alone. In fact, the senses deceive us as much as the imagination, leading to errors in perception, false beliefs, and raptures. It is the same for the body, the source of illness: “It is in the body that man is ill and it is through the body that he transmits vices to the soul. Malebranche thereby revives the conception, inherited from antiquity, of passion as a malady of the soul.”45 Malebranche did recognize the involuntary, unconscious aspect of the passions: “When one is caught by surprise by some violent passion, if one takes care to reflect on what one feels in one’s gut and in other parts of the body where the nerves insinuate themselves, and also on the changes in one’s face that accompany it; and if one considers the fact that all these various agitations of our nerves are entirely involuntary, and that they arrive despite all the resistance that our will brings to them; then it will not be very difficult to be persuaded of the simple exposition we have just made of all these relationships among the nerves.”46 His point of view is not so different from the claims of present-day neurobiologists who explain that the changes initiated by the body often come about in the first place without the intervention of consciousness and the will. The neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux distinguishes between emotional reactions and actions and observes: “You can have an emotional feeling without being conscious of the eliciting stimulus.”47 In admitting that the passions are produced without our will playing a part, 44 “N otre âme est unie à notre corps, et par notre corps à toutes les choses visibles par une main si puissante, qu’il est impossible par nous-mêmes de nous en détacher.” Malebranche, RV II, III, § IV. 45 Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine, (ed.) introduction to Nicolas Malebranche. De l’imagination. De la recherche de la vérité. Livre II (Paris: Vrin, 2006), p. 8. 46 “Lorsqu’on est surpris de quelque passion violente, si l’on prend soin de faire réflexion sur ce que l’on sent dans les entrailles et dans les autres parties du corps où les nerfs s’insinuent, comme aussi aux changements de visage qui l’accompagnent; et si on considère que toutes ces diverses agitations de nos nerfs sont entièrement involontaires, et qu’elles arrivent même malgré toute la résistance que notre volonté y apporte, on n’aura pas grand’peine à se laisser persuader de la simple exposition que l’on vient de faire de tous ces rapports entre les nerfs.” Malebranche, RV II, I, § IV. 47 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (N ew York: Touchstone, 1998), p. 298.


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Malebranche – like researchers today – conceives complete mastery of our bodies as impossible, as a utopian view. During the same period, Spinoza, son of a Portuguese Jews who had emigrated to the N etherlands, reconceptualized the relationship between substances. In the Ethics, Spinoza chose a more scientific and objective term, the Latin affectus, to refer both to actions/emotions and to passions. By that term, he means “the modifications of the body by which the power of acting of the body itself is increased, diminished, helped, or hindered, together with the ideas of these modifications. If, therefore, we can be the adequate cause of any one of these modifications, [he understands] the emotion to be an action, otherwise it is a passive state” (p. 128). The affects (joy, sadness, love, hate, and so on) occur as the result of the body in motion and are related to an altered bodily state, leading to a change in our mental and/or our physical power to act, a modification for better or for worse. Sadness, for example, is a reduction of the body’s power, while joy entails increased bodily force. Desire is an “appetite of which we are conscious” (p. 136). Spinoza describes the affects as dynamic inclinations that influence the individual’s power to act, and he associates them closely with the body and with the various emotions.48 When the soul has an emotion, it simultaneously imagines what increases its own power to act: “The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that the body exists except through ideas of modifications by which the body is affected” (p. 99). That understanding of the affects underscores the fact that, for Spinoza, the mind does not exist apart from the body, as it does for Descartes, but is part of corporeal matter, its function being to represent the physiological ideas of these modifications. The affect is therefore the idea by means of which the soul imagines the current state of the body. In this respect, it is the body that necessarily engages the mind in its power to act. Mind and body always form a whole, not as two separate substances, one material and the other immaterial, but as attributes of the same substance: God or N ature (Deus sive Natura). The problem of substance does not arise, because the philosopher identifies only one being – the deity – as the absolute substance. Man can therefore be defined as the union of soul and body, not in terms of interaction as in Descartes’s view, but in terms of correlation. In part 2 of the Ethics, Spinoza formulates that conception of their relationship, often misinterpreted as parallelism, which is rather to be grasped as a relationship in which, for every mode of extension, a corresponding idea exists, and vice versa: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of 48 According to Spinoza, melancholy is always bad because the body’s power to act is diminished—or hindered altogether (p. 128). Guillaume Le Blanc analyzes the Ethics from the standpoint of melancholiam expellere. According to him, Spinoza’s mission was to seek a response to the devastating effects of melancholy. See Guillaume Le Blanc, “Spinoza and Ricoeur. La vitalité des affects,” in Spinoza et les affects. Groupe de recherches spinozistes 7, (ed.) Fabienne Brugère and Pierre-François Moreau (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), p. 33.

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things” (p. 7). To illustrate that relationship, he uses an analogy, declaring that “the circle existing in N ature and the idea that is in God of an existing circle are one and the same thing which is manifested through different attributes” (p. 84). Hence the body is the same as the mind, but manifests itself differently. “The human mind is the idea itself or the knowledge of the human body” (p. 99). Bodies and minds are viewed as two attributes of the same substance. Chantal Jaquet explains that “in human beings, body and mind do not stand side by side but designate one and the same thing, expressed in two manners.”49 Spinoza’s notion of the body/mind union is that the object of the idea constituting the mind is the body. For him, there is no cognition prior to a penetration into the human body: Hence we see not only that the human mind is united to the body, but also what is to be understood by the union of the mind and body. But no one can understand it adequately or distinctly without knowing adequately beforehand the nature of our body… . We cannot, however, deny that ideas, like objects themselves, differ from one another, and that one is more excellent (praestantiorem) and contains more reality than another, just as the object of one idea is more excellent and contains more reality than another. Therefore in order to determine the difference between the human mind and other things and its superiority (praestet) over them, we must first know, as we have said, the nature of its object, that is to say, the nature of the human body. (p. 90)

At no point does Spinoza hesitate to make the principle of the sum – purely corporeal existence – the path to self-discovery. It is no longer a question, as it was for Descartes, of deducing physiological needs from the prior assertion of cogitations. Rather we must “read directly, in the being present to our thought, the necessities that this imposes on it … inasmuch as it is substance,”50 a material and psychic substance inseparably joined. The original truth is that of the corporeal sum: the initial knowledge of the fact that I am is required for any affirmation or negation of self to take place – and as a result for any doubt or thought. In order to be, one need not have the I think. For Spinoza, “instead of moving from cognition to being, from the subject to the object, from the I think to the I am, one moves from being to cognition, from the object to the subject, from the I am to the I think.”51 Unlike Descartes, who believes that the mind conceives of reality, Spinoza explains that “the essence of the mind is the idea of a body actually existing” (p. 138). This is the first and foremost principle. The human body sets itself up as the starting point and necessary condition for the mind. 49 Chantal Jaquet, L’unité du corps et de l’esprit: Affects, actions et passions chez Spinoza (Paris: PUF, 2004), p. 11. 50 Martial Gueroult, Études sur Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche et Leibniz (N ew York: Olms, 1970), pp. 74–75. 51 Ibid., p. 69.


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Spinoza’s philosophy restores the role the body plays in our consciousness of our own existence but does not privilege either the soul or the body. The wellknown neurobiologist Antonio Damasio pays homage to that conception and designates Spinoza’s thought a precursor of contemporary neurobiology.52 A nd the distinguished internist J. J. Groen also expresses his admiration for Spinoza’s ideas. Because the Dutch philosopher recognized “that emotions are labelled as modifications of the body and not of the mind,” Groen too crowns Spinoza one of the fathers of current theories.53 Yet, according to Damasio, “Spinoza did not venture beyond his knowledge and thus could not say that the means to establish ideas of the body include chemical and neural pathways and the brain itself” and he “knew very little about the brain and about the means for body and brain to signal mutually.”54 He did, however, perceive the correspondence between a modification of the body and its representation as an idea in the mind and tried to give a detailed explanation of their intimate communication. Spinoza always conceived of a union and cooperation between body and mind, realizing that internal or external changes produce the (increased or inhibited) human capacity to act through affects. A pioneer in his time, he discovered that the “I”’s self-understanding is not at all based on our rational thoughts but rather on the concrete and moment-by-moment experience of the body. Indeed, according to Spinoza’s most radical and antiCartesian thesis, if there is no body, there is no longer mind.55 What, then, is the concrete role of the mind for Spinoza, inasmuch as it is the “idea of the human body”? We know that, to have an idea in the mind, one must first become aware of the body’s existence and actions. Lying behind the ideas of our modifications is a thought (idea ideae) that perceives a bodily experience in the form of an image represented to the mind. When Spinoza writes that “the mind imagines a body” (p. 98, my emphasis) or that “the mind endeavors … to imagine those things which increase or assist the body’s power of acting” (p. 138, my emphasis), he uses the word imagine as a synonym for have an idea. In their annotation of this sentence in the French translation of the Ethics (Pléiade edition), Roland Caillois, Madeleine Francès, and Robert Mishrahi write that in Spinoza’s terminology imaginari designates any sensuous cognition, perceived Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003). 53 J.J. Groen, “Spinoza’s Theory of Affects and Modern Psychobiology,” in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Man: Proceedings of the Scandinavian Spinoza Symposium 1977, (ed.) John Wetlesen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1978), p. 107. 54 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 213. 55 Spinoza claims that “we cannot ascribe duration to the mind except while the body exists,” but “this something which pertains to the essence of the mind will necessarily be eternal” (Ethics, p. 268). See Errol Harris’s interpretation: “The eternity of the human mind so far as it understands adequately is not an ‘after-life’ or a continuance in time beyond the temporal death of the body. It is a quality of being and knowing.” Errol Harris, The Substance of Spinoza (Atlantic Highlands, N J: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 66. 52

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or imagined.56 Errol Harris explains the physiological and sensuous character of these first ideas about the human mind: “Thus the self-sentience of the body, what for Spinoza is the idea of the body, includes everything of which I am sensuously aware; and it is from this, and on this foundation, that all my ‘ideas’ of whatever kind are elaborated.”57 Hence Spinoza grasps connections through the “idea of the idea,” which we can understand to mean “consciousness of the idea”: “the human mind … not only perceives the modifications of the body, but also the ideas of these modifications” (p. 101) and “the mind does not know itself except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body” (p. 101). In the present case, these are ideas that the mind produces. Michael Della Rocca explains the notion as follows: “For Spinoza, ideas are modes of thought. Each idea is identical with, is one and the same thing as, the object of that idea.”58 Thus for Spinoza the image and the imagination become the concrete forms of our daily perception, the representation of the body. This idea has been revived by modern neurobiologists such as Damasio, who calls the representation of the body through a mental image “the body as theater.”59 It is true that Spinoza is wary of the imagination and sometimes calls it a confused idea, but he nonetheless attributes a vital role to it in our perceptions. He also observes that “the power of the mind by which it imagines and remembers things also depends upon this – that it involves the actual existence of the body” (p. 138) and that “the mind imagines those things which increase or assist our body’s power of action” (pp. 138–9). The imagination affirms the presence of our body. It is a way of thinking, the first kind of cognition, preceding reason and intuitive understanding. Spinoza therefore posits an imagination that is necessary for cognition and that adequately represents reality. The imagination moves into the realm of knowledge to affirm existence and, by its images, to fabricate and change reality. Reason and imagination no longer stand in opposition to each other; rather, our truth is in the first place an assemblage of corporeal and sensuous images that ground our existence in the current state of our bodies. According to Damasio, Spinoza’s insight also lay in his ability to perceive and point out the relevance of the imagination, its way of creating images that allow us to conceive of ourselves on the basis of our bodies. The Dutch philosopher seeks solutions for problems left unsolved by Descartes

56 Baruch de Spinoza, Œuvres complètes, (ed.) and trans. Roland Caillois, Madeleine Francès, and Robert Mishrahi (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 1429. 57 Harris, The Substance of Spinoza, p. 55. 58 Michael Della Rocca, “Spinoza’s Substance Monism,” in Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, (ed.) Olli I. Koistinen and John Biro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 32. 59 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (N ew York: Putnam, 1994), p. 155; Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 28. According to Damasio, in many instances the brain also learns to concoct the “emotional body” state without the body actually being activated or modified.


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and argues for the importance of the affects, and with it the value of the senses and the imagination, which also preoccupies many twenty-first century thinkers.

Medical Thought and Melancholy In the first half of the seventeenth century, many doctors wrote books that considered melancholy a pathological condition, discussing its causes, effects, and remedies. Timothy Bright in England and André Du Laurens in France launched a true vogue for the analysis of melancholy in the medical field. Du Laurens, summoned to court as Henry IV’s doctor in 1600, diagnosed the symptoms of that illness in his Discours des maladies mélancholiques (Discourse on melancholic maladies; 1594). He wrote that melancholy makes the ailing person “more raging than a lion, more inhuman than a tiger,” because “all the most noble faculties are depraved by it, the senses seem distracted, the movements out of control, the imagination disturbed.”60 His analysis of the melancholic is based on a study of organic symptoms (tremors, sighs, sobs, insomnia, restlessness, altered voice, stammering) combined with mental symptoms (fearfulness, sadness, despair, anxiety, delusions, dreams). His monism is revealed in the idea that melancholy attacks the patient physically and mentally in equal measure. He considers both sets of symptoms in his effort to detect the harmful effects of the malady, further observing that melancholy is an illness of body and soul which takes several forms and has several different origins. In its first form, melancholy of the brain, “the dry and cold intemperance of the brain” affects the mind and heart, producing “dark” visions and morbid effects.61 Du Laurens is intent on locating that type of melancholy physically, but psychic causes also contribute toward triggering the illness: internal disturbances, overwrought imagination, excessive passions, and mental distress, whose pernicious effects include a permanent sadness and fearfulness. He then turns to the second type of melancholy, which results from a disturbance in the humors. Finally, he considers hypochondriacal melancholy, “the mildest and the least dangerous of all, but the most difficult to recognize properly,” since it stems from several overheated parts and has various degrees of severity.62 Hypochondriacal melancholy, associated with the lower abdomen, also produces a disequilibrium in the humors, adding bodily symptoms to the mental manifestations. Finally, Du Laurens proceeds to 60 “Plus furieux qu’un lion, plus inhumain qu’un tigre,” “toutes les plus nobles puissances en sont depravees, les sens paroissent esgarez, les mouvements desreglez, l’imagination troublee.” André Du Laurens, Discours de la conservation de la veue, des maladies mélancholiques, des catarrhes et de la vieillesse (n.p.: Théodore Samson, 1598), p. 212. 61 “L’intemperature seiche & froide du cerveau.” Ibid., 231.233. 62 “[La] plus legere, & la moins dangereuse de toutes, mais la plus difficile à estre bien recogneuë.” Ibid., 317.332–333.


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Figure 1.1

Detailed view of “Le Melancolique” in ‘Les quatre complexions de l’homme,” in Cesar Ripa, Iconologie, Ou Nouvelle explication de plusieurs images, emblemes, et autres figures hyerogliphiques des vertus, vices, arts… Paris: Louis Billaine, 1637. (p. 61)

the study of lovesickness, “another kind of melancholy, which stems from the furor of love.”63 Its primordial characteristic is contamination of the blood, leading to a boiling-hot heart and an unhinged reason. In this case, the illness is triggered by the eyes of the subject in love, who falls for a person or object with such force that mental and corporeal disturbances result. The author considers the pathology of the mind and of the body, and his lesson is that the processes set in motion affect the sufferer’s tainted humors as much as his mind. Du Laurens scrupulously analyzes the major role of the imagination in melancholy, emphasizing the opposition between the natural imagination – one of the noble faculties of the brain, which, along with the memory, is subordinated to reason – and the melancholic’s tainted imagination. He goes on to consider the damage caused by that faculty, which again affects the body and mind as a single 63

“Une autre espece de melancholies qui vient de la furie d’amour.” Ibid., 308.


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entity. When he explains that the imagination follows the body’s “disposition” or “temperature,” he declares it dependent on physiological processes and places it in a causal relationship with the humors. The depraved imagination thus corresponds to the corruption of the humors. For Du Laurens, physiological changes can be found at the very center of the relationship between mind and body, and the body has the power to trigger internal schisms. That interdependence is obvious when Du Laurens explains that melancholics “imprint” or “engrave” the image of the body in their minds. In fact, “the brain seems already to have acquired a habit; and thereafter the humor, which is dry and earthy, having engraved its image in a hard body, does not allow it to be easily erased.”64 N eurologists in our time also rely on that idea of the body’s impression on the mind through images, emphasizing that the mapping of the body comes about through the production of images transmitted to the brain, where ideas then originate. These researchers claim that this mapping is decisive for constructing the reality we perceive. Du Laurens already recognized the body’s ability to imprint itself in the mind and argued that substances communicate with each other. In his third Discours philosophique (Philosophical discourse), entitled “De l’humeur melancholique” (On the melancholic humor; 1603), Doctor Jourdain Guibelet – in contrast to Du Laurens – establishes a binary division of melancholy. He distinguishes between “the melancholic humor” and its more serious, more virulent, and less studied form, called “black bile” or “atrabiliousness,” caused by the combustion or putrefaction of the body.65 It is black bile especially that interests him and which he seeks to define. Guibelet is primarily interested in its physiological properties and analyzes at length the temperature of the bile, its black color, and its sheen. The mental aspect concerns him only briefly and superficially, except in his meticulous description of melancholy in the man of genius.66 Although the interdependence of substances is never questioned, it is also never explicitly mentioned. Guibelet confines himself to observing that the immortal soul is “obliged” to remain united with the body, an “inconvenience” that explains how the melancholic humor afflicts the mind.67 In his Consolation et réjouissance (Consolation and rejoicing; 1627), the Jesuit Étienne Binet strives to give comfort and advice to melancholics, all the while setting out their path to spirituality. Binet writes as both a spiritual and a scientific leader, but his approach is primarily moral and Christian. Through a dialogue 64 “Le cerveau semble deja avoir acquis une habitude, & puis l’humeur, qui est seche & terrestre, ayant en un corps dur gravé son image, ne la laisse pas aisément effacer.” Ibid., 255. 65 Jourdain Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques. De la comparaison de l’homme avec le monde. Du principe de la génération de l’homme. De l’humeur mélancolique (Évreux: Antoine Le Marié, 1603), pp. 219–20. 66 See in particular pp. 258 and 267–8 for a description of mental manifestations, including rage, violence, and loss of memory and of the reason. 67 Ibid., p. 266.

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between the patient and the consoler, he raises issues such as the sorrow and despair produced by the melancholic humor, the sufferer’s physical prostration, the various therapeutic remedies (such as music and song), and the imagination as the root or symptom of melancholy. Binet writes as an optimistic rationalist, continually saying that melancholy is an ill produced by the imagination, an ill to which we can put an end by having contempt for it, laughing at it, dissipating our fears, and seeking God. Like the generous soul for Descartes, for Binet the homme de bien is someone who never becomes melancholic but who knows how to control himself.68 In 1621 the Englishman Robert Burton published an overview of all the knowledge about melancholy and created a veritable encyclopedia, The Anatomy of Melancholy, which would be revised and expanded in five subsequent editions. The London theologian and doctor Timothy Bright had previously published his Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Their common method was to describe the physiopsychological character of that malady and to gather together the knowledge provided by the ancients and by the scholastic tradition, in order to devote themselves wholly to understanding and treating it. Let us note that in giving his account of the humors, Burton never separates them from the mental aspect of melancholy, and his physiological explanation is complemented by a profound interest in the soul’s suffering. In fact, the scope of his project indicates that he is intent on incorporating all external and internal factors that may produce melancholy. Body and soul clearly occupy the same plane, and he privileges neither one nor the other. Burton adopts Du Laurent’s tripartite division between melancholy of the mind, melancholy of the body, and hypochondriacal melancholy (stemming from the liver, spleen, or diaphragm).69 That division leads him to claim that melancholic symptoms can amount to more than a mere melancholic “disposition” or “state” (i. 136): morbid manifestations and harmful effects can produce a true malady affecting both body and soul. “For as the Body workes upon the Minde by his bad humours, troubling the Spirits … disturbing the Soule, and all the faculties of it, … with feare, sorrowe, etc., which are ordinary symptoms of this Disease: so, on the other side, the Minde most effectually works upon the Body, producing by his passions and perturbations, miraculous alterations; as Melancholy, despaire, cruell diseases, and sometimes death it selfe” (i. 246). Modern critics often remark that the relational conception of kinds of matter remains ambiguous in Burton’s book because his arguments are often contradictory. 68 Étienne Binet, Consolation et réjouissance pour les malades et personnes affligées en forme de dialogue, (ed.) Claude Louis-Combet (Grenoble: Millon, 1995), p. 103. 69 Hereafter, all references cited in the text are to Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, (ed.) T. C. Faulkner, N . K. Kiessling, and R.L. Blair, introduction and commentary by J.B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). The author sets aside two types of melancholy that he has not succeeded in classifying: love (or erotic) melancholy and religious melancholy. Both may stem from either physiological or psychic disturbances.


Figure 1.2

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Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6th edition. London: Crips & Lodo (1652), Frontispiece

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Rosalie Colie writes, for example, that The Anatomy of Melancholy is full of contradictions and paradoxes, and Mary Schmelzer claims that any attempt to find a lucid scientific argument in it is doomed to failure and would even constitute a misreading.70 It is true that Burton tends to foster incomprehension in his readers because, in the course of the book, he several times shifts his interest and proposes complex arguments that may easily appear contradictory. He points out that the body is sometimes the source of melancholy, but that usually the malady is caused rather by the soul and is related to decisions we make about the direction of our lives (i. 374). That ambiguity seems to rule out any definitive conclusion. As Christopher Tilmouth has noted, however, physiological deterioration concerns Burton for only five pages and for the remaining two hundred pages the author strives to explain the other origins of melancholy, most of them located in the mind.71 It is precisely mental disturbances that produce somatic changes and the outbreak of illness. In fact, as Jean Robert Simon has noted, “these psychic effects on the body may even go so far as to produce sudden death.”72 Conversely, when melancholy is produced in the body by a humoral imbalance, the body also radically affects the mind: “N ow the chiefest causes proceed from the Heart, humours, spirits: as they are purer, or impurer, so is the Minde, and equally suffers, as a Lute out of tune, if one string, or one organ be distempered, all the rest miscarry” (Burton, i. 373). Let us pause for a moment on the author’s choice of analogy: the string (that is, the bodily humors) constitutes a small part of the lute (the mind), but that part is important for the proper operation of the mind. Once a string is out of tune, the instrument’s harmony is destroyed. Burton describes the interaction between body and mind as a mutual need: each functions only when the two are in harmony. As soon as one is affected, the other immediately feels the damaging effects of the disturbance. Burton’s images of the string and lute help us understand the equivalence he establishes between mind and body, which for him always act as “one.” They form a rhythmic whole and each adds its share to the single chord, whether harmonious or out of tune. Burton gradually moves away from an explanation of melancholy based on humoral causes. He shifts his interest to the mental origins of the illness, while reasserting that an imbalance in one of the substances inevitably produces an imbalance in the other. That development leads him to take an interest in mental disturbances such as anxiety, loneliness, and sorrow as causes or symptoms of melancholy. Sorrow, for example, is “both the mother and daughter of melancholy… 70 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 453. Mary Murphy Schmelzer, ’Tis All One’: ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ as Belated Copious Discourse. American University Studies, Series IV. Vol. 190 (N ew York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 14–15. 71 Christopher Tilmouth, “Burton’s ‘Turning Picture’: Argument and Anxiety in the Anatomy of Melancholy,” Review of English Studies 56, 226 (2005): 530. 72 Jean Robert Simon, Robert Burton (1577–1640) et l’Anatomie de la mélancolie (Paris: Didier, 1964), p. 199.


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. Symptome and chiefe cause … : They beget one another and tread in a ring” (i. 256).73 As cause, sorrow gives rise to melancholic vapors in the body. But later, the vapors produce more sorrow, this time as a symptom. Burton’s notion that the soul and body constantly work in tandem rests on a radical monism, implicit in the following image: “The Body is domicilium animae [the dwelling of the soul], her house, abide, and stay, and as a torch, gives a better light, a sweeter smell, according to the matter it is made of: so doth our Soule performe all her actions… ; the Soule receaves a tincture from the body through which it workes” (i. 373). Once again we find ourselves faced with an analogy, the author’s favorite stylistic device – he uses it every time he feels the need to clarify a complex theory. This time, the body is compared to a house in which the soul dwells, and the soul’s function is assimilated to that of a torch acting beneficently within. But the image not only emphasizes the previously mentioned harmony between body and soul, it also reverses the previous image of the lute. N ow it is the body that is the “whole,” while the soul is only part of it, though endowed with a beneficent function. For Burton, harmony comes from a fluctuating relationship between soul and body, and the two are permanently enmeshed. When a man is in good health, the imagination and the appetites are always under the control of the reasonable part of his soul. But in real life, Burton observes, the passions are often overwrought and produce a humoral disturbance, which then causes the outbreak of melancholy (i. 249). He explains that the passions may cause melancholy when they form an impression in the imagination or “phantasie” (the part of the sensible soul that belongs to the inward senses; i. 152), which is communicated to the heart, since the imagination and the heart work together. The heart “immediatly bends it self to prosecute, or avoid” (i. 249) the negative impression, thus inducing the humors to act. Melancholy results when the corresponding humor causes the body temperature to drop: the heart, then, in sadness, experiences “much melancholy” (i. 249). For Burton, the passions always entail a psychophysiological aspect in which the appetite “recorded” by the imagination is transmitted to the heart and then produces physical effects.74 For him, man’s problem is “human bondage,” as Spinoza would phrase it a few decades later. Burton writes: “Good discipline, Education, Philosophy, Divinity (I cannot deny), may mitigate and restraine these passions in some few men at some times, but most part they domineere and are so violent, that as a torrent … bears downe all before, and overflows his bankes, … they overwhelme reason, judgment, and pervert the temperature of the body” (i. 248). Once again Burton uses an image, that of a violent torrent, to describe the processes unleashed by the passions. Only “some few men,” and even then only “some times,” manage to control themselves. Burton denies the capacity of the 73

Burton writes: “Sorrow is that other Character, and inseparable companion … , a common symptom, a continuall, and still without any evident cause” (i. 388). 74 According to Tilmouth (“Burton’s ‘Turning Picture’”), “the passions, then, are registers of an affection in/of the heart, stimulated by the sensitive appetite which works through the imagination” (p. 527).


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will to put an end to strong passions. He clearly understands the psychological causes underlying that illness, the helplessness of its victims to put an end to it, and even announces that melancholy is a human condition that spares no one: “No mortall man is free from these perturbations” (i. 248). Two years after Burton’s treatise, Doctor Jacques Ferrand published his medicomoral work, De la maladie d’amour ou melancholie erotique (On lovesickness or erotic melancholy; 1623), another attempt to ward off, warn against, diagnose, and treat melancholy, which now “covers the domain of eros, dear to poets, novelists, and playwrights.”75 In adopting the tripartite division of melancholy, Ferrand classifies erotic melancholy as a hypochondriacal form. Hypochondriacal melancholy “depends primarily on the liver and surrounding parts, perverts the chief faculties of the brain with blackish vapors rising from the hypochondrium to the citadel of Pallas, that is, to the brain” (p. 22).76 Ferrand is particularly interested in the ill effects of love, because that passion constitutes the source and principle of most of the disturbances of the soul. Moreover, love can take a whole range of different forms, from carnal desire to unrequited love. Erotic melancholy makes people act like madmen, which led doctors to believe they truly were mad. Ferrand mentions in this regard an unfortunate confusion that often occurred in the seventeenth century, the indifferentiation between mania (or madness) and melancholy (p. 15). He sets out to differentiate between the two and claims that melancholics have not actually lost their reason. We shall see in the particular case of Jean-Joseph Surin the consequences of that indifferentiation between the two maladies. Ferrand’s second aim is to put an end to the radical dualism of his era and to seek inspiration from the monist precepts of Hippocrates. He announces that he will turn away from any conception that separates the healing of illnesses of the body from those of the mind. In his conception of erotic melancholy, he adopts a holistic view of the human being inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, which is revealed in his examination of melancholy; sometimes he even tends toward a materialistic position. He examines two origins of erotic melancholy, “the temperature of the humor … and the black color of the spirits… . Because the melancholic humor is cold, it cools not only the brain but also the heart, seat of the faculty of courage, which is called irascible, and drains its ardor, from whence comes fear. That same 75

Marc Fumaroli, “La mélancolie et ses remèdes: La reconquête du sourire dans la France classique,” in Mélancolie, génie et folie en Occident, (ed.) Jean Clair (Exh. cat. Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 218. 76 “Depend principalement du foye & parties circonvoisines, pervertit les facultez principales du cerveau par les vapeurs noirastres montans des hypochondres à la citadelle de Pallas, c’est à dire au cerveau.” Jacques Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour ou melancholie erotique. Discours curieux qui enseigne a cognoistre l’essence, les causes, les signes, & les remedes de ce mal fantastique (Paris: Denis Moreau, 1623). All references to this edition will be cited in the text. There is a previous version of this treatise entitled De l’essence et guérison de l’amour ou de la Mélancolie érotique (Toulouse, 1610).


Figure 1.3

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Jacques Ferrand, Erotomania or A Treatise Discoursing on the Essence, Causes, Symptoms ….of Love or Erotique Melancholy. Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1640. Title Page


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humor, being black, makes the animal spirits coarse, obscure, and seemingly smoky” (p. 32).77 When the mind (“first and foremost organ of the soul”) is darkened and chilled, mental symptoms automatically occur, and the brain and mind act in concert: for example, the black color of the bile darkens the brain and thus produces a dark mind, manifest in a depraved imagination, strange visions, fear, and sadness (pp. 31–2).78 Finally, the eyes play a major role in Ferrand’s theory; they are the principal organ affected. The sight of an object (animate or inanimate) produces a complex physiopsychological reaction, during which the perversion of the humors and the warming of the “dry, earthy, and melancholic” blood (p. 8)79 combine with a depravation of the imagination and a weakening of the reason. In addition to the external cause (eye/vision), there is the path taken by the humors, along with the ravages manifested in the soul. For Ferrand, erotic melancholy is based on a delusion on the part of the victim, who is under the influence of an overwrought imagination so vehement that it prevails over the reason and obliges it to yield. Ferrand writes that this faculty actively contributes to the ills of melancholics because it forces them constantly to (re-)create in their minds an image (erroneous, embellished, and in no way realistic) of the object of their love.80 It is that aspect we need to emphasize here, because the relationship between image, imagination, and melancholy will play a preeminent role in the works of Lafayette and Racine. Although Ferrand does not speak directly of a bodily and mental “mark” or “imprint,” as the two literary writers do, he claims that the image constructed in the melancholic’s mind arises with such force that it produces physiological and psychological disturbances.81 Let us conclude these examples (which are in no way exhaustive) by noting that medical thinkers of the early seventeenth century also took an interest in the ongoing debate about the relationship between mind and body and used their own observations of the pathology of melancholy to examine that relationship. In these reflections, there is “a framework in which medicine and the science of the soul, physics and ethics … communicate at the very least, if they do not interpret each

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“La temperature de l’humeur … & la couleur noire des esprits… . L’humeur Melancholique estant froide rafroidit non seulement le cerveau, mais aussi le coeur siege de la puissance courageuse, qu’on nomme irascible, & abbat son ardeur, de là vient la crainte. La mesme humeur estant noire rend les esprits animaux, grossiers, obscurs, & comme enfumez.” 78 “Premier & principal organe de l’ame.” 79 “Sec, terrestre & melancholique.” 80 See Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour, 20.26–30. 81 Other treatises also consider melancholy, including N icolas Abraham de La Framboisière’s Scholae medicae (1640), Lazare Meysonnier’s Traité des maladies extraordinaires (1644), Lazare Rivière’s Institutiones medicae (1657), Jean Aubery’s L’antidote d’amour (1599; re-ed. 1663) and the country doctor François du Port’s Medica decas (1694).


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other.”82 At the same time, most of these doctors adopted an exclusively monist perspective. In their common effort to determine the nature of the melancholic’s suffering, they also investigated the problem of the temperature of the melancholic humor. This gave rise to a crucial question that would concern doctors as well as theologians and moral philosophers: Can woman become melancholic?

Melancholy and the Female Sex In the medico-philosophical tradition, studies of melancholy were devoted to the male sex: men were the principal subjects from the standpoint of melancholic pathology but also from the standpoint of the humoral constitution needed to be a genius. The place occupied by women was problematic. In works dating from the seventeenth century, the camps were sharply divided between those who included women in their observations on melancholy and those who opposed the theory of inclusion. It was primarily the Italian Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) who originated the “male” image of the melancholic, a legacy that continued into the early seventeenth century. Ficino, harking back to Aristotle, was primarily interested in how melancholy fostered genius in men. He attributed a positive value to it so long as the temperature of the humors was properly regulated. He viewed melancholy as a propensity for extraordinary knowledge and creativity. Ficino thereby provided his successors with a particularly virile model of melancholy, since it became an honor, a real privilege, to be a melancholic man. Melancholy made a man ingenious, harmoniously joining together the different human faculties within him (ratio, mens, and imaginatio), which endowed him with great mental powers.83 Hence an image of melancholy was fashioned, not as a pernicious malady but as a temperament favoring the sublime creativity reserved for men. Women were systematically excluded. Concurrently, the pathology of melancholy continued to find its way into the seventeenth-century medical tradition. Jacques Ferrand, basing himself on the authority of Hippocrates, discovered a surprising characteristic in those suffering from melancholy: the malady turned men into women, made men feminine.84 Was it possible to conclude, then, that women have a natural disposition toward melancholy or, on the contrary, must one be a man to suffer from it? Opinions were divided. On one hand, there were those like André Du Laurens, Jacques Ferrand, 82 Patrick Dandrey, “‘L’amour est un mal: Le guérir est un bien’: La nature du mal d’amour au XVIIe siècle,” Littératures classiques 17 (1992): 278. 83 Marsilio Ficino, “On a Healthy Life,” in Three Books on Life, (ed.) and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, N Y: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America, 1989), chaps. 1–4. 84 Conversely, Ferrand recounts the story of a few women for whom the furor of love pushed out their genitals, making them “men” (p. 12). That theory, however, was rejected by anatomists of his time.


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and Marc Duncan, who openly proclaimed that woman could be afflicted with melancholy.85 The other camp was represented primarily by Hippolyte-Jules de La Mesnardière, who stubbornly and fanatically protested against such a possibility. The debate took place within the context of demonic possessions in the first half of the century, in particular the possession of Loudun in 1634, which affected a convent of young Ursuline nuns. In the many varied analyses, three theories alternated: either this was a case of true demonic possession, or it was an illness of the imagination, or it was female melancholy. According to Du Laurens, “Hippocrates and several other doctors recognize hysterical hypochondria, which originates in the womb through the retention of the menses or some [other] matter: it produces the same effects as the others and is often more virulent because of the marvelous sympathy the womb has with all parts of the body.”86 That female malady, known as the “suffocation of the womb” or “uterine furor,” was for Du Laurens a particular form of hypochondriacal melancholy, which stems from the nether parts (the spleen or liver). Although Du Laurens treats that female malady as a form of melancholy, in his hierarchy (melancholy of the brain, melancholy of the body, and hypochondriacal melancholy) it is the form located at the very bottom. Whereas melancholy of the brain is reserved for men, uterine furor (and hypochondriacal melancholy) is allotted to women. The dualism at work, going counter to Du Laurens’s monism of mind and body, is that between man and woman. Ferrand also detected two female maladies, “satyriasis,” and “uterine furor,” and classified them as kinds of erotic melancholy.87 Whereas satyriasis is “a pruritus or itching of the private parts with pain,” uterine furor is described as “a rage or furious madness stemming from an extreme ardor of the womb (amarry) or hot intemperance communicated to the brain and the rest of the body through the conduit of the spine, or through the acrid vapors rising from tainted semen stagnating around the womb.”88 Body and brain are both affected by the illnesses, In his De praestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac venificiis (1563), the famous Dutch doctor Johann Weyer—who studied medicine in Paris, then in Orléans—was one of the first to maintain that women possessed of demons were in reality melancholics and that the so-called demons were only creations of their overactive imaginations. Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London: John Windet, 1603); and Daniel Duncan, Discours de la possession des religieuses Ursulines de Loudun (Samur: Lesnier, 1634). At the same time, Weyer and Duncan were Protestants and as such were fighting superstitions they attributed to the Catholicism of the time. 86 “Hippocrate & plusieurs autres Medecins recognoissent une hypochondriaque hysterique, qui vient de la matrice par la retention des mois, ou de quelque matiere: elle produit mesmes effects que les autres, & est bien souvent plus furieuse pour la merveilleuse sympathie qu’a la matrice avec toutes les parties du corps.” Du Laurens, Discours des maladies mélancholiques, pp. 335–6. 87 Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour, p. 75. 88 “Un prurit ou demengaison des parties secretes avec douleur,” “une rage, ou folie furieuse prouvenante d’un ardeur extreme de l’amarry ou intemperature chaude 85


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which Ferrand deplores. He explains that the production of a “heat” or “burning fever” in women causes that intemperance in their constitution. Women’s humors are usually “cold,” but a shift produced by the ardor of desire leads to a heat that is difficult to detect because it is camouflaged inside the female genitals: “Their appearance [is] similar to alembics sitting nicely on turrets without anyone outside seeing the fire; but if you look under the alembics, and place your hand on the ladies’ hearts, you will find in all places a great inferno.”89 Ferrand touches only briefly on the subject of the melancholic woman, who hardly seems to interest him, rapidly observing that the malady afflicts young women about to be married and mentioning a list of authors to consult for remedies. He suggests a quick wedding to prevent the fatal consequences of that illness, which in women often leads to suicide. Let us immediately contrast Du Laurens and Ferrand to the camp of doctors and theorists who relentlessly protested against including women among melancholics, a camp led by Jean Bodin and La Mesnardière. Between 1570 and 1635, the debate often took the form of critical responses, as some writers took up the arguments of others in order to demolish them. It was within this context that the philosopher and theorist Jean Bodin wrote his treatise “Réfutation des opinions de Jean Wier” (Refutation of the opinions of Johann Weyer), which appeared as an epilogue to his De la démonomanie des sorciers (On the Demon-mania of Witches; 1580). In the treatise, Bodin carefully examines the symptoms of the possessed nuns of Loudun. He accuses Weyer of a crucial error: “It was not necessary to … attribute the raptures of the witches, their evil spells and strange acts, to melancholy, much less to make the women melancholics.”90 On the contrary, he discerns that “the humor of woman [is] exactly the opposite of burning melancholy,” which “proceeds from heat and excessive dryness… . Yet women are naturally cold and wet.”91 Bodin communiquée au cerveau, & au reste du corps, par la conduitte de l’espine du dos, ou par les vapeurs acres ellevées de la semence corrompuë croupissante à l’entour de l’amarry.” Ibid., p. 76. It was Ambroise Paré who referred to the womb as an amarry, literally, a “thing filled with sorrow.” See J.F. Malgaigne, (ed.), Œuvres complètes d’Ambroise Paré (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1840–1841), 2:167. 89 “Leur mine semblable à des alembics gentiment assis sur des tourettes sans qu’on voye le feu dehors; mais si vous regardez au dessous de l’alembic, & mettez la main sur le coeur des Dames vous trouverez en tous les lieux un grand brasier.” Ibid., p. 164. It was common at the time to compare the shape of the uterus to vessels or alembics. 90 “Il ne failloit … pas attribuer les transports des Sorciers, leurs malefices, & actions estranges à la melancholie, & beaucoup moins faire les femmes melancholiques.” Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), 4th edn (Lyon: Antoine de Harsy, 1598), p. 493. 91 “L’humeur de la femme … [est] directement contraire à la melancholie aduste,” “procede d’une chaleur, & secheresse excessive… . Or les femmes naturellement sont froides & humides.” Bodin, De la démonomanie, p. 493. That theory linking melancholy exclusively to heat and dryness was particular to Bodin. Rebecca Wilkin’s study meticulously considers the opposing viewpoints of Bodin and Weyer within the context of the importance

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masculinizes the malady and, from his male standpoint, “the laudable effects of the temperate melancholic humor, which makes man wise, calm, and contemplative … are qualities as incompatible with woman as fire is with water.”92 S ince melancholy is a virile creative malady or temperament, woman is systematically excluded from it. The poet, playwright, and doctor Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière takes up Bodin’s claims in his Traité de la melancholie (Treatise on melancholy; 1635). He argues that, by virtue of her cold and wet constitution, woman cannot be melancholic, given that this malady is always hot by its very nature: “All melancholies … stem from an excess of heat.”93 N othing is so contrary to melancholy as woman. One must therefore “seek another cause of the prodigious effects noted in [the possessed women], which reason prevents us from attributing to any ill that has its seat in the body or its origin in the soul.”94 La Mesnardière establishes an opposition not only between men and women and between male and female maladies, but even between male and female temperaments (dryness and heat for men, dampness and cold for women) and imaginations (active for men,

of women and notions of gender in the early modern period. Wilkin shows how Bodin “construed the body of the witch as a text full of deeply ensconced secrets” that needed to be interpreted. As she argues, Bodin did so with an interpretative theory that she calls “torturous hermeneutics” (Women, Imagination, p. 85). 92 “Les effets louables de l’humeur melancholique tempérée, qui rend l’homme sage, posé, contemplatif … sont qualitez aussi peu compatibles avec la femme que le feu avec l’eau.” Bodin, De la démonomanie, pp. 495–6. 93 “Toutes les Melancholies … viennent d’un excès de Chaleur.” Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière, Traité de la melancholie, sçavoir si elle est la cause des effets que l’on remarque dans les possédées de Loudun (La Flèche: Martin Guyot & Gervais Laboe, 1635), p. 13. La Mesnardière is responding to the objections of Daniel Duncan, a Scottish professor of philosophy, who had disputed the idea that the young Ursulines were possessed. He had wondered whether their ills did not stem rather from an overwrought imagination, from deceit, or from melancholy rather than supernatural forces. In his Apologie pour M. Duncan, Docteur en médecine contre le traité de la mélancholie tiré des réflexions du Sieur de la M. (Saumur: Lesnier, 1635), Marc Duncan accepts Daniel Duncan’s argument and refutes La Mesnardière’s. Duncan then argues that “not all melancholy comes from heat and dryness … [and] it is not so incompatible with women’s temperament” (toute Melancholie ne vient pas de chaleur & de seicheresse … [et] elle n’est pas tant incompatible avec le temperament des Femmes; p. 48). He adds that, in theory, melancholy can affect both men and women, but that it is more malignant and violent in women because of the opposition created in their constitution (women are cold, melancholy hot; p. 94). He concludes that “there is no privilege in the sex of women that can guarantee them from that illness” (il n’y a pas de privilege dans le sexe des Femmes qui les puisse garantir de cette maladie; p. 98). 94 “Chercher une autre Cause des Effets prodigieux qui se remarquent en [les possédées], que la Raison nous empesche d’attribuer à aucun mal qui ait son siege dans le corps, ou son principe dedans l’Ame.” La Mesnardière, Traité de la melancholie, p. 130.


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passive for women).95 Connected to that antimony of the sexes is the prerogative of melancholy, which is reserved strictly for men, since that heat is “miraculous,” as if “a fire were seen burning in a river without any artificial devices.”96 T hat heat touches on mystery, on the line between man and genius, and in that sense constitutes a more lofty transformation reserved for the virile sex. La Mesnardière is even opposed to the general idea that the nuns of Loudun are suffering from an illness, since their “embonpoint,” the bright red of their shame, their conduct, and their speech prove that “the ill is in their bodies without being uncomfortable, and the extravagances and furors that take hold of them are often the effects of a cause that does not act like the others.”97 Particularly for Bodin and La Mesnardière, but also for Du Laurens, melancholy was endowed at the time with a virile and privileged aspect. It was sometimes conceded that women suffered from it, but they were said to be afflicted with a melancholy stemming from the nether regions of the body. La Mesnardière is particularly clear on this point when he refutes the “prevailing appearance that it is to melancholy, engendered in the brain by its own intemperance or coming to it through the tenderness it has, not only toward the womb whose passions it embraces, but also toward the whole body, from which it receives the vapors, that … the wondrous things seen in the possessed women” are to be imputed.98 In the medical investigation of female melancholy in the first half of the seventeenth century, a sexist dualism prevailed, with authors consciously differentiating between male and female constitutions. They divided up the sites where melancholy originates and spreads, then hierarchized them (brain, body, spleen/liver, uterus). At the same time, in Lafayette’s fiction and in Racine’s Phèdre (Phaedra), women came to be associated with melancholy. That was a result of the history of medicine in the seventeenth century, which gradually included woman in the diagnosis of melancholy, even in that of the brain. As we have seen, that tradition first associated uterine furor either with erotic melancholy (for Ferrand) 95

On the active and passive imagination, see ibid., pp. 46–59. Todd W. Reeser examines the contradictions between the notions of heat/moisture and cold/humidity that doctors used in defining the female organism. Reeser suggests that the underlying aim was “to create an implied biological masculinity out of these deeply sexist constructions.” See his Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of N orth Carolina, 2006), p. 39. 96 “L’on voyait du feu brûler dans une Riviere sans qu’il y eust de l’artifice.” La Mesnardière, Traité de la melancholie, pp. 30–31. 97 “Que le mal est dans leurs Corps sans qu’il en soit incommode, & que les extravagances & les furies qui les saisissent souvent sont les effets d’une Cause qui n’agit point comme les autres.” Ibid., pp. 35–6. 98 “Grande apparence que c’est à la Melancholie qui s’engendre dans le Cerveau par sa propre intemperie ou à celle là qui luy vient par la tendresse qu’il a non seulement vers les Entrailles dont il épouse les Passions, mais encore vers tout le Corps duquel il reçoit les vapeurs, qu[e] … les Merveilles que l’on voit dans les Possedees.” Ibid., p. 27.


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or with hypochondriacal melancholy (for Du Laurens). What happened next was exactly what La Mesnardière had feared: the female sex was said to possess the most distinguished form of melancholy, that produced in the brain. By 1660, the nuances and differences among forms of melancholy and between the sexes had disappeared, even as writers were taking their distance from the humoral model. Curiously, Ficini’s form of melancholy – that of privilege – was eclipsed, making way for an analysis of the illness’s pathology. Melancholy now occupied a place of choice in the moral and literary realm, as the affliction of a soul troubled by blinding passions or an overwrought imagination. It was also seen to have pernicious consequences for the body, manifested in mutism, insomnia, pallor, and even the outbreak of new maladies.

From Medicine of the Body to Medicine of the Soul In the mid-seventeenth century, when Duc François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) published his Maximes (Maxims; 1664), the debate surrounding the relationship between mind and body was no longer framed by science but was primarily expressed as an ethical and moral concern. That dualist debate relied on the Cartesian model. At the time, melancholy was linked to an imbalance produced by excessive passions, leading moralists to “deduce … a dualist rhetoric that treated maladies of the soul in terms that were now metaphorical, exclusively metaphorical, no longer attaching the words melancholy, atrabilious, ill humor, and dark ideas to any physiological foundation.”99 Patrick Dandrey remarks that it was not until Freud that thinkers would reconcile themselves with monist thought and replace “quite simply the blackness of bile with the darkness of the unconscious.”100 I would like to emphasize this claim, since it points to the specific “dialogue” between the seventeenth century and the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. It was precisely Freud who debunked the notion of the “rational” and rehabilitated a holistic perspective, once again linking mind and body. It was also Freud who “rehabilitated” the affects and discovered the drives, the deep-seated motivations for our behavior. N eurobiologists would then take the further step of returning to the body, replacing seventeenth-century humoral conceptions with an improved understanding of the body’s biochemical activity. Unlike seventeenth-century medical doctors, the moralists were steeped in a dualist conception of the relationship between soul and body. The relationship between substances that the duc de La Rochefoucauld established was exclusively on the order of analogy: “The defects of the soul are like the wounds of the body: however much care is taken in healing them, the scar always appears.”101 This 99

Dandrey, “‘L’amour est un mal: Le guérir est un bien,’” p. 284. Ibid. 101 “Les défauts de l’âme sont comme les blessures du corps: quelques soins que l’on prenne de les guérir, la cicatrice paraît toujours.” François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 100


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principle of analogy between body and mind occurs again when he declares that “there are relapses in maladies of the soul just as in those of the body. What we take for a cure is usually only a respite or change in our illness.”102 At the same time, the interest of doctors in the body was now replaced by a primordial attention to the soul: “The health of the soul is no more assured than that of the body; and though we may seem far removed from the passions, we are in no less danger of losing control of them than of falling ill when we are well.”103 The excesses caused by the passions affect the health of the soul even more than that of the body. La Rochefoucauld takes the Cartesian view of suffering and illness to the extreme. It is not only that they are caused by uncontrolled violent passions; the passions themselves are said to be damaging in general. “The passions have an unfairness and a self-interest about them, which means that it is dangerous to follow them, and that one must be wary of them even when they seem most reasonable.”104 When La Rochefoucauld speaks of the humors, he deplores their “secret influence on us, inasmuch as they play a considerable role in all our actions without our being able to know it.”105 The very apt understanding (recognized by current thinking) that the affects produced by the humors do not always manifest themselves consciously and that, as a result, they escape our control, leads La Rochefoucauld to the moral argument that this “unconscious” operation is pernicious.106 Réflexions diverses, Portraits, Mémoires, (ed.) J. Truchet, M. Escola, and A. Brunn (Paris: Garnier, 2001), Maxim 194. 102 “Il y a des rechutes dans les maladies de l’âme, comme dans celles du corps. Ce que nous prenons pour notre guérison n’est le plus souvent qu’un relâche ou un changement de mal.” Ibid., Maxim 193. 103 “La santé de l’âme n’est pas plus assurée que celle du corps; et quoique l’on paraisse éloigné des passions, on n’est pas moins en danger de s’y laisser emporter que de tomber malade quand on se porte bien.” Ibid., Maxim 188. 104 “Les passions ont une injustice et un propre intérêt qui fait qu’il est dangereux de les suivre, et qu’on s’en doit défier lors même qu’elles paraissent les plus raisonnables.” Ibid., Maxim 9. See also Maxim 10. 105 “Empire secret en nous: de sorte qu’elles ont une part considérable à toutes nos actions, sans que nous le puissions connaître.” Ibid., Maxim 297. In fact, for La Rochefoucauld, judgment and mind are not separate. Rather, “judgment is only the greatness of the mind’s light; that light penetrates to the depth of things; it takes notes of all things that must be noted and perceives those that seem imperceptible. Hence we must agree that it is the range of the mind’s light that produces all the effects one attributes to judgment. It was wrong to believe that the mind and the judgment were two different things” (le jugement n’est que la grandeur de la lumière de l’esprit; cette lumière pénètre le fond des choses; elle y remarque tout ce qu’il faut remarquer et aperçoit celles qui semblent imperceptibles. Ainsi il faut demeurer d’accord que c’est l’étendue de la lumière de l’esprit qui produit tous les effets qu’on attribue au jugement. On s’est trompé lorsqu’on a cru que l’esprit et le jugement étaient deux choses différentes; Maxim 97). 106 In his self-portrait, La Rochefoucauld indicates that he is afflicted with a melancholic humor. As Eric van der Schueren remarks, that humor “escapes the simple

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In his Pensées (published posthumously in 1670), Blaise Pascal (1620–1662) devotes some attention to the study of the relationship between soul and body. John Lyons has examined the influence on Pascal of Descartes’s notion of the bodymachine: “Following the Cartesian idea that the body is a machine, Pascal seized on a central feature of machines, their repetitive activity, and saw how powerful repetition itself can be. Any habit, thought Pascal, can be considered a ‘machine,’ even if it is a purely mental habit. Yet the most powerful habits are those that unite material objects, including the human body (the machine in the conventional Cartesian sense) with perceptions of the mind. Pascal saw repetitive routines, what we would call ‘programs,’ as offering a way to transcend the difference between the physical and the mental.”107 But Pascal goes further than Descartes, transcending the differences between the two substances and conceiving of their union and interdependence. Like Descartes, however, he makes use of the theory of two different substances, explaining: “Our soul is cast into the body, where it finds number, time, dimensions” and “we are automaton as much as we are mind” (L 233-418 and L 252-821).108 Like Descartes, Pascal also gives preference to the mind as a tool of cognition: “All our dignity therefore consists of thought. It is by thought that we must right ourselves, and not by space and time, which we could not fill” (L 347-200).109 The Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa lies behind these observations. For Pascal, however, that differentiation becomes the basis of a moral philosophy and not, as for Descartes, the foundation of a philosophical and scientific epistemology. Pascal concludes, on the basis of the separation of human beings into two kinds of matter, that we are ignorant and bereft. We are in a “terrible ignorance about all things; I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even the part of me that thinks what I say, that reflects on everything and on itself, and does not know itself any more than the rest” (L 194-427).110 H e reinforces that idea by declaring that “what clinches our powerlessness to know things is that they are composed of two contrary natures of different kinds, of soul Hippocratic characterization of temperament, the appropriation of which is a further sign of social distinction, based on a correspondence between the superiority of temperament and the superiority of rank.” Eric van der Schueren, “Dans les yeux d’un duc et pair. De l’autoportrait mélancolique à la genèse des Maximes,” Tangence 60 (1999): 44. 107 John D. Lyons, “Meditation and the Inner Voice,” New Literary History 37 (2006): 536. 108 “N otre âme est jetée dans le corps, où elle trouve nombre, temps, dimensions,” “nous sommes automate autant qu’esprit.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (ed.) Dominique Descotes (Paris: Flammarion, 1976). All references to this edition will be cited in the text. 109 “Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée. C’est de là qu’il faut nous relever et non de l’espace et de la durée, que nous ne saurions remplir.” 110 “Ignorance terrible de toutes choses; je ne sais ce que c’est que mon corps, que mes sens, que mon âme et cette partie même de moi qui pense ce que je dis, qui fait réflexion sur tout et sur elle-même, et ne se connaît non plus que le reste.”


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and body. For it is impossible that the part that reasons within us is anything other than spiritual; and were we to claim that we are merely bodies, that would exclude us even more from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself” (L 72-199).111 He concludes not only that it is difficult for man to distinguish between the two orders (corporeal and spiritual) but also that “man is for himself the most prodigious object of nature; for he cannot conceive what body is, and even less what mind is, and least of all how a body can be joined to a mind. That is the height of his difficulties, and yet it is his own being” (L 72-199).112 Hence the nature of each substance is inconceivable for the human being, as is their union. Pascal creates additional binary divisions, between God’s grandeur and man’s bereft state, between divine purity and human sin, between the pure love of God and concupiscence. Once again, his thinking assumes a moral dimension: the human being is incapable of knowing himself and the world because he floats “over a vast, always unsettled and shifting environment, propelled from one end to the other” (L 72-199).113 Unlike Descartes, who affirms the possibility of self-knowledge and of the progression of knowledge generally, Pascal places the emphasis on our ignorance, our limits, and our corruption. We are in the midst of an incessant war between the senses and the reason, and we endure the human being’s subservience to the imagination (L 82-44). Pascal and Descartes also differ in their respective judgment of the senses. For Descartes, only the cogito can lead the way to truth, and that cogito is valid only when it represses uncertain, vague, or erroneous pathways, including the senses and the imagination. Pascal, antiCartesian in this respect, nevertheless accepts “two principles of truth, reason and the senses,” even though they mislead each other (L 83-45).114 In opposition to Descartes, he posits a truth that is rational and emotional, in which reason and the senses act in concert. One must listen to both sides. That leads him to stipulate a mixed and dual knowledge, in which reason must rely on the senses and on an affective cognition: “We know the truth not only by reason but also by the 111 “Ce qui achève notre impuissance à connaître les choses, est qu’elles sont composées de deux natures opposées et de divers genres, d’âme et de corps. Car il est impossible que la partie qui raisonne en nous soit autre que spirituelle; et quand on prétendrait que nous serions simplement corporels, cela nous exclurait bien d’avantage de la connaissance des choses, n’ayant rien de si inconcevable que de dire que la matière se connaît soi-même.” 112 “L’homme est à lui-même le plus prodigieux objet de la nature; car il ne peut concevoir ce que c’est que corps, et encore moins ce que c’est qu’esprit, et moins qu’aucune chose comment un corps peut être uni avec un esprit. C’est là le comble de ses difficultés, et cependant c’est son propre être.” 113 “Sur un milieu vaste, toujours incertains et flottants, poussés d’un bout vers l’autre.” 114 “Deux principes de la vérité, la raison et les sens.” See also L 430-149 and 230. Pascal notes that the reason and the senses deceive each other, and that man’s problem is the misuse and corruption of every principle.


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heart” (L 282-110).115 The Cartesian “I think” is transformed into an “I think and I feel,” an interdependent relationship where mind and body, rational knowledge and affective knowledge, and thought and instinct join forces. It is in this sense that writers such as Surin, Lafayette, Molière, and Racine are close to Pascal. N ot only do they obliterate the superiority of the rational realm and the illusion of the will’s and the judgment’s mastery over the passions, but they also demonstrate that reason and the affects are pathways to our conception of ourselves, and that these two principles cannot be separated.116 Pascal alerts us as well to the dangerous power of the imagination, “that deceptive part of man, master of error and falseness … [but which] is not always so” (L 82-44).117 By its opacity, the imagination is the worst enemy of reason. Pascal articulates its power: it “enjoys controlling and dominating, to show it can do anything” (L 82-44)118 and acts with such force that it prevails over the reason and obliges it to yield. It incites us to actions that destroy our judgment and our senses; moreover, it has the capacity to obscure the difference between true and false. Matthew W. Maguire notes “Pascal’s steady recourse in this fragment to language that describes imagination as a kind of violence in relation to others, engaged in ‘control,’ ‘domination,’ ‘haughtiness,’ and ‘daring.”119 By contrast, the reason becomes a secondary power, prey to the imagination, which “makes us believe, doubt, or deny the reason” (L 82-44).120 The imagination rules the two principles of truth, reason and the senses both.121 115

“N ous connaissons la vérité, non seulement par la raison, mais encore par le coeur.” 116 Pascal also formulates the idea of a precipice toward which the human being runs, dominated by his imagination, pursued by his warring senses and reason, or blinded by his passions. It is this same image of the abyss or precipice that we will find in Lafayette, who thereby accepts the internal schism between the reason and the senses, the will and the force of the passions. 117 “Cette partie décevante dans l’homme, cette maîtresse d’erreur et de fausseté … [qui pourtant] ne l’est pas toujours.” 118 “Se plait à contrôler et à dominer, pour montrer combien elle peut toutes choses.” 119 Matthew W. Maguire, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 19. 120 “Fait croire, douter, nier la raison.” Conversely, in La logique (1662), Arnauld and N icole recognize the deception stemming from the imagination but also assert reason’s power over it. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre N icole, La logique, ou, L’art de penser, (ed.) Charles Jourdain (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). The philosopher most critical of the imagination is undoubtedly N icolas Malebranche. According to him, that faculty not only turns man away from the truth but—as Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine observes—“it also makes us live in a world where the order of things is reversed, where appearances, superstition, and amour propre prevail. It is ‘deadly’ both ‘to those who possess it and to those who admire it in others without possessing it themselves’” (introduction, Nicolas Malebranche, p. 8). 121 Descartes believed that the imagination was grounded in the senses, argued for the power of the reason and of the will to restrain it, and explained that this faculty had


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The literary writers discussed in the following chapters develop the ethical and moral notion of conflict within the human being. Like La Rochefoucauld and Pascal, they touch on the imagination, the senses, the passions, and the opposing forces acting within their characters that cause their tragic breakdowns. For Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine, the conjunction between mental suffering and physical prostration becomes an integral element of the analysis. Hence the importance they grant to the body as the expression of the troubled soul. By contrast, they take their distance from any dualist model or from the analogical principle found in Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, adopting an integrated perspective that clearly demonstrates the union between mind and body. That perspective subtly grasps the role of the affects, the senses, and the imagination. It is here that the current researchers in psychosomatic medicine, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis can find inspiration and innovative precursors in the seventeenth century.

Mind/Body and the Romantic Period Having defined the shift in the mind/body relationship during the early modern period and its consequences in Western thought, we must also consider the views of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, before turning to the heart of our subject, the affinity between seventeenth-century conceptions of the human being as an integrated subject and contemporary theories that expound such holism. Even a cursory glance at the romantic period reveals that there were clear detractors of Descartes’s rationalism, of the Enlightenment’s insistence on reason, and of the philosophical materialism of the era, which claimed that everything (including the spiritual) could be explained in terms of physical matter. How did romanticism seek to affirm the union of mind and body, reason and affects? And how were these ideas different from those that connect the seventeenth century to our current perceptions in particular? The romantic thinkers repeatedly expressed a concern to recover a unity that had been lost. Wordsworth calls the “‘anxiety of … hope’ … the feeling that the condition of harmony has to be returned to, that the idea of unity has to be recovered or reborn.”122 According to Geoffrey Hartman, the the power only to deny but never to create an external reality. Pascal, conversely, felt it necessary to distinguish between an internal and an external imagination, the latter of which creates its own truth. The external imagination legitimates an entire system based on illusion and distributes reputations, imposing respect for the magistrate and observance of the law and justice: “The imagination has everything at its disposal; it produces beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in the world” (L’imagination dispose de tout; elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur, qui est le tout du monde; L 82-44). Despite its powers of deception, it can become a source of reason and of temporary happiness for those on whom it bestows glory. 122 Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 40.

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desire “to maintain something of the interacting unity of self and life, is a central concern of the Romantic poets.”123 Jerome McGann calls attention to the social and political transformations at work in times of “epistemological crises,” which instill writers with the desire to seek unity.124 To unify the human being, one must also come to understand the union between reason, sensation, and imagination, which, as Robert J. Richards has shown, is a process that entails considerations of philosophy, science, and literature.125 As Jean-Jacques Rousseau endeavored to find a new harmony and to investigate new truths, he subordinated reason to the cult of the imagination, the affects, and the intuition. Rousseau also countered the materialists’ claims that “a machine does not think [une machine ne pense pas]”126 and elevated the human being above a purely mechanistic construction. He then embraced the senses as the original and sole source of knowledge of the outside world. As Rousseau writes in Émile (1755), “The first truth that strikes me and [that] I am forced to accept” is the knowledge of my existence via the “senses through which I receive impressions … . To perceive is to feel; to compare is to judge; to judge and to feel are not the same. Through sensation objects present themselves to me separately and singly as they are in nature; by comparing them I rearrange them.”127 Existence is first of all based on the ability to feel: “To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas.”128 The most immediate force working upon us is the senses. Rousseau highlights this further when he speaks of the education of the child. At first, the child is dominated by his sense perceptions, which he receives passively. The senses are active forces that take hold of the (passive) child. It is the tutor’s role to help him develop clear perceptions of his impressions and to form associations among them and make judgments. But when speaking of puberty, as John Lyons has shown, “Rousseau links sensibility with sentiment, and sentiment is emphatically not, for him, a reaction to an external physical stimulus. Instead, 123 Geoffrey Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Selfconsciousnes,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958–1970, (ed.) Geoffrey Hartman (N ew Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 302–03. 124 McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 40. 125 Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 19. 126 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’éducation, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 585. 127 “J’existe et j’ai des sens par lesquels je suis affecté. Voilà la première vérité qui me frappe, et à laquelle je suis forcé d’acquiescer … . Apercevoir, c’est sentir, comparer, c’est juger.” Ibid., pp. 570–71. The English translation is taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1974), p. 232. 128 Rousseau, Emile, p. 253. “Exister pour nous, c’est sentir; notre sensibilité est incontestablement antérieure à nôtre intelligence, et nous avons eu des sentiments avant des idées” (p. 600).


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sentiment, which Rousseau may have gotten from Pascal or some other writer in the Augustinian-Jansenist current, seems to be an inherent part of the human mind or spirit that conditions how people perceive the world and themselves in relation to the world.”129 For Rousseau, the term “sensibility” [sensibilité] has two parallel meanings. It can refer to a mental image, which he associates with the imagination, or to a physical perception. At first, “the child’s body is active, but his mind is passive, impressionable, and incapable of detaching itself from the stream of sense data.”130 The “natural education” by the senses must be completed by the tutor, who seeks to complement with active judgments the sensations from the outside world that act on the passive body. Awareness is thus more than just sensation, and the power of the mind resides in the fact that it “brings my sensations together and compares them,” a process that Rousseau calls “attention, meditation or reflection.”131 Although, for Rousseau, the human being undeniably consists of a single, unified organism in which the physical and mental faculties clearly interact, his views differ in two respects from seventeenth-century conceptions. First, the body is not disengaged from the senses. Sensibility may be linked either to the body (through physical stimuli) or to the mind (mental images), but it is the only physiological aspect Rousseau considers. The body-proper with its many repertories (blood, chemicals, skin color, posture, facial expression, and so on) and the variety of changes in the body induced by the senses are left out. Second, even though his intriguing idea of the sensations and judgment working together can be seen to provide a fairly satisfactory answer to the mind/body problem, the body itself remains passive for Rousseau, even during sense perception. He says, in fact, that the human being receives these impressions passively and that only by rearranging them does the intelligent being become active with regard to them. To feel is to be passive, while the subject who compares occupies a position of activity. In a similar fashion, in the 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes the new romantic concept of self, emphasizing that the mind is part of the nature it perceives. The Wordsworthian mind is not an isolated entity but is always changing, is in a constant interchange with sensations that modify the mind even as the mind modifies sensations in turn. We should not understand the mind merely as a passive receptacle, however. In its interchange with sensation, “it recognizes itself in an external sensation… . Wordsworth is moving toward a notion of external self.”132 This idea is close to what neurobiologists call “the self … [as] a repeatedly reconstructed biological state” in constant interaction with the environment. The current view is that the organism actively modifies itself 129 John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 199. 130 Ibid., p. 200. 131 Rousseau, Emile, p. 520. 132 Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 36.


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and “continuously acts on the environment … . [The organism] must sense the environment (smell, touch, hear, see), so that appropriate actions can be taken in response to what is sensed. Perceiving is as much about acting on the environment as it is about receiving signals from it.”133 Wordsworth is positing the association between signals received from the body and the active modulations that constantly take place within it. Most important, the changes occur in both the mind and in sense perceptions, and the mind is “gradually produced”134 from the emotions and sensations. Despite this idea of mind as a process growing out of feelings, there is a certain underlying suggestion that feelings need direction through thought. Although in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth initially says that “all good Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” these feelings need to be “modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feeling will be connected with important subjects.”135 That is, the influx of feelings is in need of “contemplating” and “representation” by thoughts. Wordsworth even believes that we can form “habits of mind” that “blindly and mechanically” learn to understand the connections between the impulses. While mental associations take place through the affects, there is an implicit idea of conditioning, and here Wordsworth seems to be in agreement with Descartes. Thought becomes an instrument for training and transforming the “impressions.” Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances” in Les fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil) foregrounds a subjective experience in which the external world of nature and the inner world “correspond” to each other through connections (vertical, horizontal, synesthetic, transcendental) that elicit feelings and ideas in the subject. The poet affirms thereby the role of the imagination in perceiving and understanding these correspondences. Baudelaire conceives of a unified organism in which sensations and the imaginative faculty are not opposed to the “reason” but constitute almost “scientific” faculties that aid us in understanding the “correspondances” between the visible and the invisible. Again, this dynamic vision of body and mind assumes that the two are on equal footing; even more intriguing, it is precisely the term “correspondences” that neurobiologists such as Damasio now use to refer to the mapping that occurs from body to mind through the modifications and perceptions of the body. Baudelaire articulates the notion we encounter today that “the idea of an object in a given mind cannot occur without the existence of the body” as a pathway, establishing the mind as “made up of images, representations, or thoughts of our own parts of our body in spontaneous Damasio, Descartes’ Error, pp. 227 and 225. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, (ed.) Michael Mason, preface by John Mullan, 2nd ed. (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2007), p. 82. 135 Ibid., p. 62. 133 134


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action or in the process of modifications caused by objects in the environment.”136 This notion clearly departs from Cartesian rationalism, which casts our experience in terms of abstract thought and reason. N evertheless, the differences between seventeenth-century holistic conceptions and the romantic viewpoint need once more to be stressed. For the romantics, the sensory modalities were separate from the rest of the body and could be understood without any further influence from the body-proper. Although they had a comprehensive understanding of the ongoing representation within the self, they relinquished the “prior levels” that neurobiologists have highlighted and that the seventeenth century had already clearly studied: the range of bodily repertories (humors, reflexes, senses, bodily states, and so on) that register pleasure and pain.137 Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1810; On Germany) considers the definition of the self at even greater length. How are ideas formed in the human mind? The author asks this question in evaluating the various contributions of German, French, and English philosophers. She is opposed to materialistic reductionism, which rids the human being of free will and a moral sense, and she rejects the theory that the human mind develops solely from external sensations and experience.138 She suggests instead the dual origin of

Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, pp. 213–14. With Baudelaire, we witness a reappearance of pathological melancholy, which he called “spleen.” In Le misanthrope, we already find the word “spleen,” linked to black bile and humoral melancholy. But Baudelaire associates it primarily with the affected soul of the artist as a sort of “mood,” Stimmung, which is, however, pathological. See Robert Kopp, “‘Les limbes insondées de la tristesse.’ Figures de la mélancolie romantique de Chateaubriand à Sartre,” in Mélancolie, génie et folie en Occident, (ed.) Jean Clair (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), pp. 328–39. In Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age, 1750–1850 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), Allan H. Pasco links this melancholy to depression, a psychological malady, and argues that the romantics “purposefully dwelled on melancholic, morbid thoughts” (p. 147). As in the seventeenth century, the cultivation of melancholy was linked at the time to a willful distinctiveness (consider, in particular, Alceste’s and Argan’s desires to be different and Phaedra’s freedom to “choose” her own suicide as an act of independence). As in Phèdre, there is often also an element of fatality; the romantic hero is “born” to suffer (p. 151). In Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807), melancholy is seen as the psychological effect of the “heroïne’s selfdestructive internalization of the patriarchal values and modes of thinking and feeling.” See Kari Lokke, “Sibylline Leaves: Mary Shelley’s Valperga and the Legacy of Corinne,” in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, (ed.) Gregory Maertz (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 1998), p. 167. 138 Mme de Staël accuses Locke of bringing to France a materialism based on sensation and sensory knowledge of the external world that does away with innate ideas and that fails to resolve the questions of our moral duty and of the immortality of the soul. Instead, she admires Leibniz’s philosophy but claims that Kant was the greatest philosopher. 136 137

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ideas: from inside us and from external circumstances.139 She also asserts the unity of sensibility, imagination, and reason, which are of service to one another and together constitute the “I,” which can be described as a mobile center and an integrated organism.140 Without question, she assumes an intermediary stance between the idealism of Descartes (a thinker to whom she pays homage) and the thinking of those philosophers who derive all truth from sensory knowledge. Yet underlying her thinking is a clear division between interior and exterior, material and immaterial, mind and body, erroneous and accurate knowledge. The duality of idea formation is posited throughout, in that she still distinguishes between an immaterial soul – free of “servitude” – and a material body, one whose senses are “subject to error,” which is distinct from the soul and of lesser value: “The proofs of the spirituality of the soul cannot be found in the realm of the senses. The visible world is abandoned to that realm, but the invisible world cannot be subordinate to it; and if one does not allow for spontaneous ideas, if thought and sentiment depend entirely on sensations, how could the soul, in such servitude, be immaterial?”141 In contesting John Locke’s fixation on the body and the extreme empiricism of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Mme de Staël sets as her primary goal to affirm the innate capacity of our moral faculties to distinguish between right and wrong. Yet in doing so, she remains dependent on a vision in which the human being remains a “double nature,” defined by two almost separate forces: the senses and the soul, internal and external circumstances;142 and she likens herself to Descartes in claiming the freedom and power of the will as an active regulatory force. In opposition to both rationalism and the philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment that turned it on its head, the romantic authors briefly discussed here demonstrate the formation of a new “self” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the new unity of the human being. Yet in redefining the mind, they rely heavily on the idea that it takes shape from feelings. The real breakthrough is the idea of mind as a process informed by its relationships to the organism and to objects. But the problem remains: the senses can be and are separated from the body-proper.

139 See Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, (ed.) la Comtesse de Pange (Paris: Hachette, 1958–1960), Vol. 4, part 3, pp. 15–16. 140 Ibid., pp. 28–9. 141 “Les preuves de la spiritualité de l’âme ne peuvent se trouver dans l’empire des sens, le monde visible est abandonné à cet empire; mais le monde invisible ne saurait y être soumis; et si l’on n’admet pas des idées spontanées, si la pensée et le sentiment dépendent en entier des sensations, comment l’âme, dans une telle servitude, serait-elle immatérielle?” (pp. 45–6). 142 She notes, however, that certain faculties belong to both body and mind, such as memory and calculation (p. 257).


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The Relationship between Substances: The Contemporary Conception It was with Freud that a new and genuine interest in the mind’s influence over the body replaced previous investigations, physiological for the most part, and that a fundamental acceptance of the union between mind and body ushered in a new way of reasoning and new ways of treating illnesses.143 Lilian Furst asserts that Freud’s perspicacious understanding of the role of the “unconscious” represented “an enormous advance on mere ‘imagination.’ By surmising the power of the unconscious, Freud was able to suggest the mechanism whereby ‘psychophysical’ or psychosomatic disorders became manifest.”144 Before turning to the neurobiological theories that concern us today and to neurobiologists’ interest in the seventeenth century, I would like quickly to reconstruct Freud’s “conversion” argument and assert, with Furst, that his interpretation is “the major landmark in the return swing of the pendulum away from the fragmentation” of the substances to the recovery of a psychophysiological model of mind/body union.145 Freud’s interest in “conversion” as it concerns repression [Verdrängung] has often been misunderstood: “While repression is the accepted translation for ‘Verdrängung’ in psychology, the literal meaning of the German word is to supplant. The difference between the customary and the literal translation is important. ‘To repress’ denotes to keep down, restrain, curb, check, overcome; ‘to supplant’ means to take the place of, oust, usurp a position or function.”146 In subsequent chapters, we will see that both sets of connotations are germane in describing repression: there is both an attempt to “keep down” the violent passions and a “displacement” onto the body, conversion in the Freudian sense. Freud not only noted the persistence of unresolved disturbances in the psyche and studied their “leap” onto the body but also identified the diversity of pathological manifestations produced, acknowledging that the patient’s treatment ought to have a mental and a physiological aspect.147 The imperative to “read” the body’s language, that is, to provide it with a meaning that is inherently connected to 143 There was a lexical shift from “melancholy” in the seventeenth century to “hysteria” in the nineteenth century and to “(psycho)neurosis,” a term introduced by Freud. In the eighteenth century, the notion of melancholy coexisted with that of madness and hysteria, and Rousseau does not distinguish clearly between melancholy and hysteria. For the history of hysteria, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1994). 144 Lilian Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 2003), p. 32. 145 Ibid., p. 35. 146 Ibid., p. 33. 147 Sigmund Freud, “Psychische Behandlung (Seelenbehandlung),” Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik, Studienausgabe, Vol. 11, 5th ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), p. 18.


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our inner self, constituted one of his most important insights and had a decisive influence on “psychosomatic” medicine. With the advent of a new current within medical practice came greater attention to the role of emotions, resulting in a “total” picture of health and disease.148 Franz Alexander’s Psychosomatic Medicine (1950) is considered one of the earliest attempts to define the “psychosomatic approach … [as] a multidisciplinary approach in which psychiatrists collaborate with experts in the different branches of medicine.”149 Alexander was a key figure who studied the interrelationship between the psychic and the physical. According to the Freudian psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, the purpose of studying psychosomatic illnesses is “to draw the psyche from the mind back to the original intimate association with the body” and to redefine the psyche as the imaginary elaboration of body parts, feelings, and functions that reflect real physical activity.150 Instead of verbal “speech,” we are confronted with physiological “speech.” Joyce McDougall, a N ew Zealander psychoanalyst, understands psychosomatic illness as a “theater of the body”151 and soma as the place where modifications of psychic origin are represented. She underscores the importance of deciphering the language of distress, which is mediated through the body, and seeks to “reconvert” physical disturbances to discover their origin in unvoiced distress. I shall not attempt to provide a full history of the important transformations within psychosomatic medicine. I merely wish to point out the turn toward “the body in the forefront as the site of the disorder.”152 The term “somatoform,” which has recently replaced “psychosomatic” in the DSM-IV, is a clear indicator of that shift in focus. While the shift was intended to provide a more “scientific” diagnosis, it has led to accusations within the psychiatric community that the “biopsychological” model – that is, the social and psychological factors attributing to the disorders – is being forgotten in favor of a “behaviorist” view. The major contribution of neurobiology has been to liberate psychiatric medicine from an emphasis on “rationalist” convictions and from behaviorism. At the same time, it continues to engage in a dialogue with seventeenth-century thinkers and is determined to show us that the famous Cartesian formula (“I think, therefore I am”), obsolete but persistent, must be erased from our thoughts for good if we are to construct reality. After centuries of scientific knowledge based on the hegemony of reason established by Descartes, we are now experiencing

Furst, Idioms, p. 39. Franz Alexander, Psychosomatic Medicine: Its Principles and Applications (N ew York: N orton, 1950), p. 13. 150 Donald Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (N ew York: Basic Books, 1958), pp. 254, 244. 151 Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (N ew York: N orton, 1989). 152 Furst, Idioms, p. 45. 148 149


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the “affect revolution.”153 In his effort to dismantle once and for all the Cartesian notion of the primacy of reason, the neurologist Joseph LeDoux replaces the rational brain with the idea of the “emotional brain,” the title of one of his books (1988). And in L’homme neuronal (1983; Neuronal Man), Jean-Pierre Changeux declares that “the cleavage between mental and neural activities is not justified. As a result, what is the point of speaking of ‘mind’? There are now only two ‘aspects’ of a single ‘event.’”154 Hence Spinoza’s idea of modes seems more modern than ever and has been resuscitated by the prominent neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, who grants the utmost importance to the Dutch philosopher in his most recent book, Looking for Spinoza (2003). This return to the seventeenth century is remarkable. Damasio points to Spinoza’s insight that the body and the mind are on equal footing. He identifies Spinoza as a startling pioneer who unlocked the secret of consciousness as a matter of mind and body. He shows how the Dutch philosopher, in anticipating a solution to the mind/body problem, opened the way for a revised study of reason, consciousness, and affect. Damasio makes a compelling case for the dialogue between the seventeenth century and the contemporary era, one that, as I suggest in this study, can also include other writers who are just as important as Spinoza. Let us compare Spinoza’s most radical and anti-Cartesian thesis to Damasio’s view. In the Ethics, Spinoza proclaims: if there is no body, there is no longer any mind, “the mind does not know itself except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body” (p. 101). Damasio, in one of his most daring and controversial arguments, explains that “the mind exists for the body, is engaged in telling the story of the body’s multifarious events, and uses that story to optimize the life of the organism.”155 T he term affect – used by Spinoza to rid himself of the Cartesian notion of the passions and later employed by Freud to express the state of a mind joined to a body – is still key to studies of what is now called the “neurobiology of the affects.” Damasio’s further divides affects into emotions and feelings. Feelings appear only after emotions, which consist of information received by the body-proper. Emotions can be described as a series of chemical and neural responses.156 Feelings constitute the mental representations (or “mapping”) of bodily states; they are the perception of such states, “an idea of a certain aspect of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances,” and may involve “the perception of a certain accompanying mind state – the changes in mode of thinking.”157 Damasio explains that our feelings arise from the body-sensing regions of the brain, which map the

153 See Emily Eakin, “I Feel, Therefore I Am: A Thinker Reunites Mind and Body,” New York Times, April 19, 2003. 154 Jean-Pierre Changeux, L’homme neuronal (Paris: Fayard, 1983), p. 364. 155 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 206, emphasis mine. 156 Ibid., p. 53. 157 Ibid., p. 89.


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changes occurring in the body.158 Feelings are “the mapping of a particular body state and from which a mental image of the body state can emerge.”159 This means that they depend on both body and brain, each of which is capable of contributing to the processes of consciousness and to creating the “feeling” and “thinking” self. Joy, fear, sorrow, and so on, are all produced by the changes taking place in the body (body postures, facial expressions, sense experience). It is these manifestations of the body that give rise to our perception of feelings. LeDoux, who takes the same tack as Damasio, is primarily interested in the idea of “emotion” and in the importance of soma for the production of affects. He intends to show the interrelatedness between emotion and cognition but also explains that we experience our emotions primarily in our bodies.160 Hence, for Damasio and LeDoux, experiencing affects becomes crucial for our knowledge of emotion, and there is a strong link between automatic bodily responses and the subsequent processing by the brain that leads to our conscious perception of these changes. While the emotions operate automatically, “feelings do involve conscious content, but we don’t necessarily have conscious access to the processes that produce the event.”161 This “new” argument, putting great emphasis on the subjective experience of body and mind, shows that affects are vital to consciousness. To anticipate the argument developed in the following chapters, we can say that writers other than Spinoza emphasized the need for a holistic perception. Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine had already attempted to explain the interrelationship between body and mind and their integration. The crux of their common argument was, first, that the body acquires an individuality that expresses and causes mental perceptions, and second, that the “I”’s understanding of itself is not grounded in rational thoughts but in the concrete and moment-by-moment experience of the body. For them, the body does not serve solely as the passive mirror for the soul’s distress but acquires a central function in unfolding and transcribing the distress. When we strive to understand how crucial the emotions and feelings are for our self-understanding and hence to affirm the role the body plays in the construction of our reality, we break down the separation between body and mind that Western thought has maintained for three centuries. As Frank Ochmann has said, we have long known by experience how physical ills act on our morale and, conversely, how psychic suffering literally affects our heart.162 158

Ibid., pp. 196–97. Ibid., p. 88. 160 LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, p. 295. 161 Ibid., p. 299. Malebranche had already noted our incapacity to master the violent, unreflective passions with our will, a theory adopted and developed by present-day neurobiologists. 162 In German: “Die Erfahrung hat uns längst gelehrt wie sehr uns physische Probleme auf die Stimmung schlagen und umgekehrt Seelenturbulenzen buschstäblich ans Herz gehen können,” Frank Ochmann, “Die Macht der Gefühle,” Stern 35 (2003): 98. 159


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Yet it is only recently that attempts to account for the integration of mind and body have stimulated a renewed interest in our holistic ancestors. The efforts of neuroscientists not merely to reconcile mind and body but to explain how they work “in concert” lead us back to the seventeenth century, where we find the rudimentary foundations of these studies. In the following chapters, I shall analyze the literary representation of mind/body disorders to reveal the “other” voices that emerged, voices that refused to be caught up in the mind/body dichotomy but that explored and aptly illustrated the interwoven experience of physiological and psychical mechanisms. By considering the common effect of “conversion,” I will explore various views directly relevant to current research on the mind/body relationship, views that lie behind the “affect revolution.”


Chapter 2

Possession, Exorcism, and Madness: The Context of Jean-Joseph Surin’s Illness

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. – Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

Was Father Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–1665) a “madman” punished by Jesus Christ for taking His name in vain, as Surin’s contemporary Father Babinet proclaimed, or was his illness the effect of a profound melancholy that had assailed him, as the physician Marc Duncan believed? Was Surin the victim of a diabolical influence over his body and mind? Was he an “obsessive,” as Father Claude Bastide claimed and as Surin himself confirmed in his self-portrait? The difficulty that both Surin and his contemporaries had in grasping the nature of his illness, and the preponderant interest it attracted at the time, were expressed in a variety of medical treatises, religious writings, and oral explanations, whose aim in every case was to argue one of these theses. In his partly autobiographical Science expérimentale (Experimental science) – written in 1663 but published only two centuries after his death – Surin invokes the mystery surrounding the nature of his illness, which resulted in “some even going looking for a race and a horoscope and, through observations of what had happened in my youth, finally concluding … [that] there was no reason to hope that things would change for the better… . Most men, even the wisest among them, tended to say it was only a melancholic humor, or a devout illusion, or a fantasy.” In his Traité de la mélancolie, Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mesnardière opts for the view that Surin’s symptoms were more serious than those of melancholy. N evertheless, Marc Duncan and Guy Patin speak of Surin’s “manic hysteria,” “erotomania,” or “delirium melancholicum” and attribute the illness to members of religious orders who are confined and removed from all sexual activity, and who then take leave of their senses. See HippolyteJules Pilet de la Mesnardière, Traité de la melancholie, sçavoir si elle est la cause des effets que l’on remarque dans les possédées de Loudun (La Flèche: M. Guyot and G. Laboe, 1635); and Marc Duncan and Guy Patin in Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle. Une analyse de psychologie historique (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. 281. “Quelques-uns allaient rechercher jusque dans une race et un horoscope, et par des observations prises de ce qui s’était passé en ma jeunesse, concluant, enfin … [qu’] il n’y avait pas sujet d’espérer que cela changeât en mieux… . La plupart des hommes, mêmes les plus sages, tendaient à dire que ce n’était qu’une humeur mélancolique ou illusion de dévotion, ou fantaisie.” Jean-Joseph Surin, Triomphe de l’amour divin sur les puissances

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Whether melancholy or madness, damnation or the delirium of a confined and lonely soul, the Jesuit father’s “unknown illness” lasted from 1637 to 1654, a period when the author’s thinking eludes our grasp. We will never know the exact nature of the obscure illness that afflicted Surin for almost twenty years. Yet his mutism, and the absence of letters written during this period, make clear to us the violence and turbulence the illness caused him. Once a prolific author of letters written for a diverse audience, Surin suddenly lapsed into a silence imposed by his suffering and began to speak again only when he was on the road to recovery. In Science expérimentale, he sought an explanation for his illness, a justification for his debility and mutism, and implicitly blamed those who, out of scruples, ignorance, or malice, had accused him of being weak or mad. Surin’s writings are divided between a “before” and an “after,” and his illness is the occasion for an intellectual transformation. Before his illness, Surin followed the views propounded by the scholars of the Jesuit community. Writing his narrative in 1663, he found himself at an impasse, caught between the rationalist arguments put forward by church authorities and the ideas resulting from his personal ordeal. The priest wrote down the reflections to which his experience gave rise and which led him to invent a way of thinking about the mind/body relation distinct from the predominant theories of his environment. Surin attempted to answer the following questions: how does man conceive of himself? What is the function of the soul and of the body in one’s self-understanding? What is the role of pain in the notion of selfhood? Illness introduced a rift between Surin the priest and exorcist and a Surin who was himself infirm, who through his illness and in response to his suffering revised his thinking about the human being’s constitution, its prevailing faculties, and the foundation of the most direct sense of “selfhood.” His reflections on the state of his illness and its relation to madness are among the leitmotifs of his narrative and the ground of his writing: “Indeed, there was no one who did not judge at the time that I was utterly unhinged and like a sixyear-old child, yet I was never more serious to my own sense, or more attentive to God in my reason, or more desirous to satisfy him” (p. 196). He defends himself against those who judge him “mad” and who decry him as insane, showing that this way of thinking is inadequate because it confuses madness with his illness, which he calls “obsession”: the takeover of his body and his soul by demons. “N evertheless, Our Lord left me with reason and competence as great as I have at de l’enfer et Science expérimentale des choses de l’autre vie, (ed.) Michel de Certeau (Grenoble: Millon, 1990), pp. 220–21. All references to this edition will be cited in the text. See also Michel de Certeau’s detailed study of the history of Surin’s works, including an explanation for the delay in publishing Science expérimentale resulting from the loss of the original manuscript. See “Les œuvres de Jean-Joseph Surin. Histoire des textes,” parts 1 and 2, in Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 40, 4 (1964): 443–73 and 41, 1 (1965): 55–78. “Car il n’y avait personne qui ne jugeât alors que j’étais tout à fait démonté et comme un enfant de six ans, et pourtant je ne fus jamais plus sérieux en mon sens ni plus attentif à Dieu dans ma raison, ni plus désireux de lui satisfaire.”

Possession, Exorcism, and Madness

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this moment, which was extremely painful to my mind. Those around me did not see the violence I was suffering, and it was impossible for me to express it, so that it gave rise to a justified aversion to me, and punishments were inflicted on me as on madmen, which I sorely felt, because I had my full senses and discernment, and I was incapable of saying so or of doing otherwise” (p. 196). In distinguishing between the two states (madness and obsession), the author seeks to assert that his soul had not lost its reason but that he suffered from a debility of the reason in which the soul, unable to act, found itself under the sway of external forces that prevented him from thinking freely. He insists that at every point in his illness and at the time of writing, he remembered everything – that is, reason, wisdom, and reflection never left him (cf. p. 197) – and he adds a self-justification to this explanation: “Believing one is damned is something that several very wise men have believed” (p. 179). Surin wishes to convey that, unlike the madman, who has truly lost his reason, he was clearly aware of demonic interference but was deprived of the means to react against it and to release himself from its control. Surin’s illness followed the famous historical event of the possession of Loudun. His literary works are little known today, though easily accessible in French; his notoriety lies instead in the role he played as an exorcist at the convent of possessed Ursuline nuns, where he was dispatched in 1634. Loudun, a diverse city with a seditious population – a Huguenot stronghold at the time – had experienced a long history of internal struggles between parties seeking religious and political power. Between 1630 and 1640, the positions of the warring camps had hardened around the person of Father Urbain Grandier. Grandier became the target of criticism not only because of his religious affiliation (he associated with Jesuits), his audacious writings against the Catholic Church, and his moral transgressions, but also because of his insatiable political ambitions. After seizing the post of parish priest, he also procured important jobs for the members of his family. In that turbulent political and religious atmosphere, the prioress Jeanne des Anges and a dozen nuns were overcome by hysteria. They suddenly came to believe they were possessed by demons that made them scream irrationally “N éanmoins N otre-Seigneur me laissa la raison et l’advertance aussi grande que je l’ai à cette heure, ce qui était une extrême peine à mon esprit. Ceux qui étaient auprès de moi ne voyaient pas la violence que je souffrais, et il m’était impossible de le dire, de sorte que cela donnait une juste aversion de moi, et [l’on] me traitait avec des châtiments comme on fait aux fous, qui m’étaient sensibles, à cause que j’avais mon sentiment et discernement entier, et que j’étais incapable de le dire, ni de faire autrement.” “Croire que l’on est damné, est une chose que plusieurs fort sages ont cru.” Urbain Grandier clashed with the authority of the Catholic Church because of his liberal view toward the marriage of priests and because of his mode of life, which was discredited as libertine. He caused a scandal with his affairs, even fathering an illegitimate child. Grandier was also the author of a political pamphlet entitled La cordonnière de Loudun (The lady cobbler of Loudun), which targeted Cardinal Richelieu. See Michel de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 81–90.

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and commit blasphemies, then engage in bizarre contortions. During one of the exorcism sessions the Catholic church had set up, a demon speaking through the nuns uttered Grandier’s name. Grandier was then publicly accused of witchcraft. The trial began on July 8, 1634, and ended with his condemnation to death by fire. He was also the target of moral persecution by parties who reproached him for having sexual relationships with local young women. As N icholas Paige explains: “Grandier was a convenient scapegoat, having made at least as many enemies as cuckolds in the city… . [Yet the] prompt execution of his sentence did nothing to stop the possession, the continued visibility of which served numerous interests.” The possession of Loudun continued after Grandier’s death, a visible sign of the invisible political or religious conspiracies striking the city, which the public exorcisms did not end. Surin, a devout and zealous young man who had believed deeply in his vocation since the age of thirteen, was granted authority to deal with the affair. He distinguished himself from his contemporaries in his method of exorcism, departing from the usual public spectacles and preferring a private form of treatment, an “interior approach.” The priest had “a notion of diabolical possession whereby the demons not only took advantage of the possessed person’s weaknesses but acted within her by uniting with her soul, in accordance with the mystical model of divine union with the soul.” Through private dialogue with the nuns, particularly with Jeanne des Anges, he sought to restore the body’s health with the help of the soul. According to him, an exorcist had to address both the physical and mental aspects of possession and to instill God’s love into the soul in order to liberate the body. That conception implies a profound union of body and mind. Surin labeled the nuns’ illness an “obsession.” The theoretical distinction between “possession” and “obsession” is that, during possession, demons seize hold of a person’s body and act within it, but without taking over the person’s mental life (Science p. 167). In the case of obsession, conversely, physical symptoms are the manifestation of a profoundly psychological disorder.10 Surin’s The seventeenth-century libertine thinker Gabriel N audé had already condemned the women’s “frivolous and groundless accusations” against Grandier. Gabriel N audé, quoted in Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France, p. 300. N icholas D. Paige, Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 184. “Une conception de la possession diabolique où non seulement les démons profitent des faiblesses de la personne possédée mais où ils agissent en elle en s’unissant à son âme suivant le modèle mystique de l’union du divin avec l’âme.” Katherine Dauge-Roth, “Méditations, figures et expériences de l’autre vie: Jean-Joseph Surin à la rencontre du démoniaque,” in L’Autre au XVIIe siècle. Actes du 4e colloque du Centre International de Rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle. University of Miami 23 au 25 avril 1998, (ed.) Ralph Heyndels and Barbara Woshinsky (Tübingen: N arr, 1999), p. 276. 10 Paige, Being Interior, p. 186.


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interior approach to exorcism attempted to reduce the distress of the mind before curing the body, by means of long and frequent dialogues between the nuns and himself, which resembled the relationship between psychoanalyst and patient in our own time but that was completely unheard of in the seventeenth century under such circumstances. As an exorcist, Surin opted for an approach whose aim was not to repress the body, unlike that of traditional exorcists, who tethered the possessed to pews to constrain their bodies. Rather, his integral approach acted through the soul of the possessed person, and, in the case of Jeanne des Anges, it resulted in a dazzling success. N ews of his victory over the demons spread, and he achieved notoriety in neighboring cities and throughout France. Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Anne of Austria, and Louis XIII judged Jeanne des Anges’s recovery so remarkable that they invited her to come tell them her story. But the end of Jeanne’s illness also marked the beginning of Surin’s long ordeal. Surin endured the same self-inflicted torment, an apparent outgrowth of his contact with the nuns, though it emanated from far deeper conflicts about opposing truths, differing value systems, and conflicting conceptions about humanity. His spectacular success had put him in the spotlight, and his individualistic approach ran counter to the code of obedience and to the traditionally prescribed authoritarian methods of exorcism. His superiors (for example, Barthélemy Jacquinot, whom Surin never identifies but to whom he alludes) eschewed his notion of subjectivity and individualistic struggle in favor of a strict code of conduct based on subordination and self-restraint. They even cast him out as a madman and interned him in Bordeaux. Surin’s inability to comply with the ever-present struggle these orders imposed on him is clearly portrayed in Science expérimentale through the malady that afflicts him both physically and mentally. Surin was interned, physically abused, and put on display as a “madman” to satisfy the curiosity of spectators, who misunderstood the nature of his illness. During these years of confinement, Surin formed a strange friendship with the Frondeur François-Louis, prince de Conti, a friendship “that death alone would interrupt and which would be a determining factor in the history of his writings.”11 We know very little about that close friendship, but it raises crucial questions: could Surin have been a conspirator in the Fronde? Was he in league with these political insurgents or was he simply a man whose modern notion of the “self” conflicted with the religious conducts of self-restraint and obedience? It is known that Surin’s mother hosted various clandestine meetings of politically subversive activists, “attended during the Fronde by the prince de Conti, the duchesse de Longueville, the duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, the comtesse de Marsin, councillors in Parlement, and a few Jesuit fathers.”12 While the political component

11 Michel Certeau in Surin, Correspondance, (ed.) Michel de Certeau (Paris: Brouwer, 1966), p. 489. 12 Michel Certeau in Surin, Science expérimentale, p. 426.


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of Surin’s struggle is in itself a rich topic, his case exemplifies his personal battle against shifting epistemologies in the mid-seventeenth century. This leads us to raise the question, unresolved but pertinent, of whether Surin’s diagnosis of madness might not have been a means to stigmatize him, to get rid of him, a decision stemming from the church’s deep desire to dispose of a political opponent and an individual who was disrupting and threatening the hierarchical order of the religious community. We might take into account what Michel Foucault calls “the great confinement” of the seventeenth century,13 that is, the marginalization, repudiation, and internment of particular groups under absolutism. Sophie Houdard, true to Foucault, calls the internment of Surin during his illness the elimination of an “other” accused by the church of being guilty, infirm, and hysterical, motivated by the fear that his charisma might give rise to dissidence.14

Aut deus aut daemon: The Experience of Illness The end of Jeanne des Anges’s possession, then, coincided with the beginning of Surin’s illness. After his contact with the possessed nuns, he found himself suddenly afflicted by demons, which took hold of his inner life and manifested themselves physically.15 But his illness, far from being restricted to simple “contamination,” stemmed from much deeper conflicts, caused by the inner Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), p. 54. Sophie Houdard, “Quand l’autre ressemble au même: Le traître dissimulé,” in Heyndels and Woshinsky, (eds), L’Autre au XVIIe siècle, pp. 360–62. 15 We could link the interpretation of Surin’s illness to the conviction that harmful intervention by the supernatural can cause disease and melancholy. At the historical level, the persecution of individuals for practicing witchcraft continued until the seventeenth century. It was firmly believed that melancholy could be linked to bewitchment or demonic activity. Moreover, a person of a melancholic disposition was considered a particular target for demons and witches. The Malleus Maleficarum (1488) describes at great length how the Devil can enter the soul of an individual and induce delusions and hallucinations, which are typical of melancholy. Black bile was also seen as the Devil’s humor, causing, under malignant influences, great damage, such as despair, strange imaginings, and suicide. It is nevertheless telling that Surin’s superiors blame not the Devil but rather his depraved imagination or “fantasy” and that they condemn or mock him (see pp. 212–13), never taking his ills seriously. It is only Father Claude Bastide who believes that his illness is the work of God acting through the temptations of the Devil (p. 220). Surin himself deliberately uses the term “obsession” to highlight God’s ultimate agency behind the demonic acts and to distinguish his state from “possession.” Scholars of the early modern period have studied the relationship between acedia and melancholy. In Christian belief, acedia was a spiritual illness that befell monks. Caused by faithlessness, weariness of spirit, or despair, it was considered an illness of “sinfulness” and one of the seven deadly sins. Christian writers reflected on its relationship to black bile. 13

14


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divide between contrasting truths, value differences, and conflicting notions of the human being. His own demonic possession, which Surin called “obsession,” showed that the tensions between him and his superiors were far from resolved, while his inability to comply and his constant struggle to conform to the cultural and religious codes of his times took a somatic pathway, in the form of a malady that weakened him physically and mentally. While Surin most likely uses the term “demon” in a literal way, these demons also symbolize the profound affective disturbances inside him that prevented him from putting an end to his suffering, leading to despair and testifying to severe melancholy. Surin’s physical symptoms were insomnia, exhaustion, and a growing weakness, which ultimately made him unable to preach, speak, and write, and which culminated in physical paralysis. Surin was bedridden, unable to dress on his own, eat, or drink. Every movement cost him enormous effort, and he was in constant pain: “His strength failed him all of a sudden and he fell into a terrible illness, since he could make no movement of his body without extreme pain and had no power to speak or walk, or to take any action except with extreme torment; so thoroughly bound was he that what was necessary, such as eating, walking, and all the other movements necessary to life, cost so much that, in order to rest, he abstained from everything” (Science p. 173).16 Surin’s body expressed and translated the unresolved tensions produced by his repeated incapacity to reconcile doctrines that conflicted with his unbound notion of “self.” Surin meticulously describes his growing and recurrent paralysis, enumerating all the physiological symptoms that assailed him and made him “so dispirited and so listless, and so constricted in his feelings and speech” (p. 169, my emphasis),17 that he lost all strength and peace of mind. The recurrent use of the term constriction (p. 170) captures his continuing exhaustion and paralysis. Despite all his efforts to free himself from his symptoms, he was obliged to recognize that, under their lethargic influence, he came “to lose all ability to move and even the power of speech … and fell into the greatest humiliation imaginable” (pp. 171–172).18 His paralysis, his incapacity to subdue the body, and his utter helplessness were a great “shame” in the eyes of his elders, who criticized and harshly condemned him. Since Christianity and Cartesian philosophy both teach the insignificance of the body and the primacy of the mind, should he not have set aside somatic pain and attached himself exclusively to the soul? For Descartes, in 16 “Les forces lui défaillaient tout à coup, et [il] tomba dans un mal terrible, car il ne pouvait produire aucun remuement de son corps, sans extrême peine, et n’avait ni la puissance de parler, ni de marcher, ni de faire aucune action, qu’avec un extrême tourment; si lié que ce qui était nécessaire, comme de manger, de marcher, et tous les autres mouvements nécessaires de la vie, lui coûtaient de telle façon que, pour avoir repos, il s’abstenait de tout.” 17 “Si abattu et si languissant, et si resserré en son sens et en la parole.” 18 “À perdre la faculté de tous ses mouvements, et la parole même … et tomba dans la plus grande humiliation qu’on se fût pu imaginer.”


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fact, a “generous” and conscientious soul is obliged to use its will to put an end to the body’s unwanted manifestations. By contrast, the almost scientific interest the priest takes in matter, and the enormous importance he grants it, run counter to the priority given to mental health in Augustinian thought and, subsequently, in the Christian theology of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. During this time, the dualistic view of man prevailed and led to the doctrine that the soul was imprisoned in the body, led even to outright hostility toward the body.19 James N . Lapsley writes that in the medieval period, “if the health of the body was not forgotten, it was … generally relegated to the status of a matter of relative indifference, which might as well be sacrificed to gain eternal bliss.”20 Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1548) constituted a “method” “to conquer oneself and regulate one’s life without determining oneself through any tendency that is disordered.”21 In the quest for spiritual immortality, the Christian subject had to gain control over his unruly passions and learn how to govern his body and his acts. Surin’s understanding of the body’s “claims” breaks away from Saint Ignatius’s asceticism and its influence within the Jesuit community, since he understands that man is not always under his own control. His illness will further teach him that the corporeal experience of God delivers a true message of salvation that competes with the merely spiritual “knowledge” of man’s redemption. In other word, Surin experiences a “total” salvation that involves both body and soul.22 James N . Lapsley, Salvation and Health: The Interlocking Processes of Life (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), p. 39. 20 Ibid., p. 41. 21 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Elder Mullan (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1997), p. 10. Surin writes in his Guide spirituel of the necessity for ascetic withdrawal from the body and mentions his selfflagellation. N evertheless, the knowledge he records in the Science is different and constitutes a clear separation from the dichotomy of body and mind and the ascetic principles voiced by Saint Ignatius. 22 The relationship between body and mind in Christian theology has been variously interpreted throughout the history of Christian theology, particularly in relation to the question of resurrection. The Old Testament postulates that the human being will be resurrected body and soul. God’s human incarnation in Jesus confirms resurrection as a “full” salvation involving both body and soul, as does the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The N ew Testament further distinguishes between an individual resurrection after death and a final resurrection at the time of the Last Judgment but “never returns to the distinction between a mortal body and an immortal soul to explain the defeat over death and the final resurrection. At the same time, ‘body’ does not mean the body at the time of its death … It is important, however, that the body, that is, the personal ‘I’ of the dead, capable of communication, be identical to that of the resurrected ‘I,’ so that it can communicate with others.” Augustine in particular was responsible for obscuring the “original unified biblical conception of ‘flesh’ (as body and mind)” and for reinterpreting it as “an individual concept of soul vs. flesh (body).” The medieval interpretation of resurrection privileged the soul, which, however, needed the body; in modern times, either the resurrection of the “flesh” 19


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As he will come to write later on, throughout his illness Surin experienced an inability to save his soul by achieving control over his body. Despite his constant efforts to use his reason and to compel his soul to be resolute, the soul proved to be incapable of putting an end to the manifestations displayed on his body. Surin clearly describes a process we now call “conversion,” in which psychic disturbances produce corporeal symptoms, such as insomnia or paralysis, which express the inner turmoil. Somatic symptoms affected Surin’s most basic functions and completely incapacitated him. In a parallel manner, psychic pain manifested itself in his soul, as “a continual dread that grew at every turn” (p. 205). This dread fettered him to such an extent that he lost all hope. He alludes several times to his agony and his growing desolation and reveals how mental suffering goes hand in hand with physical pain. His increasing exhaustion was closely connected to the mental feeling of being “oppressed,” a term that becomes the leitmotif for his mounting infirmity. As he points out, he was far from “insane,” but his mental dilemma manifested itself as an incapacity to “express,” to “hold back,” and to fight (p. 196) the demons battling inside his soul and body that produced his torment. When the body gives out, the soul, “in dire distress, succumbs as well, unable to go on any longer” (p. 172).23 Surin emphasizes that mental and somatic prostration are closely linked: he is exhausted both “outside” and “inside” (p. 175); the body feels physically what the soul perceives in its own way. The priest repeatedly refers to the pain he experienced. N onetheless, language remains incapable of fully capturing that pain. Although Surin notes many times that his pain increased, and though he points to his depression, desolation, and torments, he does not provide his readers with a detailed account of its nature.24 Language, therefore, while a necessary component of his experience, fails to convey psychic and physical pain completely. It may allow Surin to assess the pain to a certain degree, but he implicitly suggests that behind his description of it are dimensions that are closed to language. (body and soul) has been restricted to the soul, or the body has been reduced to a marginal status. All quotes refer to the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, “Auferstehung der Toten,” 3rd edn, vol.1 (Freiburg: Herder, 1993), pp. 1191–1210. The translations are mine. Surin never directly addresses the question of resurrection. Questions of faith prevail in which body and soul and, in particular, the language of the senses guides his experience of God. At the same time, there is an implicit assimilation of his situation to the martyrs, “blood witnesses” who partake in a union with Christ in death. Surin alludes to the fact that God “united himself closely to [the priest’s] substance” (see p. 229) and mentions that a voice greater than his own spoke through him, bringing tears to his eyes (p. 262). 23 “N e pouvait plus résister à cette impression,” “un effroi continuel qui croissait à tous rencontres,” “étant réduite à toute extrémité, vint à succomber n’en pouvant plus.” 24 Language is also part of Surin’s remedy, however. By writing, he attempts to define his pain and, though he has not direct access to it, he uses language to cope with the past. He also shows the “breakdown of language” during obsession itself. For Surin’s muteness was one of his symptoms: he was unable to communicate his pain and to argue his case before his superiors.


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It is also the priest’s incapacity to “speak,” both literally (Surin experienced muteness) and figuratively (he was not allowed to speak openly), that leads to his confrontation with the Jesuit community. Looking back, he harshly criticizes his superiors’ insensitivity to his pain, the disparity between their expectations and his perspective, and the breakdown of “language,” his inability to communicate his ordeal. Ultimately, in his experience his pain was neither believed nor acknowledged by his superiors, who were disapproving. Their diagnosis of a disturbance caused by the imagination, which Surin used to “indulge” himself, that is, to attract notice by standing out from the community, clearly conveys their misconception and their failure to understand the nature of his illness. He exposes the growing clash between the affected subject, who insists on his indomitable physical infirmity, and his superiors’ insistence on self-control and repression of the body. While they seek to teach him rules of self-restraint, they overtly condemn his illness and fail to understand it, restricting their diagnoses to a preconceived notion of a mind/body disunion. In 1663 Surin condemned the effect their repressive methods had had on him: far from being salutary, their violence aggravated his suffering. In a dramatic passage of Science expérimentale (pp. 212–13), the priest creates an insurmountable gulf between “them” (the religious fathers) and “me.” In this part of the narrative, unlike in the rest of the book, Surin employs the first-person point of view, which highlights the emotion and agitation that overwhelmed the writer at this moment. The retrospective third-person narrative – meditative in nature – is replaced at this point by the painful memory of an unresolved opposition, conveyed by an “I” that holds within it the entire spectrum of emotions Surin felt during his treatment. The author ironically adopts the well-known classical model, the Platonic dialogue between an “I” and a “he.” In so doing, he shows his readers that he is helpless to put an end to his suffering. Surin writes that he could not “overstate how terrible … [his] pain was in that condition” (p. 211). He highlights its overwhelming effect and contrasts it to the insensitivity of his superiors in the face of that “incomprehensible” suffering, “which meant that even the most reasonable men had great difficulty tolerating me, and judged that I was indulging myself too much through an imagination I ought to have conquered and repressed, that just taking a step or undoing a hook on my cassock was so laborious and painful that it was impossible for me to accomplish it … and that for this reason men said one had to take control of oneself and prevail” (p. 212).25 Surin harshly rejects these “most reasonable men” who compelled him to “repress” (réprimer) 25

“Qui faisait que les hommes même les plus raisonnables avaient grande peine à me supporter, et jugèrent que je me flattais trop par une imagination que j’eusse dû vaincre et réprimer, que seulement faire un pas, ou défaire un crochet de ma soutane m’était un si grand travail et douleur, qu’il m’était impossible d’en venir à bout, … que pour ce que les hommes disaient qu’il faillait se vaincre et passer outre.” That bitter condemnation is directed primarily at Father d’Anginot, superior of the exorcists in Loudun, who fills Surin with so much dread and uncertainty that he loses “all strength and all joy, and absolutely all heart,” and declares it is a “wonder” that he made it back “from that precipice” (toutes


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the body, to control himself, and to force himself to get well. He reveals that doctrines of physiological suppression are invalid, while alluding to the perils of attempted repression. Whereas Surin’s superiors preached doctrines of bodily repression and of rational control through the use of the will, the priest understood, at the time he was writing Science expérimentale, that the unresolved conflicts or crises between him and those around him, repressed (refoulés, now in the Freudian sense) by his own consciousness,26 could take a somatic path and be converted into organic manifestations. On one hand, we see the extent to which Surin’s environment forced him to adopt rationalist doctrines of self-control. That is, according to his superiors, the act of repressing (réprimer) the misdeeds that they believed were caused by an uncontrolled imagination would put an end to his illness. Indeed, they “could not come to understand what these ills of the imagination consisted of and how painful were their effects; for want of seeing that, I say, they condemned of weakness, of cowardice, and of imagination those who were debilitated by such ills, against which they were entirely powerless” (p. 212).27 On the other hand, Surin dares assert that all repression (répression) is chimerical, even harmful, and that the disquieting spectacle of his utterly infirm body revealed to the world that these theses were ill-conceived. It was only in 1663 that the priest revealed to his readers, without fear, the harm done by the method that proclaimed willpower and reason a sufficient challenge to somatic claims, and that he dared depart from the respectful tone characteristic of most of Science expérimentale. Through irony, harsh attacks, and bitter reproaches (for example, in his use of terms with powerful connotations such as weakness and cowardice, which he applies to his own person), he clearly shows his indignation at being misjudged by these men faithful to rationalism and the trauma caused by their destructive methods. His initial disapproval of rationalism has now turned into a concern about its influence inside the Jesuit community, since his brethren counsel a perilous path, which he judges detrimental to man’s physical and mental welfare. He repeatedly posits his powerlessness and the “extremity” of the ills he suffered, which was “inconceivable” to them (p. 212), since their belief in the mind’s rational control over the body was unshakable and any other truth escaped them. Surin’s indignation becomes a powerful outcry against his superiors, as he alternates between his personal protest (narrated in the first person) and a generalization of his case (presented in the third person), forces et toutes joies, et absolument tout coeur; merveille; de ce précipice; Science p. 315). Surin finds his sole support in Father Claude Bastide. 26 See Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, and Daniel Lagache, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 6th edn (Paris: PUF, 1967), s.v. “Refoulement.” 27 “N e pouvaient venir jusqu’à comprendre en quoi consistaient ces maux d’imagination, et combien sont pénibles leurs effets; faute, dis-je, de voir cela, ils condamnaient de faiblesse, de lâcheté, d’imagination ceux qui sont affaiblis de tels maux contre lesquels ils ont une entière impuissance.”


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denouncing any possibility of repression (se réprimer) and opposing to it a truth of human experience, namely, that “the nature … of oneself is weak and the imagination very delicate” and that reason has no dominion over man “when the insides are weakened” (p. 212).28 Like a “soft piece of wax” (p. 405), the soul can become prey to forces that “live within as absolute masters” (p. 407).29 In retrospect, Surin must be seen not only as an early rebel against dualistic models of mind and body but also as a personal judge of the peril resulting from attempts to subdue the body. In his helplessness to put an end to his suffering, he undeniably reveals the bankruptcy of beliefs in man’s rational control over himself and in the ability to subdue the body through the power of will. In Science expérimentale, he boldly confronts his superiors and in particular disputes the notion of the autonomy of the will and the efficacy of rational control exercised on oneself to combat the ills of the imagination and the overwrought passions. He seeks to show how his illness manifested itself as a complete annihilation of mental autonomy, as seen in his incapacity to “repress” (réprimer) or “conquer” involuntary manifestations, both physical and mental. In 1655 Surin wrote that he had become “a desperate soul,”30 an infirmus, whose two aspects Jean Lhermitte poignantly brings to light: infirmus in both body and mind.31 Even as Surin was struggling in vain against the demons assailing him, Descartes was formulating his therapy to treat the violent passions, thereby expressing confidence in man’s capacity to master himself through strong actions and powerful reasoning. Surin’s experience suggests that the body cannot gain access to a seemingly elevated rational order because there are other “claims” that find their way to expression. Surin passively endures the utter powerlessness of his will and the breakdown of his reason. Whereas the idea of “reason” lies behind Descartes’s idea of the self, Surin is in fact able to apprehend himself only through extreme pain experienced physically and mentally, and through the manifestations unfolding in the “theater of his body.”32 Descartes’s final work, Passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul; 1649), rationalizes the passions and suggests that the will has power over their excesses. Written while Descartes was corresponding with Princess Elizabeth, it was conceived as a revision and illustration of his earlier theories and as a rationalist epistemology that would make fully coherent the Cartesian search for “generosity.” In it he claims that humankind can surely and rigorously impose order on the most violent passions and hold the body in check through the use of “good sense” and 28

“La nature … de soi est faible et l’imagination très délicate,” “quand le dedans est affaibli.” 29 “Une cire molle,” “demeurent là-dedans comme maîtres absolus.” 30 Jean-Joseph Surin, Correspondance, (ed.) Michel de Certeau, p. 516. All subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text. 31 Jean Lhermitte, Mystiques et faux mystiques (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1952), p. 211. 32 I take this term from the title of Joyce McDougall’s book: Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (N ew York: N orton, 1989).


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will. For Descartes, “the principal effect of all the human passions is that they incite and dispose the soul to want the things for which they prepare the body.”33 “Things” – useful or harmful – therefore constitute an invasion of the corporeal order: they place the soul under the influence of that order and dispose it to consent to its effects. When the physical disposition is so strong that it compels the soul to bow to the body’s harmful demands, it becomes a danger to man’s reasonable life, threatening his freedom of judgment. For Descartes, the human will must rather stand above the power of the passions: “The will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained.”34 Descartes intends to assure his readers that humanity – by the strength of reason and will – can “acquire a very absolute dominion over all their passions” and that the soul, through “firm and determinate judgments,” can correct the harmful passions and put an end to them and to the palpable excesses of the body.35 He therefore argues that even the weakest person can be trained to “arrest the movements of the body that accompany [the strong passions]” and regain self-control by using these weapons.36 Fundamental to his epistemology is the inherent belief that even the weakest human being can acquire such dominion over disruptive passions and can hold the body in check, and he seeks to help his readers lead a happy life. Although we do not know whether Surin was familiar with Descartes’s work, there is a striking resonance between Surin’s vocabulary and Cartesian terminology in Passions de l’âme. Surin uses the terms “good sense,” “willpower,” and “weapons,” and the opposition between “weak” and “generous” souls, to subvert rationalist orthodoxy. He comes to grasp, through his helplessness and pain, that the attempt at control over the body by the will and self-restraint is wholly deficient. Subsequently, in his Science, he denies the possibility of effective mastery of the passions. He makes it clear that irrational forces (such as demons or violent passions) do not allow us recourse to firm and determinate judgments that would put an end to such forces. By means of that conviction, Surin debunks the “weapons” that Descartes defines in Passions, namely, the capacity of the soul’s judgment to battle the movements of the passions: “What I call its own weapons are firm and determinate judgments relating to the knowledge of good and evil, according to which it resolves to conduct the actions of its life.”37 For Surin, the 33 “Le principal effet de toutes les passions dans les hommes, est qu’elles incitent et disposent leur âme à vouloir les choses auxquelles elles préparent leur corps.” René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), art. 40. 34 “La volonté est tellement libre de sa nature, qu’elle ne peut jamais être contrainte.” Ibid., art. 41. 35 “Acquérir un empire très absolu sur toutes leurs passions,” “des jugements fermes et déterminés.” Ibid., art. 50 and art. 48. 36 “Arrêter les mouvements du corps qui … accompagnent [les passions fortes].” Ibid., art. 48. 37 “Ce que je nomme ses propres armes, sont des jugements fermes et déterminés touchant la connaissance du bien et du mal, suivant lesquels elle a résolu de conduire les

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body cannot be shunted aside through mere willpower. Whereas Descartes sees resolve and “good sense” as the essential moment in the struggle against the passions,38 Surin has learned that autonomous manifestations experienced by his body are uncontrolled by his individual will. Descartes believes, moreover, that those who do not know how to dispose of the will are guilty of “cowardice” and “weakness of soul.”39 When Surin explicitly evokes the apparent “weakness” or “cowardice” (Science p. 212) of poor infirm people like himself, he clearly seems to be echoing the terminology Descartes uses in Les passions de l’âme in order to subtly challenge rationalist concepts of “générosité.” He even goes so far as to explicitly express his indignation at his elders’ attempted devaluation of him as a “weak soul,” in Cartesian terminology. For the priest observes with great bitterness that his superiors judge him to be the “poor infirm” (p. 212) who easily lets himself be carried away by the passions or by chimera, pure effects of the imagination. H e violently denounces such accusations and justifies himself by claiming he is the target of demons and the victim of processes beyond human freedom, powerless – as any of us would be – to combat these “absolute masters” (Science p. 407).40 It is at this point that Surin’s “experiential” knowledge leads him to passionately reject the rationalist philosophy of the suppression of the body via the mind’s self-determination and supremacy over the passions, and that he touches on Spinoza’s alternate understanding of how the body works in unison with the mind. Like Surin, Spinoza tackles complex themes: on one hand, the concrete role that emotions and sense perception play in directly expressing “the constitution of

actions de sa vie.” Ibid., art. 48. 38 Ibid., art. 153. 39 “Lâcheté,” “faiblesse d’âme.” Ibid., art. 142. 40 Descartes might have called Surin a “weak soul,” the feeble victim of excessive passions. At the same time, the philosopher believed that being more reasonable—that is, stronger—also implies being less religious. For Descartes, God is located at the limit of knowledge, as an initial conception (the infinite) that stands at the origin and end of human experience. But on earth, man discovers his own truths. N evertheless, the Surinian type of (religious) experience is not opposed to the “scientific/rational” type Descartes describes. On one hand, Surin deliberately seeks to transcend religious experience through writing. He begins to name, classify, divide, separate, and distinctly represent his personal experience, in which the body becomes a central part of all such experience. In Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), Michel Foucault attributes that very tendency to represent, name, and classify to the seventeenth-century desire to elaborate “knowledge.” On the other hand, Surin’s narrative seeks to prove its initial concepts by establishing them as facts, through examples and explanations of his individual (and religious) experience. His illness corresponds to a religious experience but transcends it as well, through his “scientific” truth, as demonstrated in the title. As in Descartes’s thought, which does not oppose rationalism to religion, religious experience and rationality correspond in Surin and assert the same “truth,” a truth where (religious and secular) knowledge comes about in the epistemological unity of mind and body.


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the body,”41 connecting body and mind; on the other, “the impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions” when other “claims” find their way to expression. In part 4 of the Ethics, Spinoza discusses what he calls “human bondage or … the strength of the emotions,”42 recognizing that feelings and passions easily take control of our lives, and he explains our lack of power to moderate these affects. Only knowledge of these passions might serve as a remedy. Just as Surin evokes “demons,” unknown disturbances that act violently on the human being divided within himself, Spinoza notes that human beings are often incapable of eliminating negative affects and remain under the sway of disturbing passions, even as they remain ignorant of their causes. Yet Surin turns this understanding into a subversive challenge to rationalist idealism and its belief in the omnipotence of “will.” His debunking of doctrines of self-restraint is twofold. In Science expérimentale, he first shows his readers the extreme harm that the method of physiological repression causes: “For the efforts I wanted to make, I exhausted myself extremely, and it is a wonder I did not destroy myself altogether and render myself incapable of ever recovering, so great and profound were the ills that came to me as a result of these efforts” (Science expérimentale p. 212).43 His disapproval of that ideal becomes a warning of its danger, which may nearly have caused his death. He calls it a wonder that he is still alive. We see how subversive Surin is here, in daring to make such a direct and radical criticism. Spinoza himself would never have ventured to call rationalist philosophy injurious, but confined himself to declaring it erroneous and utopian. In addition, Surin sarcastically and bitterly criticizes the “wisest men of religion” (p. 213), who “reach such great excesses of rigor against the poor infirm” (p. 212) and treat him with “force” and “cruelties” in order to “tame” his mind (p. 213). Their repressive methods prove to be so inept that, Surin concludes, his “constriction became so great that his mind went into an oppression, with despondency and discouragement so great that it was a piteous and horrifying thing to see the degree to which it became anxiety and abandonment” (p. 175).44 These significant words imply his state of profound Angst, a term Freud introduced three centuries later to describe an anxiety neurosis whose symptoms are displayed in violent attacks, accompanied by a host of successive somatic manifestations. Oppression and “the precipice of despair” (p. 176)45 point to a depressive state that, in its severity, 41 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, (ed.) James Gotmann, trans. William Hale White and Amelia Hutchinson (N ew York: Hafner, 1949), p. 196. 42 Ibid., p. 187. 43 “Pour les efforts que j’ai voulu faire, je me suis extrêmement épuisé, et c’est à merveille que je ne me suis détruit tout à fait, et rendu incapable de jamais revenir de là, tant les maux qui me venaient de ces efforts étaient grands et profonds.” 44 “Son serrement se rendit si grand, que son esprit entra dans une oppression, abattements et découragements si grands, que c’était chose pitoyable et effroyable à voir jusqu’où il devint d’angoisse et de délaissement.” 45 “Le précipice du désespoir.”


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surpasses the experience of dysthymia – a more moderate but persistent illness – which the Latin poet Lucretius had contrasted to melancholy. It was commonly believed in the seventeenth century that despair could be caused by the workings of the Devil, who was held responsible for producing “religious” melancholy in his victims. Theologians and medical authorities frequently argued that people suffering from feelings of terror were losing sight of God’s grace and were under the sway of the Devil. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton lists terrors of mind, intolerable pains, and despair as symptoms of religious melancholy and explains that the Devil sends these diseases, using his power to pervert the humors and induce delusions in melancholics. As Jeremy Schmidt writes, “it was commonly thought that the devil used melancholy and religious despair as the instruments in driving people to self-murder, to blaspheme against God’s power or willingness to save, or to despair sinfully of salvation.”46 T he mental agitation and emotional turmoil Surin experienced during his obsession, which he describes as oppression or desolation, could be explained by the belief in religious melancholy and the so-called Devil’s bath [balneum diaboli]. Such an understanding of melancholy, however, was contested in Surin’s time by a group of medical doctors who insisted on a purely humoral explanation. They contended that despair is produced by the flow of black bile and is not supernatural in origin. Burton admits that religious melancholy is a controversial subject, while Guibelet disputes its very existence. He criticizes, as a common misconception of the people, the tendency to attribute to demons what is unknown to them, instead of trying to understand it. He goes on to reduce demonic melancholy to humoral melancholy plain and simple.47 Du Laurens lists despair as among the symptoms of melancholy of the soul and is concerned that both mind and body are affected by it.48 From a modern perspective, the dispute about “religious melancholy” may be of lesser interest than the specific question of how it was to be cured. In fact, medical and theological voices agreed that spiritual comfort and physical remedies had to go hand in hand. Both sides eschewed dualistic diagnoses and understood that “if the body was ill, it was very clearly the soul that was at stake”49 and that remedies for grief and despair had to include mental and physical purges. But the Jesuit community surrounding Surin lost sight of the spiritual and physical remedies the priest’s condition demanded. Although ostensibly concerned with the health of the soul, they refused to provide him with spiritual comfort, burdened his soul even more, and overlooked the body altogether, thus exacer Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 49. 47 Jourdain Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques. De la comparaison de l’homme avec le monde. Du principe de la génération de l’homme. De l’humeur mélancolique (Évreux: Antoine Le Marié, 1603), p. 262. 48 André Du Laurens, Discours de la conservation de la veue, des maladies mélancholiques, des catarrhes et de la vieillesse (n.p.: Théodore Samson, 1598), p. 214. 49 Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, p. 49. 46


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bating his symptoms. Surin, by contrast, joined those of his time who were reaching an important understanding: that body and mind depend on each other and that the increase in mental anxiety produced by repressive methods simultaneously produces new physical symptoms. In his discussion of his “melancholy,” Surin takes into account how a mental disorder and a physical symptom stem from the same source. In a clear-sighted manner, Surin experiences and describes what we now call “conversion,” that is, the process by which a psychic (invisible and unconscious) disturbance becomes visible by expressing itself somatically in manifestations that have no immediate organic cause. According to Joyce McDougall, who follows traditional Freudian thinking, psychosomatic illnesses result from a repressed mental conflict: “Psychic pain and mental conflict arising from inner and outer stress are not recognized at the level of verbal thought and discharged through psychic expressions such as dreaming, day-dreaming, thinking or other forms of mental activity; rather they may lead to psychotic solutions of an hallucinatory kind or find discharge in psychosomatic manifestations.”50 The seventeenth-century medical tradition did understand that mental disturbances could cause bodily disorders. Du Laurens, Burton, and others recognized the influence of the mind on the body and affirmed the unity of the two in proposing a cure. According to Burton, while melancholy is sometimes the outcome of one humor’s predominance over another, a mind that is “out of balance” can also cause humoral disturbances, and inner turmoil can activate physiological imbalances. Surin too engages in an extensive discussion of how bodily ailments can be activated by internal wounds. His holistic approach postulates that mental anxiety and unresolved turmoil can lead to somatization in the form of illness. Surin’s somatic drama is played out on a register that Louis Marin calls the “second category” of signs: “corporeal symptoms [as] hidden movements of the body or soul.”51 Hence, manifestations displayed on the body reveal a mental anxiety, unformulated desires, unhealed psychic wounds, in which body and mind engage in a relationship we would now call “correlation.” Surin never overtly mentions the source of his turmoil, but the McDougall, Theaters of the Body, p. 42. See also Freud, “Studien über Hysterie,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (London: Imago, 1952), p. 233. 51 Louis Marin, La parole mangée et d’autres essais théologico-politiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), p. 18. According to Freud, “anstatt der seelischen Schmerzen treten körperliche auf” (Freud, “Studien über Hysterie,” p. 233) [the transformation of mental pain into physical pain). He calls this phenomenon of convergence Entgegenkommen [somatic compliance] (Sigmund Freud, “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse,” in Werke aus den Jahren 1904–1905, Gesammelte Werke, 5th edn, vol. 5 [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1972], p. 200), which points to the interplay between mind and body. See Lilian Furst’s definition of Entgegenkommen: “A confluence of the physical symptom and its psychological origin. Freud emphasizes both the reciprocity of body and mind and the absolute necessity for ‘eine psychische Bedeutung, einem Sinn’ (‘a psychical significance, a meaning’) to underpin and sustain the symptom.” Lilian Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (N ew York: State University of N ew York Press, 2003), p. 35. 50


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divide within himself points to his desperate but failed attempts to conform to the religious and cultural codes of his time, as expressed in the demand by the Jesuit community that one subdue the body, and with it, unruly passions, through the power of will, and that one practice absolute obedience to one’s superiors. Conversion intervenes again when the anguish is translated by and into the body. The Angst inculcated in Surin’s soul manifests itself as a suicide wish, taedium vitae, which Lucretius termed the most perilous outcome of a somatic disturbance. Haunted by the specter of damnation, traumatized by reproaches and with no way out, Surin gets it into his head to “throw himself out the window of the room where he was staying, which overlooks the rock on which the house is built” (Science p. 180).52 This wish is carried out in a series of exclusively instinctive mechanisms that reveal the “theater of the body” in action: “When he entered, he saw the window was open; he went to it, and having considered the precipice toward which he had had that raging instinct, he withdrew to the middle of the room, facing the window. There he lost consciousness, and suddenly, as if he had been sleeping, without any view of what he was doing, he was flung through that window and thrown thirty feet from the wall, all the way to the riverbank” (pp. 180–1).53 The passive voice Surin uses in this passage emphasizes the pure automatism of his body, which sees and considers but without the mental act of evaluating or judging. Surin demonstrates to his readers once more that the human mind may be utterly out of control, unconscious of its processes, and powerfully subjugated to the body. Although the priest miraculously survives, having fallen into a “little willow” (p. 181),54 the suicide attempt cripples him permanently. One leg will remain shorter than the other; he will never again be able to walk normally or without pain. The invalid and infirm Surin, now physically disabled, will be known as the obsessed cripple. While he does not blame the religious fathers for this particular outcome, he wishes to show how their perilous methods of rational control have destroyed and weakened him, how they have “crushed” and “destroyed” (Science p. 213) him to the very depths of his being. Surin actively discovered that the body is the translator of an underlying mental preoccupation, even as he rejected dualism as a wholly ill-conceived account of the body’s interaction with the mind. The diabolical stamp affects mind and soma, 52

“De se jeter par la fenêtre de la chambre où il était logé, qui répond à ce rocher sur lequel la maison est bâtie.” 53 “Comme il entra dedans, il vit la fenêtre ouverte; il fut jusqu’à elle, et ayant considéré le précipice pour lequel il avait eu ce furieux instinct, il se retira au milieu de la chambre, tourné vers la fenêtre. Là il perdit toute connaissance, et soudain, comme s’il eût dormi, sans aucune vue de ce qu’il faisait, il fut élancé par cette fenêtre, et jeté à trente pieds loin de la muraille, jusqu’au bord de la rivière.” 54 “The willow is reminiscent of Blaise Pascal’s most frequently evoked image: “Man is only a reed, the weakest of nature; but he is a thinking reed” (L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant). Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (ed.) Dominique Descotes (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), L 347-200.


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and the victim experiences obsession as a profound union between the Devil and his person, a union that occurs in spite of his will. When Surin writes that the “demon has the ability to imprint in the soul its feeling and its idea, so that it is as if the soul were a devil” (Science p. 366, my emphasis),55 he describes this imprint as a form of stigmatization, a physical and mental marking. Jacques Le Brun writes that in the seventeenth century, stigmata “were ‘signs,’ ‘visible and therefore corporeal’ notes, which, however, were not printed ‘extrinsically’ like the marks an illness leaves on the body, and which were also not ‘notae spirituales,’ ‘stigmata invisibilia,’ which inscribed the efficacy of certain sacraments in the soul.”56 Stigmata “usher the body into representation,” nullifying language and adopting a mode of expression all their own: marks, scars, and nonpathological but physical gestures.57 Surin revises the notion of physical stigmatization, adding another category: psychic and physical imprints working in concert. Surin perceives the diabolical mark as a profound fusion between the Devil and his person, a fusion that grows stronger despite his efforts. He compares it to the union between mind and body, which he never calls into question: “One can say that this union of the angel with man – which cannot be like that between soul and body because there is no natural subordination, nor like that between the Word and man in Jesus Christ, because that is personal … because there is something more than a union of place – that this union, I say, is a union that imitates the vital, because the demon has a certain life in man that is diabolically human and humanly diabolical” (pp. 370–371, my emphasis).58 He accentuates the interconnectedness of man and the Devil by using a morpho-syntactical reversal, a rhetorical figure known as polyptoton, modifying the relation between the human and diabolical elements by altering the adverb (“diabolically” is replaced by “humanly”). Surin thereby posits the (almost) natural union between body and soul, between the demon and the human being in its perceived totality. Their close connection is reinforced in part 4 of Science expérimentale, where Surin claims that “possession essentially consists of a union the Demon has with the soul (having been summoned by all the faculties and organs of the body), by which it holds that soul captive, performing its operations of nature or grace … and performing all 55

“[Le] démon a cette faculté d’imprimer dans l’âme son sentiment et son idée, en sorte que l’âme soit comme si elle était un diable.” 56 Jacques Le Brun, “Les discours de la stigmatisation au XVIIe siècle,” in Stigmates, (ed.) Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: L’Herne, 2001), p. 104. 57 Dominique de Courcelles, “Stigmates: Argument,” in Courcelles, (ed.), Stigmates, p. 13. 58 “On peut dire que cette union de l’ange avec l’homme—qui ne peut être comme celle de l’âme avec le corps parce qu’il n’y a aucune subordination naturelle, ni comme celle du Verbe avec l’homme, en Jésus-Christ, parce que cela est personnel … parce qu’il y a quelque union plus que locale—que cette union, dis-je, est une union qui imite la vitale, parce que le démon a une certaine vie dans l’homme qui est diaboliquement humaine et humainement diabolique.”


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the operations it wants in these same faculties and through these same organs” (p. 403).59 The demonic mind symbolically imprints both body and soul and reigns beyond the reach of the human will. Surin once more denies the will’s capacity to put an end to melancholy and holds the conviction that diabolical control acts “without discernment” (p. 215) or consciousness, impelling the possessed man to say things so horrible that the soul “speaks, as it were, in the most furious sense in the world” (p. 215). With this reversal of the postulate of the preponderantly free cogito, the Surinian mind – unconscious and out of control – sinks into “an engulfing confusion,” which is mercilessly condemned by others as a “mortal sin” (p. 216). The psychoanalytic tradition would explain the unresolved and unconscious battle taking place inside Surin as a conflict between the different aspects of the self that Freud names the ego, the id, and the superego. For Surin, it is expressed as a permanent struggle between two minds – one beneficent, the other malevolent – as he demonstrates in a letter written to Father d’Attichy, taken from his Correspondance: I cannot explain to you what happens within me at that time and how this mind has joined with my own, but without taking away my awareness or the freedom of my soul, and nevertheless becoming like another me, as if I had two souls, one of which is dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs, and stands at a remove, watching the actions of the one that has been introduced into it. These two minds battle on a field that is the body, and the soul itself is, so to speak, divided… . Indeed, I feel that the same cries coming from the mouth also come from these two souls, and I am at a loss to discern if it is joy that produces them or the extreme rage that fills me. Tremblings, which seize me when the Holy Sacrament is administered, also come, it seems to me, from the horror of its presence, which is unbearable to me. (p. 264, my emphasis)60

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“L’essentiel de la possession consiste en une union que le Démon a avec l’âme (s’étant intimé par toutes les facultés et organes du corps) par laquelle il tient cette âme captive, faisant ses opérations de nature ou de grâce … et faisant dans ces mêmes facultés et par ces mêmes organes toutes les opérations qu’il veut.” 60 “Je ne saurais vous expliquer ce qui se passe en moi durant ce temps et comment cet esprit s’unit avec le mien sans m’ôter ni la connaissance, ni la liberté de mon âme, et se faisant néanmoins comme un autre moi-même, et comme si j’avais deux âmes dont l’une est dépossédée de son corps et de l’usage de ses organes, et se tient à quartier, regardant faire celle qui s’y est introduite. Ces deux esprits se combattent en un champ qui est le corps, et l’âme même est comme partagée … . Voire, je sens que les mêmes cris qui sortent de la bouche viennent également de ces deux âmes, et je suis en peine de discerner si c’est l’allégresse qui les produit ou la fureur extrême qui me remplit. Des tremblements, qui me saisissent quand le saint Sacrement est appliqué, viennent également, ce me semble, de l’horreur de sa présence qui m’est insupportable.”


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This key passage, which insists on the power of the “I feel” for Surin, clearly demonstrates the union and the split experienced during his illness. In addition to Surin’s passivity (“watching the actions”), his inability to express the obsession through language (“I cannot explain to you”), and his incapacity to grasp and evaluate it (“I am at a loss to discern”), this passage highlights the complex mechanism of the divided self experienced within his being. It is striking that this internal division is the consequence of an almost natural union between the demon and the afflicted man’s mind and body. The opposition is thus no longer between body and mind, as Saint Augustine experienced it; it is felt within as the presence of a rival power that reigns over every component of Surin’s constitution, seizes hold of his identity, and brings about a divide within him, a conflict of wills, emotions (cries, tremblings), and feelings (rage, horror). For Surin, the opposition between the external (physiological and sensuous) man and the internal man of reason and faith is neutralized by the intimate experience of what could be called a dual interaction, in which mind and body as one find themselves confronted by a second (demonic) identity. We could go even further and speak of a dualism of souls. These two souls interact at every moment, but one of them, the demonic, asserts its control over the other, that of Christian faith, which must then recognize its debilitation. Surin is buffeted by two antagonistic forces, God and the Devil, in “that ‘interior’ he had believed was indivisible.”61 Cartesianism posits such an indivisibility of the mind, but that view runs counter to Surin’s personal experience during his illness. One of Descartes’s chief assertions in the Sixth Meditation is that the mind, unlike the body, can be conceived only in its unity: “There is a great difference between the mind and the body, in that the body by its nature is always divisible and the mind is entirely indivisible. Indeed, when I consider my mind, that is, myself inasmuch as I am merely a thing that thinks, I can distinguish no parts in it, but I conceive of myself as a single and complete thing.”62 For Descartes, one of the most distinctive characteristics of the mind, in contrast to the dismembered and divided body, is its indivisibility. Conversely, Surin suffers from the apprehension of his mind’s divisibility, shifting back and forth between his own self and that of the adversary. In writing about his illness, he describes the characteristics of what we now call schizophrenia, a term invented by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Schizophrenia is characterized by a psychic dissociation (Spaltung) affecting the personality and manifesting itself in a 61 Stanislas Breton, Deux mystiques de l’excès: J.-J. Surin et Maître Eckhart (Paris: Cerf, 1985), p. 79. 62 “Il y a une grande différence entre l’esprit et le corps, en ce que le corps, de sa nature, est toujours divisible, et que l’esprit est entièrement indivisible. Car en effet, lorsque je considère mon esprit, c’est-à-dire moi-même en tant que je suis seulement une chose qui pense, je n’y puis distinguer aucunes parties, mais je me conçois comme une chose seule et entière.” René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, (ed.) Jean-Marie Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 201.

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number of symptoms, such as hallucination, delirium, lack of will, and a deadening of affect.63 It is recognized as a brain disease that occurs when communication inside the brain malfunctions. The debate about the causes of that malfunction continues among scientists, biologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists. Although it is universally acknowledged that genetic factors play a preponderant role in those afflicted with the illness, there is some question about whether schizophrenia is exclusively hereditary, about the degree to which it is genetically based.64 Schizo comes from the Greek and signifies “to split, separate,” whereas phren means “mind.” Schizophrenia is a modern term: the term “madness” was used to capture, however imprecisely, such a mental disorder in the early modern period. N evertheless, Surin diagnoses how his internally divided mind produced his delirious ideas and hallucinations. He reports that his disorder manifested itself in the form of several demonic voices speaking inside him, constantly discussing his damnation, infiltrating his thoughts, and never leaving him in peace. In the narrative, that mental dissociation is conveyed through constant shifts in point of view between the “I” and the “he.” As Sophie Houdard observes, these shifts can be attributed to the fact that this “piece of writing … is not the precise account of a bygone past, but … redistributes on the page … the internal division experienced.”65 And it is through writing that the narrator, still utterly overwhelmed by that troubling experience, tries to release himself from that tension. The fluctuations in Surin’s narrative style are announced belatedly, in chapter 8 of part 2, where the author explains that he speaks sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third (p. 204). That is, Surin constantly shifts from saying “I” to referring to himself as “the father.” His narrative strategy in the preface can best be described as an effort to include the reader through the use of the firstperson plural, in order to “teach” and offer “consolation.” Part 4 (dealing with his reflections on the truths he has discovered) again refers to an “us,” alternating, however, with an “I.” But it is the middle sections (parts 2 and 3), those dealing with his illness, that entail constant shifts in narrative perspective. In its duality, this perspective reflects the fluctuation of the subject between past and present, experience and memory. The “he” is the authoritative narrator, who describes the 63 Rachel Miller and Susan E. Mason, Diagnosis: Schizophrenia (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 37–41. 64 Social and biological factors, and even individual character types, are generally accepted as other plausible etiologies of the brain defect. See B. Riley, P.J. Asherson, and P. McGuffin, “Genetics and Schizophrenia,” in Schizophrenia, (ed.) Steven R. Hirsch and Daniel Weinberger, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 2003), pp. 251–76. See also Graham D. Burrows, Trevor R. N orman, and Gertrude Rubinstein, (eds), Handbook of Studies on Schizophrenia, Part 1: Epidemiology, Aetiology and Clinical Features (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1986); and Dan Zahavi, (ed.), Exploring the Self (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000). 65 Sophie Houdard, “Expérience et écriture des ‘choses de l’autre vie’ chez JeanJoseph Surin,” Littératures classiques 39 (2000): 343.


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progress of his illness and reflects on the events retrospectively. The “I” appears at moments of intense involvement, as the narrator recollects emotional turmoil, anguish, frustration, and particular situations of conflicts. These shifts sometimes occur within a single sentence. They show that the narrator has not yet completely overcome his internal divisions. They also set the general mood, marking the opposition between the “I” and the community (“them”), underscoring the conflict between the subject and authority. N evertheless, the fluctuations never undermine the sincerity of Surin as a narrator. Rather, we find an authentic voice and a precise and careful narration throughout the Science. Although there is an intellectual progression, in that part 2 ends with his recovery, part 3 focuses on the divine grace he experienced, and part 4 offers truths and instruction, there is no precise moment when the author and reader move from one set of beliefs to another. We are constantly shuffling back and forth, between past and present, obsession and redemption, God and the Devil. Also, even in the later parts, the narrative voice is unable to grasp the entire experience. Expressions such as “it appears to me” or “I couldn’t say” convey Surin’s incapacity to fully explain in intellectual terms what has happened to him. Ultimately, it is the “I” whose victory is proclaimed, the “I” who has discovered his “personal” truth based on the mind/body union, a discovery that leads to his renewed engagement with his readers in the last part of the narrative. Surin’s new and personal discovery of the importance of the body runs counter to his original perception as a learned young man. According to Leszek Kolakowski, “Surin’s doctrinal starting point is the theocentric negation of nature and of the values of the created world.” That is, because of his education, the preacher is suspicious of man’s “natural” side, and for him the human learning process consists of submitting one’s soul to the divine will.66 This means that before his obsession, he profoundly distrusted the instincts, the senses, and the emotions. Prior to his illness, the body and its manifestations had only a secondary and inferior value for Surin, who suspected them of leading human beings away from the soul, which must be simple and humble, devoid of disruption. Surin’s Augustinian education is reflected in his initial belief in the separation between the interior (soul) and the exterior (body). In letter 18, written to the Jesuit fathers in May 1630, he tells how he undertook a coach journey, during which he met a young man of eighteen, who spoke to him with such simplicity and humility that Surin believed “he was an angel” (Correspondance p. 142). Surin draws the following lesson from him: “That the supernatural light that God pours into a soul makes it see everything it ought to do more clearly than the light of the sun shows sensible objects, and that the multitude of things it discovers within is much greater than anything that is in corporeal nature; that God in all his grandeur dwells and makes himself felt in

66 Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans église. La conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnel au XVIIe siècle, trans. Anna Posner (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 460.

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the pure, humble, simple, and faithful heart” (Correspondance p. 142).67 In 1630, seven years before the onset of his illness, the correspondence reveals Surin as a priest who highlights the faculty of the soul as a humble and temperate organ and who plays down the sensible world and corporeal nature, considering them reflections of a lesser beauty, inferior to that which God illuminates in the human soul. The “simple” and purified heart must thus feel the love of God. It was precisely his illness that established a revolutionary break between the young Surin and the lesson learned by the “infirm,” whose understanding of mankind has been transformed by the demonic obsession. After his illness, Surin understands that the body – and the sensations and emotions along with it – can no longer be separated from the religious experience or from life itself. They acquire an equivalent value and are always perceived in their union with the soul. At the same time, his new knowledge leaves untouched the continuing underlying tensions between himself and his community. In opposition to seventeenth-century ecclesiastic doctrines and, correspondingly, rationalist thought, Surin grants full value to the body as an accurate source of information, as something that portrays his actual state of mind. At this point, he not only breaks with the heritage of the Catholic Church but also posits himself as an arbiter of truth whose knowledge stems from his individual “mystical” experience. The priest’s narrative asserts his right to voice an alternate truth, a mystical path of religious experience. The preface to Science expérimentale depicts the exalted and experiential aspect of his mysticism, which is based on an intuitive and sensuous religious faith that lays claim to a new truth stemming from direct knowledge of God: “One can know the things of future [mystical] life by two pathways, namely, by faith and by experience. Faith is the common pathway God has established… . Experience is for few people” (p. 127).68 Surin legitimates this individually perceived truth by placing it within the tradition of the apostles. He furthermore insists on the role that the body and sense perception play in his experience and posits this pathway as rare and sublime. At the end of his mystical experiences lies an ineffable truth, that knowledge and belief stem from body and soul acting together. Surin’s revision of his own convictions at the time he was writing Science expérimentale marks a crucial change of path and clearly separates the before and the after of his illness. If we use Julia Kristeva’s concepts, inspired by those of Jacques Lacan, we may say that Surin moves away from the symbolic register, the grammatical rules of cold logic, and adopts the imaginary register: “The 67 “Que la lumière surnaturelle que Dieu verse dans une âme lui fait voir tout ce qu’elle doit faire plus clairement que la lumière du soleil ne montre les objets sensibles, et que la multitude des choses qu’elle découvre à l’intérieur est beaucoup plus grande que tout ce qui est en la nature corporelle; que Dieu avec toute sa grandeur habite et se fait sentir dans le coeur pur, humble, simple et fidèle.” 68 “On peut par deux voies savoir les choses de la vie [mystique] future, c’est à savoir par la foi et par l’expérience. La foi est la voie commune que Dieu a établie… . L’expérience est pour peu de personnes.”


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representation of strategies of identification, introjection, and projection, which mobilize the image of the body, the ego and the other, and which makes use of primary processes (displacement and condensation).”69 Lacan understands the child’s conception of itself as a slow process of formation in which instincts, affects, and sensorial experiences outside the linguistic register play a key role.70 Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are the repertories of the imaginary. Similarly, the mystical realization in Surin’s narrative posits a new register and proclaims a nondualistic truth, in which the body and its repertories – the emotions, the senses, and the intuition – together with reason constitute the human experience. His mystical “experiental” knowledge allows him to ascertain the importance and interrelatedness of body and mind and teaches him the value of emotions and sense perception. Hence, Surin’s truth lies in the realization that physiologically visible manifestations are bound up with mental pain and that unresolved disturbances manifest themselves at the level of both body and mind. Furthermore, sense perceptions play a vital role in Surin’s new knowledge, as valuable companions in the human experience. Spinoza will later attest to the concrete role the senses play as either positive or negative agents, increasing or decreasing the ability of the body to act. Surin already understands that the senses are signifying “agents” or “intermediaries” that give rise to consciousness. He even recognizes what neurobiologists now call the “mapping” of the senses, that is, their transmission of the body’s condition moment by moment to the brain.71 According to Antonio Damasio, sensory maps (visual, auditory, or tactile, for example), which belong to the physiological repertory, describe “the transformations that occur in the body when emotive reactions take place and that result in feeling.”72 Although even today little is known about how neuronal patterns draw a sensory map with mental images and produce our consciousness of feeling, sensory modalities “map the body state … from which a mental image of the body can emerge.”73 It is neural or sensory images perceived in the hypothalamus that cause the brain to respond through feelings and consciousness to an altered corporeal state. Sensory maps constitute significant agents in the correlation between body and mind, since they are responsible for the concrete image that is transmitted to the brain, from which feelings then arise. Sensory manifestations never acquire an independent value, however, nor are they a separate path to knowledge. Instead, they constitute

Julia Kristeva, “Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary,” in Constructions of the Self, (ed.) George Levine (N ew Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 289. 70 See Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” RFP 12 (1948): 367–88. 71 Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), p. 88. 72 Ibid., p. 51. 73 Ibid., p. 88. 69

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intermediary agents that link the physiological domain to the mental, and they serve as significant agents in creating consciousness. Although Surin, of course, did not possess the specific terminology of “mapping,” it is revealing that he focused sharply on sensory manifestations, a repertory that lay outside the permitted realm of reason and at the time constituted a dangerous and subversive non-lieu, or nonplace, from which to write.74 T he priest grants full value to the senses, which Descartes discredited as misleading agents and which the church and state strived to subdue, regulate, and control, determinedly adhering to the philosophy of the primacy of the rational. In the seventeenth century, the senses were “outside the system, outside plausibility, outside the dominant discourse of reason and the will, and outside language.”75 In contrast, Surin explicitly demonstrates that sensory experience produces altogether valid knowledge and sets about describing how it influences his actual state of mind during obsession: it allows him to find relief or it entails a new manifestation of pain. Among the frequent manifestations mentioned, he singles out his feeling of “constriction” (Science p. 169) when his condition worsens, or conversely, when he is improving, “a great warmth” (p. 148), “strength in his chest,” and a “dilation in his internal senses” that “open up” or “unburden” his heart and are always felt “in the flesh” (p. 169). In a letter to an unknown woman, Surin attests that his senses are “in a continual commotion … no peace, no rest; a confusion, a burning, and a continual impatience” (Correspondance p. 127).76 At the same time, however, sensory manifestations operate as signifying “agents” that produce mental symptoms, pointing to his condition. Sensory manifestations, together with physical markers, disclose how corporeal and mental pain are connected, since they have the power to unburden the heart and cause relief or to produce anxiety, a “constriction” and oppression that do not let him breathe “until they have cast [him] down again into that chasm and that horrible and frightful void of death where … [he is] nothing but abyss” (p. 129).77 The concrete feeling of a “chasm” and an “abyss” comes as the direct result of a chronological sequence, conveyed to us through the use of the term until. Surin learns through an oppressive and debilitating depression that sensory manifestations alert him to the precipice his mind and body face and comes to grasp that sensory repertories transmit valuable information to the brain 74 A non-lieu, or nonplace, is “a place where representation runs dry.” It cannot be described because it lies outside the realm of the permissible and beyond the limits of representation: that is, it constitutes a transgression. See Michel de Certeau, “Folie du nom et mystique du sujet,” in Folle vérité: Vérité et vraisemblance du texte psychotique, (ed.) Julia Kristeva and Jean-Michel Ribettes (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 287. 75 Ibid., p. 285. 76 “En émeute continuelle … point de paix, ni de repos; un trouble, un feu et une impatience continuelle.” 77 “Jusqu’à ce que qu’elles … [l’]aient replongé dans ce gouffre et dans ce vide horrible et épouvantable de la mort où … [il est] tout abîme.”


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that language is unable to grasp on its own. He learns that pain and suffering can be expressed through the senses, useful body maps that alert the human being to his or her actual state. Thus it is not the senses per se that lead Surin to the abyss of Angst and depression but rather his underlying mental struggle to conform to the religious and cultural norms of submission. The desolation in Surin’s mind is the outcome of previous sensory transmissions directly linked to the body. Mind and body struggle in vain to overcome this “precipice” of depression. Sense experience also heightens the mystical experience and reveals the alternate truth that the priest discovers as the result of his obsession. He describes how divine knowledge takes the path of sense perception: “The workings of Our Lord manifested themselves in his presence as a sort of trembling, as if it were a fever, and the body being agitated, as in a fit” (Science p. 259).78 Mysticism provides access to the immanent God, who like a “fever” infiltrates the body and mind through love, bearing witness to His grace.79 Surin, who observes that the sensory experience of divine union intensifies as the will weakens, thereby participates in the vogue for mysticism and places himself in the tradition of mystics such as the German Dominican Johannes Eckehart, known as Meister Eckehart (c1260–c1327) – who inspired Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) – the Spanish monk Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591), and the doctor, philosopher, and priest Angelus Silesius (1624–1677). He also anticipates the French quietists François Fénelon (1651–1715) and Mme Guyon (1648–1717).80 Early modern mysticism highlighted the interiority and depth of the personal dialogue with God

78 “L’opération de N otre-Seigneur se manifestait en sa présence par une façon de tremblement, comme si c’eût été une fièvre, et le corps étant agité, comme quand l’on est en l’accès.” 79 See Michael A. Sells on the mystical union between man and God: “This moment in which the boundaries between divine and human, self and other, melt away is commonly called mystical union. Mystical union is often associated with the extraordinary.” Michael A. Sells, Mystical Language of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 7. See also Bernhard Teuber’s important study on mystical language, Sacrificium litterae: Allegorische Rede und mystische Erfahrung in der Dichtung des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz (München: Fink, 2003). 80 For a detailed comparison between Surin’s mystical thought and that of his predecessors, see Stanislas Breton, Deux mystiques de l’excès; and Michel de Certeau, “Jean-Joseph Surin, interprète de Saint Jean de la Croix,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 46, 1 (1970): 45–70. Certeau argues that Surin had read the works of Saint John of the Cross (p. 49). In “A Strange Tongue”: Tradition, Language, and the Appropriation of Mystical Experience in Late Fourteenth-Century England and Sixteenth-Century Spain (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), John D. Green provides an interesting analysis of the dissolution of the “I” at the moment of mystical union. An excellent comparison between Surin’s and Saint Teresa’s thinking can be found in Patrick Goujon, “Surin, une mystique communicative: De l’exemple de Thérèse à l’exhortation pour tous,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 38, 2 (2002): 333–44.

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(or the demon), which involves both body and mind simultaneously.81 In place of the “hidden God” in whom one believes rationally, that form of spirituality stipulated a “God [who] must not be sought outside us but within us, in the deepest and most secret part of ourselves.”82 In this, it ran counter to the views of Pascal and Bossuet, who profoundly distrusted the mystical religious experience. A connection between Surin and the mystical current of the early modern period can be surmised because of the author’s focus on the individual and emotional aspect of religious experience, which acts through ravishment or rapture. The vital mystical body, which Michel de Certeau calls “a body too many” because it is positioned at the center of discourse, acquires a meaning and a value that exceed the bounds of plausibility and commands more attention than the medieval Christian and neoPlatonic tradition, or the classical age, attributed to it.83 In the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church’s violent confrontations with the mystics was a direct reaction to the abominable spectacle of the body during erotic ecstasy, the theatricality of that illogical but affective “body too many.”

“Secretum meum mihi”: Writing on Illness Surin’s Science expérimentale is an attempt to capture the reality of suffering by recording on paper a retrospective viewpoint. Surin deals with problems that will, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, also beset the modern subject: pain as authentic, imagined, hallucinated, or faked; its relation to language; its transgressive properties; and its representation on the body. When he writes in the fourth and concluding part of Science expérimentale that “the pain of the body had healed the mind” (p. 364),84 he asserts the dramatic interdependence of soma and psyche but also attributes meaning to the body itself as an entity in direct communication with the mind. This judgment occurs in the last part of the narrative, which critics tend

81 The theme of self-flagellation, which accompanies mystical discourse, is less key in Science expérimentale than in Surin’s Triomphe de l’amour or Cantiques. On one hand, self-inflicted suffering attests to the theatrical staging of the body in all its individuality. Its aim is to associate the believer with Jesus Christ by imitating the corporeal pain he experienced. On the other, bodily restraint goes hand in hand with so-called psychological self-flagellation: the hallucinatory belief in the daily presence of the demon troubles Surin, and fear so afflicts the believer that the discipline of the hair shirt and of the spiked copper girdle actively helps him resist diabolical temptation. That aspect predominates during the possession, when Surin seems to think that one must resist corporeal possession with a corporeal counterreaction (see Surin, Triomphe de l’amour, p. 50). 82 Mino Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme: De François de Sales à Fénelon, trans. Marc Bonneval (Grenoble: Millon, 1994), p. 14. 83 Certeau, “Folie du nom,” p. 294, emphasis Certeau’s. 84 “La douleur du corps avait guéri l’esprit.”


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to separate from parts 2 and 3, the autobiographical parts of his narration.85 T he last part has been called an instructive narrative or a reflection on the illness after the fact. While part 1 seeks to demonstrate the reality of the obsession (which is not madness) and parts 2 and 3 describe the various manifestations of the illness, part 4 consists of a retrospective account and a reflection on the lessons learned. The chronological sequence of the work may therefore be summarized as follows: contextualization and proof that demons exist (part 1); “I have an emotion, I feel” (parts 2 and 3), “then I believe I know” (part 4). By including doubt – implied by the phrase “I believe I know” – Surin indicates that understanding, even in hindsight, can never be complete and satisfying, since reason remains incapable of governing experience as a whole. Part of his experience remains incomprehensible and hence inexpressible. If we examine the structure of the work, we realize that the two parts in which Surin speaks as a healthy man (parts 1 and 4) frame those that deal with his illness (parts 2 and 3). In beginning and ending with his healthy state, then, he gives himself the authority to speak as a “reasonable,” recovered man rid of the demons’ influence, hence able to reflect cogently and rationally on his experience. But at the same time, he never stops pointing out the veracity of the obsession he experienced. Surin deliberately begins and ends with a description of his recovery to clarify a point that would otherwise remain incomprehensible or dubious: that the experience was neither invented nor irrational, and that as a recovered and reasonable subject, he can guarantee its authenticity. At the same time, there is no question of Surin attempting to create an exemplary hagiography or an ascetic writing that would ultimately assert the superiority of reason. To use Michel de Certeau’s terms, “the primacy of affectus over effectus”86 – that is, of the subjective and emotional element over the sober cogito – is maintained even in the “healthy” frame narrative. In accordance with Pascal’s belief that reason cannot explain everything and that “those who have a keen faith within their heart see without restraint that all that is is but the handiwork of God,” intuition, affect, and the heart remain the primordial sources of Surin’s writing.87 One of the traditional aims of autobiographical writing is to reach a deeper understanding of oneself by recollecting events or, in Freud’s terminology, by gaining access to the unconscious. According to Paul Jay, “if all writing is a form 85

Dean Ebner defines autobiography as “a self-written, prose account which attempts the recollection of the major portion of one’s past life and which focuses upon the inner thoughts or domestic or external activities of the individual.” Dean Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England: Theology and the Self (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 19. Unlike the journal, autobiography is characterized by a coherent structure and the development of the subject. 86 Michel de Certeau, “Crise sociale et réformisme spirituel au début du XVIIe siècle: Une ‘nouvelle spiritualité’ chez les Jésuites français,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 41, 3 (1965): 348. 87 “Ceux qui ont la foi vive dedans leur cœur voient incontinent que tout ce qui est n’est autre chose que l’ouvrage de Dieu.” Pascal, Pensées, L 242-781.


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of self-analysis, then autobiographical writing is probably the most explicitly self-analytical.”88 When Georges Gusdorf speaks of the “transmutation of selfconsciousness into self-writing,” he defines the task Surin undertakes: to transform his consciousness into a reflective, written “language.”89 Through writing, the “I” exercises his right to recover possession of his experience and fulfills a need to tell his story, to assemble his own life and make it adhere. Viktor von Weizäcker calls this phenomenon logophania, or “creative illness,”90 and suggests that some personal psychological experiences can be converted into a scientific or creative account. Let us note, however, that at the time Surin was writing his narrative, his inquiry into the “I” was not resolved but an ongoing process. The author’s aim in writing is to complete and further his self-analysis through a diachronic technique that oscillates between past, present, and future. “The historialization of self-consciousness into memory allows the individual to discover himself as he was, as he is, and as he ought to be after his own likeness.”91 In looking back to the “time of great darkness” (Science p. 216), Surin manages to impose order on that “engulfing confusion of the mind” (p. 216), which continues to plague him and which he seeks to alleviate.92 Unlike Pascal, who in his Pensées is wary of any subjective self-representation, Surin vividly depicts his experience and then insists on the veracity of his account. The modern critic Sophie Houdard alludes to the problem of authenticity in Surin’s autobiographical narrative, contrasting it to epistolary writing, which is conceived as a truthful transmission of a personal experience: “The letter – tool and narration, experiential report and object of experience – is addressed to an audience won over to its truth, its credibility; the letter makes it possible to ground a singular, particular spiritual knowledge in an indubitable truth, a knowledge that the Loudun public does not always easily accept.”93 Conversely, the autobiographical “self” is always a construction seeking to take the stage by elaborate discursive means: for example, the use of exaggeration, masks, and excessive theatricality.

Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22. 89 Georges Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi. Lignes de vie (Paris: Jacob, 1991), 1:10. 90 Viktor von Weizsäcker, Der kranke Mensch: Eine Einführung in die medizinische Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1951), pp. 322–7. By this term Weizäcker understands the “corporeal-mental, or at least the corporeal conditions from which a new thought emerges” in the form of a profound realization (Lebenserkenntnis). 91 Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi, 1:11. 92 N evertheless, Surin notes in a camouflaged manner that this imposition of order is in no wise that of methodical rationalism. He declares that even after the experience, self-knowledge is not complete and that only an “I believe I know” can manifest itself in writing. At the same time, he expresses the still-unresolved tensions by shifting between the first and third person. 93 Houdard, “Expérience et écriture,” p. 335. 88


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This use of discursive means and constructed elements, however, does not destroy the value of Science expérimentale as a piece of writing built on a new “science” that shuns rationalist models and invents new tools: in particular, an affirmative knowledge based on the emotional experience of “I knew through the senses” (Correspondance p. 215), in which the living, physical body may still be the true vehicle for conveying lived experience. Even after the obsession, Surin insists that the modus loquendi fails to describe his experience, the “strange things it is impossible to recount in detail” (Science p. 193). Language will always remain a detour on the way to self-expression. The linguistic medium – acting only belatedly – will never be able to assimilate entirely the essence of the actual obsession, since language is only one link in a long chain. N evertheless, Surin never places reason and affect in opposition, never establishes a new dualism that would proclaim the primordial essence of feelings at the expense of reason, as the sensibility movement would do in the eighteenth century. Rather, he is intent on linking affect and reason, body and mind, physiological language and verbal expression. To separate them would be to promote Descartes’s dualist vision and to conceive of reason as superior to physiological knowledge of the self. Conversely, in examining their interdependence and their sometimes simultaneous, sometimes staggered manifestations, Surin seems to be moving toward a holistic vision, which would be key for Spinoza as well. In the Ethics (1677), Spinoza depicts mind and body in their complete oneness. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza sees the human being not as a construction divisible into body and mind, which are to be placed in a meaningful relationship with each other, but as an experience of the self as body and mind. Spinoza never represents the mind without the body, and he demonstrates that, in order to understand the mind, we must first begin to comprehend the body. Minds are thus expressions of the body that mirror actual body states. Herein lies the essential connection between Spinoza’s thinking and Surin’s new truth at the moment of writing. While the Dutch philosopher refutes dualism from a philosophical perspective, Surin’s monism is the direct result of personal experience, and his act of writing is a way specifically to discredit rationalist theories. The mystical priest discovers the degree to which human health is grounded in mental and physical well-being and places the “I” at the center of his study. That “I” cannot be reduced to a corporeal or mental “I.” In this respect, he senses what the theorist Albert Shalom, describing holistic medicine as it is practiced today, conceives as “physical subjectivity,” that is, self-definition through the central place adopted by the “I” – emotional, sensuous, verbal, and rational all at once.94 Surin replaces a philosophy oriented toward the reflective use of the will with a mode of thinking that declares affective, intuitive, and rational knowledge as a qualitative aim of human experience. Spinoza as well describes three concrete and interrelated paths toward knowledge: the imaginatio based on sense experience 94 Albert Shalom, The Body/Mind Conceptual Framework and the Problem of Personal Identity (Atlantic Highlands, N J: Humanities Press, 1985), p. 456.


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and imagination, the ratio based on understanding and reason, and the scientia intuitive, a form of the adequate idea or “mental seeing.” One of the main points of Surin’s new “science” is to explain how sensory knowledge, intuition, and reason go hand in hand. Spinoza understands their interdependence in exactly the same way. Surin postulates as his new “truth,” learned through his own body, that the rational path of the thinking “I” is not the principal agent in life but only one element for gaining access to knowledge. He demonstrates that our body and its state of being, moment by moment, provides us with adequate sources of knowledge through our emotions and sense perceptions. This truth is scarcely distinguishable from the current neurobiological perspective of Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, who depict the mind as a direct expression of the body in the realm of consciousness and feeling and challenge the autonomy of the mind. At the heart of Damasio’s thesis is his realization that the sense of self involves body, brain, and mind, and that they mirror one another in continuous interrelated processes. He explains that it is through feelings that the brain responds to an altered corporeal state: “Feeling is the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes.”95 In postulating a truth that resembles current neurobiological thought, Surin and Spinoza provide a link between the seventeenth-century understanding of how the body and the mind work and our contemporary knowledge. Surin demonstrates that the body cannot be suppressed and that affects ineluctably resurface to claim their due, to establish their value, and to indicate that somatic manifestations are closely fused to psychic distress. He chooses his title, Science expérimentale, as the final battleground for his critical reflection on the rationalist conceptions and doctrines of his period. In an era when authors did not customarily title their autobiographies, Surin deliberately selected an unsettling and ambiguous title, which attests to a hidden motivation for his writing. Since in French expérimental means both “experiential” and “experimental,” the title links subjective reality to scientific knowledge (mirroring the intimate relation between body and mind). In addition, as N icholas Paige points out, in the seventeenth century the word science meant both “science” and “knowledge,” designating not only a methodical process but, more simply, a familiarity with something.96 Paige concludes: “The title of the Science expérimentale … points therefore in both ways at once, suggesting an experimental knowledge of the divine (and the diabolical) that can be communicated, and an experiential knowledge that, as Surin says, ‘est secret et ne se doit communiquer à personne’ [is secret and must not be communicated to anyone].”97 Whereas Paige interprets the title from the standpoint of the communicability or incommunicability of the experiential Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 86, emphasis Damasio’s. Paige, Being Interior, p. 195. There was also a more limited connotation to the word science: the quasi-anatomical discourse of a “mystical science,” of the kind that Mino Bergamo examines. 97 Paige, Being Interior, p. 197. 95 96


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experiment, I would like to point out that, through the link between the scientific and the subjective sense of science, and through the ambivalence of the term expérimentale, Surin connects not only science and experience but also science and affects, reason and affects, mind and body. The title indicates not a new scientific path that would be recommended by both Descartes and Surin, but, on the contrary, a fundamental antagonism in their ways of thinking. Descartes links experimentation to good sense, the will, and rational intuition, the human being’s unflagging guides, whereas Surin emphasizes the role played by the body and the emotions, the initial links in a sequence of events that depends closely on feeling and that produces a new awareness, through and at the moment of writing. The title is the final indicator that the human path is always dual and connected, that body and mind act in concert.98 In addition, in his narrative, the author opposes any method of corporeal repression, both in his treatment and in the philosophy, theology, and politics of his time. We have seen that his bitterness and indignation erupt against anyone who calls for repression, the stifling of the body, methods used against him that heightened his anxiety and culminated in his suicide attempt. The spectacle of Surin’s convulsive body contradicts and shuns all political, social, and religious codes of moderate conduct and obedience, and is therefore judged culturally and politically subversive in an era of profound civil unrest and political insurgency. We could go even further and say that in consigning the physiological spectacle to paper, Surin writes a revolutionary narrative against all who intend to discipline the body or who are mistrustful of it, either because they continue to follow docilely an outdated notion of Augustinian eudaemonism (the belief that human health has to do primarily with one’s state of mind) or because, like the consolidating absolutist state, they seek to suppress the body’s voice. The priest’s personal battle was thus connected to the shifting epistemologies of the mid-seventeenth century, which were of a philosophical, ecclesiastical, cultural, and political nature. It is undeniable that Surin’s obsession undermined the desensitized absolutist body at the very moment of it foundation, thereby showing how malady creates an awareness of culturally and socially induced processes. He directed an implicit and fundamental criticism at an entire authoritarian system – political, ecclesiastical, and cultural – which during that time was imposing physical and mental repression. According to Francis Barker, “From the Renaissance on, the original ‘body in pain’ becomes suppressed and replaced by a modern fashioning of a new body, subjected to the rational mind and perceived from the ‘outside’ as a biological machine, deprived of our inward concept of the body.”99 Surin’s 98

Mahmoud Sami-Ali perceives writing as “inseparable from the corporeal space … a space proper to representation, oriented in terms of a particular language.” Mahmoud Sami-Ali, Le corps, l’espace et le temps (Paris: Bordas, 1990), p. 74. Writing therefore allows one to project the body onto paper as a permanent inscription. 99 Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. vi–vii.

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obsession coincided with the creation of rigid and rationalist social models in which all corporeal “coarseness” was repressed.100 Surin was deeply suspicious of the political and philosophical agendas of his period. His illness occurred at a time when the consolidation of the “body politic” of Louis XIII’s and Louis XIV’s absolutist regime – and its parallel structure in the authoritarian Catholic Church – sought to eradicate the value of the physiological realm and to impose standards of self-denial and self-subjugation. The period during which Surin was experiencing his malady was an era of cultural “conditioning” in which individual claims to authority were condemned and harshly chastised, as the priest came to experience himself, first when he was sent away from Loudun and then when he was interned in Bordeaux. In addition, the new social models primarily targeted intellectual circles and high society, milieus Surin had frequented since his childhood. These codes, encapsulated in the terms galanterie and honnêteté, dictated, in both the public and private realms, the self-repression and “moderate” behavior required to become an homme de bien, a notion close to the Cartesian generous soul.101 T he code of honnêteté tyrannically commanded the subject to silence his individual tendencies and to efface the body’s presence. The new collective social model was thus centered on the suppression of the body’s voice. The critical postulates of Science expérimentale raised epistemological problems that were primordial at the time: the perception of (the inequality of) substances, the deep infiltration of homogeneity and bodily submission into the Jesuit community and the absolutist state, and the transformation in the nature of authority. N evertheless, it was only in 1663 that this priest’s inner split yielded to a new, firm, individualistic stance, which he dared display to his readers and through which he revealed his growing antagonism toward the influence of rationalist models in the clerical world and the increasing conflict of the self in the political order hostile to the individual. Reversing the traditional aim of religious autobiography, which is to place one’s personal experience within the bosom of the Church and to submit to its precepts, Surin presents merely a false appearance of submission and claims that the autobiographical parts are “secretum meum mihi” and ought to be concealed from the public eye. The surprising declaration in the prefatory note that certain parts of the narrative are to be read exclusively by a small circle of readers, to whom he confides his “secret,” attests that his clearsighted and sometimes trenchant reflections have an unstated aim: his knowledge is made available to a select readership only, circulated among a restricted audience and withheld from the majority. The partially secret autobiographical narrative 100 Melquiades Andres speaks in this context of a more profound and subversive freedom and individuality emanating from the mystic, who is liberated from all social constraints. Melquiades Andres, Historia de la mística de la edad de oro en España y América (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores cristianos, 1994), pp. 13, 139–201. 101 See Domna Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 49.


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conveys a certain kind of information, which is classified as “top secret.” While he certainly adopts the topos of apparent modesty, claiming he does not want to publish his narrative, he is nevertheless driven by a profound need to address the divisions between him and a larger community, which at the time of writing remain unresolved and which he can no longer keep inside.102 According to Gusdorf, “the beginning of self-writing always corresponds to a personality crisis. Personal identity is called into question, it becomes a question.”103 The affirmation of Surin’s “I” is the final result of that crisis, the consignment to paper of only partially resolved tensions. Whereas in the letters he wrote before his illness, Surin clearly demonstrated that his primary affiliation was with the Augustinian tradition of eudaemonism, his autobiographical narration relates his break from these views through the experience of an illness that abolishes the power of the cogito and challenges the reign of the will. The priest’s critical revision of the mind/body dualism as it had previously been conceived is manifested in his “interior approach” during Jeanne des Anges’s exorcism, his use of a holistic treatment that runs counter to the traditional methods of his time. His radical reorientation takes concrete form during the experience of obsession: excluded from public discourse as a “madman,”104 he experiences the marginality of a weak soul and discovers, during his twenty years of enforced silence and paralysis, a new voice that goes hand in hand with an “independent state of mind.”105 It is finally through the act of narrating his inexpressible experience that he comes to term with it, while never claiming to comprehend it completely or to convey it logically. On the contrary, his obsession and his recovery remain both enigmatic and mystifying, indicating that the true addressee of the narrative might be Surin himself, who is seeking his “way” (p. 204), split between the past, the present, and the future. Similarly, the moment of healing remains almost impenetrable, while once more presenting an alternate model of the mind/body relationship. The “triumph of divine love over hell” occurs during Surin’s sleep. God chooses to reveal himself once more through the physiological path while Surin is lying on his bed “to get some sleep” (Science p. 242), foundering in nightmares about his damnation. He 102

341).

Surin asserts the “veracity” of his account several times, however (Science p.

Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi, 1:23. Although Surin insists on the anomaly and mystery of his illness, he always takes care to differentiate it from madness, since for Descartes madness is a factor excluded from the assertion of subjectivity. “For Descartes, the exclusion of madness is the semiotic operator assuring the textual production of the Cogito.” Jean Petitot-Cocordia, “Sur ce qui revient à la psychose,” in Kristeva and Ribettes, eds., Folle vérité, p. 227. While Science expérimentale was not written during his illness, other works by Surin were created during this particular time of infliction. 105 Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1926), 5:309. 103 104

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is suddenly invaded by violent manifestations: “It seems to me that, at the time, I felt in my mind as if a second wave had covered and engulfed me, putting my soul at peace; as if, at the height of that abandonment, the soul had said: Fiat voluntas tua, and Our Lord then made me understand that abandonment to divine will must bring the soul, without really discerning the what or the wherefore, to the point even of accepting, by submission to divine power for eternity, everything that would please it” (p. 242).106 Like the mark of the Devil, the mark imprinted by God is felt by both body and mind in a state of utter passivity. Once more, the narrator abandons the use of the active voice, granting power to the senses and to automatic reactions unfolding in the body. He meticulously describes the cure as initiated by a “corporeal taste” (p. 277) of God, which subsequently manifests itself as a mental taste and leads to a mystical and heavenly “communion,” both blessed and healing: “By the taste of the flesh I come to a notion of a being who is the happiness of every being and who is my God, and I am so satisfied with it that my mind and flesh are filled with God… . I know him in a way that cannot be explained” (p. 277).107 The mystical experience of God puts an end to the priest’s physical and mental illness and restores his position inside the community. Surin again becomes a prolific letter writer and an apparently submissive member of his community. Yet his Science expérimentale, written in retrospect, poignantly discloses his critical evaluation of the rationalist and absolutist doctrines of bodily suppression – and of the holistic truth he sets against them, his inextricable individualism, and his personal battle, linked to the shifting epistemologies of his time. Through the return of the body in his work and its clear and poignant voice, he demonstrates that soma cannot be suppressed and that psychic distress is closely fused to physiological disorders. He rejects as chimerical and erroneous the rationalist thinking expressed by the Cartesian sequence “I think, therefore I am.” Through writing, Surin deliberately unseats the foundation of human experience in the cogito and puts his own truth in its place: “I am, I feel, then I think.”

106 “Il me semble que je sentis pour lors en l’esprit comme si un deuxième flot m’eût couvert et englouti qui mit mon âme en paix, comme si, dans le fort de cet abandon, l’âme eut dit : Fiat voluntas tua, et N otre-Seigneur me fit comprendre, lors, que l’abandon à la divine volonté doit porter l’âme jusque-là que, sans tant discerner ni quoi ni comment, d’accepter même, par soumission au divin pouvoir, pour l’éternité, tout ce qu’il lui plairait.” 107 “Par le goût de la chair je viens à une notion d’un être qui est le bonheur de tout être et qui est mon Dieu, et j’en suis tellement satisfait, que mon esprit et ma chair sont pleins de Dieu … je le connais d’une manière qui ne se peut expliquer.”

Chapter 3

Melancholic Subversions in Molière’s Le misanthrope (1666) and Le malade imaginaire (1673)

The health of the soul is no more assured than that of the body; and though we may seem far removed from the passions, we are in no less danger of losing control of them than of falling ill when we are well. – François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 188

The richness of Molière’s comic characters – their real density and vivacity – is certainly one of the most important innovations of the seventeenth century and attests to the genius of the illustrious writer and actor. Yet Molière is also unnerving to scholars, because his protagonists resist the classical categorization of comedy. Patrick Dandrey divides Molière’s ridicules into “fanatics” and “monsters” but soon concedes that this typology is too reductive, since in Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), the Argan character combines the two comic models. Like the fanatic, his behavior is black-and-white and his fixation on a single object makes him a monomaniac; but his monstrous side finds expression in fits of rage and persistent madness. The universe of Molière’s characters is distinguished by excess, obsession, vanity, and egoism. They ostensibly reject the codes of behavior of their environment and assert themselves through their opposition to society, “choosing to be different from everybody else, while turning away from what they castigate as the vain ambitions of the world.” For that reason, they are perceived as madmen by secondary characters, who merrily mock them and criticize their incomprehensible excesses and impetuous actions. In Le misanthrope (The Misanthrope), Philinte warns Alceste that because of his scorn and disturbed behavior – which Philinte describes as an illness – “the world finds … [him] ridiculous” (p. 212) (“cette maladie … donne la comédie”; line 106), and people are making fun of him (line 203). Célimène, who does not understand his Patrick Dandrey, “La comédie du ridicule,” Molière, des Fourberies de Scapin au Malade imaginaire, annual supplement of Littératures classiques, (ed.) Pierre Ronzeaud (January 1993): 16–19. Lionel Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), p. 212. [Translation slightly modified—trans. English translations of Le misanthrope are taken from The Misanthrope, Tartuffe and Other Plays, trans. Maya Slater (Oxford: Oxford

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intemperance, accuses Alceste of taking leave of his senses (line 563). Similarly, in Le malade imaginaire, Béralde progresses from accusing Argan of “error” or “blindness” to exclaiming: “Indeed, my brother, you are mad” (Ma foi, mon frère, vous êtes fou; Act III, scene 6). Alceste and Argan are no doubt comic heroes and their folly and imposture should not be overlooked. Yet the epithet madness attributed to them does not do justice to the complexity of mind/body disorders that occur in both plays. Although Molière’s universe is undeniably comic and illness is used as a way to portray Alceste’s and Argan’s obsessive and manic struggle for control, the plays also explore classical models of the mind/body relationship as expressed in absolutist society and in Descartes’s philosophy. In her seminal study Lire le théâtre, Anne Ubersfeld has argued that theater “appears to be a privileged form of art of capital importance since it demonstrates better than other forms of art how the individual psyche is invested in a collective relation. Classical theater distinctly plays out the tensions between individual and collective identity. It is precisely the early modern stage that reveals how the individual psyche is always invested in a collective, societal relationship, and that furthermore expresses the underlying psychological conflict, tension and stress within that society. The comic stage offers a rich reflection on absolutism as a locus of conflicting and antagonistic discourses in which ambivalences are played out. In Heterologies, Michel de Certeau emphasizes a similar point when he writes that “something that exceeds the thinkable and opens the possibility of ‘thinking otherwise’ bursts in through comical, incongruous or paradoxical half-openings of discourse.” In Larry Rigg’s words, “comedy challenges paradigms and definite versions of order” and knowledge through laughter in so far as laughter reasserts the presence of the body and thus, as Timothy Murray agrees, constitutes a violation of interpretive authority. Although Molière’s universe is undeniably comic and illness is used as a way to reveal the protagonist’s obsessive and manic struggle for control, I propose here to reexamine mind/body disorders apart from the main characters’ excesses and grotesqueness, drawing attention to the impact of the physical and social environment on their psychological constitution, on their frustrations, deprivations, and troubled interpersonal relationships. It is the purpose of this chapter to reexamine illness in the context of comic theater in order to reveal, behind the characters’ ridiculous nature and comic repetition, the profound anxiety and sense of purposelessness of the classical University Press, 2001). Page numbers will be cited in the text.—trans.] By permission of Oxford University Press. Anne Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre 1 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978), p. 9. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 194. Larry Riggs, Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2005), p. 34. Timothy Murray, Drama Trauma: Spectators of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 114.

Melancholic Subversions in Molière

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subject in the absolutist state. Bodily signs or symptoms are the result of a repression caused by the impossibility of expressing and verbalizing disapproval of codes and social rules, since these institutional and governmental networks prohibited spontaneous speech and reduced the individual to a puppet used to shore up the phantasmagorical and oscillating spectacle of the Sun King. Frankly expressed opinions lie outside the realm of the permitted, both for Molière and for his characters. Yet thanks to Freud we now know that the distinct articulation of desires, fears, and conflicts by the afflicted “I” is the first step toward dissolving psychic tensions. The relationship established between the psychiatrist and the patient is built entirely on the notion of frank and open dialogue. According to Freud, the therapeutic effect lies in leading the patient to himself take the necessary step toward understanding the source of and solution to the problem, the final result of the beneficent spoken word. Since liberation through the insightful word is taboo for Alceste and Argan, and of course for Molière, the “spectacle of the body” serves to convey the mental conflicts, which find expression in melancholy (Alceste) and hypochondriacal melancholy (Argan). In Molière’s comedies, so-called psychosomatic disorders stem from an underlying anxiety, a crisis of conscience. The autonomous post-Renaissance man – the “self-fashioning” subject, as Stephen Greenblatt calls him10 – perceived that crisis in a society where complex networks of mutual obligation were being lost but where the new individual quickly became the object of repression, manipulation, and power. Psychological disorder and extreme physical pain were the consequences of the drastic social displacement that marked the subject under Louis XIV. Molière’s characters endure the frustration of having been rendered utterly impotent, deprived of a meaningful function. Physical ailments mark the depressed (self-) excluded subject and thus mirror the characters’ psychological condition. As an “idiom of distress”,11 their melancholy expresses the psychological pain of the classical subject: his sense of fragmentation or disintegration and his reduced self-esteem. Molière’s characters embody the classical subject, and their ills are a sign of social rupture, the unperceived but ostentatious suffering of an entire portion of society. Alceste and Argan are both victims and dissidents who attest to the See Jürgen Grimm, Molière, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), p. 124. Sigmund Freud, “Die behandlungstechnischen Schriften von 1911–1915,” in Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik, Studienausgabe, 5th edn, vol. 11 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), p. 200. 10 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 9. Greenblatt analyses the construction of identity in writing among English authors at the beginning of the modern period and sheds light on the conflict between the writer and the political, religious, and cultural constraints weighing on him. It is in this context that he coins the term “self-fashioning.” 11 Lilian R. Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 2003).


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fundamental upheavals wreaking havoc in the absolutist state of the seventeenth century, where social codes imposed the disincorporation of the subject as a result of his homogenization and his assimilation to the court. Only the king had a right to an individual, public, and celebrated body. According to Jean-Marie Apostolidès, the honnête homme had to ignore his own body and insert himself into the “melting pot, where any differences that might divide the courtiers conceived in their totality dissolved.”12 Social codes required the honnête homme to practice self-restraint, a mode of behavior built around the use of reason and self-control. “This role of courtier consisted of being useful to the country by acquiring the prince’s favor, by cultivating a particular behavior of sorts – verbal discretion, vestimentary taste, a supreme capacity for knowing how to please, and so on. In this regard, we see to what extent the ‘good manners’ stemming from the doctrine of honnêteté assumed a regulatory function. That is because they served to make honnêtes gens anonymous, to neutralize them in some sense, so that the honnête homme, inhibited by the social taboo, would not criticize. Reduced to a kind of collective uniformity, the‘honnête’ nobles and bourgeois, side by side, led an existence strictly governed by the imperatives of the ritual ceremony imposed by honnête society.”13 In Le misanthrope and Le malade imaginaire, Molière was not only reacting against systems built to thwart the individual body but was also exposing the harmful consequences of the corporeal alienation of the classical subject. The two protagonists consciously perceive the mechanisms at work in society. According to Lionel Gossman, “what these characters want above all is to be distinguished, but they refuse to adopt the usual method of social advancement and privilege, since this method offers only a relative superiority to others, whereas the superiority they desire is absolute.”14 As Alceste puts it in a famous line: “I want to be distinguished from the rest” (p. 211) (Je veux qu’on me distingue”; line 63). Their illnesses are an intentional choice directed against conformism. Even as physical crises become a revolt against models of bodily repression, they also reflect the subject’s degradation and displacement, his trauma of being subjected to the absolutist doctrines of self-restraint and the purely ornamental roles played by the nobles and by the sphere that increasingly came to compete with them, namely, the Parisian bourgeoisie. Marked by an excess of black bile (Alceste) or “an obsessive attention to the free flowing of his intestinal tract” (Argan),15 the two ailing bodies codify the characters’ unconcealed rejection of the social conventions of self-control and moderation. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981), p. 51. 13 Ralph Albanese, Le dynamisme de la peur chez Molière: Une analyse socioculturelle de Dom Juan, Tartuffe, et L’Ecole des femmes (University of Mississippi Press: Romance Monographs, 1976), p. 36. 14 Gossman, Men and Masks, p. 211. 15 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 43. 12


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The subtitle of Le misanthrope – L’atrabiliaire amoureux (The atrabilious lover) – announces the title character’s illness. The term atrabilious comes from the Latin and designates a melancholic disposition. It alludes to the scientific tradition of considering a physical disorder the result of a disruption in the “humors,” a surge of black bile that may include psychological manifestations. Molière also had an inkling of the reverse process, whereby psychological factors are transferred from mind to body and find expression in somatic disorders, with body and mind mirroring each other. He exposes the two characters’ “mental otherness” and depicts their inner conflict by theatricalizing invisible psychic processes. In the two plays, “character formation prevails over symptom formation (always linked to the failure of repression and the return of the repressed).”16 Alceste is the victim not only of his humors but also of an internal conflict in which the afflicted mental state “speaks through the body.”17 In Le malade imaginaire, Argan’s hypochondria, despite having no marked organic manifestation, finds expression in his perpetual obsession with the invisible ills from which he feels he is suffering.18 Behind Argan’s illness there is no longer a disorder of the humors but captivatingly complex emotional factors that lead to his obsessive fear that he suffers from serious illnesses. In the case of both Alceste and Argan, it seems, particular physical symptoms convey an inner impasse and emotional tension. These “psychosomatic” symptoms serve to translate uncontrolled anger, fear, and mental distress. In each case, the ailment is caused by a mental frustration that manifests itself in the body and in the mind, making the protagonists appear outwardly grotesque or excessive but attesting to disorders in which psychological factors and interpersonal relationships play an important role. The plays also allow us to consider Molière’s reaction to the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body dualism and the belief in a disembodied mind. Soma and psyche are correlated; the body becomes the bearer of psychological conflicts through humoral imbalances and relentless pain.

Melancholy and Misanthropy: Le misanthrope (1666) Le misanthrope opens with the depiction of the solitary and introverted Alceste, seated on a chair in a lonely room of Célimène’s house, troubled by dark thoughts and preoccupied with exploring his sorrow. Alceste’s attention to his melancholy is rooted in his body. From the very first scene, this melancholy takes the stage, as he invokes the flow of “black bile,” also called “spleen” (p. 214) (humeur noire; line 91). His “fits of black depression” (p. 212) ([lui] échauffer la bile; line 90) 16 Mahmoud Sami-Ali, Penser le somatique: Imaginaire et pathologie (Paris: Dunod, 1987), p. 308. 17 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (N ew York: Vintage, 1978), p. 43. 18 Some of Molière’s contemporaries believed he was himself a hypochondriac, which led Le Boulanger de Chalussay to portray him in Elmire hypocondre (1670).


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cause him “angry rantings” (p. 209) (brusques chagrins; line 6) with no obvious origin.19 The interplay of physiological and psychological symptoms is accentuated by the emotional disturbances produced by the humoral changes: Alceste has “fits of black depression” (p. 212) (entre en une humeur noire et un chagrin profond; line 91). Molière was inspired at this point by the medical thinking of his time, which saw a connection between the flow of black bile and a morose, taciturn, and solitary temperament. That is, in the initial portrait of his protagonist, Molière places himself within a medical tradition that studied the physiopsychological components of melancholy and established that humoral melancholy was the result of a preponderance of black bile, perceiving the mental symptoms that accompanied the physiological imbalance as a relationship of reciprocal interaction. Alceste’s humors are out of balance and his temperament is seen to be profoundly influenced by a physiological process that poses a threat to his position in society, which explains his exclusion from courtly society. We know that Louis XIV could not stand to have the melancholic in his court. The black moods produced by the contamination of the humors were interpreted as an attitude at odds with the courtly subject’s obligation to be “joyful” and “sociable,” always smiling.20 Alceste is aware that his melancholic temperament, the result of his bile, and his cheerless soul would not be tolerated at court: “I’ve never been that sort of man, since I was small – / I haven’t got a courtier’s character at all. / I don’t possess the qualities a fellow needs / To get on well at court, and make sure he succeeds” (p. 247)21 (L’humeur dont je me sens veut que je m’en bannisse. / Le Ciel ne m’a point fait, en me donnant le jour, / Une âme compatible avec l’air de la cour; lines 1082–4). He claims his exclusion is an intentional choice stemming from the knowledge that his physical constitution and accompanying mental symptoms would be illperceived, not even tolerated, in fact, and would thus lead to his “banishment.” There is an insurmountable conflict between the physiological constitution of Alceste as victim of his bodily humors and the demands of the society of his time. He knows he is “other” by virtue of the periodic overheating of his bile, against which he has no power, since it is part of the nature God bestowed on him. As a melancholic by character or temperament, Alceste has borne the mark of contamination since his birth. Ancient Greek medicine had already observed that cold vapors could rise up through the body, darkening the mind and causing the negative passions of fear and sorrow, often accompanied by misanthropy, a close companion to melancholy. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton revived this idea, showing the body could be responsible for producing the mind’s affliction, manifested in tenacious

19

See also lines 90 and 166. Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Melancholie und Misanthropie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Molière und Rousseau,” in Aufsätze zur Literaturgeschichte in Frankreich, Belgien und Spanien (ed.) Hans-Joachim Lope. Frankfurt: Lang, 1985), p. 32. 21 [Translation slightly modified—trans.] 20


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mental symptoms such as fear, sorrow, distrust, temerity, and maliciousness.22 Likewise, Molière’s melancholic character is profoundly marked by mental disturbances that go hand in hand with the humoral imbalance. Among them, we can distinguish Alceste’s melancholic sorrow, his fear, his tendency to ruminate, his withdrawal into himself, and his misanthropy. Alceste lives in permanent fear: of losing his lawsuit, of being abandoned by Célimène, of not being faithful to his moral principles. He sinks into solitude, weary of human contact; his superficial friendships always disappoint him in the end. In Act I, he even feels betrayed by his best friend: What? Me, four friend? Why don’t you cross me off our list? It’s true I’ve always made a show of liking you; But now I’ve witnessed your behaviour we’re through. I tell you, I don’t want your friendship any more – I hate you, now I know you’re rotten to the core. (p. 209) Moi, votre ami? Rayez cela de vos papiers. J’ai fait jusques ici profession de l’être, Mais après ce qu’en vous je viens de voir paraître, Je vous déclare net que je ne le suis plus, Et ne veux nulle place en des cœurs corrompus. (lines 8–12)

Alceste distrusts everyone and would rather hang himself than sympathize with a man who does not deserve his friendship. He also rejects the sociable behavior demanded at the time. He insults or threatens his “rivals” to be rid of them, an “unhealthy” reaction in the eyes of his honnête peers because it does not conform to social demands, which, according to Philinte, require that But when a stranger rushes up and hugs you tight, You have to hug him back – it seems only polite; You can’t keep him at arm’s length, you must play the game, And if he swears you’re his best friend, you do the same (p. 210) Lorsqu’un homme vous vient embrasser avec joie Il faut bien le payer de la même monnoie. Répondre, comme on peut, à ses empressements, Et rendre offre pour offre, et serments pour serments. (lines 37–40)

Solitariness, fear, and distrust are all symptoms of Alceste’s disease, suggesting his inability to be compliant and abide by social convention. While his condition 22 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, (ed.) T.C. Faulkner, N .K. Kiessling, and R.I. Blair, introduction and commentary by J.B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth, 6 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), i. 384–396.

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forcefully places him in the margin of society, as evident in his exclusion from court life, it is worth considering that his blatant display of taciturnity and unsociability makes him willfully other. For though we may see that he is a victim of melancholy, his self-exclusion is also a choice incumbent upon him: it is his way of protesting against the model of honnêteté that surrounds him and which he perceives as a “smirking face” (p. 213) (grimace; line 137) and “dirty tricks” (p. 213) (sales emplois; line 130) that have infiltrated society. Alceste renounces the court’s codes and etiquette, which facilitate the political machine’s task of assembling and monitoring the nobility and which reduce marquesses and other nobles to participating in the king’s coucher (petit couché; line 739), to playing a purely ornamental role.23 His overt melancholy is a way of protesting against the inert and empty position of the honnête homme at court. The refusal to play the game in a system of emasculation – in Freudian terms, “castration” – lies behind his melancholy, which protects him from the void found reflected in Clitandre’s and Acaste’s lives. 24 Acaste observes that he doesn’t “have to rush off – I’ve nothing on today” (p. 235) (Rien ne m’appelle ailleurs de toute la journée; line 737). Similarly, Clitandre admits: “I’ve got an evening duty to perform at court, / But up till then Madame can count on my support” (p. 235) (Moi, pourvu que je puisse être au petit couché / Je n’ai point d’autre affaire où je sois attaché; lines 739–40). As Erich Auerbach has argued, Acaste’s and Clitandre’s verbal efforts to emphasize their virility are intended to mask their purely decorative position. Both characters incarnate the passive function of an entire social class.25 Philinte instead justifies his passivity and conformity in terms of his phlegmatic humor:

23 Frank-Rutger Hausmann has insightfully pointed to this shift of roles, which was an “alienation for the old nobility of the sword, since their military activities were turned into diversions for the king.” See “Mélancholie et monarchie absolue,” Recherches et travaux 56 (1999): 187. 24 Although Alceste seemingly refuses to play society’s “game,” he is inextricably caught up in it. In a society of conformists where everyone seeks everyone else’s approval, the “game” is not an empty battle devoid of meaning. It is a struggle for survival and existence, and marginality itself can be seen as a way to play the game. Melancholy becomes a “performance” that masks Alceste’s impotence and vulnerability as he seeks a voice within society. Hence Alceste needs the society he despises. A similar point has been made by Larry Riggs, who claims that “by denying his dependence on the social context Alceste becomes theatrical in the worst sense: he constantly repeats the themes of a narrow, derivative role. Misanthropy is a social performance as surely as is sincerity” (Molière and Plurality: Decomposition of the Classicist Self [N ew York: Peter Lang, 1989], p. 129). Oronte seeks Alceste’s approval of his sonnet, since he is also part of the world of conformists. At the same time, his self is already so fragile and damaged that it cannot help but look for self-destruction in the degradation caused by others who refuse to acknowledge him. 25 Erich Auerbach, La cour et la ville,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (N ew York: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 166.


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I take things easy, let men work their problems through; I teach myself to put up with the things they do. At court and in the town, I never intervene: My phlegm’s more philosophical than all your spleen. (p. 214) Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont, J’accoutume mon âme à souffrir ce qu’ils font; Et je crois qu’à la cour, de même qu’à la ville, Mon flegme est philosophe autant que votre bile. (lines 164–6)

By contrast, Alceste blatantly reveals his contempt for an existence of subjugation and conformity. Molière’s character, both inwardly and outwardly, is at odds with the established codes of sociability and moderation. His melancholic constitution allows him to be himself and to confront with hostility and disgust the social conventions that “prostitute” (line 54) the men surrounding him.26 N evertheless, a sense of profound desolation accompanies the hero from the start of the play and will worsen by the end of Act V, as contempt turns to frustration and gloom. Why does Molière open his play with a depiction of Alceste’s melancholy that reveals his otherness of both body and mind, and why does he end with the character’s deep despair? The last lines demonstrate Alceste’s moribund taedium vitae, his intense sorrow, profoundly afflicted selfhood, and imminent danger of suicide, as conveyed by the word gouffre, or “chasm” (line 1804), which indicates his desperate straits. Molière concludes with a pessimistic image, depicting no physical or moral recovery on Alceste’s part, thus underscoring the atmosphere of solitude and incomprehension that surrounds him, his deadly despair as a result of his inability to bow to the sociopolitical mechanisms of the time. N ot only does the character suffer because those around him do not understand his otherness; he also seeks to flee those who decry him. The “desert” to which he wishes to escape can be understood as a metaphor for his affected inner state and his persistent feeling of emptiness. In this, the ending of Le misanthrope is hardly different from that of La Princesse de Clèves: in both cases, the provincial desert is a concrete representation of the characters’ profound state of depression and reveals their inability to function normally within a society they both shun and need. Like the princess, Alceste seeks a way “out” through a place of retreat, one, however, that both conceals and reveals the nature of his depression. For his affected inner state is not something he can just “snap out of.” He has two options: either live in the society as it is constructed, a possibility he identifies with emasculation and 26

François de La Mothe le Vayer defined the misanthrope as a sincere and decent person who has become a loner after experiencing the betrayal of people he held in high regard and who seeks refuge in isolation as a defense mechanism. See his Petit traité sceptique sur cette commune façon de parler: N’avoir pas le Sens commun, (ed.) Lionel Leforestier (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 87–8.

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emotional withering (death), or leave it and wither anyway, since the vacuum in his life cannot be filled by flight. This idea of mental “vacuum” or “sterility” conveyed by the ending shows Alceste’s failure to maintain a “healthy” cast of mind. 27 It is an indication of his depression and, as Horowitz contends, of the failure of the challenge to society Alceste intended to make. His leaving the scene signifies a “self-imposed banishment … [that] serves only to concretize … [his] displaced role. Refusal to play is to leave the play, thereby preserving a degree of moral autonomy, or nobility, as a value system, it is true, but all in a power vacuum. And power – who’s got it – is what Molière’s theater is about.”28 Molière’s depiction of the “dark mood” in which Alceste leaves his world highlights the social and psychological impasse that the rejected subject must endure and the mental and physical imbalance produced in the person who refuses to serve as an ornament to the king’s court but insists on a nonconformist “self-fashioning.” Let us pause to consider the power of this transformation of a melancholic character, so debilitated that he is broken and suicidal, entirely exhausted by the “chasm.” Alceste succumbs to the sorrow produced by his melancholy, attenuating the comic aspect of the play and indicating the gravity of the impasse in which the obsessed protagonist, who has taken on the ills of his century, finds himself. Alceste’s (mental and physical) distress finds expression in anger, one of his most characteristic traits and one of Molière’s most significant innovations. Alceste is constantly flying into a rage: against his closest friends, against the immorality at court, against public appearances, against coquettes, against special favors and insincerity. That list could be extended almost indefinitely: he is permanently enraged. In ancient medicine, anger – in French colère, from the Latin cholera 27 The ending is paradoxical and has led scholars to interpret it in very different ways. In line 143 and following, the character already announces his desire to depart, and throughout the play he is torn between leaving Célimène’s place and staying. He stays only because Célimène asks him to (see Act II, scene 3). Roxanne Lalande has defined these concomitant longings as bipolar impulses for centrality and marginality (Intruders in the Play World: The Dynamics of Gender in Molière’s Comedies [Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996], p. 154). Alceste’s ambivalence lies in his “masochistic pleasure in self-willed exclusion” (p. 144) and in his need to be recognized as distinctive, and it is precisely these contradictory characteristics that are played out again in the last scene. In the end, however, we witness his failure to be acknowledged by her, and both characters face a situation of “mental death” or “depression.” Another valid reading of the ending would be that Alceste never really withdraws to the desert, since his recognition can be achieved only within society. He cannot liberate himself from playing a “role” in the “game” which, however, leads nowhere. Even a reading that valorizes his emotional dependence on society does not contradict the fact that his symptoms are neither alleviated nor cured at the end. Because he is unable to leave, his “desert” takes the form of a “living death” (p. 165) within society. 28 Louise Horowitz, “Life in the Slow Lane: Molière’s Marginal Men,” PFSCL 16, 30 (1989): 74.


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– was considered one of the manifestations of an imbalance in another humor, namely, yellow bile. Galen, basing himself on the four humors identified by Hippocrates, distinguished anger from melancholy and attributed it to a combustion (or overheating) of yellow bile, which produced an irascible temperament that was called atrabilious. These theories still survived in the seventeenth century, but the thinking of doctors was undergoing a shift in Molière’s time. It was believed that yellow bile could complicate melancholy or even cause it. Hence there was a fusion between the two temperaments.29 In his Anatomy, Burton conceives a unique relation between anger and melancholy, viewing anger as one of the sources of melancholy but never one of its manifestations.30 For Molière, however, the protagonist’s rage is not attributable only to yellow bile. It is also intimately associated with vulnerability and a feeling of impotence. In depicting anger as a mental symptom of melancholy that grows out of an underlying frustration and a feeling of rejection, the playwright went beyond the medical theories of his day, breaking free of the humoral explanation of melancholy and grasping the psyche’s influence on the human being. Descartes had already perceived how anger was stirred up by “the evil done by another” close to us. Similarly, Alceste’s rage is psychologically motivated, an impulse in reaction to the artifices, covetousness, jealousy, and infamy around him. He flies into a rage against “all men” (p. 212) (tous les hommes; line 118) when he feels misunderstood or deceived by society. In threatening situations, anger becomes a form of self-protection against a hostile environment. He interprets every disturbing event as an injury that “goes much too deep” (p. 254) (offense … trop mortelle; line 1269), as a slap in the face against which he must defend himself. In fact, when Philinte and Célimène dare criticize his mind, which takes “such offence at everything we say” (p. 233) (se gendarme toujours contre tout 29

N evertheless, as Dominique Brancher notes, “black bile, before acquiring its status as a full-fledged humor in Hippocrates’s On the Nature of Man, was only a variant of yellow bile, one of its states; both the choleric (acting in haste) and the melancholic (overly vehement) attested to their original fusion, by betraying a common incapacity to behave in a rational manner.” Dominique Brancher, “Portrait humoral du polémiqueur: Aléas de l’humeur et du style au XVIIe siècle,” MLN 120, 1 (2005): 153. That is, before Hippocrates, the distinction was not in force. Dandrey explains that the evolution of the system, the possibility that yellow bile would turn into melancholy as a result of being overheated, can be attributed to Arab doctors (pp. 324–5). That assimilation was noted as well by Renaissance doctors, who identified two melancholies: natural melancholy and that of the atrabilious temperament, which resulted from the combustion of black bile. The rudimentary schema proposed here does not describe all the nuances of the assimilation of the two humors. For a more detailed study, see Dandrey’s excellent description of the confluence of traditions in La médecine et la maladie dans le théâtre de Molière. Molière et la maladie imaginaire ou de la mélancolie hypocondriaque, Vol. 2 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998), pp. 311–17. 30 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i. 268–270. Fits of anger were also attributed to melancholy of the brain.

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Figure 3.1

‘Les quatre complexions de l’homme,” Cesar Ripa in Iconologie, Ou Nouvelle explication de plusieurs images, emblemes, et autres figures hyerogliphiques des vertus, vices, arts… (1637) (p. 61)


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ce qu’on dit; line 684), they attribute it to sorrow (chagrin; line 685), of which Alceste himself is aware (que lui-même il avoue; line 686). His excessive verbal and physical outbursts of anger certainly establish Alceste as a ridicule and set him apart from his environment. What is revealed in these dramatic fits is his immoderate nature, a reflection of his atrabilious character within the defining context of his melancholy. His fury, in addition to marking his physiological difference, enacts his moral divergence from the falseness he perceives around him. His extremism can also be seen as “a preventive strategy, for it is founded upon the not particularly heroic fear of rejection by others.”31 His impulsive outbursts of indignation are attempts to disengage himself from a society that refuses to acknowledge him. In asserting his marginality, he relies on rage to show his refusal to play the game prevalent in his surroundings. N evertheless, his self-attributed role can exist only in relation to his environment. As Riggs remarks, “the play clearly ridicules the idea that there can be opposition between an individual and his social environment, except within socially defined limits. Individuation itself is actually a function of collective existence.”32 Molière seems to understand that anger is a powerful passion with a psychological component to it, that it fuels melancholy, and that force of will has only a limited power to restrain it because anger arises impulsively. It is exactly that understanding that makes Molière so interesting in relation to twentiethcentury psychoanalytic thought. Anger, from a psychological perspective, is now considered an emotional state with different degrees of intensity and an automatic response to a threat, inciting behaviors that are often out of our control, difficult to manage. It is commonly accepted that anger is an instinctive reaction, an adaptive automatic response and defense mechanism. The eminent English pediatrician Donald W. Winnicott (1896–1971) was one of the first twentieth-century thinkers to understand the influence of an external environment, in particular one’s interpersonal relationships, on psychic states. Winnicott conceives anger as “innocent aggressive impulses towards frustrating objects” or “guilt-productive aggressive impulses towards good objects.”33 Depending on the severity of the frustration experienced, the subject may react against a world he perceives as hostile. Anger is closely bound to emotional pain in Molière’s comedy. It is an outlet for inner distress and an overt mark of Alceste’s “aggressive individual distinctiveness.”34 The character’s fits manifest themselves in the corporeal Lalande, Intruders, p. 146. Larry Riggs, “Context and Convergence in the Comedy of Le Misanthrope,” Romance Notes 25, 1 (1984): 66. 33 Donald Winnicott, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers (N ew York: Brunner/Mazel, 1992), p. 207. 34 Louise Horowitz, “Oh, Those Black Bile Blues,” in Approaches to Teaching Molière’s Tartuffe and Other Plays, (ed.) James Gaines and Michael Koppisch (N ew York: 31 32

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mechanism of “internal frustration→violent reaction.” Alceste’s emotional frustration is mediated through an anger that varies in intensity, even rising to fury and rage, and is expressed “actively”: he lashes out verbally and physically when he “succumbs to his rage” or when his anger “bursts out” of his body, his mind and tongue completely unrestrained.35 In addition, his verbal “battles” are acts of aggression, and Molière’s use of expressive resources, such as breaks in the alexandrine form and a vocabulary of persecution and vengeance, point to the character’s intense physiological and mental distress. J. Cameron Wilson aptly observes that Alceste’s emotion is so strong that it cannot be expressed solely in language. Other means of expression not transmitted in the script, such as gesture and intonation, must accompany the verbal outbursts.36 Verbal expressions of outrage and physical manifestations go hand in hand. Alceste expresses his “just anger” (p. 255) (juste colère; line 1313) against Célimène with cries of betrayal and vengeance: “I want to get my own back on your cousin for / Her wicked treachery. Oh, help me fight this war. / I must have my revenge” (p. 253) (Vengezmoi d’une ingrate et perfide parente / Qui trahit lâchement une ardeur si constante; lines 1249–50). But he also wants to punish her physically (line 1255). This powerful emotion overwhelms him when the repercussions of the limits placed on his being and of his fractured relationships with those around him manifest themselves overtly. Just as Alceste is suffocating under this regime because men are “condoning what the villains do” (p. 212) ([sont] au méchants complaisants; line 120), so too does he reject the “mask” (line 125) of moderation that others assume. Conversely, the character insists: “I want to lose my temper, and to make a stand” (p. 209; emphasis mine) (moi, je veux me fâcher; line 5), maintaining that his tantrums are intentional, that his aim is to deliberately choose aberrant behavior, even at the risk of losing his lawsuit, of being arrested, and of being abandoned by the few characters who still tolerate him. Anger not only arises from the feeling of having been betrayed but also turns into a violent rebellion against his anti-model, the honnête homme, and with him an entire system and its conventions:

MLA, 1995), p. 87. 35 See, for example, lines 95–6, 1791–80, 1277, and 1310–14. 36 J. Cameron Wilson, “Expansion and Brevity in Molière’s Style,” in Molière: Stage and Study, Essays in Honour of W. G. Moore, (ed.) W.D. Howarth and Merlin Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 100. According to Keir Elam, it is precisely the use of gesture that “materializes the dramatic subject and his world by asserting their identity with an actual body and an actual space.” See The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 66.


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Hypocrisy is everywhere, and flattery, And crude self-interest, and even treachery. I’ve had enough. Mankind’s an absolute disgrace. I’ll make a stand, alone against the human race. (p. 212) ************************* So I’m to watch the fellow fleece me, bleed me white, And let him get away with it? … I find that quite Outrageous! (p. 214) Je ne trouve partout que lâche flatterie, Qu’injustice, intérêt, trahison, fourberie; Je n’y puis plus tenir, j’enrage, et mon dessein Est de rompre en visière à tout le genre humain. (lines 93–6) ************************** Je me verrai trahir, mettre en pièces, voler Sans que je sois … Morbleu! (lines 180–81)

The ellipses after his violent exclamations depict an Alceste so angry that he no longer finds words to express his rage. He is out of breath and beside himself. A simple “morbleu!” must transmit that incommunicable frustration. This passage indicates the instinctive, autonomous and active components of anger, as restraint by the reason is beyond Alceste (“Je n’y puis plus tenir”). It is clear that such excessive outbursts create comedic effects, with Alceste appearing as the “blameworthy” (blamâble; line 150) and marginal figure who is excluded from court because of his incapacity to adopt gallant behavior. Yet it is the individuality inherent in his rage that differentiates him from the aristocratic male in the play who, having utterly lost his sense of self, is in a state of degradation. As a deliberately enraged nonconformist, Alceste asserts himself through his anger, discrediting the “healthy” function of a state composed of human carcasses, subjects emptied of a part of themselves, deprived of their ability to express anguish and pain, living a life of “spineless complaisance.” Alceste’s excesses and outbursts at both the physical and mental level serve to defend him when a new frustration arises and stand in opposition to the phlegmatic immobility of Philinte. Alceste’s furious and painful verbal outbursts express the affective content and verbal outlet sought by his underlying psychic frustration. Anger here is a profoundly emotional response, uncontrolled by reason, used to expel pain in verbal and physiological outbursts. Among the six functions of theatrical semiotic discourse recently identified by Anne Ubersfeld is the emotional or expressive function, that is, the expression of the speaker’s emotions. Ubersfeld tells us that these signs must be interpreted individually and in combination with other signs (verbal and physical) when describing the performance.37 Instead of establishing an opposition between verbal and physiological communication in Anne Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre 1 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978), p. 201.

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discourse/performance, she perceives the emotional content of certain signs and their significance for the performance as a whole. Since we do not have the stage directions for Le misanthrope to tell us what the character’s physical gestures were, we must rely on his emotional exclamations such as “damn you” (p. 237) (sang bleu; line 773) or “morbleu” (lines 180, 686), and the spontaneous verbal outburst of violent insults such as “coward,” “foul,” “perfidy,” “betrayal,” “lout,” and “traitress” (lâche, infâme, perfidie, trahison, faquin, traîtresse) to understand how accumulated negative affects seek an outlet in expressive language, an automatic, emotional response, an expressive resource.38 Although Molière evokes a conception close to that of Descartes, for whom the source of anger is linked to the experience of frustration (“the evil done by another”), he distinguishes himself from the philosopher on the question of the will’s power to put an end to it. In his correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, the French philosopher discusses how to remove unwanted disturbances through the use of reason, the distraction of our imagination, and firm will. For Descartes, passions are modes of the soul that must contain a cognitive content because they are perceptions of the soul and a part of thought. Although deprived of volition, they can be indirectly manipulated and controlled by calling on cognitive resources. In Les passions de l’âme, Descartes maintains that man can fight any violent passion by “firm and determinate judgments regarding the knowledge of good and evil,” judgments that urge him not to consent to the violence of the passions.39 In cases where the passions shake the will, he trusts in the cognitive power of man to recognize their harmful effects and use this knowledge to regulate them. By contrast, Molière highlights the emotional nature of fear and the fact that consciousness and knowledge of the passions do not necessarily put an end to the automatic, involuntary responses of body and mind. In challenging rationalist premises, Molière disputes Cartesian idealism regarding individual mastery and remedies against the excesses of the passions. When Descartes asserts that “there is no soul so weak that, being properly directed, it cannot acquire an absolute dominion over all its passions,” he asserts the power of the will over the body.40 Molière, however, questions the accuracy of this observation. Even mental evaluation processes remain ineffective when applied to emotional responses. As Alceste himself says, his anger is so powerful that it bursts out in spite of him and cannot be restrained: “And I’ve lost all the self-control I could possess” (p. 255) (Mes sens par la raison ne sont plus gouvernés; line 1312). The specificity of passions such as anger is that, along with a change in the body, they trigger an See Colin Counsell, “Signs of Performance,” in The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, (ed.) Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gray (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 202. 39 “Des jugements fermes et déterminés touchant la connaissance du bien et du mal.” René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), art. 48. 40 “Il n’y a point d’âme si faible qu’elle ne puisse, étant bien conduite, acquérir un pouvoir absolu sur ses passions.” Descartes, Les passions de l’âme, art. 50. 38


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altered state of mind, affecting the will. The reason might not be quick or efficient enough to combat its effects. It is this understanding that subjectivity can be passed on through automatic, emotional responses that makes Molière so interesting in relation to contemporary thought. Current neurobiology has examined how the notion of “I” can stem from what Antonio Damasio calls “body mapping” or “body states”.41 In his works, among them the important inquiry into the limitations of Cartesian analysis, entitled Descartes’Error, Damasio argues that in opposition to subjectivity arising from the thinking mind, neurobiology claims that physical responses produce and translate into a notion of self. Damasio explains that when the organism is, for example in a state of affliction, the body becomes the basis for the mental state, and not vice versa, thereby creating negative states, which in turn produce feelings: anxiety, sadness, anger and so on.42 In the mind, “feelings” express negative states such as despair or anger, which the body experiences in its own way, as “emotions.” Damasio’s notion of the “body-minded brain”43 points to the centrality of the body and to how the brain creates evolving representations of bodily changes, which lead to mental events and feelings, and he rejects the more culturally dominant Western and Cartesian premises prioritizing mind over body, preferring instead the views of another seventeenth-century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. “Stupors” and “trances” also accompany negative feelings, despite cognitive processes, and Damasio observes that anguish, anger, and anxiety reduce the reason’s efficiency (Descartes’ Error 147). Molière, while surely not focused on the brain directly in a scientific sense, already profoundly explored the equality between body and mind and did not hesitate to reveal how body and mind mimic each other in correlated processes. We now know that a psychic distress of any kind can take one of two paths: it can manifest itself outwardly through anger and aggression or it can remain contained within and find expression in increasing ego defenses and isolation, another form of self-protection. At present, withdrawal into the self and social 41

Damasio explains: “At every moment of our lives the brain’s body-sensing regions receive signals with which they can construct maps of the ongoing body state. We can picture these maps as a set of correspondences from everywhere and anywhere in the body toward the body-sensing regions … As far as our conscious mind is concerned there is only one source of knowledge for what is going on in the body: the pattern of activity present at any given moment in the body-sensing regions.” Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), p. 112-113. 42 Danasio writes: “The maps related to sorrow … are associated with states of functional disequilibrium. The ease of action is reduced. There is pain of some kind, signs of disease or signs of physiological discord—all of which are indicative of a less than optimal coordination of life functions. If unchecked, the situation is conducive to disease and death” (p. 138). 43 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (N ew York: Putnam, 1994), p. 223.


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alienation are considered clear symptoms of depression and entail a great risk of an eventual somatic conversion: Psychic distress and physiological dysfunction may emanate from decision conflicts, value conflicts, conflicts about the approach/avoidance alternative, a discrepancy between hopes and gratification, all of which may mobilize ego defences that may be turned outward or inward. Turned outward, the aggression is likely further to intensify the strife between the individual and his/her environment to an explosive climax. On the other hand, inhibitions to the expression of unavowed or disavowed feelings are liable to trigger conversion from mind to body as an oblique outlet for the repressed hurt.44 Molière already sensed that internal frustration could erupt outward through anger and could at the same time lead to social withdrawal and isolation, a vicious cycle that is difficult to break. It is intensified in the play when the main character announces his departure from social life. Alceste’s misanthropy and narcissistic cathexis in himself are clear psychological symptoms of his illness:45 “Since everyone I know seems hateful in my eyes, / I’d be disgusted, if they thought that I was wise” (p. 212) (Tous les hommes me sont à tel point odieux, / Que je serais fâché d’être sage à leurs yeux; lines 111–12). Feeling persecuted and abandoned, he conceives an overwhelming hatred (p. 212) (effroyable haine; line 114) for humanity and takes refuge in narcissism: But me, I’ve been betrayed, I’ve got to pay the price: I plan to leave this world, this filthy den of vice, And find a place where I don’t need to socialize, Where I can be myself, don’t have to compromise. (p. 273)46

Trahi de toutes parts, accablé d’injustices, Je vais sortir d’un gouffre où triomphent les vices, Et chercher sur la terre un endroit écarté Où d’être homme d’honneur on ait la liberté. (line 1803–06) Furst, Idioms of Distress, p. 62. Amour propre was central to the thinking of major seventeenth-century moralists such as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Jean de La Bruyère. Pascal identifies the “natural root” of that evil in each one of us. The moralists’ attempts to explain the nature of amour propre were complemented by medical theories claiming that excessive amour propre produced melancholy. In England, Robert Burton asserted that “blind self-love” could be considered a source of melancholy and concluded that it was the human being’s unhealthy tendency to focus on himself that perverted the humors. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i. 293–301. 46 [Translation slightly modified—trans.] 44 45


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In the twentieth century, Freud defined the narcissist as someone who replaces real objects of love with the introversion of the libido, a substitution he links to the instinct for self-preservation.47 Excessive self-love may be part of a profound psychological imbalance and may become pathological. J. B. Pontalis has examined the notion of mourning lying behind narcissism: death is no longer situated in consciousness or the unconscious, it is the very root of the unconscious. It is no longer the property of a psychic agency but a principle of discord between agencies. The death of social relations, or at least the despair resulting from an abandoned person’s isolation and lack of moral support, may produce an increase in narcissism, whose aim is to protect and nurture the self. This narcissism, an “effective death,” distracts a consciousness from loss and protects its subject from the total annihilation of his being.48 According to Mahmoud Sami-Ali’s recent research in psychosomatic medicine, narcissism reflects “the split in the ego or even its fragmentation into several interchangeable objects. Ego and things become confused within narcissism, which is reinstituted by means of regression.”49 In the chapter on Surin, we examined the internal division of the soul as a representation of the marginal being’s conflict. In the case of Alceste, that split speaks in the voice of the libido, and self-love is at odds with his love for Célimène. Gossman rightly argues that “Alceste does not want to love, but to be loved. The language he speaks is the language of power, not the language of love.”50 Alceste displays a behavior that La Rochefoucauld describes in Maximes: that the man suffering from an unhealthy amour propre strives “with extreme eagerness and incredible labors to obtain things that are not advantageous to him, but which he pursues because he desires them … [and] he can be found glorying in his own defeat.”51 That defeat, in turn, appears to justify his narcissism and leads to further withdrawal into himself. In Le misanthrope, the permanent humiliation the character suffers produces love melancholy (consider the subtitle of the play: The Atrabilious Lover), resulting

Sigmund Freud, “On N arcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 74. 48 J. B. Pontalis, Entre le rêve et la douleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp. 242–8. 49 Mahmoud Sami-Ali, De la projection: Une étude psychanalytique (Paris: Payot, 1970), p. 110. 50 Gossman, Men and Masks, p. 74. 51 “Avec le dernier empressement, et avec des travaux incroyables, à obtenir des choses qui ne lui sont point avantageuses, mais qu’il poursuit parce qu’il les veut … [et] on le retrouve qui triomphe dans sa propre défaite.” François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, Réflexions diverses, Portraits, Mémoires, (ed.) J. Truchet, M. Escola and A. Brunn (Paris: Garnier, 2001), Maxim 563. 47


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in his further withdrawal.52 As Eliante remarks, humoral imbalances are a lesser cause of this melancholy than other undetectable factors: “It only goes to show love’s unpredictable, / And people rarely fall for someone suitable” (p. 251)53 (Cela fait assez voir que l’amour dans les coeurs / N ’est pas toujours produit par un rapport d’humeurs; lines 1175-1176). Alceste’s irrational and pathetic pursuit of Célimène is, as Louise Horowitz has argued, “less a cry for supremacy in a sexual battle, than one for, simply, existence” and is closely connected to his amour propre.54 He needs her acknowledgment, the only way he can redeem himself by proving her constancy and sincerity under the conditions he himself will dictate. Even as Alceste realizes that his attachment to Célimène defies logic, even as he emphasizes his incompatibility with her, he senses that the mind is no longer the “master” (line 1276) and that he is powerless to change his condition. His body is therefore literally marked by the wound of love, as manifested in his melancholy. Alceste says that he is pierced (percé; line 1310) by Célimène’s cruel flirtations and suffers from the betrayal of his love. The wound gives rise to a further manifestation of rage, as an automatic reaction of self-preservation: “I’m out of my mind with rage” (p. 255) (Je ne suis plus à moi, je suis tout à la rage; line 1310). In once again disputing the will’s ability to intervene against that irrational love, Molière reveals his skepticism toward rationalist ideals of the mind’s power over the body. Alceste must admit that too much bile has accumulated (trop de bile s’assemble; line 449) and that despite his good sense (line 450), he is struggling: “All that I can do, / Is go on loving her. I’m sorry, but it’s true. / She charms me so, I can’t resist – it’s very strange – ” (p. 216) (en dépit qu’on en ait, elle se fait aimer / Sa grâce est la plus forte; lines 232–3). Despite the work of cognition, the reason remains ineffective in combating passion: “I can’t deny the facts: I’ve done my level best / To break this strong attachment, rooted in my breast. / I’ve had not 52

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were notable for the host of treatises that set out to define love melancholy and for the vast differences in the diagnoses. In Discours des maladies mélancoliques (n.p.: Théodore Samson, 1598), André du Laurens considers this form of melancholy, which for him was “psychosomatic,” involving mental and physical disturbances in interaction. He writes: “I want everyone to know through the description of this melancholy the powerful effect a violent love can have on bodies and on souls” (p. 202). Two years later, Jean Aubery, going even further, declared in L’antidote d’amour (Delff: Arnold Bon, 1663) that all carnal love is pathological. Burton devotes half of his third volume to love melancholy, which manifests itself in the body and/or mind. Jacques Ferrand argues that it is “an illness rather of the soul than of the body; and … as a result doctors must leave the cure to the theologians and moral philosophers.” Jacques Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour ou melancolie erotique. Discours curieux qui enseigne a cognoistre l’essence, les causes, les signes, & les remedes de ce mal fantastique (Paris: Denis Moreau, 1623), p. 24. The contradictions cannot be reconciled and there is such a divergence of analyses that it is impossible to know from which sources Molière was drawing. 53 [Translation slightly modified—trans.] 54 Louise Horowitz, “Life in the Slow Lane,” p. 73.


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luck with it, however hard I try” (p. 227) (Je ne cèle pas, je fais tout mon possible / À rompre de ce cœur l’attachement terrible: / Mais mes plus grands efforts n’ont rien fait jusqu’ici; lines 517–519). He must acknowledge: “That’s true. My reason tells me, every day, it’s so. / But love is never ruled by reason, as you know” (p. 217) (Il est vrai: ma raison me le dit chaque jour; / Mais la raison n’est pas ce qui règle l’amour; lines 247–8). Against rationalist notions of the power of the will to intervene, the reality presented in Molière’s play is rather of the rule of affect, what Spinoza during the same period called “man’s bondage” to his passions. Alceste’s preference for Célimène can be explained, however, by their mutual insistence on the right to choose their mood and attitude without constraint and to affirm their autonomy. The misanthrope shuttles back and forth between two worlds and two values, as demonstrated by his ardent wish not to conform to polite, emasculated models and by his craving to belong to and play a prominent role in “Célimène’s court.”55 Unlike Eliante, who is the very picture of conformism – the woman who has adapted to the codes of moderation – Célimène also reveals a desire for autonomy that is expressed in her numerous flirtations. Célimène insists: Do you really believe that anyone could force A girl like me to tell such lies without remorse? If I preferred another man, would I deny The truth, not say so openly? And if so, why? (p. 258) Je voudrais bien savoir qui pourrait me contraindre À descendre pour vous aux bassesses de feindre, Et pourquoi, si mon coeur penchait d’autre côté, Je ne le dirais pas avec sincérité. (lines 1394–6)

Alceste, torn between fascination and disgust for Célimène, assiduously desires that rebellious woman but also seeks to control her, to subjugate her so as to shore up his own power. Alceste vacillates between court life (as scholars have demonstrated, Célimène functions as a double for the king) and his blatant rejection of it, his embrace of the sincerity of ancienne honnêteté.56 As a representative of gallant or worldly society, Célimène appears attractive to Alceste because, by possessing her, he would be able to fulfill his own desire for recognition and attention. Her popularity stands 55

Ibid., p. 72. Even as the misanthrope challenges the machinations of courtly life and denigrates the political machine, he feels a profound desire to be included in the court of Louis XIV, whose rejection he suffered even before the play opened, as exemplified by his exclusion from the court and his lack of duties. His hostility is not directed against the king himself but against those around him who “receive the villain with a complaisant smile” (p. 22) ([sont] aux méchants complaisants; line 120), those who, bow to the demands of the regime, 56


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in direct opposition to his marginality, and he projects onto her his craving to be a part of this court, to be included in the world of power created by the Sun King. According to Sami-Ali, not only is every act of projection enigmatic, it also contains an element of “fascination” since the subject does not seek to identify with his object but to internalize it: “The object is put in the place of the ego ideal.”57 Projection is thus one of the “primary processes” in which the relation between individual and society is played out through an object serving as a microcosm of that society. Likewise, Célimène turns into the object of desire for the melancholic Alceste because she is recognized within the Sun King’s system, a world that remains closed to him. In courting Célimène, Alceste implicitly courts Louis XIV, fluctuates between the ambiguous tensions of (injured) love and (protective) selflove. And he must face a new failure: his seductive power over Célimène is shortlived. Since he does not manage either to possess her or to rid himself of his desire, his inner division remains unresolved and finds an outlet in renewed fury: N ow nothing matters, I’m out of my mind with rage. You’ve struck the final blow, you cruel murderess, And I’ve lost all the self-control I could possess; I’ve given in to my just anger against you, And I can’t answer now for anything I do. (p. 255) Je ne suis plus à moi, je suis tout à la rage: Percé du coup mortel dont vous m’assassinez, Mes sens par la raison ne sont plus gouvernés, Je cède aux mouvements d’une juste colère, Et je ne réponds pas de ce que je puis faire. (lines 1310–14)

The question why Célimène and Alceste are “interested” in each other has concerned other scholars over the years. Although my argument does not address that issue, I agree with James Gaines, Louise Horowitz, and Larry Riggs that both characters are engaged in a struggle for power and acceptance in a court driven by the principles of a stifling conformity. Each is attracted to the other, even as they both try to assert their superiority, but neither is ever fully able to determine the other’s behavior. The misanthrope wishes to “convert” Célimène, as Riggs has shown, and she needs Alceste as well to feel socially acknowledged. Her power is based on the recognition she receives from his gaze and on her ability to subjugate him. There is no relationship in the romantic sense. Rather, there is a mutual dependence based on a struggle for supremacy. Each is a threat and a prize for the “performance” of difference. Horowitz and Riggs have commented that the two characters, in their way of subjecting each other, choose to assert their “dominance in a system of formalized gestures and verbal forms which will ritualize others’ Sami-Ali, De la projection, p. 107.

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submission.”58 Alceste tries to control Célimène with discourses that fail to find an independent and original voice; rather, he relies on bitter words to reduce her to complete degradation (see lines 1425–8).59 Célimène also chooses her seduction techniques from within the realm of the word rather than that of the (female) body. She wants to absorb Alceste because he resists (at least verbally) her choice to adhere to the overpowering social codes required for acceptance by the court. But she also fails in the end and is forced to witness her own degradation. The play’s ending portrays the characters’ damaged state in their very failure to assert themselves. Célimène and Alceste both lose the approbation and acceptance of each other. Horowitz alludes to “a game over and lost”:60 Célimène bows to society’s demands and Alceste deceives himself by announcing his complete departure from society. Their impotence is highlighted in the “desert” in which they find themselves. Alceste’s fragility is expressed in symptoms both psychological and physiological. He compensates for his unsatisfied desire for affection with self-protective withdrawal and self-imposed exile. The protagonist’s soliloquy at the opening of Act 5 demonstrates that his unresolved frustration, and the impossibility of reconciling both worlds within him, have reinforced what is now an insurmountable chasm between “honour, honesty, the law” (p. 262) (l’honneur, la probité, la pudeur et les lois; line 1488) and the world that unfairly mocks him (line 1491). He chooses his own banishment in order to leave a world he perceives as evil: “There’s far too much corruption in the world today; / I want to leave my fellow men, get right away” (p. 262) (Trop de perversité règne au siècle où nous sommes, / Et je veux me tirer du commerce des hommes” (lines 1485–6). This ending articulates the unresolved inner distress that is projected outward in reactions of flight, resignation, and withdrawal. This withdrawal can also be understood metaphorically, as depression or emotional withering, and Molière closes the play with Alceste’s black mood. The ultimate problem is that the “body of the king” – that is, Louis XIV’s personal approval and attention – remains unattainable, even in the form of Célimène’s body. All the characters must join the new honnête (emasculated) society. They have traded their power for a prevailing sense of degradation. Alceste’s attempt to challenge, through his melancholy, the social conventions surrounding him remains unsuccessful and instead leads to his future impotence, reflected in his lowered status at the end. His ultimate failure to revolt against an environment perceived as hostile is particularly remarkable in that the maladjusted character is never perceived by those around him as a danger to the regime’s operation. Unlike Surin, who is confined when he is perceived to be a threat to the ecclesiastic order, Alceste is never seen as a menace by the marshals, the court, or his companions. Even when he is accused of taking subversive Riggs, Molière and Plurality, p. 113. Horowitz, “Oh, Those Black Bile Blues,” p. 87. 60 Ibid., p. 89. 58 59


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stances and of having produced a libelous pamphlet, no one believes the charge.61 In his melancholic revulsion against the established order, he is met with only incomprehension, mockery, and disapproval. Molière’s melancholic man has arrived on the scene too late. The Sun King’s regime has already succeeded in silencing tensions, imposing the subject’s powerlessness, and enforcing the marginality of the nonconformist. Melancholy as a voice of dissent is repressed – not in a violent manner as in Surin, but even more seriously, merely with a disapproving smile from the assimilated and conformist class surrounding him. Since the protagonist’s depressive cry goes unheeded and no companion comes along to remove him from his solitude, his continued depression finds concrete form in the mental death or “desert” that awaits him in the future. This situation will be found again in Racine, who exploits psychic mechanisms in which the feeling of guilt, and the traumatic realization that one has failed in one’s attempt to achieve the impossible and to undo the disturbing desire felt in the body, reveal the protagonist’s unresolved inner distress. Profound feelings of anguished solipsism and psychic pain can also be detected, even more than in Alceste, in Argan of Le malade imaginaire.

Latent Illness: Le malade imaginaire (1673) Among the many objectives of Descartes’s scientific project was his “search for a necessary science” that “could spare both body and mind from an infinite number of illnesses … if one had enough knowledge of their causes and all the remedies” and that could render men “masters and possessors of nature.”62 From his debate on the nature of illness to his more general account of the power of the mind, Descartes set out to explain the interdependence of the human body and mind and their influence on our well-being. In response to the conditions of war, violence, and the abuse of power that he experienced during his lifetime, he came to see reason as a means to improve the human condition and to give humankind the tools to combat its vulnerability. He conceded, however, that scientific theory would sooner or later stumble or come to a temporary halt. A typical case of this scientific impasse, even today, is hypochondria. Its “essential feature … is preoccupation with fears of having, or the idea that one has, a serious disease based on misinterpretation of one or more bodily signs or symptoms.”63 61

Ibid. “À la recherche d’une science si nécessaire,” “pourrait exempter d’une infinité de maladies tant du corps que de l’esprit … si on avait assez de connaissance de leurs causes et de tous les remèdes,” “maîtres et possesseurs de la N ature.” René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, (ed.) J.-M. Fataud (Paris: Bordas, 1996), pp. 148, 146. 63 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th edn (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), p. 462. 62


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To Pierre Fédida’s dismay, hypochondria poses a challenge to science and, I would add, to rationalism: “With the hypochondriac, we learn of the possibility of organs modifying themselves without it being possible to provide ‘scientific’ verification of that fact… . The silence of the body places it resolutely next to a language preestablished in culture and beyond the reach of the concept of positive science.”64 Psychosomatic illness eludes the grasp of scientific or rational diagnosis, since the afflicted body proves to be ailing only in the patient’s mind, in his imagination.65 Hypochondria is founded on a negative correlation, since no effect of a psychic disturbance is physiologically visible; there is no organic illness.66 Contemporary science remains incapable of explaining the silence of the hypochondriac’s body. How can the patient complain when there is no disease, when the doctor has reassured him or her that the concerns are purely imaginary? Hypochondria rarely attracted medical or psychiatric interest in the past. The ab-sence of an underlying physiological foundation produced reservations or uncertainty, since the patients’ complaints resisted a clear diagnosis. The psychoanalyst Martine Derzelle’s important book on hypochondria – La pensée empêchée (Thwarted thought, 1997) – contends that the illness was conceived within a framework of dualist thought that prevented it from being taken seriously67 and that only recently, due to the breakdown of the mind/body dualism, has hypochondria been given adequate consideration and granted a status among somatoform disorders, those in which somatic complaints cannot be fully explained by a medical diagnosis.68 64 Pierre Fédida, Corps du vide et espace de séance (Paris: Delarge, 1977), pp. 26 and 29. 65 Hysteria was long considered a female malady and hypochondria its male counterpart. On its history, see J. Cottraux, “L’hypocondriaque et le médecin imaginaire ou le corps médical face au corps malade,” in Psychothérapies médicales, (ed.) Jean Guyotat, Vol. 2 (Paris: Masson, 1978), p. 199; Eric T. Carlson, “Hypochondriasis,” in International Journal of Psychiatry 2, 6 (1966): 677; F. E. Kenyon, “Hypochondriasis: A Study of Some Historical, Clinical, and Social Aspects,” International Journal of Psychiatry 2, 3 (1966): 310. 66 I borrow the term “negative correlation” from Martine Derzelle’s Pour une conception psychosomatique de l’hypocondrie: La pensée empêchée, preface by Mahmoud Sami-Ali (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), p. 155. 67 Derzelle, Pour une conception psychosomatique, p. 54. On Descartes and the intellectual imagination as a crucial source of scientific thought, see Peter A. Schouls, Descartes and the Possibility of Science (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2000). 68 Even Freud was not satisfied with the categorization of that illness as an “actual” neurosis rather than a “psychotic” one. He realized that hypochondria was still a rather “obscure” illness stemming from frustration, in which the sufferer withdrew libido from external objects and invested it onto his own organs (leading to “erotogenicity,” with the body part in question producing sexual stimulation). See Freud, “N arcissism: An Introduction,” pp. 83–84. Research into hypochondria began to flourish in the 1950s and 1960s. Medical manuals such as the DSM-IV and the ICD-10 now categorize it as a somatoform disorder,

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In addition, the disorder is closely linked to the imagination, which plays a role in initiating and exacerbating the perceived symptoms. In practice, hypochondria may be related to an overwrought imagination. Yet doctors stress that the disorder is real, unsettling, even disabling, and that its stigma is underserved. The imagination has to be taken seriously as an indicator with real significance, because the patient truly feels ill. Reflections about the imagination’s power were already prevalent in the seventeenth century and preoccupied medical doctors, philosophers, and literary writers alike. In medical thought, the imaginative faculty was an important point of connection between body and mind and melancholy the pernicious effect of a troubled imagination, often working in combination with humoral disturbances. Although the scholastic position, which saw the imagination as a type of thought, survived in the medical practice of the seventeenth century, Descartes denied that faculty any real role in the perception of ourselves and in the acquisition of (self-) knowledge. As Rebecca Wilkin observes, the imagination is a superfluous, ornamental, even disruptive faculty for Descartes, who maintains that, “if the understanding deals with questions that have nothing corporeal or resembling the corporeal about them, it cannot receive any help from these faculties. On the contrary, so that the understanding may encounter no obstacle, one must set aside the senses and, as much as possible, empty the imagination of any distinct impression.”69 For Descartes, everything related to the noncorporeal perception of self must be guided by the understanding.70 Gérard Ferreyrolles sums up the problematic role of the imagination in Descartes, who “unseats scholastic supremacy and as a result calls into questions the epistemological value previously attributed to the imagination: with the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations métaphysiques, the imaginative faculty become alien to the vis intelligendi, whether in physics, mathematics, or metaphysics.”71 Conversely, hypochondria exposes the crucial function this faculty performs. Molière’s last comedy reveals the imagination’s role in the relation between mind and body. N ot psychic in nature with no organic cause. Sami-Ali and Derzelle have recently provided a fuller description of hypochondria. 69 Rebecca Wilkin, “Feminizing Imagination in France, 1563–1678,” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000, p. 100. “Si l’entendement s’occupe de choses qui n’ont rien de corporel ou de semblable au corps, il ne peut être aidé par ces facultés, et … au contraire, pour ne pas être entravé par elles, il doit écarter les sens et, autant que possible, dépouiller l’imagination de toute impression distincte”; René Descartes, “Règles pour la direction de l’esprit,” in Œuvres et lettres, (ed.) André Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), Règle 12, p. 79. 70 It is significant and striking that in De l’homme (1633), Descartes locates the imagination in the pineal gland, which according to Les passions de l’âme (1649) is the point of connection between mind and body. 71 Gérard Ferreyrolles, Les reines du monde: L’imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris: Champion, 1995), p. 469. See also Pierre Ronzeaud’s seminal study L’imagination au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2002).


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a delusional faculty, it is also more than just an ornamental tool: it has the capacity to give expression to real anxiety disorders.72 The comedy ballet Le malade imaginaire opens with Argan seated in a chair, talking to himself and counting up the money he has spent for his medications: “a good detergent enema, composed with a double dose of catholicon … to scour, wash, and clean out the lower abdomen … a hepatic julep, soporific and sleepinducing … a good purgative and corroborant medicine, following Monsieur Purgon’s order, to expel and evacuate Monsieur Argan’s bile” (Act 1, scene 1).73 Molière could have drawn from any of a large number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises for his portrayal of hypochondriacal, or “windy,” melancholy, the most common form of the illness according to André Du Laurens. Hippocrates and Galen had defined it as originating in the lower parts of the body, in the region of the thorax, liver, or spleen, and a long medical tradition had established it as a third form of melancholy, distinguishing it from that caused by humoral disturbances and that originating in the brain. The enemas and purgatives to which Argan submits bring to mind the humoral aspect of hypochondriacal melancholy as an overheating of black or yellow bile. M. Purgon’s and M. Fleury’s aim, then, is to reestablish the balance of the humors and the moderate temperature of the blood. Yet the doctors are unable to find an organic cure, a “good purgative and corroborant medicine … to expel and evacuate Monsieur Argan’s bile” (Act 1, scene 1). For the illness defies a humoral explanation, and organic remedies aimed at the health of the body remain ultimately powerless.74 At the same time, these ineffective (and even harmful) treatments evoke the medical malpractice and abuses of doctors in Molière’s era.75 72

This gap between philosophical conceptions entails not only an opposition between Gassendi and Descartes—as James Gaines realizes—but also between Molière and Descartes. See James Gaines, “Sagesse avec sobriété: Skepticism, Belief, and the Limits of Knowledge in Molière,” in Le savoir au XVIIe siècle. Actes du 34e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature. Charlottesville, University of Virginia, 14–16 mars 2002 (Tübingen: N arr, 2003), p. 170. 73 “Un bon clystère détersif, composé avec catholicon double … pour balayer, laver et nettoyer le bas-ventre, … un julep hépathique, soporatif et somnifère … une bonne médicine purgative et corrobative, suivant l’ordonnance de Monsieur Purgon, pour expulser et évacuer la bile de Monsieur.” 74 Argan displays an ambivalent relationship to medicine. On one hand, he abandons control of his body to his doctors. On the other, he strives to prove his debilitation to them. We now know that ambivalence about the medical world is typical of the hypochondriac, who consults doctor after doctor but expresses doubt about their diagnoses. See Hans-Jürgen Möller, Gerd Laux, and Arno Deister, Psychiatrie. Duale Reihe (Stuttgart: Hippocrates, 1996), p. 234. 75 Molière was critical of the medical knowledge of his time because it was founded on an opposition between knowing and feeling. His criticisms of the abuses of medicine have been adequately treated elsewhere and I will not reiterate them here. On this subject, see, for example, Michel Albeaux-Fernet, “La fiche médicale d’Argan. Le malade imaginaire,”

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Argan is physically ill only in his own mind, in his imagination, though the many purgatives the doctors give him represent a real danger for the organism, and the eight medications and twelve enemas taken within a month’s time prove to be suicidal.76 Molière lived at a time when a break was occurring between the inherited definition of humoral hypochondria as a physiological disturbance and a new conception of hypochondria as an imaginary illness, “an illness without illness,” but one that resulted from an aberration of the soul.77 For example, Burton argued that the force of the imagination played an influential role as a cause of melancholy. Argan’s pathological preoccupation with illness stems no doubt from a disordered imagination that overrides his reason, causes his excesses and madness, and ostensibly creates comic effects. His depraved melancholic imagination expresses itself as a ludicrous fear that he is permanently afflicted by disorders so powerful that he might succumb to them and leads to submit conscientiously to superfluous treatments to restore his health. Yet in Le malade imaginaire, Molière also uses hypochondriacal melancholy in a profoundly modern sense, showing the underlying mental frustration that produces a somatic conversion in negative form, that is, not an organic illness but an expression of repressed fear in which bodily organs serve as the catalyst. As an “idiom of distress,” hypochondriacal melancholy in Molière’s plays expresses the main character’s profound anxiety and feeling of purposelessness through his compulsive obsession with his body. Hypochondria is often accompanied by psychological disorders, among them depression and extreme anxiety. We see clearly the powerful relationship between the seventeenth-century understanding of psychological factors and our contemporary knowledge of them in Molière’s exploration of Argan’s fixation on the ego, his extreme sensitivity to any defect in his environment, and his dependence on that environment as a condition for preserving his narcissism. The exaggerated attention the protagonist pays to his physical condition, his unhealthy narcissism, takes the place of any contact with the outside world, and his dread of being seriously ill renders him so weak that, when he goes into the house, he must lean on the arm of his wife, his “lovey-dovey” (mamour; Act I, scene La revue des deux mondes 8 (1973): 20–8; Francis Assaf, “Essai d’une taxonomie du savoir medical: 1665–1715,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 27 (2005): 175–96; Alain Couprie, Molière (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992); Carlo François, “Médecine et religion chez Molière: Deux facettes d’une même absurdité,” French Review 42, 5 (1969): 665–72; Paisley Livingston, “Comic Treatment: Molière and the Farce of Medicine,” MLN 94, 4 (1979): 676–87; and Patrick Dandrey’s two volumes, La médecine et la maladie dans le théâtre de Molière. Sganarelle et la médecine ou de la mélancolie érotique. Molière et la maladie imaginaire ou de la mélancolie hypocondriaque. 76 See Harold C. Knutson, Molière: An Archetypal Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 106. 77 Dandrey, La médecine et la maladie dans le théâtre de Molière. Molière et la maladie imaginaire ou de la mélancolie hypocondriaque, Vol. 2, p. 396. See also Martine Alet, “La mélancolie dans la psycho-pathologie du début du XVIIe siècle,” PFSCL 27, 53 (2000): 462–4.


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7). Argan has experienced severe social displacement: he has no public duties and no social contacts. He is entombed in his house, and his preoccupation with his illness serves as a substitute for intimate relationships. Argan languishes in a melancholic – what would now be called a depressive – state, which gives rise to a sense of moral, intellectual, and emotional asphyxia, an imaginary death that is all too real given the subject’s immobility. The character’s solitary confinement in his house even suggests a sepulcher, and his focus on himself demonstrates a constant obsession with death, which haunts his thoughts and words: “I would succumb if [my doctor] did not take care of me for even three days” (Act III, scene 3).78 There is a sickly element to his character that is troubling from the start, since he lives with the absurd conviction that he is suffering physiological ills that wear on him mentally and physically and will lead to his death. Shockingly, that solitary melancholic, almost “defunct” as a result of his lack of activity, repeatedly asserts the possibility of his death to members of his family and twice enacts his death in front of his daughter, Angélique, and his wife, Béline, so that he may observe their reactions. The situation of emotional withering or “desert” at the end of Le misanthrope can be found again in Le malade imaginaire, in the image of a home/ tomb where Argan’s living remains are buried before his loved ones’ eyes. Death is thus understood, first, as a physical act that would put an end to life (see the multiple enactments of death within the play), then as an increasingly anxious state, advancing to what would now be called depression, in which the imaginary encounter with death takes place. Argan’s shudder at the sight of his body, buffeted between life and death, expresses the character’s essential underlying anxiety. Throughout the play, he is distressed by an “existential” fear of dying, which leads him to seek out the help of someone he can trust by adopting him into the family: “Infirm and ill as I am, I want to find a son-in-law and doctor allies, so that I can rely on their good help against my illness, can have the sources and remedies I need within the family, and can have consultations and prescriptions” (Act I, scene 5).79 The hypochondriac’s search for a living remedy – personified in the doctor/son-in-law – is a response to his inherent anxiety. He makes his doctor (or doctors) his confidant(s) in order to combat an undefined fear that alarms him.80 Three centuries later, Freud differentiated between the German terms Furcht and 78

“Je succomberais, s’il était seulement trois jours sans prendre soin de moi.” “Infirme et malade, comme je suis, je veux me faire un gendre et des alliés médecins, afin de m’appuyer de bons secours contre ma maladie, d’avoir dans ma famille les sources et des remèdes qui me sont nécessaires, et d’être à même des consultations et des ordonnances.” 80 For example, Antoine Adam makes Argan the “plaything of his nerves” (Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, Vol. 3 [Paris: Del Duca, 1952]), p. 398. Jean Serroy proposes that sadness and an obsession with death account for why Argan takes refuge in illness. Jean Serroy, “Argan et la mort: Autopsie du malade imaginaire,” in L’art du théàtre. Mélanges en hommage à Robert Garapon, (ed.) Yvonne Bellenger, Gabriel Conesa et al. (Paris: PUF, 1992), pp. 239–46. 79

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Angst, using Angst to characterize the “neurotic” fear of patients troubled by the proximity of an imagined peril. Whereas Furcht designates fear of a concrete object of which the subject is conscious, Angst expresses a fear of an undefined or unspecified object. That anxiety is linked to the instinct of self-preservation and becomes traumatic by virtue of its lack of definition.81 Although Molière does not use this terminology, he investigates the role anxiety plays in illnesses of mind and body and analyzes the significance of undefined traumatic anxiety and its “conversion” into bodily suffering. Argan is in a state of Angst, worried by the prospect of death for no plausible reason but fearing it all the more because he cannot name its cause: “Ah! Ah! I can’t go on. It will be the death of me” (Act 1, scene 5).82 The endlessly repeated “ah’s” are clear signs of a fearfulness that turns into an obsession with the body. Anxiety, helplessness, and impotence are closely related. They are expressed as an inability to articulate words – “I haven’t even the strength to be able to speak” (Act 2, scene 9)83 – as a total dependence on his family, and as outcries: “There’s nobody here. N o matter what I say, they always leave me alone” (Act 1, scene 1).84 Lalande writes that Argan “needs the gaze of others to substantiate his being”85 because his situation of enforced idleness, which colors the play, leads to anxiety. His diminished sense of worth is channeled outward in reactions of presumed helplessness that mask his affective needs. The character’s depressive state demonstrates the tension between him and his environment, and we can certainly understand his complaints and fears as puerile behavior displaying his self-obsession and bourgeois boredom.86 The key to understanding his melancholy lies, however, in his emotional state of being. His not feeling “well” (Act I, scene 1) points to a mental impotence that represents more than self-willed infantilism: it can be seen as an inner “dismantling” manifest in his fragile, damaged, and already “emasculated” body. According to Albanese, hypochondria allows Argan to turn his body into an object of pure exhibition but also reveals the passivity of the body.87 His excessive distinctiveness, rooted in the passive body, is, as much as his fear of death, a sign of his withered posture, manifest in his reduced virility and in the inverted logic of performing his death in 81 Sigmund Freud, “N achträge,” in Hysterie und Angst, Studienausgabe, Vol. 6, 8th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), pp. 302–303. 82 “Ah! ah! je ne puis plus. Voilà pour me faire mourir.” 83 “Je n’ai pas seulement la force de pouvoir parler.” 84 “Il n’y a personne. J’ai beau dire, on me laisse toujours seul.” 85 Lalande, Intruders, p. 169. 86 This matter has been of interest to scholars who give greater importance to Argan’s behavior as representative of bourgeois self-obsession and boredom. My reading is not oriented in that direction but rather follows Horowitz and Albanese in focusing on the passivity of the hypochondriac’s body as a sign of impotence and as the exhibition of the vulnerability of the maladjusted subject. 87 Ralph Albanese Jr., “Le Malade imaginaire, ou le jeu de la mort et du hasard,” Dixseptième siècle 154 (1987): 6–7.


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order to take control of something. What Argan really fears is his own impotence, and his efforts to perform and thereby control death are weak attempts that give him the illusion of dominance. While the anxiety cannot be named, it can be enacted in an effort at mastery. It also seems that acting out his death allows him to be acknowledged, to become the object of the gaze within his environment. N evertheless, his need to be recognized remains unfulfilled. His wife, Béline, asks: “What is his loss? And what was his function on earth?” (Act I, scene 12).88 The demeaning reality is that Argan is useless and clings fearfully to anything that can provide him with meaning. This play is often characterized as a farce, and the mania and obsession the main character displays is instrumental for reading the character as “another would-be masterful subject whose methodical effort to subjugate women, bodies, and emotion subjugates him.”89 Argan’s obsession with (physiological) control is no doubt embedded in comedy, and through his character Molière thematizes both excess and narcissistic gullibility. The passive, fixated character who has lost a reasonable outlook reminds us of the liberating power of farce, which, through transgression and broad humor, serves as a reflection of the absolutism of Louis XIV and allows us to cope with forces we cannot control. Greenberg informs us that “carnival forms the overarching structure”90 of the play and shows how the grotesque body of organic excess could find its public expression through the performance of the play during the pre-Lenten festivities, which allowed public display of the unclean body and attention to the humorally afflicted body. Although carnival permits us to laugh at Argan’s excessive focus on his bowels, it is also possible to see the implications of inadequacy and frustration that lie behind that obsession. Comedy adopts a “symptomatic language,” using repressed material to voice something that in classical society was both obfuscated and feared.91 There is something disturbing about the excess in Molière’s last play. The character’s anguish and frustration are at odds with the rather cruel laughter of the other characters and of the spectator and upset us even as they amuse us. In addition, the shocking display of the body, the intense, unbound suffering, the breakdown of language – its inability to capture illness effectively – and the overwhelming and grotesque emphasis placed on the character’s disintegration, bear a striking resemblance to Antonin Artaud’s concept of a “theater of cruelty” in Theatre and Its Double. Here Molière sheds all masks and visibly exposes a truth that remained repressed in absolutist society: the inner frustration and anxiety experienced by the classical subject that was disruptive of the dominant political ideology of unity and “health” at the time. This play of the body, passions, desires, and drives 88

“Quelle perte est-ce que la sienne? et de quoi servait-il sur la terre?” Riggs, Molière and Modernity, pp. 200–201. 90 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 31. 91 Along similar lines, Larry Riggs has called the comedy of Le misanthrope a symptomatic language of fears and frustration. See his Molière and Modernity, p. 122. 89

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reduces the power of language and depicts miscommunication, death, and decay. Molière’s last comedy shocks us into an awareness of our own individual bodies and thus entails the will to reconnect the spectators with something more primal and true, namely, the body and its subjectivity and possible repression.92 And it is precisely this active agenda of revealing something to the audience that Greenberg describes as the essential feature of seventeenth-century theater: “The theater is never just a mimesis but also, and perhaps more important, a poiesis: it is a production of certain representational parameters by which and through which we are subjectively positioned. In a sense what I am suggesting is that the very gestures of inclusion/exclusion that define the parameters of subjectivity in the larger sociopolitical forum of absolutist Europe are internalized and repeated on the seventeenth-century stage.”93 I am suggesting a counterreading of the more familiar view of the play as a farce. I do not think that laughter and the eradication of excess are at odds with an understanding of the play as a symptomatic revelation of hidden anxieties and frustrations within absolutist society and, on a larger scale, within us. In fact, the play shows that the character’s sickly condition is triggered by a society in which “emasculation” and impotence are present not only in the upper classes but in the bourgeoisie as well. Anxiety and frustration are the active mechanisms at work, and the character attempts to purge his inertia through verbal and physiological outlets. His anguished cries “verbalize” the anxiety, attract attention to his wounds, and “cathect words like organs.”94 He substitutes, for concrete somatic manifestations, a verbal preoccupation with his physiological ills, a designation of his illness, and his repeated worried complaints are themselves symptoms of the feeling of lack underlying his hypochondria. And again, he needs the gaze of those around him to find approbation and acceptance. He asks Toinette to speak less loudly because it hurts his head and accuses her of forgetting his illness (Act II, scene 2). He deliberately reminds his brother that he is very ill: “I am in such a great state of weakness that it is not believable.”95 He explicitly adds that he is too weak to speak (Act II, scene 9). His plaints and complaints can again be interpreted as unsuccessful efforts to mask his impotence through verbal “performances”

92 In his concept of the “theater of cruelty,” Artaud elaborates theater’s corporality and emotionality, in which the spectator becomes fully invested (“Le théâtre et son double,” in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 4 [Paris: Gallimard, 1964]). I would argue that such affectcharged spectacle is part of Le malade imaginaire through the incorporation of “grotesque” corporality. The ending of the play illustrates very well the physical and emotional limits to which the character is pushed. 93 Mitchell Greenberg, Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering, and Seventeenth-Century Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994), p. xiv. 94 Derzelle, Pour une conception psychosomatique, pp. 112 and 114. 95 “Je suis dans une foiblesse si grande, que cela n’est pas croyable.”


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intended to express inner frustration but also to reveal his dominion and reinforce his power by encoding it as an exacerbation of his illness. We now know that hypochondria is a psychic state that displays itself by turning the organs, which are perceived as ailing, into a spectacle. It is also a projection onto the body of failed attempts to connect with a particular environment. The renowned psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida explains: “The hypochondriac withdraws interest and libido … from the objects of the outside world and focuses them on the organ that preoccupies him.”96 The twentieth-century psychoanalyst Michael Balint had already observed the narcissistic element entailed in the various contradictory strivings of certain patients whose “interest is centred upon their ego – or their own self, … – and although apparently they have very little love to give to people, they are anything but secure or independent; equally they cannot be described as stable, self-contained, or self-sufficient. As a rule they are highly sensitive to any failure of their environment in treating them as they expect to be treated; they are easily hurt and offended.”97 Furthermore, hypochondria is not the result of a repression but rather, as Renata Saled claims, it is a symptom, an affect. Saled argues that the hypochondriac is inhibited in his reactions and reacts neurotically, with intense fear, rather than with an organic illness.98 M artine Derzelle also asserts “the permanent and burdensome presence of depression” in the hypochondriac, which “seems to mask … internalized paranoid anxieties” and leads him to withdraw into himself. Contemporary thought establishes anxiety as both symptom and cause of hypochondria. A number of commentators have seen Argan’s passivity, his diminished sense of worth, and his withdrawal into himself as internalized reactions to a lack and an unsatisfied desire. His underlying anxiety about impotence and sterility is articulated in attempts to attract the attention and concern of his family, whom he accuses of neglect and endlessly persecutes when he is feeling abandoned. His threats and ruthless efforts to assume power are further symptoms of his illness, as he strives to regain a control he feels he has lost and to annihilate others in the same way that he feels annihilated. His need to assert himself is directly linked to his anxiety and insecurity. He engages in a battle for supremacy that is not an “empty game” but a matter of life and death, channeled through the need to find recognition and self-assertion: “And I want it to be,” he shouts” (Act 1, scene

96 Pierre Fédida, “Une plainte restée en souffrance,” Psychologie médicale 7, 4 (1975): 709. 97 See Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (Evanston, IL: N orthwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 54–55. Sándor Ferenczi also diagnoses the patient’s narcissistic preoccupation with his/her own body as a symptom of hypochondria. See his “Psycho-Analysis of a Case of Hysterical Hypochondria,” in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, (ed.) John Rickman, trans. Jane Isabel Suttie et al. 2nd edn. (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), p. 123. 98 Renata Saled, On Anxiety: Thinking in Action (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 20.


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5).99 He warns his daughter to carry out his wish to marry the husband he has picked out for her or otherwise, “I’ll put [you] in a convent before two days are done” (Act II, scene 9).100 He strives to prove his virility, as Molière demonstrates with the phallic symbol of the little finger: “Watch out at least, this little finger knows all and will tell me if you’re lying” (Act II, scene 8).101 Yet once again, his complaints, orders, and attempts at subjugation mask his impotence, show his fragility and “emasculation” resulting from his “radical social displacement, in the sense that … [he] has been rendered powerless as civic … [player] by a state which has reduced function to ornament.”102 His impotence or “emasculation” is demonstrated by the fact that he remains incapable of producing another child and male heir, as he tells his wife: “All my regret if I die, my dear, will lie in not having had a child with you. Monsieur Purgon told me that he would get me to make one” (Act I, scene 7).103 Argan’s lack – manifest in his solitude, anxiety, and the monomaniacal reiteration of his suffering – originates in an existential void, an absence of definition, and a feeling of displacement. Having no function in life and no solid relationships, he communicates this lack through the “fetishization” of his body. Like Alceste, he is a “marginal player” in a society in which neither character (whether aristocrat or bourgeois) can find himself. Recent studies have shown that this narcissistic focus on body parts stems from a feeling of loss and simultaneously, from the absurd hope of protecting the body against hostile intrusions and alienation. Whereas Freud saw hypochondria as an eroticized preoccupation with oneself, Derzelle, while recognizing this libidinal element of the illness, also notes the opposite: a fear of the body as a whole and a biological preoccupation with the body to render it beyond “damage, desire, death or castration.” The hypochondriac attempts to “deny castration through a fetishization of the corporeal.”104 The patient is traumatized by the question he asks over and over again: “How do I protect myself against loss and damage?” Derzelle points out that, in his interrogation of his body, the patient is seeking answers he cannot find, and his disorder results from rupture, trauma, or psychological cleavage. The patient displays “what is fundamentally only a façade, a lack perhaps, in the form of a defensive fetishization of the somatic,” a fetishization cast into relief by the spoken word that fails to describe it.105 Similarly, only Argan’s focus on his cherished organs procures him an outlet to define himself and to find meaning in his existence. He establishes a series of 99

“Et je veux, moi que cela soit.” “Je [vous] mettrai dans un couvent avant qu’il soit deux jours.” 101 “Prenez-y bien garde au moins, car voilà un petit doigt qui sait tout, qui me dira si vous mentez.” 102 Horowitz, “Life in the Slow Lane,” p. 65. 103 “Tout le regret que j’aurai, si je meurs, mamie, c’est de n’avoir point un enfant de vous. Monsieur Purgon m’avait dit qu’il m’en ferait faire un.” 104 Derzelle, Pour une conception psychosomatique, p. 116. 105 Ibid., p. 106. 100


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obsessive and ritualistic behaviors in order to “take care” of himself (Act III, scene 3), the sign of a narcissistic cathexis intended to achieve the (inaccessible) health of the mind via the (imagined) health of the body. The many enemas, evacuations, and purgings he mentions attest to that fetishization of the body through ritual actions or compulsions. Argan blindly submits to a series of “medical” rituals: “Monsieur Purgon told me to walk my room every day, twelve paces one way and twelve the other; but I forgot to ask him if that was lengthwise or widthwise” (Act II, scene 2).106 He conscientiously takes daily enemas (Act I, scene 2; Act III, scene 4), consumes his bouillon with careful attention to the prescribed diet (Act I, scene 2; Act II, scene 6), always wears his cap on his head, considering it a sacred object and forbidding anyone to remove it (Act II, scene 5), and would be unable to “walk without a staff” (Act III, scene 2). Even as the rituals nourish him, they also end up controlling him, for he gives himself over to mechanical thoughts and launches into repetitive actions, fearing he will lose his fragile health if they are not performed correctly. In addition, his rites express an internal split: he is suffering from the lack of a unified corporeality. Paradoxically, his body is a façade, a “castrated” body, since its fetishization masks, first, the invalid’s inability to conceive of it in its totality, and second, the failure of an internal gaze that would penetrate the afflicted body and reflect upon its causes. For Argan, ritual and performance become a subterfuge hiding the underlying void and allow him to avoid questions he dares not face. Through these practices, which are both sacred and automatic, he refuses to confront his own “castration” and the anxiety triggered by the emasculation of his selfhood. Like Alceste, Argan is the marginal subject who withers emotionally in a society in which his cry for existence goes unheard. At the same time, he craves meaning in that society and desperately wants to be included in it. Symbolically, Argan’s rites mimic the regular ceremonial performances at court under Louis XIV, which themselves masked a lack behind a ritualistic façade. Performances provide the subject with the illusion of power while masking his underlying impotence. Molière bases his character’s compulsive behavior on a larger social model, revealing that ritualistic actions and bodily performances provide the illusion of domination. Molière’s character, however, finds his own way to rebel against the castrated honnête performance. He rejects the subdued, decorative, and regulated body in the Sun King’s ceremonies107 and expresses his autonomy through rituals that embrace a neurotic compulsion with the ailing body. Argan’s rites – though no less absurd than those at court – are organized around the sick, impure, contaminated body and thereby transgress the accepted limits that social codes have placed on the display of physical matter. Béline, aware of the marginality of her husband, 106

“Monsieur Purgon m’a dit de me promener le matin dans ma chambre, douze allées et douze venues; mais j’ai oublié à lui demander si c’est en long, ou en large.” 107 In this respect, the king’s mythic body on earth resembles God’s perfect body. For a closer study, see Apostolidès, Le roi-machine, Greenberg, Baroque Bodies and Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1997).


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reproaches him for being “unclean, disgusting, constantly an enema or a medicine in his belly, blowing his nose, coughing, spitting all the time” (Act III, scene 12).108 The fundamental distinction that follows from this, as Jean Serroy defines it, is between Argan’s “body as rot” (as perceived by others) and his “delicate, suffering body” (as perceived by the character himself). This body asserts itself as sensitive and alert, able to react to the suffering transmitted to it and to display it as pain. Argan’s body speaks a particular language: it is present, susceptible, and emotional, “ready to assert its existence, even painfully.”109 It stubbornly resists its concealment, returns despite its repression, and reveals itself. Argan’s rituals, centered around his impure body, can thus be read as a clandestine rejection of society’s emasculation and degradation of a body that functioned as pure decoration in Louis XIV’s ceremonies and rituals. In response, the marginal man, in order to display his alterity, finds refuge in compulsions and illnesses that allow him to “fashion himself” autonomously. N evertheless, the hero remains obsessed and anxious, feeling barely alive, fearing the imminence and proximity of his death. His otherness remains a disorder, a disturbance of the imagination. Yet behind the imagination’s power lies a real disease stemming from a psychological conflict, the “mind torturing the body with illnesses unseen.”110 While Argan’s brother argues that the protagonist’s troubled imagination is incapable of producing physical ills, we see that the imaginative faculty is endowed with the ability to produce the sensation of real suffering. The main character experiences his symptoms as authentic. Contemporary thought underscores what Molière had already grasped: the link between the hypochondriac’s real suffering and the imagination, not as a depraved faculty, but as an important connection between mind and body with real content. The French psychiatrist Henry Ey explains: Hypochondria is an illusion, and the problem of hypochondria is only one aspect of the problem of hallucinatory and delirious projection. But what characterizes the illusion is precisely that it is experienced on both the imaginary and the real register. The reality that hypochondria contains is nothing less than the reality of our body’s proper place within our “world,” … the experience “by which I am my body” and which links “my body” to “me” in a relation of “having.” In hypochondria, the perfect disposition of my body escapes me, and what I feel in my body is then an event and not only an accident occurring in spite of me and against me.111 108

“Malpropre, dégoûtant, sans cesse un lavement ou une médecine dans le ventre, mouchant, toussant, crachant toujours.” 109 Serroy, “Argan et la mort,” pp. 99 and 95. 110 Richard Friedman, “Behavior: When the Mind Tortures the Body with Illnesses Unseen,” New York Times, September 9, 2003. 111 Henri Ey, Etudes psychiatriques, aspects séméiologiques, Vol. 2 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1950), p. 479, my emphasis.


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Ey grasps the imagination’s function of unifying psyche and soma and of contributing to the sensation of feeling the body. Through the comic hero’s melancholy, the playwright explores how the imaginative faculty can externalize or expulse repressed anxiety and how it translates inner distress into a concrete body image. The imagination creates or produces, not inventions or lies, but an awareness of mental conflicts that might ultimately be converted onto the body. Molière grants the imagination a cognitive function and highlights its intimate relation to both mind and body.112 For the imagination brings about Argan’s real sensation of having a body and of feeling it. It is not reason that creates the hypochondriac Argan’s feeling of “self”; rather, the imagination produces his notion of subjectivity, intervening not as an accident but as a valid event, since it unleashes the notion of his body outside thought (“despite me and against me”). Argan feels truly alive because his imagination, through the body, creates a notion of self grounded in physiological suffering that he takes to be authentic. His subjective understanding based on his corporeal state is a particular way of conceiving of himself as someone with a body, a full-fledged individual who affirms himself in his totality. It is the feeling of being alive that distinguishes him from his environment. The character reiterates: “I feel headaches from time to time … It sometimes seems to me that I have a veil before my eyes… I sometimes feel weariness in all my members” (Act III, scene10).113 In short, the feeling that his body is alive becomes a form of empowerment in that mental processes are grounded in the body. What Damasio calls the “assembly of body images,” that is, the physical and special sensory images of the body that are the foundation of the notion of self,114 constructs the character’s reality. Rather than an invisible body, we have one that is composed of activities and images through which the “I” is perceived. Unlike the Cartesian idea of subjectivity, which begins with the res cogitans, a disembodied mind devoid of spatial extension, Argan’s selfhood is based on the modifications he experiences through the imagination and the senses. Argan judges things by relying on physiological detail. From our current perspective, we can say that Molière assumed that the body produces consciousness as the first link in a long chain of physiological and psychic mechanisms.115 That emphasis on the body is already present in Molière’s play: the body not only conveys internal distress but Argan defines himself by the way he feels during his bodily crisis. Argan’s hypochondria must not be understood as a harmful product of the imagination without real foundation – a notion that would link Molière to Descartes 112

M. C. Célérier speaks of the hypochondriac’s “persecuting” body: the imagination projects and “expels the painful representation from the psychic space” onto a “bad object,” an organ perceived as sick. M. C. Célérier, “De la causalité psychosomatique,” Topique 22 (1978): 125. 113 “Je sens de temps en temps des douleurs de tête … Il me semble parfois que j’ai un voile devant les yeux … Je sens parfois des lassitudes par tous les membres.” 114 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 195. 115 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 138.


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– but rather as a latent faculty that subtly illustrates the interdependence of body and mind and produces a “state of body” in which corporeal somatization, felt but invisible, is intrinsically linked to mental affliction. It is here that Molière’s thinking and Spinoza’s philosophy of the imagination intersect. For the Dutch philosopher, as for Molière, the imagination is linked to an idea that indicates what he calls a “modification” of a bodily state. As Gilles Deleuze explains, in Spinozan thought, “inasmuch as the mind has these ideas, it is said to imagine” and ideas “indicate our current state … they do not express the essence of the external body but indicate the presence of that body and its effect on us.”116 In the Ethics, Spinoza observes that the “modifications of the human body, the ideas of which represent to us external bodies as if they were present … [are] images of things, although they do not actually reproduce the forms of the things. When the mind contemplates bodies in this way, we will say that it imagines.”117 Spinoza characterizes the imagination as having or perceiving knowledge. Consequently, the mind recognizes via the imagination what is happening in the body. His concept of the imagination is broad enough to include sense perception and memory. As a capacity to represent (external and internal) bodies, it is the first and lowest of three kinds of cognition. The act of imagining constructs an individual notion of selfhood experienced by the body as an “I am” and then transmitted to the mind: “therefore I think.”118 The imagination, rather than intellection, constitutes the first active means of perceiving that allows a person to grasp the most intimate foundation of his being. We have observed that, in Le malade imaginaire, the state of imagined suffering becomes a reality for Argan, that fictive pain can be experienced as real and translated into concrete language, thereby subverting the traditional dualism of mind and body. The hypochondriac defines himself by means of an antithetical and self-protective response, devotes himself to the fetishization of his dejected, tainted, and suffering – but nevertheless feeling, precious, and alive – body. Illness in Molière becomes a truly radical and defensive counterreaction against the cultural system of the time, which is perceived as sterile and threatening, a form Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1981), p. 106. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, (ed.) James Gotmann, trans. William Hale White and Amelia Hutchinson (N ew York: Hafner, 1949), pp. 97–98. 118 Spinoza, Ethics, p. 98. Spinoza also speaks, of course, of the errors that can originate in the imagination. He writes: “Here I wish it to be observed, in order that I may begin to show what error is, that these imaginations of the mind, regarded by themselves, contain no error, and that the mind is not in error because it imagines, but only in so far as it is considered as wanting in an idea which excludes the existence of those things which it imagines as present. For if the mind, when it imagines non-existent things to be present, could at the same time know that those things did not really exist, it would think its power of imagination to be a virtue of its nature and not a defect, especially if this faculty of imagining depended upon its own nature alone, that is to say … if this faculty of the mind were free” (p. 98). 116

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of “castration” that alienates man from his feeling body. The invalid seeks to rebel against the antithetical model represented by the falsely displayed “health” of the (emasculated) bourgeois, and reacts against sexual, emotional, and corporeal repression by devoting himself to the suffering body. Argan’s illness also subtly unmasks the vulnerability and impotence of the classical subject. Molière reveals a “destructive … self-destructive hierarchical system, generative of a vicious cycle of abuses and the source of the individual’s profound alienation.”119 In his last play, then, he shows the inherent impotency of the new bourgeois class. N evertheless, Molière’s hypochondriac exposes a fragmented body, one that has lost the sense of its unity, and begins a “sort of mourning of self through the bad organ.”120 By the end of the comedy ballet, that fragility of the main character leads to complete debilitation in the form of madness. The predominant fanciful reading of Charpentier’s ballet does not sufficiently explain the almost “cruel” way in which the play ends, with Argan locked up once more and blinded by a false reality. Argan fails in that society as surely as Alceste. Through the costumes, the music, the dancing, and the use of Latin, that ending creates the illusion of a true “vertigo” where confusion and sheer madness reign.121 The burlesque ceremony at which Argan is “the leading man” (Act III, scene 14) – a dupe to his whole family’s trickery – metamorphoses the patient into a doctor. It is arranged by characters seeking to “perform a comedy” (Act III, scene 4) at the expense of the invalid. Argan is locked up to perform an imposed role in a grotesque ceremony, resembling a puppet on a string, for a household who has deprived the melancholic character of his autonomy. Argan becomes a victim to the artifice of those around him, who seek to “entertain” themselves but leave him in illusion. The grotesque and disconcerting ending of the play led James Gaines to ask whether the comedy marks the final triumph of madness or the tragic murder of the protagonist, two complementary elements indeed.122 This ending can be read as being much darker than it is traditionally understood to be. On one hand, we see the character’s complete loss of autonomy. On the other, we experience the crossing of boundaries between patient and doctor, illness 119 Karolyn Waterson, Molière et l’autorité. Structures sociales, structures comiques (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1976), p. 125. 120 See Fédida, Corps du vide, p. 60. 121 John Powell notes the final dramatic turn of the play: “The styles and patterns of music and dance join with those of language and stage action to form a dramatic arc towards the final triumph of music, mayhem and madness.” See John Powell, “Music, Fantasy and Illusion in Molière’s ‘Le malade imaginaire,’” Music and Letters 73, 2 (1992): 234. The theme of “make-believe” is also presented in the first interlude. Claude Abraham comments on the contrast between the gloomy atmosphere of Argan’s house and the festive and burlesque interludes. See his “Teaching Fête: Le malade imaginaire,” in Gaines and Koppisch, (eds), Approaches to Teaching Molière’s Tartuffe and Other Plays, p. 112. 122 James Gaines, “Le malade imaginaire et le paradoxe de la mort,” in Le labyrinthe de Versailles, (ed.) Martine Debaisieux (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), p. 81.


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and health, sanity and madness, with no clear resolution and with no possibility for Argan to “purge” himself by adopting a new “sane” or “healthy” role within his society. Even though, as Mitchell Greenberg has remarked, “the body seems to end the play as triumphantly present as ever,”123 it does so even more ominously, as the borders between illness and madness become blurred and Argan pays the price for the bleeding and killing caused by the political and cultural epistemology fixed on the “homosexual male.”124 The play ends not with a “cure,” even partial, of the obsessive protagonist but with a state of complete confusion and vertigo, in which incomprehension, mockery, madness, and anguish offer no “way out.” That state is just like the emotional desert that awaited Alceste in Le misanthrope. Molière thus chooses to close with the sick character’s inability to return to a state of health and with the theme of societal pressures and their influence on body and mind, played out here in the total collapse of Argan, who is unable to solicit help and to find an end to his aggrieved state of vulnerability. While we laugh at the unmasking of the difference between appearance and reality and at the apparent contradictions within Argan’s new “role” as doctor and/or patient,125 the comic aspect of the play is mitigated by the fact that this laughter is neither truly “liberating” nor “spontaneous.” Moreover, in this frenzy and madness, we cannot fail to observe the underlying tension that interrupts the flow of music, words, and dancing and that we the audience continue to carry with us.

Epilogue: Complaint and Psychosomatic Illness Alceste’s melancholy and Argan’s hypochondriacal melancholy are two types of mind/body illness by which Molière illustrates how inner distress manifests itself on the soma and the psyche and demonstrates the inherent and vital correlation between the two. It has been my aim to suggest a reading of mind/body illnesses in which the social environment of the characters plays an important role. For Molière, melancholy is psychodynamic: that is, cumulative psychic tensions generate organic responses, and “decision conflicts, value conflicts, choices, threat, and loss”126 are apt to prompt psychophysiological dysfunction. The two characters’ frustration with societal models causes a profound dichotomy: on one hand, their illnesses challenge the ideological imperatives of repression and control imposed by both absolutism and Cartesian rationalism; on the other, they expose the tensions and stresses of Louis XIV’s regime. Both characters are marginal in that they cannot meet the requirements of absolutism and demonstrate the impotence of the Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 46. Joan E. DeJean, Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in SeventeenthCentury France (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), p. 138. 125 See Ulrich Haut, “Alceste. Wege zum Verstehen einer ambivalenten Figur,” Französisch Heute 21, 2 (1990): 149. 126 Furst, Idioms of Distress, p. 49. 123 124


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displaced individual. Illness affects the maladjusted subject, shows his moment of crisis, and allegorically maps the instability of a culture that, on the groundwork of reason, “subordinates or excludes emotion, along with the body and nature.”127 Three centuries later, Freud and Sandór Ferenczi studied the connection between melancholy and fractured social relations, as well as the underlying revolt hiding behind the illness.128 In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud observes: “Their [melancholics’] complaints [Klage] are really ‘plaints’ [Anklage] in the old sense of the word.”129 Molière masks his own judgment of the fragility and fragmentation of the classical subject, who suffered from the repercussions of an oppressive system that ruled out otherness and banished or marginalized the alienated subject. We have seen that illness produces behaviors in the two protagonists that imitate Louis XIV’s political and cultural mechanisms (conquest, attempts to empower, narcissism, aggression, ritual). But we have analyzed the flip side as well: the explicit complaint, insurrection, and frustration that malady brings forth. Through Alceste’s and Argan’s suffering, Molière expounds on the failure of Louis XIV’s absolutist policy to create unity and lodges a complaint against the radicalism and profoundly repressive nature of the social code of honnêteté and the classical subject’s assailed sense of worth. As Michèle Longino points out, far from being simple modes of life, they were profoundly manipulative operations: “This was more than mere fashion; it was an aggressive mind-set for comprehending and managing the Other.”130 As decisive apparatuses for controlling the masses, bodily repression and manipulation of the self reduced an entire society to conformity and deprivation. The playwright ends both plays with the frighteningly imminent “mental death” or deep depression of a dissenting individual discredited and ridiculed by those around him. Moreover, both plays show the main characters’ failure to distinguish themselves meaningfully from that society. Molière leaves us with a cynical and caustic smile that could not be more effective, since he himself left the world of the court after a performance of Le malade imaginaire. The “dark sorrow” with which he abandoned his audience communicated his critical stance toward the demands of absolutism along with his sense of crisis, if not his own rebellion against the epistemological codes and behaviors of his era.

127 Larry Riggs, Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births (Charlottesville, VA: Rockwood Press, 2005), p. 4. 128 Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, (ed.) Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint and N icola Zarday Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), entry of February 23, 1932. 129 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 14: 248. 130 Michèle Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7.


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In conclusion, we could consider the extent to which the psychological malaise in the two plays refers to Molière’s personal troubles and his suffering following the loss of Louis’s personal attention and support. At the time Le misanthrope was being written, there was a ban on Tartuffe (1664) being performed, and the controversy surrounding the latter play led to one of Molière’s greatest personal crises, in response to his changing relationship with the institutional forces of society. Jürgen Grimm asks whether the character of Alceste may not contain some autobiographical elements, since Le misanthrope seems to project Molière’s personal conflicts and to suggest his changed status in the shifting waters at court. The “unmasking” of false appearances in the play and the preoccupation with sincerity may allude to Molière’s “depression” at the time, according to Grimm.131 Renée-Claude Lorimier’s description of the political dimension of the play focuses on the problem of communication within the court – and we could add between Louis and Molière – that finds expression in the play.132 Although at the time Le misanthrope was written, Molière was at the height of his career, the play was never performed at court. We know that Jean-Baptiste Lully’s comedy ballets and operas began to fascinate the sovereign, who commissioned Molière to generate comedy ballets in collaboration with the artist.133 While this alliance was truly beneficial to the career of both men and provided great opportunities for Molière to work at court, the productions of the late 1660s and 1670s point to differences between Molière and Lully, and between Molière and Louis. Gretchen Elizabeth Smith writes that the year 1670 was a turning point for Molière: his performances at Louis’s châteaux declined and his visits to court were drastically reduced. Louis’s interest in comedy ballets appears to have been waning, and while he continued to support the genre, it was clearly opera that held his attention. Smith speculates on the possible causes for the “crisis” and wonders whether Louis might have perceived “Molière’s inability to give up creative control as a rebellion” and whether Lully’s rise in favor led to Molière’s downfall, the result of a lack of attention and protection.134 S he even suggests that the relationship between the playwright and the crown had been damaged during Molière’s attempts to get Tartuffe past the censors. Long royal patronage seems to have been integral to Molière’s career, but we could speculate that, while it is impossible to know the exact relationship between the playwright and the king, the constant pressure from the crown throughout Molière’s career and his troupe’s lost of autonomy over time may have created a growing anxiety, while 131

Haut, “Alceste. Wege zum Verstehen einer ambivalenten Figur,” p. 144. Renée-Claude Lorimier, “Le secret dans Le Misanthrope de Molière: Agrément courtois ou arme politique?” Etudes littéraires 28, 2 (1995): 97–106. 133 Later, the monarch’s strong sense of piety, prompted by Mme de Maintenon, changed his perspective on worldly spectacles altogether, culminating in an act of withdrawal that would be of great consequence for Racine’s career as well. 134 Gretchen Elizabeth Smith, The Performance of Male Nobility in Molière’s Comédies-Ballets: Staging the Courtier (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 210–214. 132


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the unfortunate loss of the king’s attention may have led to the same ambivalence that his characters feel: on one hand, the desire to be part of the life at court, on the other, the sense of vulnerability and purposelessness that that life entailed.


Chapter 4

Psychosomatic Fiction in Madame de Lafayette: The Enigma of Illness

If men often answer their love troubles by extensively clinging to obsessional rituals and self-imposed rules (which are supposed to prevent them from being overwhelmed by the objects of desire), women’s dilemma with the question of what kind of an object they are for the man can result in rejection of love and in its place an immersion in melancholic indifference. – Renata Salecl, On Anxiety

“Mme de Clèves, whose mind had been so agitated, fell into a violent illness as soon as she arrived home.” At the end of Mme de Lafayette’s novel La princesse de Clèves (The Princesse de Clèves; 1678), the distinct voice of the “ventriloquized body” – a term I borrow from Janet Beizer – bursts forth, marking the central character with a long, dangerous illness. Lafayette merely informs us of its long duration and the danger it represents, adding that the protagonist never recovers fully but remains afflicted with a “lingering illness” (p. 313) that left her “health … considerably compromised” (p. 314). N o diagnosis or other identification is provided by the narrative voice. A large number of unidentified ills appear in Lafayette’s novel: feigned sicknesses, burning pain, violent illnesses, fevers, mental anxieties bordering on madness. All indicate the characters’ intense suffering, an agitation both mental and physical. Illnesses as violent and “considerable” (p. 172) as that suffered by the princess also afflict the duc de N emours, the heroine’s mother, and M. de Clèves, the princess’s husband, and they dumbfound the doctors, who are unable to cure them. Mme de Chartres, the protagonist’s mother, is afflicted with a fever so threatening that “people began to despair” (p. 172) for her life; and she in fact succumbs to it. M. de Clèves also finds himself “almost lifeless” (p. 293), ultimately perishing from his violent fever. Lafayette clearly points out the imminent danger threatening her characters but allows us to speculate about the

“Mme de Clèves, dont l’esprit avait été si agité, tomba dans une maladie violente sitôt qu’elle fut arrivée chez elle.” Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves et autres romans, (ed.) Bernard Pingaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 313. All references to this edition will be cited in the text. Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1994). “Maladie de langueur,” “sa santé . . . demeura considérablement affaiblie.”


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symptoms and origins of the illnesses she evokes. The only common denominator is the “violence” and “extravagance” (p. 313) of the suffering. In her refusal to name the illness directly, Lafayette challenges the classic space of the nomination of things that Michel Foucault attributes to the seventeenth century. She severs the relationship between the signifier and the signified “where one represents the other.” The enigma of her writing disconcerted critics even in her own time. For example, Jean-Baptiste-Henri de Valincour noted that in their dialogues, Lafayette’s characters use “signs” that are impossible to decipher, an enigmatic language that annihilates the omnipotence of the logos. Hence, instead of naming the ailing body, she exposes and represents it, confronting us with the riddle: “What is this body?” That mystery corresponds to her general project. As Joan DeJean explains, Lafayette opts for a vision in which the reader must read between the lines, must verbalize the language of silence and repression. Such mutism and repression, precisely, are revealed through the concrete language the illness speaks. In seventeenth-century medicine, “the word ‘fever’ itself usually denoted a disease, not merely an elevation of body temperature. Often a particular organ of the body was regarded as the ‘seat’ of a given disease.” It was believed that fevers were caused by a mix of physical and emotional factors, such as fear, anxiety, and disappointment. Lafayette’s literary victims suffer and even die from violent fevers, leaving little doubt about the emotional causes depicted in the novel. Yet these fevers are veiled in shadow, consonant with the author’s penchant for ellipsis and ambiguity. The elliptic illnesses unmask previously buried secrets and the author traces their symptoms back to the initial source of distress, analyzing the factors that lead to conversion: the repression of passion, the failure of language, pshychological distress, and external factors. Melancholy in the novel is a state anterior to fever and is broadly characterized by sorrow, feelings of guilt, selfdeprecation, fear of abandonment, and despair. We would currently use the term See Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 81. The criticisms made by Lafayette’s contemporary Valincour were directed at her efforts to subjectively mingle fiction and history without making clear judgments, presenting her readers with silence at crucial moments. See Jean-Baptiste-Henri Du Trousset de Valincour, Lettres à Madame la marquise *** sur le sujet de La princesse de Clèves (Paris: Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1678). It is in this respect that fiction is metaphorical, according to Michel de Certeau: it operates in an “other” realm, informing the “real” without claiming to represent it and using an ambiguous language that must be decoded. See Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 51. DeJean, “Lafayette’s Ellipses,” p. 889. See DeJean, “Lafayette’s Ellipses.” p. 889. Audrey C. Peterson, “Brain Fever in N ineteenth-Century Literature: Fact and Fiction,” Victorian Studies 19 (1976): 446. See DeJean, “Lafayette’s Ellipses.” p. 889.

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“depression” to capture what the seventeenth-century medical tradition saw as an emotional and/or physical ailment. Here I use the term “melancholy” in a more restricted sense than in the other chapters, to designate the phase of (internal) torment. Melancholic symptoms are subsequently converted into organic illnesses such as “fever.” Surreptitiously, Lafayette gives us crucial indications for understanding the illnesses and alerts us to the strong link between disquiet within and somatic manifestation. That is, the “psychosomatic” nature (as we now call it) of certain illnesses is explored in her novel, which even alludes to the bad end that can result when the conflict remains hidden from consciousness or deliberately suppressed. The letter from a secondary character in the novel, Mme d’Ambroise, addressed to her lover, the vidame de Chartres, provides key evidence that an illness can break out as a direct result of an interplay between psychic and physiological factors. In this letter, she tells the vidame of her painful reactions when she learned of his infidelity: “I pretended to be ill to conceal the disorder in my mind; but I became so in reality and my body could not bear such violent agitation” (pp. 210–11).10 A chain reaction and interdependent symptoms are clearly present in this case: first, internal pain in the form of a mental disturbance with, simultaneously, the pretense of illness as a means of dissimulating one’s distress from oneself and others; then “conversion” and the outbreak of real illness as a result of the unresolved turmoil. That explanation, which Lafayette offers repeatedly in her writings, strikingly shows that the author grasps the dynamic between organic symptoms and the psychological origin of illness following an upset or emotional stress that is concealed from oneself and others, or, in modern terminology, “repressed.” Before twentieth-century research into psychosomatic illnesses, Lafayette got to the root of the psychological factors that play a determining role in the genesis of certain illnesses. The writing of illness in Lafayette’s fiction displays a novelty that Michel de Certeau attributes to a more general epistemological change in the seventeenth century: historical writing was now organized around the psychological and social life of the human being and gradually took an interest in the psyche (and no longer in spirituality).11 Lafayette’s narration constructs a sociocultural and historical truth intrinsically linked to the subjective realm of the author’s psychic space. Her depiction of psychosomatic illness functions as an allegory that allows for a double reading. First, it illustrates the translation of inner distress into physiological disturbances. Second, illness unveils individual’s constant struggle in the face of social relations and pressures, the profound crises and frustrations that are deemed nowadays “psychosocial.” Didier Coste speaks in this context of allegory as a fictional genre in which the novel allows simultaneously for a concrete and for a symbolic reading, camouflaging behind the use of fiction the cognition 10 “Je feignis d’être malade pour cacher le désordre de mon esprit; mais je le devins en effet et mon corps ne put supporter une si violente agitation.” 11 Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 154–6.


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and perception of particular cultural and political environments.12 Lafayette’s historical and cultural fiction seeks to make the absent present, to bring forth the unsaid, by contextualizing a particular environment that crystallizes conversion disorders. Her inquiry critically considers the nature of patriarchy under Henry II (and implicitly, Louis XIV). Lafayette’s writings have been studied for their important role in the development of the novel, since they deflate the romanesque illusion of the précieux novel, revealing the bankruptcy of tales of passionate love and presenting instead the disturbing secrets, suffering, and pain associated with the passions.13 In addition, her “new novel” broaches “themes of societal pressures, avoidance, guilt of various kinds, silence and secrecy” and “offers a complementary humanistic understanding of the crises that are precipitated into such [psychosomatic] disorders.”14 The author describes profound states of suffering that initially remain hidden but that then convert into overt disorders, when the characters are unable to set aside their distress. Illness is portrayed enigmatically rather than illustrated. Unlike in Molière’s plays, humoral conceptions are completely left out. Mental factors are studied as covert sources of the disturbances. Yet bodily manifestations are also in the foreground, and this discourse imposes itself against silence and repression, articulating an individual history (that of the princesse de Clèves) and assuming cultural significance (regarding court society). My analysis of La princesse de Clèves will be divided into two parts. First, I will consider the idea of “marks” that show the importance of the body for the birth and manifestation of passions. The body lies at the foundation of affective and mental phenomena as the most direct voice of the organism. I will link the discourse of the body to philosophical and medical questions of the time and to present-day psychoanalytic discourse and neurobiological research. I will study the flip side as well: how the body speaks for and in place of the subject in a “ventriloquism” that externalizes the inner distress. Lafayette understands mind and body in dynamic terms, based on their capacity to mimic each other. Second, I will integrate the discourse of the suffering body into a sociopolitical analysis and consider illness

Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 128–30. 13 Louise Horowitz, Love and Language: A Study of the Classical French Moralist Writers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977), pp. 70–71. The question of the development of the novel form is important in itself, but I cannot do justice here to the full spectrum of critical inquiries. On that question, see Joan DeJean’s “Lafayette’s Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity,” PMLA 95, 5 (1984): 884-902; and John Lyons, “N arrative Interpretation and Paradox: La Princesse de Clèves,” Romanic Review 72, 4 (1981): 383– 400. 14 Lilian Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 2003), p. 69. 12


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a “somatic complaint”15 against the demands of patriarchal society. The novel maps the relation between an internal condition and the external situations that trigger emotional tension; social pressures (guilt, repression, denial, avoidance) lie behind the protagonists’ melancholic state. Read psychodynamically, mind/ body illness alludes to the tensions within patriarchal society, where the social climate, according to Helen Karen Kaps, is “one of constant tensions, where each individual must be on guard against himself and against the inquisitive watch of others.”16 Hélène Merlin-Kajman adds that, at court, every “sign is invested with desire, subject to interpretation, every sign represents an enigma whose key never removes the uncertainty or dissipates the effect but opens on a new enigma.”17 The patriarchy of Henry II (and of Louis XIII and Louis XIV) grants and withholds, allots and abandons, a dualist gesture that relies on the “repression” of all individuality and on constant concealment by the subject, and which gives rise to self-blame. In focusing on the “psychosocial” aspect of illness, Lafayette, by depicting tension, concealment, surveillance, and guilt, draws the connection between internal unresolved tension and its conversion onto the body. I will focus on La princesse de Clèves but will frequently refer to two other narratives by the same author, La princesse de Montpensier (The Princesse de Montpensier; 1662) and La comtesse de Tende (The Comtesse de Tende; published posthumously in 1724).18 In La princesse de Montpensier, the young Mlle de Mézières marries the prince de Montpensier. It is a political marriage: husband and wife respect but do not love each other. Since her adolescence, the princess has been in love with the duc de Guise, and her husband, who notices her feelings, suspects that their object is his closest friend, the comte de Chabannes. After a violent confrontation with her husband, Mme de Montpensier is overwhelmed by such profound sorrow that she falls ill, then dies of a broken heart when the duc de Guise abandons her. In La comtesse de Tende, Mme de Strozzi’s marriage to the comte de Tende is happy at first but is quickly destroyed when the husband is unfaithful to his young wife with an older woman. The prince de N avarre then falls in love with the comtesse de Tende and they begin a love affair, which continues even after his marriage to a friend of the countess, the princesse de N eufchâtel. When Mme de Tende learns of the prince de N avarre’s death and finds herself

15 I borrow this term from Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (N ew York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 5. 16 Helen Karen Kaps, Moral Perspective in La Princesse de Clèves (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 2001), p. 11. 17 Hélène Merlin-Kajman, L’absolutisme dans les lettres et la théorie des deux corps (Paris: Champion, 2000), p. 325. 18 Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, Histoire de la princesse de Montpensier sous le règne de Charles IXeme roi de France. Histoire de la Comtesse de Tende, (ed.) Micheline Cuénin (Geneva: Droz, 1979). All references to this edition will be cited in the text.


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pregnant with his child, she falls violently ill. Shortly after writing a letter of confession to her husband, she dies in her sixth month of pregnancy.

Bodily Marks, Mental Inscription The outbreak of the princesse de Clèves’s illness occurs a few days after she flees to her properties in the Pyrenees, at a time when she has broken off all contact with N emours, an event directly linked to the only verbal revelation of the feelings they share. When she decides to renounce that attraction forever, she is not cured; rather, she is violently afflicted by an unidentified and mysterious illness. [Her] mind had been so agitated [that she] fell into a violent illness as soon as she arrived home; … her suffering tended toward despair and extravagance… . [When] she was out of the extreme peril she had faced, … she still had a lingering illness, which left little hope that she would live… . The necessity of dying, which she considered so imminent, accustomed her to separating herself from all things, and the length of the illness made it a habit with her. When she recovered from that state, she found that M. de N emours was still not effaced from her heart; but to help her defend herself against him, she called on all the reasons she believed she had never to marry him. Quite a great battle took place within herself. (p. 313)19

Here the body itself speaks, creating a pathogenic “map” of the unresolved conflict. It assumes a dual function: first, it displays the psychic mapping; and second, in expelling the negative affect, the body acts out or enacts the repressed psychic pain. Passions are kept down and, at the same time, displaced into the body. The intermingling of an internal depressive state and somatization is also key in Lafayette’s two novellas. For the princesse de Montpensier, the torment caused by her lover’s infidelity and earlier abandonment is so overpowering that she “fell in a faint” at her husband’s feet and “did not come out of her faint” (Princesse de Montpensier p. 97).20 At this stage, the “mortal pain” (p. 97) is expressed through 19

“[Son] esprit avait été si agité, [qu’elle] tomba dans une maladie violente sitôt qu’elle fut arrivée chez elle; . . . sa douleur allait au désespoir et à l’extravagance . . . . [Lorsqu’] elle était hors de cet extrême péril où elle avait été, . . . elle demeura dans une maladie de langueur, qui ne laissait guère d’espérance de sa vie. . . . La nécessité de mourir, dont elle se voyait si proche, l’accoutuma à se détacher de toutes choses et la longueur de la maladie lui en fit une habitude. Lorsqu’elle revint de cet état, elle trouva néanmoins que M. de N emours n’était pas effacé de son cœur; mais elle appela à son secours, pour se défendre contre lui, toutes les raisons qu’elle croyait avoir pour ne l’épouser jamais. Il se passa un assez grand combat en elle-même.” 20 “Tomba évanouie,” “ne revenait point de son évanouissement.”


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the physical sign of fainting, which simulates death. Her husband abandons her, placing her alone “in the hands of her women” (p. 97). His wife then falls into a delirium, a crisis that unleashes a major functional disturbance in the heroine: “Madame de Montpensier was extremely ill … [and] the fever took hold with such violence, and with imaginings so horrible, that by the second day everyone feared for her life” (p. 98).21 The princess finds herself in an unconscious delirium so intense that when her suffering intensifies at the news of her lover’s death, it is “the lethal blow for her life” (p. 101). She succumbs to the “pain of having lost her husband’s respect, her lover’s heart, and the most perfect friend who ever lived” (p. 101).22 The ventriloquized bodies of Lafayette’s protagonists always point to a mental conflict and express a disquiet that was silenced, stifled, or “repressed” before it manifested itself openly through somatization. For the comtesse de Tende, the same perilous situation is produced by the “severe restrictions on the expression of emotions, to the point where the latter are denied validity and the subject of this imposed tyranny becomes alienated from his or her most basic desires and feelings.”23 When the countess becomes ensnared by the suppression of her strong emotions, her inner turmoil is expressed through suicidal ideas, and then as an extreme distress with a physical dimension. H er anxious state (exacerbated by her illegitimate pregnancy) leads her to something approaching madness, when “she los[es] consciousness and reason” (Comtesse p. 118).24 With the arrival of her husband – the mouthpiece for social demands – her unresolved tension turns into a true hysterical fit, manifesting itself in “her cries and tears.” The narrator explains that she “was not in the state that bodily pain causes” (p. 120).25 Here again, pain expressed physically attests to the fact that the repressed affect cannot be eradicated, that it is ready to reappear at any moment in pathological form. Unresolved tension results in physical symptoms, and the body assumes the role of translator of the internal conflict, exposing the emotional disturbance and providing information about the heroine’s overwrought condition. In fact, the countess’s affliction is so violent that it affects her baby, whom she bears at six months in a state of extreme weakness: “Her body gave out, the continuous fever took hold of her, and the violence of her suffering caused her to deliver” (p. 124).26 Her illness has harmful consequences for both mother and child. 21

“Madame de Montpensier était extrêmement malade . . . [et] la fièvre lui prit si violente et avec des rêveries si horribles que dès le second jour l’on craignait pour sa vie.” 22 “Le coup mortel pour sa vie,” “douleur d’avoir perdu l’estime de son mari, le cœur de son amant et le plus parfait ami qui fut jamais.” 23 Keren M. Smith, “Towers and Mirrors: Aspects of Space in La Princesse de Clèves,” Mosaic no. 33 (2000): 114. 24 “Elle perdit la connaissance et la raison.” 25 “N ’était pas dans l’état que causent les douleurs du corps.” 26 “Son corps succomba, la fièvre continue lui prit, et elle accoucha par la violence du mal.”

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Yet the body’s strong presence makes itself felt not only during illness but also with the advent of passionate love. The author creates a sequential chain whereby passionate love manifests itself first in the body, as a shock stimulating the visual, auditory, and tactile senses, before reaching the characters’ consciousness. Writing during the same period, Robert Burton and Jacques Ferrand pointed out the importance of visual stimuli in the outbreak of an illness, which Ferrand called “erotic melancholy” and Burton “love melancholy.” Its origin is explosive: the eye is so touched by a sight that it sets off a powerful physiological process. Thus, the electric passion finds expression in the body, leading to the contamination of the blood, a boiling-hot heart; it manifests itself physiologically as a lack of appetite, paleness, exhaustion, and so on. Unreceptive to the mind and to control by the reason, love melancholy also disturbs the imagination, in that it constantly reproduces an image of the object of love. Lafayette shares that understanding of the influence of sensory stimuli and the explosive physiological reaction that occurs. Although she does not mention the humors directly, the body is the focal point at the moment the passion is born. The princess’s passion for N emours comes about in an abrupt and powerful manner, when sensory excitation and physiological reactions are activated. The language of the body first displays itself physically, as reflexes to the external stimuli when N emours enters the room. At the sound of the door, which makes everyone lift their eyes just as the music is ending, the princess “stopped dancing” and “turned and saw a man whom she believed from the first could only be M. de N emours, who bounded over a few chairs to get to where people were dancing” (p. 153).27 Combined with that auditory stimulus is the sight of the hero, gleaming in his finery and “brilliant” festive garb, elements that ultimately make “a great impression in her heart” (p. 155, my emphasis) and bring a “troubled look to her face” (p. 154),28 which those around her notice. Lafayette captures the spontaneity of an unconscious act and then repeats it, noting that N emours “was so surprised by her beauty that when he came near to her, and she curtsied to him, he could not keep from giving marks of his admiration” (p. 153).29 Even those around her react with “a murmur of appreciation” (p. 153), a sign that all these physical reactions occurring automatically in the two characters are obvious to the general public. The murmur evokes the harmony the couple exudes through the strong corporeal presence at the moment of mutual physical attraction. The strong presence of the body that inscribes the passion allows us to approach metaphorically the imprint of passion through the idea of stigmata. Such a comparison is not meant to be taken literally. But the idea of bodily inscription in Lafayette’s works resembles the notion of “stigmata” as defined by Dominique de 27 “Acheva de danser,” “se tourna et vit un homme qu’elle crut d’abord ne pouvoir être que M. de N emours, qui passait par-dessus quelques sièges pour arriver où l’on dansait.” 28 “Une grande impression dans son cœur,” “trouble sur le visage.” 29 “Fut tellement surpris de sa beauté que, lorsqu’il fut proche d’elle, et qu’elle lui fit la révérence, il ne put s’empêcher de donner des marques de son admiration.”


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Courcelles, who writes that they represent “a performance of the body” in which the “spoken word is excluded [and] the body expresses itself through its marks, gestures, exudations.” In other words, the body speaks a particular language uncontrolled by verbal discourse or the mind’s intervention. In Lafayette’s works, passions are visibly imprinted onto the body, which like the “stigmatized body enters the space of representation, a space that is initially intimate, secret, then destined to be broken open, revealed.”30 Understanding occurs only at a later moment, doomed to failure in its efforts to limit or restrain the passions, since the body has already been marked. For Lafayette, such “marks” go beyond physical stigmata, in that the impression not only manifests itself in the body but also permeates the mind in a lasting manner. When N emours finally becomes aware of his passion, he deliberately makes the decision to hide it from Mme de Clèves (p. 163) and from his closest friend, the vidame de Chartres, but is unable to keep the duc de Guise and the princess from reading the marks of his attraction. The presence of this imprint continues to manifest itself physically (other characters perceive these changes), and lastingly, compelling the person affected to adopt a mask that barely veils a lack of self-control. The princess herself is marked against her will, physically and mentally. She begins to feel “pain” once she consciously realizes “the interest she was taking in M. de N emours: she had not dared admit it to herself before then” (p. 169).31 The extremely powerful nature of that imprint is highlighted by the narrator: “The full impression that [the duc de N emours] could wish for” occurs and the princess “dreamt merely of never giving him any mark of it” (p. 194, my emphasis).32 The protagonist’s struggle against her “ventriloquized” body (that is, the language her body adopts in imprinting and revealing her passion) finds expression in the many feigned illnesses to which she resorts at times of extreme agitation, when her anxiety and trepidation at betraying herself in public hold sway. In the first place, concealment by means of a feigned illness always comes about when a character realizes “that one cannot not love, know[s] that one is no longer in control of one’s feelings, because one is no longer in control of one’s gestures, face, or words,”33 but seeks to protect herself from the public gaze and the revelation of her feelings. Mme de Clèves, knowing “that she could not conceal from her husband the disquiet that [the sight of N emours] caused her, and also knowing that the mere presence of that prince justified him in her eyes and destroyed all her

Dominique de Courcelles, “Stigmates: Argument,” in Stigmates, (ed.) Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: L’Herne, 2001), p. 13. 31 “L’intérêt qu’elle prenait à M. de N emours: elle n’avait encore osé se l’avouer elle-même.” 32 “Toute l’impression qu’il pouvait souhaiter,” “songea seulement à ne lui en donner jamais aucune marque.” 33 Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Plon, 1950), p. 127. 30


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resolutions, chose to feign illness” (p. 268).34 When self-control fails, the heroine turns to Cartesian retreat as the ultimate mode of repressive self-protection. The “repose” identified by Descartes as a remedy for violent passion turns out to be wishful thinking. Lafayette dismisses it as ineffective, since retreat in her works does not put an end to the disturbance experienced and never blocks the characters’ agitation. In addition, through the feigned illness, the protagonist seeks to maintain the illusion of her emotional self-control to deceive the public. When she learns that her confession has been disseminated throughout the court, the princesse de Clèves pretends “that she was feeling ill” (p. 257) so as not to reveal her agitation. On several occasions, she deliberately prolongs that unnamed illness to reestablish and assure herself of her self-control before revealing herself to her entourage. Finally, the feigned illness allows Lafayette’s characters to abandon themselves to passion for a brief moment, even as it expresses their disquiet. When she learns of the marriage between the chevalier de N avarre and the princesse de N eufchâtel, “the comtesse de Tende was ready to expire from the pain” (Comtesse p. 107) and withdrew to her room, feigning illness to calm “all that is most painful in remorse and jealousy” (p. 108).35 That withdrawal is echoed in the anxiety of a secondary character, Mme d’Ambroise (the vidame de Chartres’s lover), and her use of feigned illness, a preliminary state of psychosomatic illness: “I pretended to be ill to conceal the disorder in my mind; but I became so in reality and my body could not bear such a violent agitation” (pp. 210–11). Like the “real” illness, the “feigned” illness is an indicator of the overwhelming disquiet of her soul. There is thus no real difference between them: both express the interdependence between the mental crisis and its physical repercussions. Lafayette indicates that withdrawal into oneself, the search for a safe haven through feigned illness, in no way calms violent feelings or releases the protagonists from their symptoms. Control by the will and by reason fails to put an end to the disruptive nature of the passion. In Cartesian thought, by contrast, the most effective way to remove the unwanted effects of the passions is through distraction 34

“Qu’elle ne pourrait cacher à son mari l’embarras que lui causait cette vue, connaissant aussi que la seule présence de ce prince le justifiait à ses yeux et détruisait toutes ses résolutions, prit le parti de feindre d’être malade.” 35 “La comtesse de Tende était prête à expirer de douleur,” “tout ce que les remords et la jalousie peuvent avoir de plus douloureux.” In La princesse de Montpensier, ambiguous illness is used as a way to get closer to the desired object. The duc d’Anjou “fell ill and was compelled to leave the army, either because of the violence of his illness or because of his desire to return and enjoy the peace and pleasures of Paris, and the princesse de Montpensier’s presence was not the least of the things that drew him there” (tomba malade et fut contraint de quitter l’armée soit par la violence de son mal ou par l’envie qu’il avait de revenir goûter le repos et les douceurs de Paris où la présence de la Princesse de Montpensier n’était pas la moindre qui l’y attirât; p. 65). Similarly, in La princesse de Clèves, N emours draws closer to the princess on the pretext of seeking news of her state of health.


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of the imagination and the senses, time, rest, and a “cognitive approach” based on the intervention of reason to regulate the internal turmoil. Descartes believed that sadness, anxiety, and even illness could be eliminated by our ability to “redirect” them or circumvent their effects.36 The image Lafayette conveys is just the opposite: the demands of the body are of greater force than the efficacy of the will. Although Lafayette does not criticize the Cartesian will directly, she undermines the rationalist claim that mental resolution can bring about a moderation of the passions. In La princesse de Clèves, Descartes’s position that “virtue” is based on our free will to effectively pursue the greatest good for our body and soul is shown to be utopian. Conversely, Lafayette follows Jansenist thought, which identifies the search for mental and physical “repose” as the human objective but at the same time observes that most of us do not manage to find that internal and external tranquility because we do not see clearly into our mental processes.37 Lafayette contends that the “body, and not the mind, is the seat of passion, and [that] therefore any struggle to resist it based upon reason and lucid discourse is doomed to failure.”38 The simulated illness, though an agent of inhibition and an effort to assert the will, remains incapable of freeing the princess from her passion and demonstrates the utter failure of self-control. When M. de Clèves visits his wife, who has retired to the countryside to seek inner repose, he finds her “sadder than usual” (p. 239), an “extraordinary” sadness that remains with her ever after. After her return to the court, it impels her to once more resort to a feigned illness to conceal the desolation gnawing at her. In recognizing Descartes’s error that we can overcome our anxieties and troubles through careful introspection, Lafayette offers a deeper insight into the growing torment that is the result of such an attempt at repression. Whereas Descartes ends Les passions de l’âme with the optimistic stance that man can become “so in control [of the passions] and … harness [them] with so much skill that the ills they cause are quite bearable and one even draws joy from all of them,”39 Lafayette debunks the idea of a cure based on physiological repression. Her character’s oppression and apparent disequilibrium are clearly neither tempered nor cured by considering “reasons that are contrary to those that the passion represents.”40 N evertheless, the princess persistently adheres to repressive psychological responses, as is made clear in the “confession scene,” when she uncovers her illicit passion to her husband. But she has to concede: “It René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), art. 48. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (ed.) Dominique Descotes (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), L 139-136. Pascal describes man’s escape into diversions (conversation, war, gambling, occupations) as a way to avoid thinking about the human condition and fate, whose mystery has become unbearable. 38 Horowitz, Love and Language, p. 59. 39 “Tellement maître [des passions] et . . . [les] ménager avec tant d’adresse, que les maux qu’elles causent sont fort supportables, et même qu’on tire de la joie de tous.” Descartes, Passions, art. 212. 40 “Raisons qui sont contraires à celles que la passion représente.” Ibid., art 211. 36

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is impossible that the body and the mind will not grow weary and that one will not seek repose” (p. 239),41 an observation about the link between mental and physical prostration, a “somatic drama” like that found in Mme de Clèves, her mother, her husband, and Mme d’Ambroise. It is clear that the feigned illness is an essential subterfuge used to keep up the appearance of self-control and to restore it within oneself. But Lafayette clearly attests that, despite all her characters’ efforts at self-mastery, repression fails. And she consistently foregrounds the role the body plays as the source and site of passions. At the ball, the moment the passion is born between N emours and the princess, the duc de Guise, who is watching the heroine attentively, “believed she had been touched by the sight of that prince,” since “some disquiet appeared on her face” (p. 154; my emphasis).42 Similarly, Mme de Chartres “saw … only too well” (p. 163) that her daughter was keenly aware of N emours, because she detects on her face what her daughter conceals from her by her silence. The frequency of the allusions to uncontrollable bodily manifestations in Lafayette’s writings highlights the soma as the site of passion and the overt appearance of such a physical imprint. The changes in the body are conveyed directly through the many instances in which the princess “feels” the passions physiologically before they produce a mental response. The princesse de Clèves is so marked by her passion that the mere mention of N emours’s name “gave [her] such a start … that she could not conceal it” (p. 249).43 That physical manifestation – so glaring that M. de Clèves notices it – generates a mental “sensor” in the form of intensified inner tension. She “returned home, her mind more agitated than it had ever been. Her husband easily perceived that she had grown more upset” (p. 250).44 Lafayette describes the mutual connections between mind and body and shows how activity in the body leads to “images” in the mind that amplify the pain and pleasure experienced physiologically. Similarly, the princesse de Montpensier felt her passion “coming so acutely alive in her heart” (p. 59) that she could not “keep herself from letting [the duc de Guise] know the astonishment they both felt” (Princesse de Montpensier pp. 59–60).45 The many blushes, discernible upset, embarrassed silences, and precipitous flights by the princesse de Montpensier all stem from the spontaneous register of the body. She too will attempt to conceal her distress by using the subterfuge of reclusion once the perception accompanies the distinctive content of the body. 41

“Il est impossible que le corps et l’esprit ne se lassent et que l’on ne cherche du repos.” 42 “Crut qu’elle avait été touchée de la vue de ce prince,” “parut quelque trouble sur son visage.” 43 “Donna un tel trouble . . . qu’elle ne put le cacher.” 44 “S’en revint chez elle, l’esprit plus agité qu’elle ne l’avait jamais eu. Son mari s’aperçut aisément de l’augmentation de son embarras.” 45 “Réveiller dans son coeur si vivement,” “s’empêcher de lui faire connaître l’étonnement où ils étaient de tous les deux.”


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The movement of passion in Lafayette’s writings has a certain similarity to the Cartesian conception, which asserts that the body becomes an actor in passion. For Descartes, the “passions of the soul” are “perceptions or feelings or emotions of the soul, related to it particularly, and which are caused, maintained, and strengthened by some movement of the spirits.”46 The true actors behind the passions are animal spirits, which communicate to the soul through a place of contact, the pineal gland. The workings of the passions depend either on the intermediary of that gland or on an autonomous flow of spirits. Let us note, however, that unlike Descartes, for Lafayette, the “brake” on the passions, exerted by the will from above, works only imperfectly and belatedly. That is, her characters are initially unable to conceal or control their passions, precisely because the conscious psychological response occurs only after its corporeal manifestation. When the princess felt shame, anxiety, or sorrow in considering her passion for N emours, and “blushed because Mme the Dauphine had discerned so accurately” (p. 167), when “her face did not correspond to her garb” (p. 167), or when she betrayed her “apprehension” and “disquiet, which she did not think to conceal” (p. 207)47 – a disquiet perceived by the other characters – she felt the emotion physically before it reached her consciousness and thereby impelled restraint, concealment, or flight. At the same time, in Lafayette’s fiction the body acquires a certain intelligence and a profound intimacy, since it modulates the triggers of the emotions, a role it never has for Descartes. That is, the body is a fundamental principle that initially records and articulates the passions and subsequently transmits a “mental alert” (disquiet, anxiety, shame) concerning the danger of the circumstances. This mechanism is also preponderant in La princesse de Montpensier, in which the title character is so struck by the duc de Guise that the sight of him “moved her so much that she blushed, which made her visible to the eyes of these princes” (p. 58).48 Once again, as for Descartes, the body directly transmits the emotions. But contrary to Descartes’s view, it actively works before the protagonist conceives of her inclination: the “I feel” precedes the “I think.” As David Le Breton argues, Descartes officially separated “the man from his body, making the body a reality apart and also something disparaged, a mere accessory.” The Cartesian individual is built up into a body “machine, … [not] reliable and rigorous enough in its perception of data in the environment.”49 T he mechanical structure of physical matter is inadequate in its constitution and on 46 “Des perceptions, ou des sentiments, ou des émotions de l’âme, qu’on rapporte particulièrement à elle, et qui sont causées, entretenues et fortifiées par quelque mouvement des esprits.” Ibid., art. 27. 47 “Rougit de ce que Mme de la dauphine devinait si juste,” “son visage ne répondait pas à son habillement,” “appréhension,” “trouble qu’elle ne songea pas à cacher.” 48 “Lui apporta un trouble qui la fit rougir, et qui la fit paraître aux yeux de ces princes.” 49 David Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité (Paris: PUF, 1990), pp. 68–69.


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epistemological principle for transmitting one’s inner state, a transmission that is reserved for thought. Barker is right to argue that “the Cartesian body is ‘outside’ language; it is given to discourse as an object, … but it is never of languaging in its essence.”50 In the Second Meditation, Descartes denies that the physiological faculty has the capacity to acquire that self-knowledge: “We conceive bodies only through the faculty of understanding that is within us and not through the imagination or the senses, and … we know them not because we see them or touch them but only because we conceive them through thought.”51 Descartes’s effort to posit the operation of consciousness within the body remains entirely intellectual and abstract. His conception of the body’s motions and sensations relies on “pure intellection;” an intellectual act of consciousness.52 Although Descartes corrects that thesis in the Sixth Meditation by admitting he has experienced “corporeal inclinations toward joy, sadness, anger, and other similar passions” without his “consent being required,” he seeks to disparage the value of soma as an “obscure and confused” way of thinking, placing the emphasis on the “error in judgments” made on the basis of physical experience.53 For Descartes, the body “no longer refers to anything but itself. Man is ontologically separated from his own body, which, though tethered to man, seems to pursue its own peculiar adventure.”54 In the Western world, the secondary role of the body in the generation of (self) knowledge became inscribed as the most revolutionary divorce between the (external and inferior) body and the (internal and superior) mind. Through her clear-sighted view that the body’s deliberate task lies in expressing and transmitting passions, Lafayette envisions a different relation between mind and body, particularly apt in that it is consistent with contemporary neurobiological understanding. Her ultimate preoccupation with the body as the seat of passion leads her to anticipate some intriguing aspects of modern thought essential for understanding cognition. Alongside her view of the body as in union with the Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 90. 51 “N ous ne concevons les corps que par la faculté d’entendre qui est en nous, et non point par l’imagination ni par les sens, et que nous les connaissons pas de ce que nous les voyons, ou que nous les touchons, mais seulement de ce que nous les concevons par la pensée.” René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, (ed.) Jean-Marie Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 91. 52 See Dalia Judowitz’s argument on this subject in Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Judowitz correctly remarks that even when Descartes mentions the role of the senses, he conceives it as an internal, unmediated, perfectly transparent “conversation” based on linguistic expression (pp. 167–70). In that respect, the material side of the senses is stripped away and they become a mental act (p. 168). 53 “Inclinations corporelles vers la joie, la tristesse, la colère, et autres semblables passions,” “[sans que mon] consentement y fût requis.” Ibid., pp. 191, 197. 54 Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps, p. 61. 50


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mind, she adopts a mode of thinking in which experiencing feelings involves the dynamic involvement of the body. She begins to articulate in a particularly pertinent manner the network of what Damasio calls the “emotions,” that is, the set of affective responses that are felt first in the body. Damasio writes that social emotions (shame, embarrassment, admiration, etc.) but also “pain or pleasure, behaviors, drives … [are all] incorporated in the machinery of the emotionsproper.”55 Abundant emotional reactions occur that support thinking. Damasio argues that the “emotions provide a natural means for the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and around the organism, and respond accordingly and adaptively.”56 In that respect, they signify a form of evaluation. The ultimate response of the emotions is to create “feelings,” which are “definitions” of the emotions. In this respect, the emotions (transitory changes and specific behaviors) precede the “feelings” (mental evaluation, “perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thought with certain themes”).57 The concordance between Lafayette’s ideas and neurobiological research lies in the conception of a chronological sequence running from bodily mapping to feelings and thoughts. We have seen that the princess experiences passions physically before she begins to feel them. The neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux calls that sequence “the emotional procession” from physical expressions to cognitive levels: “First, emotional reactions occur. These overt bodily responses and associated changes in internal body physiology are the advance guard of emotional responsivity. Subsequently … a feeling emerges as we become aware that our brain has determined that something important is present and we are reacting to it.”58 That sequence is central in Lafayette’s works. Attraction, turmoil, and sadness, physically perceived, dramatically reveal the state of mind of her princesses even before they have conceived them. When Mme de Clèves believes M. de N emours to have been wounded during the tournament, “the interest she took in it gave her an apprehension and a disquiet that she did not think to conceal; she approached him with the queens and with a face so changed that a man more disinterested than the chevalier de Guise would have perceived it; hence he easily noticed it” (Princesse de Clèves p. 207). In fact, those around the princess also perceived the emotion painted on the heroine’s face, since the duc de N emours himself “knew on his face the sympathy she had for him” (p. 207).59 The mental evaluation of Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), p. 38. 56 Ibid., p. 54. 57 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), p. 86, Damasio’s emphasis. 58 Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (N ew York: Penguin, 2002), p. 206. 59 “[L]’intérêt qu’elle y prenait lui donna une appréhension et un trouble qu’elle ne songea pas à cacher; elle s’approcha de lui avec les reines et, avec un visage si changé qu’un 55

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these physical displays occurs only at a later moment, once she begins to feel pain: “It was very painful for her to see that she could no longer control the concealment of her feelings and that she had allowed the chevalier de Guise to see them” (Princesse de Clèves p. 209).60 We find in this seventeenth-century author the distinctive features of physiological mapping and its connection to the mind as a representation of “emotions.” Lafayette offers a pertinent description of what Damasio will call the “movement out” of the emotions: “Many of the changes in body state – those in skin color, body posture, and facial expression, for instance – are actually perceptible to an external observer. (Indeed, the etymology of the word nicely suggests an external direction, from the body: emotion signifies literally ‘movement out’).”61 According to Damasio, the brain’s relevant response to the emotional body occurs only at a later moment. Similarly, in Lafayette’s novel, it is after a spontaneous bodily manifestation (perceptible by others) that the princesse de Clèves notes “that she was no longer in control of her words and face” (p. 204)62 and that physical marks were erupting against her will.63 In La comtesse de Tende, the chevalier de N avarre also “could not entirely conceal his passion; [the comtesse de Tende] noticed it, her amour propre was flattered, [and] he told her, looking at her in such a way that his passion was fully declared: ‘And do you believe, Madam, that there is any fortune I would prefer to that of marrying that princess?’” (p. 106).64 The two characters’ tone of voice and facial expression announce “a disquiet and silence between them more telling than words” (Comtesse p. 106).65 The body freely intervenes through “uncontrolled gestures … involuntary manifestations … [which] replace the controlled word,”66 and which attest to a homme moins intéressé que le chevalier de Guise s’en fût aperçu; aussi le remarqua-t-il aisément,” “connut sur son visage la pitié qu’elle avait de lui.” 60 “C’était une grande douleur de voir qu’elle n’était plus maîtresse de cacher ses sentiments et de les avoir laissés paraître au chevalier de Guise.” 61 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (N ew York: Putnam, 1994), p. 139. 62 “Qu’elle n’était plus maîtresse de ses paroles et de son visage.” 63 Conversely, N emours often reacts with controlled gestures tending to create a desired effect, such as when he intentionally causes a stir upon entering the ballroom in order to be the center of attention (p. 153). All the same, from time to time “disquiet” and “sorrow” (p. 264) erupt on his face as a blush or involuntary tears, indicating that “he did not have the use of his reason” (il n’avait pas l’usage de la raison; p. 309). Momentarily beside himself, he abandons himself “to all the various movements agitating him” (à tous les divers mouvements dont il était agité; p. 308). 64 “N e put cacher entièrement sa passion; elle s’en aperçut, son amour-propre en fut flatté [et] il lui dit en la regardant d’un air où sa passion était entièrement déclarée: Et croyez-vous, Madame, qu’il n’y ait point de fortune que je préférasse à celle d’épouser cette Princesse?” 65 “Un trouble et un silence entre eux plus parlant que les paroles.” 66 Thérèse Lassalle-Maraval, “Pour ne pas en finir avec ‘La Princesse de Clèves’ ou du ‘dire’ come mode de ‘faire,’” in Eros in Francia nel Seicento, (ed.) P.A. Janini, G.


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subjectivity of the “self” founded in the body. That way of “feeling” intimately through the body is also manifest in the princesse de Montpensier, who was “so surprised and so troubled by [the duc de Guise’s] speech that she did not think to interrupt him, and then, when she had recovered herself and was beginning to reply, the prince de Montpensier entered. Disquiet and agitation were painted on the face of his wife the princess. The sight of her husband unhinged her completely” (p. 67).67 Once again, the mind captures a reality first perceived by and through the body. Jean-Daniel Krebs calls that physical capacity the “mapping of the body,”68 which literally and visibly expresses the characters’ psyche, in a correlation between physical response and mental perception. The many mechanisms of that correlation are currently the concern of Damasio and LeDoux. At the same time, the physical and mental inscription of the passions in Lafayette’s characters closely resembles Spinoza’s ideas. Both Spinoza and Lafayette conceive of a subjectivity of the “self” founded on physical “mapping” (emotions), and they agree that the body plays a fundamental role in transmitting these processes to the mind. Spinoza observes in his Ethics: “The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that the body exists except through ideas of modifications by which the body is affected.”69 Spinoza also realizes that deliberate mental action circles around an altered bodily state, and he concludes that “the mind affirms of its body, or any part of it, a greater or less power of existence than before.”70 The link between Spinoza and Lafayette could not be more striking: for the novelist, the body “feels” the alterations caused by the passions even before the mind does, and in an intimate manner, and the affirmation or negation of that feeling by the mind directly follows. The two thinkers both explain how the mind furnishes the contents of the body, and how the phenomena of bodily and mental manifestations mimic each other. The mind does not exist without the body, and the experience of “I am” precedes the reflective act of “I think,” which, in the case of the princesse de Clèves, then translates into feigned illnesses and the repression of feelings. Spinoza also claims in the Ethics that the body is useful as a regulatory mechanism that acts directly during a change and increases or diminishes the Dotoli, and E.P. Carile (Paris: N izet, 1987), p. 307. 67 “Si surprise et si troublée de ce discours qu’elle ne songea pas à l’interrompre, mais ensuite, étant revenue à elle et commençant à lui répondre, le Prince de Montpensier entra. Le trouble et l’agitation étaient peints sur le visage de la Princesse sa femme. La vue de son mari acheva de l’embarrasser.” 68 Jean-Daniel Krebs, “Dissimulation und Kommunikation der Affekte in Madame de Lafayettes Princesse de Clèves und Zesens Adriatische Rosemund,” in Die Affekte und ihre Repräsentation in der deutschen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 42, (ed.) Jean-Daniel Krebs (Bern: Lang, 1996), p. 167. 69 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, (ed.) James Gotmann, trans. William Hale White and Amelia Hutchinson (N ew York: Hafner, 1949), p. 99. 70 Ibid., p. 185, emphasis Spinoza’s.


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person’s ability to act: “Whenever, therefore, the mind is agitated (conflictatur) by any emotion, the body is at the same time affected with a modification by which its power of action is increased or diminished. Again, this modification of the body … receives from its own cause a power to persevere in its own being, a power, therefore, which cannot be restrained or removed unless by a bodily cause … affecting the body with a modification contrary to the first … and stronger than it.”71 N eurobiological researchers have taken a new interest in the seventeenth century because writers such as Spinoza and Lafayette already contributed to the conception of how feelings and thought may arise from the body’s regulatory actions. The body’s role in the actual state of the organism belies the idea of a disembodied mind. In demolishing three centuries of post-Cartesian thought that had given precedence to the “I think, therefore I am,” neurobiologists nowadays abandon the idea that the mind is filled primarily with abstract thoughts and contend that “our mind is made up of images, representations, or thoughts of our own parts of our own body in spontaneous action.”72 It is this vision of the mind “mapping” the images of the body that is perceived by Lafayette, who recognized that mental and corporeal processes mirror each other. Passions, as portrayed in Lafayette’s work, modify body and mind through a complex collection of responses within the organism that occur in the form of drives, reflexes, sensations. Yet beyond that portrayal, Lafayette studies her characters’ attempts to keep down the passions. “In the princess, bodily signals … always issue forth from the register of trauma and not from an eloquence of silence wherein it is good to be interdicted.”73 Feelings do not represent a harmony between body and mind. On the contrary, the narrative voice records the protagonist’s conscious attempt to keep the passions down and to battle their effects. Hence, at the root of Lafayette’s work lies the study of a “repression” that is never fully achieved but is the fundamental cause of the princess’s sorrow, anxiety, and sadness. The simultaneous mechanisms of restraint of the passions and their displacement onto the body structure the novel, and the author thoroughly explores their effect on the characters. The princess turns to self-protective acts that fail to keep the passions down. Rather, the heroine of the novel is always split between two tendencies, the fulfillment of her passion and its renunciation. She vacillates: on one hand, she tries to see N emours and “did not stopping going to Mme the Dauphine’s home after supper” (p. 169),74 knowing she would run into the duke there. She also seeks “the freedom to dream” about N emours (p. 193). In these cases, she displays a permissiveness regarding the satisfaction of her passionate love. But on the other,

71

Ibid., p. 195, my emphasis. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 213. 73 Eric Van der Schueren, “Le portrait dans la Princesse de Clèves,” Littératures 40, 95 (1999): 113–114. 74 “N e se laissa pas d’aller l’après-dînée chez Mme la dauphine.” 72


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“she used … [a] pretext to no longer go to the places where he could see her … but in doing a great violence to herself” (pp. 194–5).75 Restraint, abdication, and withdrawal are perceived as a “violence” done to herself, a sign of her deep internal division. Mme de Clèves’s split is expressed in many rhetorical questions: “Do I want to get involved in a love affair? Do I want to fail M. de Clèves? Do I want to fail myself? And finally, do I want to expose myself to the cruel remorse and mortal pain that love causes?” (pp. 236–7).76 Although the logical response to all these questions is no, she must face her own weakness: “I am defeated and overcome by an attraction that sweeps me along against my will. All my resolutions are in vain; I thought yesterday everything I think today, and I do today the opposite of everything I resolved yesterday” (p. 237).77 On one hand, the princess’s actions are determined by her love, but on the other she seeks to repress her passion by relying on moral and social arguments, and suspends the fulfillment of her passion. The princess finds herself facing a precipice between two opposing values. She becomes her “staunchest adversary as she tries to achieve absolute self-mastery,” without, however, managing to quiet her reined-in body.78 Before Freud, Lafayette sensed that there are two operations within psychic life: the drive that seeks to liberate itself and the drive that seeks to censor this first drive. In the twentieth century, Freud differentiated between the primary and the secondary processes. The fluid primary processes are autonomous reactions by the body without the intervention of consciousness, and they follow the pleasure principle. That is, they seek satisfaction of the drives and emanate directly from our unconscious. “Their fate depends on how strong they are and on whether they fulfil the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure regulation.”79 In Lafayette’s works, the body is automatically directed toward what Freud calls pleasure. But the satisfaction of the drive is already opposed by a secondary process – the regulatory principle – that represses drives. This process is an internalized mechanism by which one seeks to block the body’s free expression. The secondary processes, or control of the libido by the reality principle (subject to social law) – that is, by 75

Elle se servit . . . [d’un] prétexte pour n’aller plus dans les lieux où il la pouvait voir . . . ce fut toutefois en se faisant une extrême violence.” 76 “Veux-je m’engager dans une galanterie? Veux-je manquer à M. de Clèves? Veux-je me manquer à moi-même? Et enfin, veux-je m’exposer aux cruels repentirs et aux mortelles douleurs que donne l’amour?” 77 “Je suis vaincue et surmontée par une inclination qui m’entraîne malgré moi. Toutes mes résolutions sont inutiles; je pensai hier tout ce que je pense aujourd’hui et je fais aujourd’hui tout le contraire de ce que je résolus hier.” 78 Michael Koppisch, “The Princesse de Clèves’s Will to Order,” in Henry, (ed.), An Inimitable Example, p. 198. 79 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 187.


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reason, the will, judgment, or shame – appear repeatedly in Lafayette’s works. The princesse de Clèves’s (self)-prohibition of her passion has, in psychoanalytic terminology, “a regulatory function … whose major role is to inhibit the primary process.”80 That is, a sort of self-restraint serves as a vector bound to reason, duty, and the law. These tendencies, far from finding the Freudian equilibrium necessary for healthy functioning, work against each other in Lafayette’s novel, with the processes of restraint prevailing over those favoring the fulfillment of passionate love. Eric Van der Schueren points out that “nothing in the text suggests that it [the passion] may be illegitimate,”81 but that the heroine’s anxiety stems from an oppressive scotomization, a tear between what is permitted and the prohibited space of her passion. Jansenist thought is fully expressed in the novel as the renunciation of the “flesh,” which entails a “violent” sacrifice of oneself. Lafayette adopts the Jansenist divorce between “flesh” and “will/spirit,” which Pascal borrowed from Saint Augustine for his “three orders of reality”: “flesh, spirit, will.”82 Following Saint Augustine, Pascal rediscovered in concupiscence – libido sentiendi – a form of perverted love at odds with chastity and divine love. He dethrones sexual desire, calling it a foul passion infecting body and soul, an “illness” that distances man from grace.83 The princesse de Clèves struggles against herself with “superhuman violence” to repress the carnal desire she feels. According to Louis MacKenzie, “the notion of ‘superhuman’ violence to self in the service of what is held to be a higher value is altogether consonant with the Jansenist program, pointing as it does to what Pascal calls ‘abêtissement,’ a program of self-denial and –abnegation undertaken in the service of loftier principles.”84 For the princesse de Clèves, “the precipice” is the constant inner struggle against the undefined, secret nonplace of the freedom of inclinations, which is at odds with the reign of reason and duty.85 Her mother, Mme de Chartres, instills and maintains in her daughter an almost psychotic fear of the prohibited space of passion and sexuality, symbolically presenting the immoral precipice to which her passionate love for N emours would lead: “You are on the edge of the precipice: it requires great effort and great violence to hold yourself back. Think of what you owe your husband, think of what you owe yourself” (p.

Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, and Daniel Lagache, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 6th edn (Paris: PUF, 1967), s.v. “Processus primaire.” 81 Van der Schueren, “Le portrait dans la Princesse de Clèves,” p.114. 82 Pascal, Pensées, L 460-933. 83 Ibid., L 320-230. 84 Louis MacKenzie, “Jansenist Resonances in La Princesse de Clèves,” in Approaches to Teaching Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves, (ed.) Faith Beasley and Katharine Ann Jensen (N ew York: MLA, 1998), p. 42. 85 Horowitz, Love and Language, p. 58. 80


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172, my emphasis).86 M. de Clèves further exacerbates his wife’s anxiety: “I see the peril you are in; get control of yourself for the love of yourself and, if possible, for the love of me” (p. 250, my emphasis).87 Closely related to Pascal’s abyss, Lafayette’s “precipice” can be interpreted as the internal split between desire and will/reason.88 While the mother’s and husband’s instructions to Mme de Clèves turn on the “will” to perform one’s familial, social, and patriarchal duty, every time the princess allows herself to think of N emours, she perceives her desire as a fall into the order of the flesh, concupiscence, and sin. Even after her husband’s death, Mme de Clèves “continued to examine her reasons of duty, which were opposed to her happiness; she found it painful to find them so strong, and she repented that she had shown them so clearly to M. de N emours” (p. 310).89 According to Ralph Albanese, Lafayette examines the “hidden elements of her [protagonist’s] psyche,” which escape the power of reason.90 T he melancholic abyss in which the heroine finds herself subtly alludes to a mode of conduct perceived as unclean. In Jansenist thought, Pascalian concupiscence is scotomized as a fall into unseemliness, a step toward erotic desires, which Julia Kristeva rightly identifies with a preoccupations with “the other sex, the edge of the body – lamella of desire,”91 a borderline place that shatters the ramparts constructed there. During her fits of despair, Mme de Clèves even considers herself the cause of her husband’s death (p. 294) and “found consolation only in thinking … that, for the rest of her life, she would do nothing but what he would have been very pleased to see her do had he lived” (p. 295).92 The scenes of confession, of circulating “messages,” of interrogations and silent self-blame stifle the character, worn down by the force of the “violence” she does to herself. We 86 “Vous êtes sur le bord du précipice: il faut de grands efforts et de grandes violences pour vous retenir. Songez ce que vous devez à votre mari, songez ce que vous vous devez à vous-même.” Harriet Stone observes that even after Mme de Chartres’s death, the voice of the law speaking through the mother continues to assail the princess: “In death Madame de Chartres becomes the simultaneous absence/presence, the voice outside of history that continues to speak.” Harriet Stone, The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 162. 87 “Je vois le péril où vous êtes; ayez du pouvoir sur vous pour l’amour de vous-même et, s’il est possible, pour l’amour de moi.” 88 See Pascal, Pensées, L 183-166. 89 “Examina encore les raisons de son devoir qui s’opposaient à son bonheur; elle sentit de la douleur de les trouver si fortes et elle se repentit de les avoir si bien montrées à M. de N emours.” 90 Ralph Albanese, “Aristocratic Ethos and Ideological Codes in La Princesse de Clèves,” in An Inimitable Example: The Case for the Princesse de Clèves, (ed.) Patrick Henry (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), p. 94. 91 Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 99. 92 “N e trouvait de consolation qu’à penser . . . qu’elle ne ferait dans le reste de sa vie que ce qu’il aurait été bien aise qu’elle eût fait s’il avait vécu.”


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shall later see that not only Jansenist thought but also Henry II’s policies fed the “repression” of desires and promoted silence and restraint through an “invisible law” that inculcated self-blame in the conscientious subject. The repercussions of that violence are expressed as relentlessness, sadness, and anxiety, attesting to the princess’s psychological crisis. Melancholic distress in the novel is an expression of the failure to suppress, giving voice to the “excessive suffering,” “violent suffering,” and turmoil that the narrator repeatedly underscores. At the same time, the tension between desire and the apprehension of her passion continues to torment the princess. When N emours indirectly confesses his love to the princess, his speech “pleased and offended her in almost equal measure” (p. 193),93 leading to her renewed “precipice” in which “it seemed to her that she ought to respond” but also “that she should not heed” his words (p. 193).94 She seeks to flee once more: she intentionally withdraws from N emours but does so with “extreme violence” (p. 195) to herself, as it causes “a profound sorrow” (p. 194). Later, when she believes she has given marks of her attraction to the duke, she returns, “her mind more agitated” (p. 250) than ever, a sign that her unbearable turmoil has intensified. It now bursts out as tears and, even more [intensely] manifests itself psychologically through deep despair. Even though emotional distress is ultimately “converted” onto the body as fever and illness, Lafayette constantly highlights psychological suffering as a factor triggering eventual physiological harm. The narrator elaborates on the emotional features of anxiety, which reinforces the princess’s solipsism and growing trauma. Lafayette proposes a reflection on distress and its effects, commonly called “melancholy” in the early modern period, which biology now calls the “psychic maps” of depression. Sorrow is an essential “mark” of the formative factors of conversion. Damasio writes: “The maps related to sorrow … are associated with states of functional disequilibrium. The ease of action is reduced. There is pain of some kind, signs of disease or signs of physiological discord… . If unchecked, the situation is conducive to disease and death.”95 It is precisely this signal that fails for the princesse de Clèves, who silences her pain but becomes so exhausted that it eventually destroys her. Elizabeth Grosz gives the name “abyss” to the borderline between the manifestation of affect and its presence in the unconscious, the threat of a mental precipice from which the afflicted person is likely to fall.96 Through the abyss of melancholic suffering or what we call now “depression”, Lafayette presents heroines split between two antagonistic forces: love and death, desire and will/ reason, Freudian eros and thanatos. It is not the protagonists’ reputation that preoccupies them, as Louis MacKenzie rightly observes, but what Mme de Clèves, 93

“Plaisait et l’offensait quasi également.” “Il lui semblait qu’elle devait y répondre,” “qu’elle ne devait pas les entendre.” 95 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 138. 96 Elizabeth Grosz writing on Julia Kristeva, in Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 72. 94


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Mme de Montpensier, and the comtesse de Tende think of themselves. That is, they internalize a notion of guilt that leads them to engage in scenarios of internal self-condemnation.97 As Pascal would say, mapping out the Jansenist perspective, “man succumbs to himself” and to his desires initially through thought.98 Fortunat Strowski attributes to Pascal the capacity to “read in that enigma” men’s variable and diverse hearts.99 Through the crises of the three female figures, Lafayette attests to a similar motivation, exposing the dimensions of distress that escape the clear-sighted introspection of the logos. The suffering soul is “divested of its language”100 and the characters submit to the rule of psychic and physical processes beyond their control, processes inexpressible in spoken language. Despite all her efforts, because of her mental crisis Mme de Clèves “no longer recognized herself” (p. 236), a state Pascal calls aveuglement (blindness). Instead of moving toward a liberating realization during her attempts at introspection, the princess, who “abandoned herself to these reflections” (p. 298, my emphasis) and who emerges from them with “such conflicting reflections” (p. 298),101 must concede that there is no liberating outcome. This experience undermines any belief that reflection leads to a final lucidity. On the contrary, her feelings are “actively and constantly concealed from consciousness by herself,” a direct sign of the intensity of her distress.102 Powerless and deceitful, “that conviction, which was an effect of her reason and of her virtue, did not enlist her heart” (p. 299).103 Mme de Clèves’s increasing melancholic state implies that there is “a certain excessive moment of ‘madness’ inherent to cogito, … [an] antagonism between cogito (the transparent subject of self-consciousness) and the unconscious, its opaque Other that subverts the certitudes of consciousness.”104 The Cartesian ideal of self-exploration through language and reason is subverted in Lafayette’s fiction, since such exploration never leads to full understanding of the self and to the end of affliction. Rather, Lafayette shares Pascal’s pessimism that “we know ourselves so little,” think we are faring well when in fact we are on the edge of the “precipice.”105 It is this understanding that leads her to explore the “preconscious” territory of her characters’ psyches. 97

MacKenzie, “Jansenist Resonances,” p. 42. Pascal, Pensées, L 160-795. 99 Fortunat Strowski, Les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: Mellottée, 1930), p. 31. 100 Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie, 2nd edn (Paris: PUF, 1997), p. 98

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101

“S’abandonna à ces réflexions,” “réflexions si contraires.” Serge Doubrovsky, “La Princesse de Clèves: Une interprétation existentielle,” La Table ronde no. 138 (1959): 42. 103 “Cette persuasion, qui était un effet de sa raison et de sa vertu, n’entraînait pas son coeur.” 104 Slavoj Žižek, introduction to Cogito and the Unconscious, (ed.) Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 1–8, quotation p. 6. 105 Pascal, Pensées, L 175-709. 102


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Social Tension and Somatic Distress The illnesses of Lafayette’s characters can be interpreted as the articulation of a tension between the individual and her environment. Somatic distress is a manifestation of a suffering that exceeds the realm of repressed passionate love and expresses a pathological reaction directly linked to psychosocial factors. At the heart of melancholic suffering lies a sense of abandonment, which translates expressed and unfilled needs and emotional wounds. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud studies the link between death of an object of loss, melancholy, painful dejection, loss of the capacity to love, and self-reproaches. As the result of a loss experienced, the melancholic internalizes the object of loss to which he had experienced an ambivalent unconscious desire. Two twentieth-century psychiatrists, Germaine Guex and Charles Odier, have renewed Freud’s interest in this condition and theorized a new relationship between loss and depression, which they define as an “abandonment syndrome.” Guex presents the abandonment syndrome as “a psychic state dominated by the anxiety of being abandoned” (whether that abandonment is real or imaginary), with psychic and physical repercussions marked by “the fear of emotional risk.” Symptoms vary, but the subject often experiences an intense and even chronic anxiety, the manifestations of which “reactivate old traumas and bring out once again the specter of loneliness and the absence of love.”106 It is often the case that the afflicted person fears that an abandonment experienced in the past is being repeated in the present or will be in the future and therefore stays on her guard, inhibited by the fear of future disappointment. Charles Odier adds that the specter of abandonment manifests itself as “a sort of obsession or obsessed feeling, more or less acute or torpid,” which unleashes an intense psychological crisis.107 Abandonment (real or imagined) is a recurring motif throughout the novel, and we can read the characters’ emotional crises as an internal perception of (possible or past) abandonment. Feelings of abandonment are not dealt with openly but are converted onto the body. For example, Mme de Chartres falls gravely ill when she discovers her daughter’s feelings for N emours. While her daughter’s marriage to M. de Clèves had not posed a threat to their relationship, the pain stems from the realization of an “affective” break between mother and daughter. The emotional pain caused by that realization triggers her fever, which becomes a “considerable illness” (p. 172) when the princess leaves her in that condition to meet the duke. Male characters are also prone to emotional turmoil pointing to traumatic situations of abandonment. M. de N emours and M. de Clèves fall simultaneously ill when the princess makes the decision to sanction her feelings. Perceived by N emours as a separation, that act produces his illness because he Germaine Guex, Le syndrome d’abandon, 2nd edn (Paris: PUF, 1973), pp. 19, 50. Charles Odier, L’angoisse et la pensée magique. Essai d’analyse psychogénétique appliquée à la phobie et la névrose d’abandon (N euchatel: Delachaux & N iestlé, 1947), p. 158. 106 107


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is “desperate about almost never seeing her again” (p. 194).108 Similarly, M. de Clèves falls ill and dies when he realizes his wife’s passionate feelings for the duc de N emours and believes he has discovered their clandestine relationship. There is an underlying link between abandonment, depression, and his mind/body disorder, resulting in a state so “violent” that his illness turns “very dangerous” and in fact kills him after only a few days. His wife’s constant care cannot put an end to his accusations of “perfidy” and “dissimulation” (p. 290), stemming from a rage whose source lies in his feeling of abandonment. The relationship between a great fear of abandonment, emotional crisis, and “conversion” can be seen in the princess herself. An early and enigmatic separation (in keeping with the predominant tone of the work) anticipates the events of the novel: “Her father had died young” (p. 137),109 and the mother raised the future princess away from the “commerce” of the sexes at court, forgotten by the king [as pater familias] and overlooked by the court. 110 Horowitz has noted the strong presence of patrilineal figures in Lafayette’s work who generate and censor erotic desire and force the characters to bow to the father’s order.111 As a “double” of the father, Mme de Chartres instills an “invisible law” in her daughter, the law of inhibiting love: Mme de Chartres “told her of men’s lack of sincerity, their deceits and infidelities” (p. 137).112) According to Harriet Stone, “Clèves, the model husband appropriate for the princess, will be selected by Mme de Chartres to inhibit her daughter’s self-expression.”113 Fear of abandonment is triggered by two losses in the princess’s life: She suffers the death of her mother, who was herself troubled by the conviction that she had been abandoned by her daughter; and Mme de Clèves finds herself once again abandoned after her husband dies from an illness caused by his conviction that he was emotionally betrayed and abandoned for N emours: “She found herself unhappy to be abandoned to herself, at a time when she had so little control of her feelings and when she had so wished to have someone who could feel for her

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“Désespéré de ne la voir presque plus.” “Son père était mort jeune.” 110 The prince de Clèves, stopped by his own father while proposing marriage to Mlle de Chartres, is only able to marry her after the duc de N evers’s death, when the prince has “full freedom to follow his inclination” (une entière liberté de suivre son inclination; p. 147). That infringement of paternal law can be understood as revenge against the “bad father.” Tragically, that revenge brings no happiness because, through a “repetition compulsion,” the prince unconsciously experiences the princess’s insensitivity as paternal rejection. 111 Louise Horowitz, “A Tale of Two Henry’s, a Saga of Three Jacques’s: La Princesse de Clèves,” Dalhousie French Studies 26 (1994): 32-3. 112 “Lui contait le peu de sincérité des hommes, leurs tromperies et leurs infidélités.” 113 Harriet Stone, “Exemplary Teaching in La Princesse de Clèves,” French Review 62, 2 (1988): 249. 109


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and give her strength” (p. 173, my emphasis).114 There is a clear cause for the fear of abandonment here but that fear begins to control her and her relationships. Mme de Clèves cannot commit herself emotionally because a defensive attitude prevents any active cathexis. The prince de Clèves serves only as a passive mirror – like N emours, with whom, not without reason, he shares a first name, Jacques. Shattered relationships are projected onto the conjugal relation, and the personal psychic wound turns out to be too powerful to allow the characters to establish healthy social relationships based on affection. In La comtesse de Tende, the countess’s husband takes the place of the absent father and “look[s] on her as a mere child” (pp. 103–104),115 whom he abandons to engage in a relationship with a more mature woman. The wife suffers from his indifference. That marriage recalls that of Henry II, who abandoned his wife for his mistress and was constantly becoming involved in “commerce” with various women. The duc de Guise, for his part, has lost his father and lives in “fear of the cardinal de Lorraine, his uncle, who stood in for his father” (p. 44).116 T he princesse de Montpensier is identified exclusively as the “niece” (p. 45) of the house of Bourbon, which decides – without concern for her feelings – to marry her to the prince de Montpensier. The comte de Chabannes, “of a much more advanced age” (p. 48),117 rules over the life of the prince de Montpensier and his wife, a role falling to him because of the absence of their biological fathers. Lafayette exposes the underlying disillusionment and feeling of loss produced by repeated abandonment. We could read this fear of being “abandoned again” within the context of the situation at court, where emotional tensions are present but denied and repressed. Symbolically, the fear of abandonment points to a perceived lack of emotional nurturing at court and to unfulfilled needs. Personal impasses precisely reflect the wound of an entire society, where the “law” of the father reigns but where patrilineal descendants impose and repress, engender and abandon. The society portrayed is founded on male figures who – just like the king – act out their (arbitrary) will, in a “commerce” designed solely for their diversion or satisfaction. By its “invisible” laws, the autocratic regime fabricates or restricts love and its desires. It is important to note that the monarch plays a primordial role in the first meeting between the princesse de Clèves and N emours: it is he who orders the princess to dance with the duke but immediately blocks their relations by separating the couple.118 The enforced act, which gives rise to their passion, “Elle se trouvait malheureuse d’être abandonnée à elle-même, dans un temps où elle était si peu maîtresse de ses sentiments et où elle eût tant souhaité d’avoir quelqu’un qui pût la plaindre et lui donner de la force.” 115 “Il ne la regarda que comme une enfant.” 116 “La crainte du cardinal de Lorraine son oncle, qui lui tenait lieu de père.” 117 “D’un âge beaucoup plus avancé.” 118 Horowitz writes: “Captives of official marriages (the king wishes N emours to court Elizabeth by proxy, quintessential sign of the affective distanciation of the couple), the princess and the duke ‘fall in love’ at the instant when their chance for individual autonomy, 114


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serves only his own diversion: he never wonders about the fatal consequences of his act. Indeed, he blocks their desire immediately, sanctioning their meeting and ordering N emours to match with the queen of England. Restriction occurs as well in the king’s refusal to order the marriage of M. de Montpensier and the princess, who is then abandoned to her mother because “no one dared think of Mlle de Chartres anymore, for fear of displeasing the king” (p. 147).119 While the monarch is the supreme censor, love and passion are dependent on his whim, and he repeatedly subjects his subjects to forms of emotional abandonment. Lafayette show us “the impact of patriarchy’s power on human relationships” 120 and shows its interdependence with frustrated needs. The pressure of the patriarchal structure not only thwarts the plans of the protagonists but serves as a powerful basis underlying their psychological crises. Patriarchy forces the characters to keep down, to suppress, and to overcome their emotional needs through recourse to the “invisible law” that the characters have imprinted in their consciousnesses. Key terms such as “precipice,” self-blame, and “violence” to oneself refer not only to the princess’s individual conflict; they are also cultural messages of repression ordained by the state. In fact, the guilt from which Lafayette’s heroines suffer shows that patriarchy erects itself on the repression of its subjects. Society demands the exercise of control over bodily drives. It is significant that the combat against passion takes the form of “flight” in reaction to the inquisitional climate at court. It is precisely that invisible law (designed to control the characters’ behavior and even their thoughts) that underlies the heroine’s anxiety symptoms and that leads to conversion and discharge through collapse. The princess falls into “an affliction so violent that she almost lost the use of her reason” (p. 293); her “suffering … surpassed the limits of reason” (p. 294); and her “ailments mingled together” (p. 295).121 The heroine’s lassitude and psychic pain, her mental exhaustion, were known as “madness” in the seventeenth century and as “nerves” in the medical opinion of the nineteenth century. Freud called it “neurasthenia,” a term that has fallen into disuse but that captures the nature of the heroine’s suffering. Whereas Freud explains the outbreak of that illness as a disturbance with a somatic origin, Elizabeth Wilson has recently modified that view, placing the emphasis on the correlation between psychological and biological factors. N eurasthenia is often caused by an irritability and hypersensitivity of the nerves affected by periods

for passional, not political (in the largest sense of the term) relationship is denied to them. From the beginning to end Henri II remains the progenitor of desire, taboo, and violation.” Louise Horowitz, “A Tale of Two Henry’s,” p. 32. 119 “Personne n’osait plus penser à Mlle de Chartres, par la crainte de déplaire au roi.” 120 Donna Kuizenga, “The Princesse de Clèves: An Inimitable Model?” in Henry, (ed.), An Inimitable Example, p. 76. 121 “Une affliction si violente qu’elle perdit quasi l’usage de la raison,” “douleur . . . passait les bornes de la raison,” “douleurs se confondaient.”

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of stress.122 As was the case for Surin, the princess’s entourage considers that state of extreme suffering to be within the realm of curable madness, “‘frenzies,’ episodes of violence, or ‘melancholic’ spells,”123 and her internment in a convent is reminiscent of Surin’s confinement in Bordeaux, where superiors cast an uncomprehending but discriminating gaze on someone who did not know how to “behave.”124 N evertheless, let us be clear: the princess finds herself at a mental stage that is almost beyond reason without actually being so. The author makes every effort to reveal a kind of suffering whose nature surpasses the logical and cognitive capacity of human beings since it is situated outside the realm of speech. Even in our own time, few critics have taken an interest in psychic pain as a purely affective and sensual suffering, elements that Elaine Scarry attributes to physical pain. In my view, there is a paucity of similar studies describing the entire repertoire of psychic pain.125 That mental distress is key for Lafayette, however, since the princesse de Clèves’s “nervous” illness unfolds entirely in “the theater of her mind,” that is, in “phantasmogorical, unconscious, and idiosyncratic scenarios.”126 T hat idea is in no way at odds with the presence of consciousness, but it is an affective consciousness, which Spinoza establishes as the first agency of human thought and which – like Lafayette – he terms imagination.

The Precipice of the Imagination: Between the Formalization of Desire and the Law For Lafayette, the imagination is a complex faculty. It is a place where memories of the past and inklings of the future, bodily mapping and reason, individual drives and social duties, and intuition and knowledge all come together. First, the imagination is clearly linked to the passions. In her reveries in Coulommiers, Mme de Clèves imagines the object of her love as she would like him to be. N emours 122 See Freud’s sexual-biological explanation in “Zur Psychotherapie der Hysterie,” in Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik, Studienausbage vol. 11, 5th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), pp. 37–97. See also Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. 123 Foucault, Maladie mentale, p. 78. 124 The convent is also a place of female solidarity apart from the patriarchal system, a place of protection, where Mme de Clèves recovers her health. The queen who takes her there represents that solidarity among women. 125 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 8. A “psychology” of madness began to take shape only in the early nineteenth century, when it became inscribed “within the dimension of interiority” (Foucault, Maladie mentale p. 86). 126 Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth of the Psychoanalytic Stage (N ew York: Bunnel & Mazel, 1991), p. ix.


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becomes a purely imaginary and idealized production, in keeping with princess’s desire: eroticized, heroic, and triumphant, reduced to a phallus (consider the image par excellence of the Indian cane). Far from corresponding to the true N emours, that image is a mirror of the princess’s narcissistic desire, a sort of fetish (an object that procures her sexual gratification) that she constructs for herself and contemplates to experience sexual pleasure. Image, imagination, and desire are intrinsically linked, maintained, and strengthened. Just as the princess uses the image of N emours as a fetish, he abandons himself to her image in his imagination. First, he steals the portrait of Mme de Clèves in order to contemplate it in secret and to be carried away by the image/imagination. Then, he spies on her at Coulommiers in her most private moments, which increases his own desire. Finally, he watches her from a house located across from hers, reproducing in his imagination the erotic atmosphere of Coulommiers through the image “of beautiful houses and gardens” (p. 296). In place of the real image, he substitutes a virtual production of his lust. It is precisely that imaginary “fabrication” that makes each of them the other’s object of desire, a fetish built on an idealized image. Roland Barthes notes the lure of the subjective and idolatrous image in his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse): the beloved “is precisely the Unique, the singular Image that has miraculously arrived to correspond to the specialty of my desire. It is the figure of my truth.”127 In the novel, the imagination generates affectionate feelings and contributes toward sparking love’s desire.128 But it is also a tool of repression. Even as the imagination invents an idealized N emours, it also creates the opposing image of Mme de Clèves’s deceased husband bearing authoritarian messages of guilt. As an instrument of self-blame, the imagination, according to Elaine Scarry, is an “intentional state,”129 a mental impulse that reminds the princess of her duty: conjugal, familial, and social. It seeks to impel her to renounce N emours, hence to repress her love. In this case, then, the imagination gives rise to a dual realization in the heroine: of the force of her desire but also of the guilt and horror that neglect of her duty represents. The princess evokes her horror: “When she began to have the strength to imagine it and saw what kind of husband she had lost, when she considered that she was the cause of his death and that it was by virtue of the passion she had had for another that she was its cause, the horror in which she held herself and M. de N emours cannot be represented” (pp. 293–4).130 T he term Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 43. Of course, the imagination also appears in Jansenist thought as a “deceitful faculty,” a principle which, according to Pascal, ruins “judgment and the senses” (Pensées L 80-99). When provoked by jealousy, the imagination has the power to aggravate the princesse de Clèves’s affective disorder and to produce alarming crises that warn her of the depth of her attraction to N emours and her resulting vulnerability. 129 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 164. 130 “Quand elle commença d’avoir la force de l’envisager et qu’elle vit quel mari elle avait perdu, qu’elle considéra qu’elle était la cause de sa mort et que c’était par la passion 127 128

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horror is linked to a knowledge founded in the imagination and stemming directly from her excruciating mental pain. She blames herself for violating the “invisible law” and for killing her husband – a form of patricide since he is a substitute for the father and king. Through that crime, she enters the realm of “abjection,” disrupting identity, order, and the system, and, through her disruption, she signals the fragility of the law of the father.131 Perceiving herself as “abject,” though not explicitly labeled as such, she looks on herself with repugnance and horror, as one who has violated the law of the father, murdered her husband, and become a tangible threat to the order of society. Kristeva understands the “abject,” in the first place, as a biological reaction of nausea, horror, or fear when we are confronted with a threatening breakdown between self and other, subject and object.132 We are drawn to and repelled by the abject, which is the very image of perversion, “since it neither abandons nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, a law; but diverts, bends, corrupts them; uses them, wears them down, so as to better deny them.”133 The abject designates both the threat to society and the self’s reaction to such a collapse. In another crucial sense, when Mme de Clèves’s feelings for N emours dare resurface one last time, in the garden close to her apartment, ideas “crowd her mind,” (p. 298) and for two full hours she is lost in ambivalent desires. The imagination is not linked to any desire to marry N emours, however; it paints the “crime” (p. 298) such a marriage would constitute in the eyes of her deceased husband, a crime against the “invisible law” of the spouse, the mother, and the king. She rekindles an image of the deceased husband and mother, of her “duty” inculcated in her since her youth. Then she comes to a second realization, which amplifies the horror she is doing to herself: she “made it out to be a crime not to have felt any passion for [her husband]” (p. 294, my emphasis).134 This crime is to have been lacking in feeling and to have fallen short of her “duty,” thereby violating familial, social, and political law. Patriarchal law has been inculcated as deeply as possible into her consciousness, and her self-condemnation illustrates the fact that social obligations have even invaded the imaginatio, the most interior and secret part of the soul. As Freud would later say, the imaginary order evokes “an other who is me,” whom the subject has internalized.135 Although physically absent, the “father” is present. He has seized hold of the heroine’s soul: her imagination submits to his aims and her imaginative knowledge becomes a nightmarish place of self-blame. She “went over incessantly everything she had said” to her husband qu’elle avait eue pour un autre qu’elle en était cause, l’horreur qu’elle eut pour elle-même et pour M. de N emours ne se peut représenter.” 131 Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, p. 12. 132 Ibid., p. 9. 133 Ibid., p. 23. 134 “Se faisait un crime de n’avoir pas eu de la passion pour lui.” 135 Sigmund Freud, “Die Traumdeutung,” in Fragen der Gesellschaft / Ursprung der Religion, Studienausgabe, Vol. 9, 8th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), p. 235.


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(p. 295)136 to recriminate and punish herself by psychic torture, which shows she is literally and symbolically confined within the distressing scenario of her soul, constantly tormented to the limits of her strength. The imagination surpasses the power of memory because it not only revives absent characters but also recalls and reinforces their demands. It is an active medium endowed with values, inculcating the tensions between social conformity and emotional drives. Just before she forever renounces a future with N emours, the image of ills past and to come is rekindled in the princess. That reproduction as image is clearly expressed by the verb “foresee” (prévoir) whose root, see, connotes both an active re-creation of a disturbing event through its projection into the future and an act of reason, a reflection consistent with the duty imposed by the superego. The princess “recalled the memory of M. de Clèves… . [At the same time, she saw] the reasons she had not to marry M. de N emours … strong with respect to her duty and insurmountable with respect to her peace of mind” (p. 212).137 Memory and imagination are both instances of a moral imperative that actively invokes the carnal and emotional “precipice,” and the princess, who never manages to liberate herself from that torture “so contrary … to her happiness” (p. 298), succumbs to it through her illness. Yet for Lafayette, the imagination is not contrary to reason and order. It is both a tool of the repressive forces that makes the princess see the “reasons concerning her peace of mind and the misfortunes she foresaw were she to marry that prince” (p. 298)138 and an agency of the superego as Freud would later identify it. Freud defines the superego as the set of drives, social in their origin, belonging to political, religious, and moral institutions, a partly unconscious activity. Its role is to assure the synthesis of the contradictory demands within the human being, that is, to internalize public demands and prohibitions.139 It is revealing that Lafayette links the imagination to an awareness of the familial, social, and political superego. Mme de Clèves, she writes, “would have liked to tell herself” that her fear of being unhappy if she married N emours “was unfounded, both in terms of her scruples about the past and of her fears for the future. At other times, reason and her duty showed her entirely contrary things, which quickly prevailed over the resolution not to remarry and to never see M. de N emours again. But it was a very violent resolution to establish in her heart, touched as it was” (pp. 310–11).140 Here, the 136

“Repassait incessamment tout ce qu’elle lui avait dit.” “Rappelait la mémoire de M. de Clèves . . . . [Elle voyait en même temps] les raisons qu’elle avait de ne point épouser M. de N emours . . . fortes du côté de son devoir et insurmontables du côté de son repos.” 138 “Raisons qui regardaient son repos et les maux qu’elle prévoyait en épousant ce prince.” 139 Sigmund Freud, “Das Ich und das Es,” in Psychologie des Unbewussten, Studienausgabe, Vol. 3, 6th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), pp. 273–330. 140 “Elle eût bien voulu se pouvoir dire qu’elle était mal fondée, et dans ses scrupules du passé, et dans ses craintes de l’avenir. La raison et son devoir lui montraient, dans 137

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superego of the social order is attributed to past “duty,” which projects itself into the future and contains all the codes assimilated to the deceased husband. At the same time, the opposition between “reasons” and “feelings” cannot be reconciled (“all her feelings were full of turmoil and passion”; p. 310),141 and reappears as an internal division between drive and repression, a conflict that torments her through the various contradictory images that unfold in her mind. If she is not to listen to the aspect of the imagination impelling her toward her desires, she must make a “very violent resolution” – repeated a second time as the “violence to make resolutions” (p. 311) – which is opposed to her nature and unhinges her by its “extravagance.” Through her protagonist’s profound, unresolved despair, Lafayette shows that the construction of patriarchal society is based on the violence the subject does to herself, which not only causes upheaval in her but also stifles any articulation and fulfillment of autonomous desires. It is after the final confrontation with herself that Mme de Clèves falls into a violent illness, emerging from it with the decision to withdraw from the image of N emours, that is, to repress any image of him, her ultimate effort to totally eradicate her feelings by removing herself from any visual contact. She tells N emours: “The certainty of no longer being loved by you, as I am, seems to me such a horrible misfortune that, had I no insurmountable reasons of duty, I should still doubt whether I could resolve to expose myself to that misfortune… . Do men hold onto their passion in these eternal commitments?” (p. 306).142 Once again, she experiences anxiety about an imagined abandonment, which she projects onto the male sex and into the future, an abandonment she perceives as a certainty and which she generalizes because of her earlier experience of loss and her knowledge that desire is short-lived. Her decision not to see N emours again is followed by the resolution to leave the court “on the pretext of a change of scene … without making it appear a decisive plan to give up life at court” (p. 314).143 Let us note that the protagonist’s illness leads to a key decision: to abandon in turn the society inhibiting her but without openly announcing that break. The princess’s clandestine renunciation amounts to an infraction of a political nature. Just as she removes herself from the image of N emours, she deliberately refuses

d’autres moments, des choses tout opposées, qui l’emportaient rapidement à la résolution de ne se point remarier et de ne voir jamais M. de N emours. Mais c’était une résolution bien violente à établir dans son coeur aussi touché que le sien.” 141 “Tous ses sentiments étaient pleins de trouble et de passion.” 142 “La certitude de n’être plus aimée de vous, comme je le suis, me paraît un si horrible malheur que, quand je n’aurais point des raisons de devoir insurmontable, je doute si je pourrais me résoudre à m’exposer à ce malheur. . . . Les hommes conservent-ils de la passion dans ces engagements éternels?” 143 “Sur le prétexte de changer d’air . . . sans faire paraître un dessein arrêté de renoncer à la cour.”


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any production of images, whether by the court or at court.144 Her rejection is a sort of (de)negation since she projects everything that is “bad” onto the person of N emours and formulates the implicit judgment to flee the court as a whole, and with it patriarchal law. The final retreat that Lucien Goldmann calls “the rejection of the world within the world”145 is thus the rejection of a specific world, that of the court. It signifies a radical refusal to continue living in accordance with the order of the father (which is also that of the mother and the monarch). Illness acquires the value of a “purification” of this system and a realization of the damaging mechanisms from which the protagonist seeks to liberate herself. It is significant that her break comes about at a time when “the face of the court changed completely” (p. 271),146 a period of transformation under the new king, Francis II, and of a reorientation of power relations at court. It is also a time announcing great turbulence inside and outside the country as a result of a growing rebellion among the princes, a weakening of royal power, and religious discord, which would lead to incessant religious wars. The end of Lafayette’s novel depicts the disappearance of unity in sixteenth-century France and the increasing hostility of a whole portion of society toward the new monarch. The country was becoming not only a place of opposition between two religious factions (Catholicism and Protestantism) but the stakes of two countries with different political and religious interests: Spain and England. Yet the heroine’s flight from patriarchal authority is veiled in an ambiguity about place that corresponds to the general, often enigmatic tone of the novel. I would argue that Mme de Clèves’s retreat from court, far from resolving the inner division between “duty” and “desire,” in no way puts an end to her turmoil. Even after the heroine recovers from her illness, her confusion and turmoil continue, as we see in her inability to choose a fixed site of repose (rest or tranquility). A death-like, stultifying situation reigns at the end of the novel, exemplified by the dual nature of the retreat (to her home and to the convent). The ending alludes to a continuous and unresolved vacillation, a sign of persisting internal tensions and of a failure to find the peace of body and mind she covets. Her refuge in a religious establishment, a female universe, points to an attempt to escape patriarchal spaces and to encounter a female solidarity to protect her in the future from the aggressive gaze of N emours (and implicitly, of the monarch). But her regular return to her home – a place reminiscent of familial and social duty – demonstrates her failure to truly liberate herself from patriarchy. Her departure might be viewed as a means “to fight the battle for herself, and thereby, to restore order to the short life remaining 144

Harriet Stone, “Court Society and Economies of Exchange,” in Beasley and Jensen, eds., Approaches to Teaching Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves, p. 53. Domna Stanton is right to see that illness as the rejection of the rules of courtly life. See Domna Stanton, “The Ideal of ‘repos’ in Seventeenth-Century French Literature,” L’Esprit créateur 15 (1975): 79–104. 145 Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 62. 146 “La cour changea entièrement de face.”


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in her,”147 as Michael Koppisch succinctly argues. But, as Harriet Stone and Louise Horowitz have remarked, in the lifeless and claustrophobic atmosphere that marks the novel’s final pages, there is a strong presage of the princess’s premature death, the sense that she is barely clinging to life. The dual retreat is meant to provide moral healing but engenders only absence: absence of her passions and their disorderly reign but also absence of life, as we see in the announcement of her untimely death in the last lines of the novel. “Madame de Clèves … chooses not only a spiritual suicide but a physical one as well, as if recognizing that the only way out of the dilemma of unsatisfied passion is the death of the instrument that is the seat of the longing: the body.”148 She distinguishes herself from her environment not only through retreat and the aspiration to purity but also through the powerful destruction that is the sole way out of her “emotional vacuum.”149 In the prevailing enigmatic tone of the novel, the narrator concludes that the heroine’s life was rather short (p. 315), designating death as the ultimate outcome of the battle within herself. In that respect, there is clearly resistance to a neat ending, and Lafayette thereby questions the belief that resolution or amelioration through the discharge of passion is possible. The final devastating verdict, the princess’s death, shows that the intensity of her suffering is beyond remedy. The novel’s refusal to offer true release and healing is in keeping with the overall structure of the narrative, which is constantly marked by suppression, ambiguity, and rupture. If we read between the lines, we find rupture implied in the princess’s shifting back and forth from one location to another, which ultimately proves to be injurious, suggesting that the character is “breaking apart.” This idea of the continued division and unresolved turmoil within the princess is reinforced when we consider the geographical location of her home. It is located in the Pyrenees, a region that was the object of a struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism at the time. Later, with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, it became the site of profound Catholic repression against the Huguenot communities 147

Koppisch, “The Princesse de Clèves’s Will,” p. 208. Horowitz, Love and Language, p. 68. See also Stone, “Exemplary Teaching,” pp. 256–7. 149 N emours also remains “entombed” in the garden (p. 297) across from her room, immersed in a “profound reverie” and consumed by his melancholic state. I shall deal only briefly with the “body-tomb,” identified by Julia Kristeva as the key image of the melancholic individual’s cadaverization, a sinking into “total paralysis of psyche and body” (Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir. Dépression et mélancolie [Paris: Gallimard, 1987], pp. 83–4). N emours finds himself in a state halfway between wakefulness and sleep, almost paralyzed. The “black sun” of imaginary castration caused by the princess’s abandonment amounts to a sort of death, which engulfs him. He enters a state prior to language and consciousness, a prenatal country, transmitted by the term “lain” (couché) and by the symbolic place of the “little wood” (La princesse de Clèves p. 297), the place of the unconscious. For N emours, this place becomes that of oneiric melancholy. 148


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that had established themselves there. That place is also noted for its proximity to Catholic Spain, a country even more repressive than France in its politics and religious intolerance. Spain is implicitly evoked through the marriage between Elizabeth and Philip II (who was more than twice his wife’s age), an unhappy political marriage ordered by Henry II, which would end in Elizabeth’s premature death. From that standpoint, Mme de Clèves’s flight to that place of violence and instability could be read as her failure to liberate herself from the repression inherent in the patriarchal regime. The borderline place represented by the Pyrenees may also signify the princess’s encounter with herself, which may certainly have a promising aspect but which ends with her inability to establish her own laws and to live in a state deprived of passion and with it, the body. It seems that salvation, peace of body and mind, is possible only in death, as Pascal claimed.150 But beyond the symbolic importance that Kristeva gives to the notion of borderline, let us glimpse the place of this “abyss,” where the unity of society is threatened. It is here that dissolution occurs or violence breaks out, and that unknown dangers come into being: “What is excluded can never be fully obliterated but hovers at the borders of our existence, threatening the apparently settled unity of the subject with disruption and possible dissolution.”151 It is exactly this dual significance that is part of the geography of the Pyrenees. On one hand, as a place of new religious conflicts, that region represents bitter power struggles for the unity of the country that extend beyond the princess’s story to involve 150 An alternative way of reading the ending of the novel is to contend that the protagonist’s final retreat represents the triumph of reason and Cartesian rigor. For in leaving the court, the princess decides to live in repos (tranquility), apart from the world of agitation, which also includes the realm of the passions. The loss of her affective life thus entails a perfect control over herself and the passions. The idea of virtue expressed in the final line of the novel can be understood within the broader context of Cartesian philosophy. According to Descartes, virtue depends on the use of reason to examine what is best for both body and soul and can be acquired through conduct, thus bringing us a natural happiness. In the Discours, setting forth the principles necessary for the practice of virtue, he determines to carry out what reason recommends without being diverted by the passions (René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, (ed.) J.-M. Fataud [Paris: Bordas, 1996], p. 86). This proposition echoes the princesse de Clèves’s resolution to protect herself from the deleterious effects of her passion on her tranquility and to pursue the path of “virtue,” as exemplified by her radical departure. The enigmatic question remains, however, whether this act of Cartesian virtue is sufficient for happiness and whether it leads to contentment and satisfaction. Domna Stanton has argued tellingly that the princess withdraws “from the movement and activities of the world to a retreat where man, relieved of disquieting passions and desires, could be spiritually reborn and enjoy uninterruptedly a stable, independent, and virtuous life” (“The Ideal of ‘Repos,’” p. 102), and she makes the case that the princess achieves a virtuous state (p. 101). While her reading is superb, I find the conclusion of the novel more ambiguous in its announcement of the princess’s premature death and in the lifeless atmosphere it depicts. 151 Grosz, Sexual Subversions, p. 71.

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all of France, marking the dissolution and violence to come. At the same time, the borderline assumes the symbolic meaning of a mental state. It is the place of break, of abandonment and banishment, and it (re)inscribes a social reality in the protagonist’s psychic space. Here marginal subjects – misfits or rebels, Huguenot communities, conspirators, and protesters – all cross paths. Thus we could consider the protagonist’s retreat as an open form of rebellion against patriarchy. She decides to live as an “outcast” who embraces her marginality and, in that respect, her abandonment of court society can be seen as a form of “victory.” N evertheless, the circle of suffering – completed only with the princess’ death – that manifests itself in her feeble body calls into question any resolution or amelioration. The princess’s muteness and permanent escape from desire through death could be labeled futile, since her “solution” remains “inimitable.” Lafayette’s ending once more reveals her evasiveness and her refusal to give a clear answer to the troubling question of the cost of individual needs in the face of social demands.

Chapter 5

The Theater of Melancholy: Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677)

If there be hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart. – Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Is love melancholy a state of mind or a veritable illness? Seventeenth-century doctors such as Jacques Ferrand and Robert Burton inquired at length about the causes and symptoms of so-called erotic melancholy, which was difficult to classify in terms of the three-fold divisions of melancholy – of the brain, the body, and the hypochondrium – and presented great difficulties of definition. The problem was that an external cause lay at its source. An unexpected encounter with a person with whom the subject falls madly in love may produce humoral reactions that affect the brain and create mental disturbances (such as a depraved imagination, sorrow, or strange visions) and physical symptoms (exhaustion, insomnia). Burton and Ferrand did not omit to illustrate the pathology of erotic melancholy and warned that this particular type produced real and harmful effects. Both doctors sought a cure for its undesirable manifestations, which could be conceived of as a true malady. Through the love melancholy of the title character and of Hippolytus in Phèdre (Phaedra; 1677), Jean Racine understands his characters’ illness as the result of (an illicit) passion and represents the interdependence of soma and psyche. Yet two key differences arise in Racine’s description of love melancholy that Phaedra’s melancholy appeared within the context of the feminization of the malady before 1660. Between 1611 and 1645, doctors gradually came to recognize that melancholy (originally a man’s illness) could also afflict women. Robert Burton, André Du Laurens, and Jacques Ferrand understood “uterine furor” as a form of melancholy. Phaedra, however, has often been anachronistically described as a hysteric because of her fits of rage, inhibitions, lethargy, and hallucinations. But hysteria was not identified in its current form until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its theatrical aspect especially interested JeanMartin Charcot. Conversely, the center of Joseph Breuer’s and Freud’s theory was the idea of a conversion of a traumatic affect from the repressed past (repression being a defense mechanism), which reappeared in the form of a somatic response. Freud incorporated the spasms and hallucinations described by Charcot into his theory of conversion, arguing that hysterics repeat in the physical spectacle traumatic images from the past, in particular a (real or imaginary) sexual trauma. See Sigmund Freud, “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse,” in Gesammelte Werke. Werke aus den Jahren 1904–1905, Vol. 5, 5th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1972), p. 278.


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detach his perspective from the medical studies of his time. First, the object of erotic melancholy is neither the sole determining factor of the conflict nor the only explanation for the ailment. Melancholy is born of the cleavage between love and duty: moral, social, and political. Racine provides a psychological explanation of melancholy and explores the mental repertoire of the human being through the internal conflicts of his characters. Moreover, in Phèdre he grasps the connections between responses plotted on the body and those manifested in the mind, opening the possibility that the somatic repertoire creates an idea of the self, in a century that discredited the construction of subjectivity through the body and demonstrated the limitations of the senses. Racine resolved the problem of the division of substances and the body’s influence over the mind (or vice versa), jettisoning the dualist Cartesian model and replacing it with a study of the complex physiopsychic processes at work. Monism became for him a presupposition that was beyond doubt. The mechanism at work is Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ split into two forces, one internal (passionate love), the other external (the law). Their conflict stems from the choice of the love object and the psychological shock resulting from the social taboo surrounding that object. This conflict disturbs them, puts them at odds with themselves, and makes them feel “monstrous”. Phaedra falls passionately in love with her stepson, Hippolytus; and Hippolytus, for his part, experiences passionate feelings for his father’s enemy and prisoner. In the preface, Phaedra is introduced as a woman “neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent,” but “involved by her destiny, and by the wrath of the gods, in an unlawful passion” (p. 145). Racine presents two characters torn between their conscience and the power of their passion, oscillating between regret and desire, life and death, passivity and rebellion. The playwright presents us with his protagonist’s horrible mental crises and, in the closed space of the palace, exposes the delirious soul, the brutality of silence, and the incapacity of language to comfort the characters: Phaedra’s frenzy of taedium vitae when she is abandoned to her own devices, Hippolytus’ repressed tensions when he seeks to quell his passion. The two protagonists nevertheless display a passivity, which stands in contrast to the force with which their love is imprinted and manifests itself through the many questions that plague them, their many declarations of “alas!” and “ah!” and their need to flee – Phaedra into the night, Hippolytus in search of the last monster on earth. What differentiates them

“N i tout à fait coupable, ni tout à fait innocente,” “engagée par sa destinée et par la colère des dieux, dans une passion illégitime.” Jean Racine, Théâtre complet, (ed.) Jacques Morel and Alain Viala (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 577. All references to this edition will hereafter be cited in the text. Suzanne Toczyski observes that there is a tension between the protagonists’ passive nature and the active force with which their desire takes root: “Cartesian notions of volition—I desire; or, my mind instructs my body to desire—alternate surreptitiously with a more receptive posture—passion in the etymological sense: desire happens to me.” Suzanne Toczyski, “Teaching Phèdre: Desire and Phenomenology in Action,” in Racine et/

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is that Hippolytus denies his illegitimate love even to himself, and with it, the political revolt it contains, whereas Phaedra acknowledges her passion, and with it, her guilt. Phaedra’s torment is introduced to us even before the character appears on stage. Theramenes describes her enigmatic malaise, explaining that she is A dying woman, Sick’ning of a dire disease Of which she will not speak, weary of life. (Act I, scene 1) Une femme mourante et qui cherche à mourir … atteinte d’un mal qu’elle s’obstine à taire. (lines 44–5, my emphasis)

The heroine’s solitary suffering and suicide wish emerge as two insuperably linked elements that allude to her compromised health. From the start of the play, Phaedra’s appearance – frail, weak, barely able to stand – indicates, beyond the pathological aspect, a major psychological disturbance surrounded in mystery. The secondary characters cannot fathom the suffering she fiercely keeps silent and are aware only of her beaten-down body. Phaedra is dazed, staggering, and delirious, and her incomprehensible behavior troubles her confidante: “You see it [the light], and would fain / Be hidden from the sunshine that you sought” (Act I, scene 3) (Prête à vous cacher, / Vous haïssez le jour que vous veniez chercher; lines 167–168). Oenone is concerned about the “secret malady [that] / Slays her,” as “weary yet restless from her couch she rises” (Act I, scene 2) (chagrin inquiet [qui] l’arrache de son lit; line 149) and “ all her senses are disorder’d” (Act I, scene 2) (désordre … dans son esprit; line 147). N ote the important element of repression at the center of Phaedra’s ailment as Racine depicts it. The repetition of words such as “secret malady” and a “disorder” that “slays” refer to a deliberate mutism to be attributed to a desire to repress. Silence and mystery turn out to be significant tools of this repression: Phaedra verbally rejects the horror (horreur; line 238) of her illegitimate passion for her stepson because the monstrosity of that choice makes her guilty in the eyes of her husband, Theseus. According to Francesco Orlando, “repression and repressed may also refer only to the prohibition by which some contents are officially censured in a society, whether excluded from the conscious level, or from that of speech.” ou le classicisme. Actes du colloque conjointement organisé par la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature et la Société Racine. University of California, Santa Barbara 14–16 octobre 1999, (ed.) Ronald Tobin (Tübingen: N arr, 2001), p. 324. English translations are taken from Phaedra, Robert Bruce Boswell, trans., Project Gutenberg, 1999. (Ed.) Dagny, John Bickers, and David Widger. 11 Feb. 2009. http://www. gutenberg.org/files/1977/1977-h/1977-h.htm. Francesco Orlando, Toward a Freudian Theory of Literature with an Analysis of Racine’s Phèdre,” trans. Charmaine Lee (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

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For Phaedra, this is a prohibition on publicly naming forbidden contents. We find her in a tormented state of mind because of her personal conflict between the need to speak and the restraint she imposes on herself, suffering alone in her relentless efforts to repress the illicit love for her stepson, which she finds intolerable in herself. Hippolytus is also powerless before a love he seeks to deny and flee. He has been overcome by a mad passion (fol amour; line 113), directed at Aricia, which puts an end to the “happy time” (Act I, scene 1) (heureux temps; line 35) he had previously enjoyed. The outbreak of this unsatisfied and repressed passion creates a disorder manifested in pain (douleurs; line 37) and sorrow (line 38), which he also tries to dissimulate from those around him. His suffering is perceived through his acts and his silence: Hippolytus abandons his daily activities, turns away from his friends, and languishes in voluntary isolation. Complex questions torment him: Must he leave the family home or follow his duty (line 27), which consists of looking after the two women in accordance with his father’s wishes? The hero’s inability to decide between fleeing or carrying out his filial duty reflects his inner torment. Racine clearly grasps the idea of a transposition, or (to use the psychoanalytic term) a “conversion,” of a psychic problem onto the “theater of the body.” H e demonstrates how the two characters’ unresolved conflicts (between moral/ political conscience and passionate love) instigate corporeal manifestations. For Phaedra and Hippolytus, there is a rift between affect and representation because of their repression of the desiring body, which nonetheless returns in the form of the suffering body speaking its own language. Racine shows us a double mechanism: he presents the protagonists’ melancholy as a language manifest in the body that also expresses itself through the body, especially as a “mapping” of repressed desire. Hippolytus’ melancholy reveals itself physically and the secondary characters read his internal disorder on his body. Hence Theramenes deciphers the melancholic moans and sighs inscribed in his wan and defeated appearance: “What mean these signs of sorrow?” (Act II, scene 6) (Pourquoi ces marques de douleur? line 715). For Phaedra, the internal disorder produced by her illegitimate passion appears both outwardly and inwardly in a host of associated symptoms, such as prostration resulting from insomnia and from her refusal to eat, suicidal thoughts, periodic stumbling, a state close to mania, flight into a fantasy world, tears, lack of affection for her children, and outbursts of rage. Phaedra vacillates between death and life, between a depressive phase and a manic phase. On one hand, she wishes to die, as she exclaims: “For the last time I come to look on thee, O Sun!” 1978), p. 15. The preeminence of repression in Phèdre leads Richard Goodkin to call it a repression play. Richard Goodkin, The Tragic Middle: Racine, Aristotle, Euripides (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 153. Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (N ew York: N orton, 1989), p. 16.


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(Act I, scene 3) (Soleil, je te viens voir pour la dernière fois; line 172). A rejection of life is at the heart of her melancholy – displayed in her repetition of the word “death” – and attests to a state we would now call profound depression. But on the other, she wishes to prolong her life in her effort to escape the emotional void that threatens her: “Yes, I will live if life can be restored” (Act I, scene 5) (Vivons, si vers la vie on peut me ramener; line 364). In this manic phase, we read other disquieting symptoms, such as her sleeplessness and the act of succumbing to her desire, which, when spurned, turns to rage and guile, as well as her frenzied and feverish behavior, her violent madness, and the furor that overcomes her in the end. Phaedra desires and pursues, while at the same time she represses her love, staggering back and forth between two forces (light and darkness) and two objectives (life and death). That vacillation is made manifest in the lexical fields of night and day that Phaedra uses to express her struggle. The heroine’s “double” and “divided” nature is seen in her body – torn between the need to live and her lassitude – and in her soul, which seeks the light of salvation but is “dazzled” by its blinding rays. The body represents and performs its deep split, revealed through spontaneous, contradictory, or unreflective acts: Phaedra clasps her children to her, only to push them away again; she writes the same letter three times and each time tears it up. Her torment increases to the point of becoming a derangement of the reason. She hallucinates in a state close to madness, “her vacant eye” (Act V, scene 5) (œil tout égaré; line 1476), no longer recognizing her retinue, and she “wanders to and fro with doubtful steps” (Act V, scene 5) (porte au hasard ses pas irrésolus; line 1477). The unresolved conflict is transmitted through the language spoken by the body in its uncontrolled movements (roaming), which overcome her in the end, turning into a violent disorder unequivocally resembling madness: “Have I lost my senses? / What said I? and where am I? Whither stray / Vain wishes? ” (Act I, scene 3) (Insensée, où suis-je? et qu’ai-je dit? / Où laissé-je égarer mes voeux et mon esprit? lines 180–81). Racine assigns the body a central role in the representation of that internal conflict and implies an interplay between it and the mind. Instead of naming the ailing body, he exposes and represents it, opting for a vision in which the spectator must read between the lines, must verbalize for himself the language of silence and repression. Somatic manifestations display Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ internal disturbances; the characters remain divided between passion and guilt consciousness. In Racine’s exposition of the psyche, that intimate connection “Les melancholiques sont aussi ennemis du Soleil, & fuyent la lumiere, pource qu’ils ont leurs esprits & humeurs du tout contraires à la lumiere. Le Soleil est clair & chaud, l’humeur melancholique est noire & froide” (Melancholics are also enemies of the sun and flee the light, because their spirits and humors are contrary in every way to light. The sun is bright and hot, the melancholic humor dark and cold). André Du Laurens, Discours de la conservation de la veue, des maladies mélancholiques, des catarrhes et de la vieillesse (n.p.: Théodore Samson, 1598), p. 250. Paradoxically, Phaedra seeks out the sun as well.

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between body and mind is more than a humoral imbalance, more than a potential link between kinds of matter communicating through the animal spirits, as Descartes viewed it. Solange Guénoun argues that between “the classical melancholic model founded on the theory of the humors and the Cartesian model based on the mechanics of the passions, Racinian tragedy enacts a melancholic imaginary, lovesickness, which is no longer humoral but which also does not arise from the Cartesian body-machine.” Racine’s presentation of the languishing body is problematic for any theory based solely on humoral disequilibrium and for any dualist interpretation. Phaedra’s conflict is not that between soul and body, nor does it entail a disproportion in the surge of the humors: it lies in the dual forces acting equally on mind and soma.

Theater of the Body, Theater of the Mind The anxieties associated with passionate love and the shock it produces in the two characters manifest themselves in a mapping of the body and in mental equivalents, showing that mind and body act in concert, each expressing in its own way the internal split. Let us note that Racine does not understand the relationship between mind and body as the ascendancy of the reflective faculty, which would hold the body in check; rather, he seeks to show how corporeal matter creates adequate responses that convey the afflictions of the mind. This exact idea of equality or correspondence is also central to current conceptions of the mind/body problem, and researchers have created a specialized terminology to highlight the importance of the interplay between body and mind. One of the chief aims of neuroscientists is to teach us to conceive mental and physiological processes as an “integrated” whole and to alert us to the cognitive content of body maps. Antonio Damasio argues that “the mind exists in and for an integrated organism; our minds would not be the way they are if it were not for the interplay of body and brain… . The human brain and the rest of the body constitute an indissociable organism integrated by means of mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory circuits.”10 Damasio thus distinguishes between the emotions and the feelings. Emotions are the direct corporeal response to a collection of changes in body states, together with mental images that have been activated in a specific brain system, which is responding to a particular entity or event. They are often perceptible to Solange Guénoun, “Mélancolie, hystérie ou le refus classique de la division dans Phèdre de Racine,” in Discontinuity and Fragmentation, (ed.) Freeman G. Henry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), p. 57. I borrow these terms from Joyce McDougall’s Theaters of the Body and Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth of the Psychoanalytic Stage (N ew York: Bunnel & Mazel, 1991). 10 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (N ew York: Putnam, 1994), p. xvi.


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an external observer through skin color, body posture, or facial expression, for instance, while other changes may be “perceptible [only] to the owner of the body in which they take place.”11 Emotions generate feelings, and feeling an emotion is the conscious and alert response to changes in the body state, the process of monitoring the experience of what the body is doing while thoughts occur. They are produced through a representation of the body in the form of maps in the brain: “Feelings do not arise necessarily from the actual body states – although they can – but rather from the actual maps constructed at any given moment in the bodysensing regions.”12 We must understand these maps as “visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory. The somatosensory modality … includes varied forms of sense: touch, muscular, temperature, pain, visceral, and vestibular.”13 The body becomes the basis for the mental state, creating positive or negative states, which in turn produce feelings: anxiety, sadness, guilt, joy, hope, and so on. Damasio explains that when the organism is in a state of affliction such as sadness, despair, guilt, or anxiety, that state gives rise to neural maps associated with functional disequilibrium and pointing toward illness or disorders.14 In the mind, “feelings” express negative states such as despair or sadness, which the body experiences in its own way, as “emotions.” N euroscientific research thus sheds light on the central role of the body, which transmits to the mind adequate and verified information about the current state of the organism, allowing the brain to react effectively. Damasio’s notion of the “body-minded brain”15 points to the centrality of the body and to how the brain creates evolving representations of bodily changes, which lead to mental events and feelings. Racine, while leaving out the idea of the brain, already profoundly explored the equality between body and mind and did not hesitate to reveal how body and mind mimic each other in correlated processes. Without possessing the current terminology or knowledge, he glimpsed an important mechanism whose value has been reaffirmed by neurobiology, namely, that the body is part of the content of psychic consciousness.16 It is precisely such a principle of correspondence that the playwright represents for us through Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ melancholy, which takes a physical and mental pathway simultaneously. The modalities of 11

Ibid., p. 139. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), p. 112. 13 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), p. 318. 14 “The maps related to sorrow … are associated with states of functional disequilibrium. The ease of action is reduced. There is pain of some kind, signs of disease or signs of physiological discord—all of which are indicative of a less than optimal coordination of life functions. If unchecked, the situation is conducive to disease and death.” Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 138. 15 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 223. 16 See in particular ibid., p. 226. 12

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that physical mapping are sensory and “somatosensory” signals such as temperature, pain, and touch – the “images” or “maps” Damasio identifies as modifications directly linked to the corporeal realm and the most direct signals of the internal state. Racine also conceives of bodily signals as cognitive processes that are not irrational but that instead constitute the basis for the feelings and consciousness. In the first place, Phaedra’s inner split is displaced onto the body. But in addition – and this makes Racine interesting for neurobiologists – he observes the flip side of their relationship, namely, the way that the body fashions mental contents, how mind and body reflect each other. At many times in the play, Racine shows that the foundation of the passions is initially a corporeal construction made up of sensory manifestations and blood, which gives rise to feelings. Let us note the importance for Phaedra of blood. When she perceives Hippolytus, she remarks, “My blood forgets to flow, my tongue to speak / What I am come to say” (Act II, scene 5) (Voici vers mon coeur tout mon sang se retire. / J’oublie, en le voyant, ce que je viens lui dire; lines 581–582).17 A t the sight of the external object (Hippolytus), a physiological reaction occurs, constituting one of the bases for the feeling (turmoil or internal excitation manifested by forgetfulness). The sensory path by which the body transcribes the basis for the feelings is traced as well. Phaedra is struck by a violent fit every time her confidante mentions Hippolytus’ name: “My lips / Tremble to say his name” (Act I, scene 3) (À ce nom fatal, je tremble, je frissonne; line 261). The diverse sensorial manifestations occur automatically, without the control of the reason, and thereby reveal her turmoil. Phaedra must then confess that “reason reigns no longer o’er myself … I have lost control of all my senses” (Act III, scene 1) (ma faible raison ne règne plus … j’ai de mes sens abandonné l’empire; lines 760–1). That same process occurs when the heroine affirms the connection between sight, the sound of Hippolytus’ voice, her blushing, and her confusion. When Phaedra describes her first meeting with Hippolytus, she identifies a physiological and mental sequence: “I look’d, alternately turn’d pale and blush’d/ To see him” (Act I, scene 3) (Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue; line 273). That is, sight produces antinomic sensations (blushing and turning pale) and transmits a corporeal reaction that neurobiologists call “emotion,” preceding “feelings,” which affect Phaedra to the point that her “soul grew all distraught” (Act I, scene 3) (trouble; line 274). Then once again, physical sensations become more intense, particularly since they are at odds with each other. Phaedra recalls: “A mist obscured my vision, and my voice / Falter’d, my blood ran cold, then burn’d like fire” (Act I, scene 3) (Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler, / Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler; lines 275–6, my emphasis).

17 On the role of blood in the play, see Patrick Dandrey, “Le sang de don Gormas et les yeux d’Hippolyte: Dramaturgie et imaginaire médical au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 182 (1994): 53–64.


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That physical mapping also occurs in Hippolytus, whose hand, when touched by Phaedra, suddenly freezes, as Theramenes notices: “What mean these signs of sorrow? / Where is your sword? Why are you pale, confused?” (Act II, scene 6) (Pourquoi, Seigneur, pourquoi ces marques de douleur? / Je vous vois sans épée, interdit, sans couleur? lines 715–6, my emphasis). Felt or “sensed experience” mediates his internal state, and here again, the somatic repertoires indicate the character’s psychological turmoil. At the same time, Racine, through Hippolytus’ pallor, shows that consciousness has its root in sensations of the body. For at that precise moment he feels his own guilt and transgression stemming from his illegitimate love for Aricia. He stands petrified (a physical reaction) and overcome (a mental manifestation) when he realizes that he cannot kill in Phaedra the monster he recognizes in himself. The “mark” of his passionate love (and the conflict it causes) is inscribed in him physically and mentally. The mapping of emotion in the two characters shows a body that, according to Guénoun, enacts “desire and the effects of the taboo, the place of a materialization of an inner psychic conflict.”18 The body becomes an important transmitter of the cleavage between erotic passion and the restraints placed on it by social or moral conscience, as indicated by immobility (a physical aspect) combined with the feeling of guilt or turmoil (a mental element), which strike Hippolytus when Phaedra tries to touch him. It is therefore clear that Racine has assigned a key role to the processes intimately linked to the body and to the body’s capacity for expressing the power of affects in emotional reactions. He shows that intense passions affect body and mind as a single substance, and that cognition is based on the combination of physical and mental manifestations.

Image/Imagination For Phaedra, it is the content of her mind particularly – her image of Hippolytus – that serves as the key trigger to her sensory reactions. The sight (real or imaginary) of the hero produces antagonistic reactions in her: rigidity and trembling, heat and shivering. That phenomenon is crucial because it places the image, and with it, the imagination, at the center of Phaedra’s melancholy, as both source and symptom of her illness. Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus – very close to the love Lafayette portrays between Mme de Clèves and N emours, in its sudden onset and its physiological mapping as a “mark” – depends on an image: that of Hippolytus, whom Phaedra cannot erase from her consciousness. An important portion of her hallucinatory fantasies focus on Hippolytus, whom she sees constantly (line 287). For seventeenth-century doctors, the outbreak of love melancholy was related to sight. Jacques Ferrand in particular believed that the symptoms of erotic melancholy manifest themselves the first time a susceptible person lays eyes on the object. Subsequently, the infatuated person internalizes the image of the love 18

Guénon, “Mélancolie, hystérie ou le refus classique,” pp. 57–8.

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object, which becomes part of her imagination and produces a melancholic disorder stemming from the desired object’s absence, or his rejection, or his contempt for her.19 The illness is linked to the “image” the subject creates of the external object, that is, the fictive reproduction of the object in the imagination. The image/imagination plays a special role in Racine’s play, in particular by referring back to the original source of the illness and to the psychophysiological mechanisms stemming from it. By contrast, for Descartes “the imagination tends to deceive the soul.”20 One of Descartes’s central arguments in the Méditations (Meditations) is that the imagination does not have the capacity to reproduce images clearly and distinctly.21 Rebecca Wilkin rightly observes that for Descartes, that faculty is either deceptive or it is superfluous to the human essence, because it does not have the capacity to represent clearly and stands apart from the self’s faculty for conceiving.22 By contrast, Racine shows that the image of the object when Phaedra first perceives it, and its reproduction in her imagination, are at the origin of the “mapping” that produces melancholic symptoms. The imagination is neither passive nor superfluous but an active process reproducing and creating replicas of the object (Hippolytus/Theseus) on which the heroine’s suffering is based. The seventeenth-century medical tradition classified the imagination as one of the inward senses, which also included common sense and memory. For Burton, the faculty of fantasy, or imagination, is a mode of cognition: it engages in thinking by recalling things absent to the mind or by creating new things on its own.23 The “corruption” of fantasy, however, is a symptom of melancholy. Du Laurens identifies the imagination as a valuable and noble faculty that represents to the intellect all the things it has received from common sense.24 He focuses primarily 19 Jacques Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour ou melancholie erotique. Discours curieux qui enseigne a cognoistre l’essence, les causes, les signes, & les remedes de ce mal fantastique (Paris: Denis Moreau, 1623), pp. 46–7. 20 “L’imagination tend à tromper l’âme.” René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), art. 211. 21 The image of wax in the Second Meditation demonstrates that the imagination “leads imperceptibly to error” and that “I could not even conceive through the imagination what wax is, and … only my understanding conceives of it” (porte insensiblement dans l’erreur; je ne saurais pas même concevoir par l’imagination ce que c’est que cette cire, et qu’il n’y a que mon entendement seul qui le conçoive). René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, (ed.) Jean-Marie Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 87. Similarly, in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes reaffirms that the imaginative faculty needs the intellect in order to conceive (p. 175). 22 Rebecca M. Wilkin, “Feminizing Imagination in France, 1563–1678,” doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000, pp. 108–109. 23 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, (ed.) T C. Faulkner, N .K. Kiessling, and R L. Blair, Introduction and commentary by J. B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth, 6 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), p. 139. 24 Du Laurens, Discours, p. 194.


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on its capacity to “feign” (a term that is not to be understood negatively) or to construct images “as she likes,” amassing them from the treasury of memory but also composing and combining new images. The imagination serves the intellect through its practices, including contemplation.25 Both Burton and Du Laurens note its relation to perception and to the human body: once humoral corruption sets in, the cognitive processes are disturbed and the imagination becomes troubled. The surprising thing is less the opposition between seventeenth-century medical conceptions and Descartes’s position on the imagination (since they emerged during the same historical period) than the central idea of “printing” or “engraving” that appears in the medical texts. In the section on melancholic disturbances, which immediately follows the discussion of the imagination, Du Laurens describes how melancholics imprint or engrave images linked to their condition. Hence the love melancholic will imprint the object of his love in his mind and will constantly evoke that image.26 We have seen the importance of lasting marks in Lafayette’s fiction. The imagination “maps” or engraves objects, experiences, or bodily changes, a process that reveals that the mind is closely shaped by the body. At another level, the idea of representation becomes important within the context of fidelity to the object re-created. This does not mean that the image created has to resemble exactly the object in the outside world but that it comes about through an interaction with the body: the body’s own “desires” (humors or signals) play a role in creating the image. The link between early modern medical thought and Racine’s tragedies lies in the idea that images are mental snapshots that signal the body’s state. And finally, memory is a key factor in representation: the sense of self may depend on the recall of an image. In Racine’s Phèdre, all these different aspects of the imagination come together: wakefulness, image, representation, and memory. Disturbances related to melancholy evoke a past moment for the character, through which Racine explores the connection between mental affliction and physical symptoms. The obsessively repeated image Phaedra sees is a piece of the distressing past with traumatic connotations for the protagonist. She re-creates the moment when she met Hippolytus for the first time. He looked like a hero, “faithful, proud / E’en to a slight disdain” (Act II, scene 5) (fidèle, mais fier, et même un peu farouche; line 638). This meeting is also modeled on another image from an even more remote past, the moment when Theseus himself “cross’d the waves” (Act II, scene 5) (traversa les flots; line 643), came to Crete and ravished her. Her visual image is the result of modifications her imagination has made, a selective replica because it combines Hippolytus and Theseus into the image of the perfect lover, as she would have wished him to be. This means that she really sees Theseus in Hippolytus, and loves Theseus not as he is – an unfaithful husband and absent king – but as the young man who is “worthy to win the love of Minos’ daughters ” (Act II, scene 5) (digne sujet des vœux des filles de Minos; line 643), a hero with beautiful eyes, innocent 25

26

Ibid., pp. 194–99. Ibid., pp. 254–6.


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words, and intrepid ways. It is thus a re-creation and phantasmal erotization of the desired object. Julia Kristeva calls this phenomenon “the opportunity to … replay [a bygone meaning] in illusion and disillusion.”27 The heroine vaporizes the father and replaces him with the son, privileging fantasy over reality. It is from the standpoint of his study of human beings’ dependence on emotional reactions, in conjunction with images/imagination, that Racine anticipates the psychoanalytical key idea that in conjunction with repressive coping styles, the imagination can serve as a defense mechanism. At a second level, we can see the affinity between early modern medical conceptions and literary perspectives on the imagination. Racine perceives that mental images are not replicas of one particular object but that the individual engages with his or her own organism and environment and reconstructs objects from memory, generating images that constitute the self. Phaedra, then, is in love not with Hippolytus but with an idealized image of him that transforms Theseus into an innocent and faithful young man (an embellished image, given the long history of her husband’s infidelity).28 That sort of repetition of a prior scene unfolding in the psyche brings to mind what Endel Tulving and Martin Lepage call “episodic memory,” that is, a partial and incomplete memory re-created as mental “images.” Thanks to visual representation, the person “sees” or “visits” the past. These images can be of a visual, auditory, verbal, spatial, or pictorial nature.29 Phaedra frequently revisits the past. When she flees into the imagined scenario, she reproduces images from the past, like that of the labyrinth where Theseus killed the Minotaur with Ariadne’s help; but – and this is key – she usurps her sister’s place and substitutes Hippolytus for her husband.30 27

115.

28

Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir. Dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p.

As in the case of the princesse de Clèves, the imagined infidelity appears only shortly after the protagonists marry. It therefore seems, as Louise Horowitz argues, that marriage is the source of an unidentified “trauma” and leads to the repression of desire just as the couple is forming a civil unit and submitting to the laws of society. Louise Horowitz, “Racine’s Laws,” Dalhousie French Studies 49 (1999): 139–40. 29 Endel Tulving and Martin Lepage, “Where in the Brain Is the Awareness of One’s Past?” in Memory, Brain, and Belief, (ed.) Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 212–14. 30 The labyrinth is the place of sexual initiation and the force of desire, but also a “matriarchal” place where man’s power is effaced, since Theseus places himself under the guidance of the female sex. Phaedra says she would have “revealed … / The subtle windings of the labyrinth” Act II, scene 5 (enseigné les détours; line 656) to Hippolytus, would have “wished to lead the way through” (devant … [lui] voulu marcher”; line 660), guiding him to his doom or salvation. For her, the labyrinth is an (imaginary) place where she frees herself from society’s demands, in this regard following her mother, who engaged in a “labyrinthine” pleasure with a bull. See Charles Mauron, L’inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine (Paris: Corti, 1969), p. 115. More recently, Mitchell Greenberg has studied the sexual transgression inherent in the episode of the labyrinth, explaining that the “forehead huge … armed with fearsome horns,” the “yellow scales” (front large … armé


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That reproduction, then, is an episodic, increasingly important reprise by which Phaedra places herself at the center of a past she has altered and reconstructed: My sister would have arm’d you with the clue. But no, therein would Phaedra have forestall’d her. Love would have first inspired me with the thought; And I it would have been whose timely aid Had taught you all the labyrinth’s crooked ways … . I would myself have wish’d to lead the way … . Phaedra with you would have explored the maze, With you emerged in safety, or have perish’d. (Act II, scene 5) Ma sœur du fil fatal eût armé votre main. Mais non, dans ce dessein je l’aurais devancée. L’amour m’en eût d’abord inspiré la pensée. C’est moi, Prince, c’est moi, dont l’utile secours Vous eût du Labyrinthe enseigné les detours … . Moi-même devant vous j’aurais voulu marcher, E t Phèdre au labyrinthe avec vous descendue Se serait avec vous retrouvée ou perdue. (lines 652–62, my emphasis)

By recollecting the past, the heroine replays and evokes the source of her ill: the strong feeling of guilt toward her sister stemming from Phaedra’s betrayal, followed by her abandonment of Ariadne, when Phaedra allowed the young, unfaithful Theseus to take her away, leaving Ariadne shattered: “My sister Ariadne, by what love / Were you betray’d to death, on lonely shores / Forsaken!” (Act I, scene 3) (Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessé, / Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée; lines 253–4). The reconstruction of that past reenacts a distressing trauma for the two sisters, an important moment when Phaedra became guilty of a crime against Ariadne. That past returns during her fits of melancholy and is reproduced in her imagination every time she evokes Hippolytus. The image of that young hero involuntarily and cruelly produces the image of Theseus and the recollection of a troubling past, Phaedra’s ravishment and Ariadne’s abandonment. As Harriet Stone observes, Phaedra lives in the phantasmagorical scenario of her mental representations, which become a substitute for the real world she can no longer see.31 In her hallucinations, the heroine shifts back and forth between the de cornes menaçantes, écailles jaunissantes; lines 1517–1518), and the reference to the sea monster as a “bull” Act V, scene 6 (taureau; line 1519) evoke the cursed sexuality of Phaedra and her mother. Mitchell Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 146. 31 Harriet Stone, “The Seduction of the Father in Phèdre and Athalie,” in Actes de Baton Rouge, (ed.) Selma Zebouni (Seattle: PFSCL, 1986), p. 154.

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present and the past. She sees herself, for example, “seated in the forest’s shade” (Act I, scene 3) (assise à l’ombre des forêts; line 176) and seems to perceive “Thro’glorios dust flying in full career, / A chariot” (Act I, scene 3) (un char fuyant dans la carrière; line 177). The world of her imagination depicts the forest where Hippolytus was born of an Amazon mother and where he regularly trains (ironically, it is also the place where her rival Aricia goes to hide out with him and where they consummate their love). At other moments, she flees to places from the past: the port and the labyrinth, the site of Theseus’ victory, of their escape together, but also of her abandonment of her sister. She also recognizes in that place her own feeling of abandonment following Theseus’ many infidelities. When she learns that Hippolytus actually loves a rival, her unsatisfied passion and the elaborate secret scenario she imagines of the young lovers seducing each other produce an anxiety attack and a new sense of betrayal and abandonment: They love each other! By what secret charm Have they deceived me? Where, and when, and how Met they? … Have they often been seen Talking together? Did they seek the shades Of thickest woods? Alas! Full freedom had they To see each other. (Act IV, scene 6) Ils s’aiment! Par quel charme ont-ils trompé mes yeux? Comment se sont-ils vus? depuis quand? dans quels lieux? … Les a-t-on vus souvent se parler, se chercher? Dans le fond des forêts allaient-ils se cacher? Hélas! ils se voyaient avec pleine licence. (lines 1231–2, 1235–7)

Her imagination depicts a place, the forest where the lovers hide from her sight, and the invocation of that image culminates in a phase of mania – or furor, the Latin word (fureur; line 1323) – and “jealous rage” (Act IV, scene 6) (jalouse rage; line 1258), followed by another relapse in which delirium alternates with depression. In the context of these phantasmagorical projections, we may certainly speak of Phaedra’s hallucinations. Unable to live in the real world, she escapes into the fantasy of a reproduced past, both erotic and oneiric. In Hippolytus, Phaedra sees the past, which cannot be eradicated from memory. That explains her obsession, her desire to transform him so as to expiate her sin. When she desperately pleads with Hippolytus to look at her, that is, to recognize her as she is, she seeks through his approval a revision of the past that is preventing her from recovering her health: “Your own eyes might convince you of the truth, / If for one moment you could look at me” (Act II, scene 5) (Il suffit de tes yeux pour t’en persuader / Si tes yeux un moment pouvaient me regarder; lines 691–2). By means of the hero’s gaze, both real (through his eyes) and imagined (in her imagination), Phaedra seeks to free herself from the traumas of the past:


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her abandonment of her sister, the indifference of her unfaithful husband, and the emotional void she suffers as a result. On one hand, Phaedra is reliving the troubling experience of her own ravishment, which reawakens her feelings of guilt about her sister. On the other, she seeks to transform that past by constantly re-creating it. Hippolytus, an imaginary object, becomes a sort of mirror, simultaneously himself and his father within a spatial reality where everything is repeated indefinitely within Phaedra’s mind and outside it, and where time turns back on itself, is neutralized and reduced to space. Phaedra wants to prove she is alive, the erotic object of another’s desire. She would replace the father’s abandonment with the son’s love and thereby continue to express her sexuality even as she expiated her sin. But since Hippolytus refuses to see her, that is, to consent to her, she remains torn between past and present and sees her “loss” inscribed in his eyes (line 910). She is unable to forget, revise, and overcome that past and, at the same time, unable to bear her unsatisfied sexual drives in the present. The heroine remains a prisoner to an internal split between two images, that of the father and that of the son, and between the past and the desire to modify it, to transform it by overcoming the traumatic experience. Racine situates himself at the site of the “primary processes” (before Freud theorized them), that is, the successive layers of the unconscious flowing freely from it. The psychic scenario infinitely repeats and constantly reproduces the powerful feelings of love (at the individual level) and the predetermining past (at the symbolic level). Phaedra remains captive to her illness, which moves unhindered from her mind to her body and which, by the intensity of the trauma, damages her physical and mental health. The protagonist is imprisoned within her mind because of the impossibility of maintaining her physical and psychic integrity, her frustration at her failure to possess Hippolytus except in her fantasies, and her self-blame. At the end of the play, Racine depicts the return of the hallucinatory and oneiric world. He shows Phaedra’s mania (or furor), either as a symptom of melancholy or as a new distinct illness. In classical medicine, “mania” designated “an aberration of thought and a disturbance in what is usual and habitual in the state of health, without fever.”32 Phaedra’s mania is thus the last phase in a rejected and unresolved turmoil, which marks her full entry into the world of the imagination and its phantasmagorical projections, with no means of escape.

32 Jackie Pigeaud, La maladie de l’âme: Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989), p. 100. Pigeaud focuses on the question of the different definitions of mania (pp. 100–107) and on the confusion between furor/mania and insania (pp. 252–5). Mania could be considered an affliction of the body and/or of the mind, a separate illness or a symptom of melancholy. N evertheless, in common parlance, mania and melancholy overlapped.


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Sometimes, to soother her secret pain, she clasps Her children close, and bathes them with her tears; Then, suddenly, the mother’s love forgotten, She thrusts them from her with a look of horror, She wanders to and fro with doubtful steps; Her vacant eye no longer knows us. (Act V, scene 5) Le trouble semble croître en son âme incertaine… . Elle prend ses enfants et les baigne de pleurs; Et soudain, renonçant à l’amour maternel, Sa main avec horreur les repousse loin d’elle. Elle porte au hasard ses pas irrésolus; Son œil tout égaré ne nous reconnaît plus. (lines 1470–6)

It is difficult to know whether, at the time, mania was perceived as a symptom of melancholy or as a separate illness. This complication goes back to the Corpus Hippocraticum. In fact, in common parlance, the illnesses of mania and melancholy were often confused and the multiple subdivisions that had existed since Hippocrates were not recognized. Let us note, however, that in Racine’s play there is a desire to push Phaedra’s melancholy to the extreme. The malady brings about a complete breakdown of her reason and an “excessive mental tension for a short time,”33 which the doctor of antiquity Caelius Aurelius, the most important figure in the history of psychiatry, diagnosed as the key feature of madness. Whether it is an illness of both the mind and the body or, in a more restricted sense, solely a malady of the soul, that state of disorientation is crucial in Racine’s play because it manifests a radical disaffectation toward the external world. The heroine is unable to see or recognize those around her, shoving away her children, “starv[ing] her mother-love,” (Act V, scene 5) and no longer recognizing her loved ones (lines 1473 and 1476). We now know that a pathological emotional disinvestment is the sign of profound depression, a stage of regressive somatization which patients describe as psychic death. Joyce McDougall explains that, when someone is abandoned, frustrated, or rejected, “‘love leads to psychic death, that is, to the loss not only of mental barriers against implosion from others but also of my body limits. N othing short of total indifference towards any loving attachment can assure my survival.’ It then becomes necessary to maintain a barrier of ‘disaffectation’ toward others, that is a barrier created by the loss of all awareness of affect … and even toward the narcissistic investment of one’s own body and mind.”34 Phaedra experiences a similar process of radical disaffectation. Deprived of her “image of the body” (which has become impossible without Hippolytus), she abandons herself to mania and, a psychic death that will soon be followed by physical death by poison. 33

34

Pigeaud, La maladie de l’âme, pp. 105–106. McDougall, Theaters of the Body, p. 37.


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According to Jean Emelina, this disaffectation and the ensuing death represent “the physical ravages of the ego in the grip of the id and superego. She ‘dies of shame’ in the literal sense of the word. The frustrated libido devours the subject instead of devouring its object. It is not until Freud that the rights of desire could finally be looked in the face, and even then not without difficulty.”35 Hippolytus’ tragic death destroys any possibility that the heroine will continue to strive (if only in her imagination) to possess him. The hero’s decease annihilates the very production of her desire, an integral part of her, without which she can no longer survive. Phaedra uses a slow and violent poison as the last stratagem to feel her body one last time, alive through her suffering. All the same, even the “strange and fatal chill” (Act V, scene 5) (froid inconnu; line 1640) – that is, the act of killing the senses through suicide – which Medea’s poison offers her will not put an end to the crisis. She knows that, facing her father, Minos, the judge of Hades who governs by laws, she will continue to languish, to wither, “drown’d in tears, and scorch’d by fire” (Act II, scene 5) (dans les feux, dans les larmes; line 690). She will never be able to escape the past, which hounds her in the present and into the future. Racine depicts a cyclical time that leaves the heroine without defenses against the past’s reassertion in the present. That eternal suffering is particularly tragic since Phaedra does not have the option of Molière’s Argan, who expels the “abject” body through a monomaniacal preoccupation with his own health, transmitted in his cries of “I don’t want anything to do with it [the body], I expel it.”36 Such a conclusion is denied Phaedra by her lineage, which fills the present with the past. She knows that the dual cycle of life and death, rather than the place of an appeasement, is inscribed in her being and destroys any possibility that she will escape her fate. Since her mother is Pasiphae, daughter of Helios (the sun god), she is the granddaughter of life, day, and light. Her terrible “heritage” (Act III, scene 3) (affreux héritage; line 861) is the result both of her mother’s crime – her sexual relationship with a bull – and of the fact that her father, Minos, “holds the fatal urn” (Act IV, scene 6) (tient l’urne fatale; line 1278) of her life: Minos is judge of all the ghosts in hell. Ah! how his awful shade will start and shudder When he shall see his daughter brought before him, Forced to confess sins of such varied dye, Crimes it may be unknown to hell itself! What will thou say, my father, at a sight So dire? I think I see thee drop the urn, And, seeking some unheard-of punishment, Thyself become my executioner. (Act IV, scene 6) Jean Emelina, Racine infiniment (Saint Just La Pendue: SEDES, 1999), p. 147. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 10. I borrow the terms “abject” and “corporeal expulsion” from Kristeva, who identifies the corpse as the ultimate abjection, death infecting life. 35

36

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Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature Minos juge aux enfers tous les pâles humains. Ah! combien frémira son ombre épouvantée, Lorsqu’il verra sa fille à ses yeux présentée, Contrainte d’avouer tant de forfaits divers, Et des crimes peut-être inconnus aux enfers! Que diras-tu, mon père, à ce spectacle horrible? Je crois voir de ta main tomber l’urne terrible, Je crois te voir, cherchant un supplice nouveau, Toi-même, de ton sang devenir le bourreau. (lines 1280–8)

Phaedra is doomed to wander without respite and without end, torn between the torment that life offers her and that which awaits her at her death. Although her father now incarnates divine law in the world of the dead, he chose to marry Pasiphae, representative of the world of erotic desire and daughter of the sun god.37 The heroine is monstrous as a result of her hybrid nature: in her life and death, erotic drives and their dissolution, primitive nature and civilization, past and present all work in concert. It is that set of conflicting binary forces that appear in Phaedra’s body, which becomes the place of action for a conflict between adverse forces. Jules Brody identifies these two concurrent powers at work in Racine’s play in Freudian terms, as the “pleasure principle” (oriented toward the immediate satisfaction of the instincts) and the “reality principle” (the regulation and restriction of pleasure).38 Freud elaborates two innate human tendencies: a life drive (eros) and a death and destruction drive (thanatos), the tendency of all organic life to return to a prior state of things. Racine, through the idea of a struggle between a psychic force oriented toward pleasure – an autonomous driving force that impels the characters to listen to the voice of their passion – and an “unpleasant” psychic force that blocks pleasure through guilt consciousness, depicts two concurrent principles that cannot unit harmoniously in either Phaedra or Hippolytus and which produce their breakdown and suffering. At the same time, eros and thanatos, life and death, civilization and a precivilized state where instincts and desire reign are all inscribed in Phaedra’s genealogy.

37 In Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University of Press, 2001), Mitchell Greenberg points out that “Phèdre appears as the interstice of ‘biology’ and ‘ideology’ in that in her, in her mythically confined origins, … nature and culture are already at war” (p. 105). 38 See Jules Brody, “Freud, Racine, and the Epistemology of Tragedy,” Philosophy and Literature 14, 1 (1990): 1–23. Freud elaborates that theory in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (“Jenseits des Lustprinzips),” Psychologie der Unbewussten, Studienausgabe, Vol. 3, 6th edn [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975], pp. 213–72).


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The Duality of Human Nature Phaedra’s dual nature also shows Racine’s affinity for the ideas of Port-Royal, and the character’s conflict allows him to express the religious notions of original sin and the bereft state of the being deprived of grace. In his Confessions, S aint Augustine had pointed to his own divided will – the conflict between light and darkness, God and the Devil, divine love and sensual pleasure – which battled each other and hindered the search for peace and tranquility. In the seventeenth century, Pascal reaffirmed that cleavage as a constitutive element of humanity and, in his Pensées, argued that the human being is constantly torn – like Phaedra – between opposing forces, enduring an “internecine war … between reason and the passions … always divided and at odds with himself.”39 The Pascalian human being “oscillates between two natures, that is, between the principles and feelings of nature before the Fall, and the appetites of fallen nature, worldly desires.”40 She exemplifies the paradox of the Jansenist human being, who is “drowned, lost on an earth that is hardly more than a point in ‘the visible world,’” and who suffers miserably from the principles that guide him or her but who knows s/he is deprived of grace.41 Phaedra’s suicide at the end of the play reveals that the situation, without hope and without solution, overwhelms her soul, leaving her a prisoner to her desire. The schism that Racine portrays in his protagonist, which links the playwright to Port-Royal, is between the consciousness or horror of sin and the indomitable power of erotic desire, the conflict between libidinal transgression and moral conscience. A large share of her melancholy is produced by her split between her rightful conscience and her illicit love. Fully conscious of the “frightful crime” (Act V, scene 1) (crime affreux; line 1291), she is visibly in torment and confesses to her confidante to relieve herself of her oppression: “When you shall know / My crime, my death will follow none the less” (Act I, scene 3) (Quand tu sauras mon crime et le sort qui m’accable; line 241). This leads Lucien Goldmann to call Phaedra the “righteous sinner”42 who recognizes her own guilt and who, despite her incestuous desire, has moments of introspection. According to N annerl Keohane, Jansenism claims that, “however frail and pitiful man appears by comparison with the infinite universe, he has one advantage over it – his consciousness. He can know his frailty, know that he must die, and he can know himself.”43 Pascal 39

“Guerre intestine … entre la raison et les passions … toujours divisé, et contraire à lui-même.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (ed.) Dominique Descotes (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), L 412-621. 40 Édouard Morot-Sir, La métaphysique de Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1973), p. 106. 41 Lucien Jerphagnon, Pascal et la souffrance, preface by Julien-Eymard d’Angers (Paris: Les éditions ouvrières, 1955), p. 122. 42 Lucien Goldmann, LeDieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 421. 43 N annerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 277.

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declares in his Pensées that “the greatness of man is great in that it knows itself to be bereft,”44 and Phaedra, precisely, bears witness to this consciousness of her bereft state and to Jansenist human greatness when she admits she is guilty toward herself and toward Theseus. As Christian Surber notes, however, words and confessions cannot resolve the tensions tearing her apart.45 Racine clearly shows that, far from putting an end to the dilemma, speaking never provides comfort and confessing does not end the prolonged silence. Charles Mauron understands this persistent silence as an element of self-repression.46 Like in the Princesse de Clèves, confession scenes only break her silence but not her passion. Phaedra’s melancholy expresses the “Where am I?” of the Jansenist man in exile on earth, his search for peace and his inability to find it in this life and apart from the Divine.47 In addition, Jansenism argues for the “punishment of preexisting sins [because] God abandons us to ourselves and to the perversity of our hearts.”48 Familial guilt is an important theme in Racine’s play, returning as the monstrosity of tainted desire – adulterous and incestuous – but at the same time forming a roadblock to that desire. The interconnection between the feeling of love and the corruption of that love is also apparent in Phaedra’s mother. This indicates that a dual nature is part of the maternal lineage and is passed on by Venus’ punishment. The “hidden god” in the title of Goldmann’s study is still present in the play in the form of Venus and the Sun, two agents who do not reveal themselves directly but who observe and act through intermediaries.49 Simon Critchley discerns that Phaedra “is watched throughout by the Sun and she is acutely conscious of being watched by this silent, distant, but omnipresent Jansenist God.”50 Similarly, Venus makes a moral judgment of the protagonist, imposing the family stigma from one generation to the next, and the illness that afflicts the protagonist shows that Phaedra is without grace. Phèdre has been called a hereditary tragedy in which the sins of the mother come back to haunt the daughter through the vengeance of a “cruel God”: Venus. Racine presents us with a pathology that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Originally, illness is imposed from without: Venus harbors wrath against the 44 “La grandeur de l’homme est grande en ce qu’il se connaît misérable.” Pascal, Pensées, L 397-114. 45 Christian Surber, Parole, personnage et référence dans le théâtre de Jean Racine (Geneva: Droz, 1992), pp. 219–20. Surber, however, rejects any Jansenist reading of human greatness and insists that Phaedra’s notion of guilt is not a “salutary realization linked to a linguistic elaboration … [but] rather more of a Spinozan ideal” (p. 218). 46 Mauron, L’inconscient, p. 35. 47 Philippe Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: Colin, 1970), p. 252. 48 Antoine Arnauld, Œuvres philosophiques, Vol. 1, (ed.) Elmar J. Kremer and Denis Moreau (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), pp. 265–266. 49 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché. 50 Simon Critchley, “I Want to Die, I Hate My Life—Phaedra’s Malaise,” New Literary History 35, 5 (2004): 22.


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descendants of Pasiphae, the daughter of Helios and mother of Phaedra, whom Venus cursed with perverse sexual desire. Illness preexists in Phaedra’s lineage but is transmitted from within: through the blood. Scholars have understood this blood disorder metaphorically, linked to the present/absent gods who impose Phaedra’s monstrous desire but watch her silently. To elaborate on this idea, we can understand illness in terms of an archaeological mythology of heredity: “illness” constitutes the center of hereditary transmission. As Jean Borie notes, in the early modern period, views on heredity were dictated by the Church; a scientific approach to heredity began only in the nineteenth century, when there was particular interest in the idea of the family curse. Religious theories gave way to a scientific rationalization of the “degeneration” of entire family lines based on notions of “blood.”51 Similarly, at the center of Racine’s hereditary play is the idea that illness makes Phaedra the victim of a “contagion” in which family illness and individual illness intersect. Because she is the last cursed one in her family, her death will end her “race” and with it that pathological inheritance. Hence, in addition to a religious preoccupation with the transmission of sin and a concern with the political question of succession (centered on Theseus and Aricia), there is in Racine’s play a question of heritage, treated from a mythological angle that places illness at its center. Racine’s view is almost deterministic in that the transmission of illness cannot be interrupted. Yet according to Borie, the idea that, through the power of clear reason and moral conscience, the individual’s reaction can make a difference remains ingrained in French thought. The hereditary perspective is never separated from a moral discourse.52 And it is Phaedra’s consciousness of her crime that crystallizes the appeal to moral conscience and reason in the play. Furthermore, we can understand Phaedra’s references to blood in biological terms. The importance of blood in the play allows us to read Phaedra’s illness within the context of two theories that coexisted in the seventeenth century: the biological understanding of melancholy as stemming from a transformation of blood; and the belief, a precursor to an understanding of “genetics,” in the perversion of blood as a hereditary mark transmitted at birth. Simon Critchley compares Phaedra’s hereditary dilemma to a virus that flows through her: “Blood is the existential mark of the past, of one’s bindedness to a past that you might think you are through with, but which is not through with you… . Contaminated by the virus of Venus that flows in her veins, Phaedra cannot exist in the present.”53 Ideas of predestination, crime, and monstrosity are distinctly linked to the key term “blood.” Phaedra exclaims: “It is the will of Venus, and I perish, / Last, most unhappy of a family / Where all were wretched” (Act I, scene 3) (Puisque Vénus le veut, de ce sang deplorable / Je péris la dernière, et la plus miserable;

51 Jean Borie, Mythologies de l’hérédité au XIXe siècle (Paris: Galilée, 1981), pp. 16 and 95. 52 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 53 Critchley, “I Want to Die,” p. 31.


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lines 257–8).54 It is the family blood that Venus condemns through the inevitable torments inflicted on Phaedra (line 278). The notion of an inherited fault or sin is a religious element of the play that points to Racine’s affiliation with Port Royal. Yet we can also see it as an inquiry of a biological nature. Even without understanding the “science of blood,” Racine depicts the importance of bloodlines in transmitting certain traits from one generation to the next. We could even go so far to say that Phaedra is the product of her biological “makeup” (or genetics, as we would now say). In addition, the biological view that illness is produced from within can be found in seventeenth-century medical theories. In 1620 William Harvey described the circulation of blood through the heart. In Racine’s Phèdre, blood (line 220), the heart (lines 222 and 224), and illness are all evoked in relation to one another. While Racine does not describe the circulatory system directly, he alludes to it through the role that blood plays in causing physical changes. More important, however, the idea of blood was prominent in theories of melancholy in Racine’s time. Timothy Bright discerned that a change in temperature and an alteration in the melancholic humor could bring about changes in the patient. He distinguished between natural melancholy, caused by a surge of blood that had become too hot, which then produced cognitive disturbances; and unnatural melancholy, produced by residues of thick and impure parts of the blood, which was expressed as despair and a disorder of the reason.55 Similarly, Phaedra’s mental ordeal originates in physiological changes linked to blood.

Melancholy and Sociopolitical Transgression Phaedra opens with the predominant theme of the characters’ inhibition in the face of their passionate love and melancholic suffering, caused by the split between law and desire. But Theseus’ return brings about the articulation of the repressed in the characters’ consciousness and reveals their sociopolitical transgression. It would be wrong to understand Hippolytus’ or Phaedra’s despondency solely as a passive response to the conflict between their desire and their conscience. In the twentieth century, Freud explained that melancholy represents a revolt produced by the subject’s disillusionment with structures, prescriptions, and social prohibitions, which the melancholic pushes away by means of his illness.56 The melancholic’s discourse is focused on the relationship between the individual and society, and the subject assumes a rebellious stance, rejecting the mechanisms of power. In 54

[More literally: “Since Venus wills it, from this disgraceful blood / I perish last of all, and the most wretched.”—trans.] 55 See Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London: John VVindet, 1586), pp. 190ff. 56 Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” in Psychologie des Unbewußten, Studienausgabe, Vol. 3, 6th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), pp. 199–200.


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this context, we can read the melancholy of the two protagonists in Phèdre as a transgression of the law of desire established by Theseus. In proclaiming her right to choose her object of love (as her husband does) and to substitute the son for the father, Phaedra opposes a prohibition: that of the law of the monarch. In fact, the choice of object is significant because the order violated is the law against incest. Similarly, Hippolytus falls in love with his father’s enemy, a taboo choice in Troezen, and quells the political revolt within him that his choice of object entails. For both characters, the transgressive dimension assumes the status of a violation of natural law, a radical usurpation of the relationship between father and son, man and woman, monarch and subject. In its place, the “pervert” puts a sexual relationship that deviates from the norm and from the law. For the protagonists, “the laws of love” (amoureuses lois; line 59) are opposed to Theseus’ laws, and political and social laws fail to constrain desire. The word loi (law), repeated many times in the play, turns out to be a force antagonistic to desire. Phaedra mentions that her adulterous passion for Hippolytus came about at the very moment when she was pledging her marriage (les lois de l’hymen; line 270), and her desire for Theseus’ son violated the sacred authority of marriage under which she had just placed herself. The moment of entering into the legal bond of matrimony amounts to a sort of trauma, as Louise Horowitz observes, when the subject realizes that the law and desire stem from two adverse forces and cannot be harmoniously joined.57 We must also recognize that Phaedra transgresses even the law of desire established by the king, her husband, since, through the choice of object, she violates the prohibition on incest and adultery. Her passion for Hippolytus is a violation of the taboos of patriarchal society and her illegitimate passion is sexually and politically transgressive. At the same time, Phaedra’s continual moral battle against her drives is manifested in the creation of laws of her own that are supposed to eradicate the passion she feels for Hippolytus. Hence she seeks to deny herself the sight of that son, imposing geographical distance between them. Or, as she tells him: “I forbade / Your very name to be pronounced before me” (Act II, scene 5)58 (J’ai même défendu, par une expresse loi, / Qu’on osât prononcer votre nom devant moi; lines 603–604, my emphasis). Her laws, created to exterminate her ailment by distance and silence (by blocking the production of images of Hippolytus in her imagination), constitute another form of repression. N evertheless, no moral or political imperative can release her from her suffering. Symbolically, Phaedra’s melancholy acts as a sexual, moral, social, and political rift with society and reveals the boundaries inherent in any society and any individual: the line between sanity and madness, law and desire, life and death. Racine confronts us with the “abject” embodied in Phaedra, who is “perverse because … [she] neither abandons nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, a law; but diverts, bends, corrupts them; uses them, wears them down, so as to better deny 57

58

Louise Horowitz, “Racine’s Laws,” p. 139. [Translation slightly modified—trans.]

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them.”59 The protagonist consciously places herself in the maternal line through her own monstrous “taint,” that of her transgression and that of the profanation against the father/king/husband. Her symbiosis with the maternal element is revealed to be a dangerous implosion that calls into question the paternal law and has the power to annihilate his authority. Her melancholy, then, reflects the unresolved conflict visible in the split between her transgressive, liberated desire and her shame about her crime, which she admits to Theseus: Do not profane endearments that were once So sweet, but which I am unworthy now To taste. You have been wrong’d… . I am unfit to meet your fond caress, How I may bear my shame my only care Henceforth. (Act III, scene 4) Je ne mérite plus ces doux empressements; Vous êtes offensé … . Indigne de vous plaire et de vous approcher, Je ne dois désormais songer qu’à me cacher. (lines 916–17, 919–20)

The dual mechanism of the “heart big … with / Sighs” (Act III, scene 3) (cœur gros de soupirs; (line 843) and “the horrors of remorse” (Act IV, scene 6) (l’horreur de … [ses] remords; line 1228) and “fears” (Act IV, scene 6) (craintes; 1227) resulting from her internal revolt produces the sense she has committed a crime whose “shame … pursues … [her] to the grave” (Act IV, scene 6) (crime affreux dont la honte [la] suit; line 1291), an overwhelming feeling that she has fallen short of her social duty by her free (and repulsive) choice of love object. Like the “bestiary” creatures in the play, Phaedra embodies an irreparable rift between her desire and the law. It is precisely that cleavage that surfaces through the two faces of her melancholy: on one hand, her taciturn, suicidal, and dejected mien; on the other, her rage and outbursts.60 Racine shows that for Phaedra that unity fails, 59 Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, p. 23. Kristeva introduces the notion of the “abject,” a biological reaction of nausea, horror, or fear when we are confronted with a threatening breakdown between self and other, subject and object (p. 9). The abject is the place where meaning collapses, where boundaries begin to dissolve. Abjection is also linked to desires, drives, and incest, which draw attention to the fragility of the law (p. 124). It may be an embodiment of the line between the human and the beast, as inscribed in Phaedra’s monstrous genealogy, for example. The abject is both a threat to society and one’s reaction to such corruption. Phaedra causes horror to others and to herself in recognizing her transgression of such boundaries. 60 Similarly, the seventeenth-century medical tradition distinguished between two types of melancholy: one whose symptoms were desperation and sorrow and one that


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evidence of the disturbance produced by her scotomizing pursuit of Hippolytus and the social and political violation that her desire entails. Similarly, Hippolytus’ melancholy expresses his split between sexual desire and the law of the father and assumes the significance of the violation of an interdict. Above all, it is part of a repudiation of paternal law and a transgression of the social order through the choice of object, since Aricia occupies the place of a social taboo, both sexual and political. She is a prohibited object, condemned to a sterile life without husband or progeny – hence without sexual pleasure – and a symbol of Theseus’ authoritarian power. Hippolytus loves the one his father condemns: By my father’s stern command Her brethren’s blood must ne’er be reinforced By sons of hers; he dreads a single shoot From stock so guilty, and would fain with her Bury their name, that, even to the tomb Content to be his ward, for her no torch Of Hymen may be lit. Shall I espouse Her rights against my sire, rashly provoke His wrath, and launch upon a mad career? (Act I, scene 1) Il défend de donner des neveux à ses frères: D’une tige coupable il craint un rejeton; Il veut avec leur soeur ensevelir leur nom. Et que jusqu’au tombeau soumise à sa tutelle, Jamais les feux d’hymen ne s’allument pour elle. Dois-je épouser ses droits contre un père irrité? Donnerai-je l’exemple à la témerité? (lines 106–12)

In fact, in Phaedra he recognizes his own “perverse” and usurpative desire, but he conceals his transgression from himself and from those around him through repression: “Let this dreadful secret / Remain forever buried in oblivion” (Act II, scene 6) (Qu’en un profond oubli / Cet horrible secret demeure enseveli; lines 719–720). Unlike Phaedra, he denies his guilt and externalizes it by projecting it onto Phaedra. This is obvious when he “for very shame … cannot bear … [her] sight” (Act II, scene 5) (ne peut plus soutenir … [sa] vue; line 668) and flees her, but must admit a moment later: “I am, indeed, confounded / With horror and manifested itself as furor. On this question, see Patrick Dandrey, Les tréteaux de Saturn: Scènes de la mélancolie à l’époque baroque (Paris: Klincksieck, 2003), pp. 15ff. Medical opinion nevertheless remained divided on the question of furor and melancholy. For Du Laurens, there were two distinct and separate illnesses: mania (when coupled with rage and fury) and melancholy (whose symptoms were sadness and fear). See Du Laurens, Discours, pp. 227–8.


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astonishment extreme” (Act II, scene 6) (je ne puis sans horreur me regarder moimême; line 718). His conflict comes from the fact that he seeks to repress his love but, unable to do so, he resorts to flight. Speaking of Aricia, he says, “I should not need to fly, if it were hatred” (Act I, scene 1) (Si je la haïssais, je ne la fuirais pas, line 56). Unlike Phaedra, Hippolytus finds the body and desire terrifying, and that anxiety is displayed in his obsession with fleeing. The son who seeks desperately to leave Troezen in order to tame a monster (line 99) is not in search of his father or of adventure, but is frightened by love and wants to repress his sexuality, which he considers destructive and his chief foe. The portrait Racine draws of the anxiety, denial, and repression that surround nascent sexuality displays an intimate understanding of the psychic and physical processes of adolescence. Psychoanalysis uses the term “denegation” to describe a “process by which the subject, even while formulating one of his desires, thoughts, or feelings, heretofore repressed, continues to defend himself against it by denying that it belongs to him.”61 Freud sought to show how anxiety neuroses are related to a lack of mastery over sexual excitation and to an attempt to repress it.62 In our own time, the professor of psychoanalysis Paul Verhaeghe explains: “[Freud] had discovered the erotic impulses of childhood. Obviously, these impulses develop themselves along the lines of the erotogenic zones. The moment they emerge, they are strange, even ‘alien’ to the psyche… . The Real is apparently traumatic in itself and inaugurates a primal anxiety as a basic affect.”63 In portraying Hippolytus, Racine recognized the stage of childhood when sexuality manifests itself openly (“A secret burden on … [his] spirits cast / Has dimm’d … [his] eye” [Act I, scene 1]; chargés d’un feu secret … [ses] yeux s’appesantissent; line 134) but is perceived as a profound wound of a disturbing nature. He depicts the denial of sexuality as a psychic and physical drive that the character cannot control. Hippolytus displays the turmoil, anxiety, and disturbance that awakening sexuality can cause. For him, it culminates in melancholy, a pathological displacement stemming from the negative image of his father’s overactive sexuality, which blocks the realization of Hippolytus’ own desire. N evertheless, in Racine’s plays, denegation cannot be explained in purely psychological terms. It acquires a political significance within the context of social transgression. As Larry Riggs has noted, the denegation stems from the fact that the hero is afraid he will be like his father and seeks to transform the father’s image: “[He] wants to revise the history of his father, Thésée, in order to escape See Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, and Daniel Lagache, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 6th edn (Paris: PUF, 1967), s.v. “Dénégation.” 62 See Sigmund Freud, “Über die Berechtigung, von der N eurasthenie einen bestimmten Symptomkomplex als ‘Angstneurose’ abzutrennen,” in Hysterie und Angst, Studienausgabe, Vol. 6, 9th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), pp. 44–5. 63 Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine, trans. Marc du Ry (N ew York: Other Press, 1999), p. 28. 61


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the inexorable logic of that myth and transform his own identity.”64 Hippolytus is convinced that “no unworthy obstacle” hinders Theseus’ return (Act I, scene 1) (par un indigne obstacle il n’est point retenu; line 24). It is paradoxical that the son wants to prove the father’s constancy and honor even in the face of reality. Indeed, since his childhood the “less glorious” (Act I, scene 1) (moins glorieux; line 83) tales about his father have been filled with infidelities, deceptions, abandonments, and ravishments. “Loathing to hear it” and urging him “to cut short the tale” (Act I, scene 1) (comme à regret écoutant ce discours; line 91), he would plead with Theramenes not to have to hear it. Lying behind the repression of his sexuality is his apprehension that he will resemble his father, and this repression is accompanied by the construction of a moral conscience diametrically opposed to the paternal model. His dilemma then takes the form of a desire to kill the bad father/husband/ king and the image of fickleness. In placing Aricia (the legitimate heir) on the throne, Hippolytus would annihilate the usurpation of the crown, obliterating from memory the father’s violation. As Horowitz argues, however, that civil rebellion, which would reinstate the legitimate heir, is a means of imposing Hippolytus’ law and of joining it to his desire, a narcissistic investment that shows he is mindful of that desire and that he cannot liberate himself entirely from his sexuality.65 The ambiguity in the son/father relationship plays out the theory of the “Oedipus complex” as Freud develops it in Totem and Taboo: the son is ambivalent toward the father, oscillating between admiration and hostility. According to the totemic hypothesis, the primal father possesses all the women in the horde, but is later killed by an alliance of his sons. Yet he lives on – as an absolute – in the individual and collective taboos inscribed in the social order. The paternal homicide nevertheless produces guilt in the sons, which resurfaces in successive generations as a vestige of the crime. That notion of guilt, referring back to the crime, is also unconsciously reproduced in neurotics. Their neurosis expresses a conflict: they are tormented by the accusations of their conscience and punish themselves for the impure desires

64

Larry Riggs, “Mythic Figures in the Theatrum Mundi: The Limits of SelfFashioning,” in Le savoir au XVIIe siècle. Actes du 34e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature. University of Virginia. Charlottesville 14–16 mars 2002, (ed.) D. Lyons and Cara Welch (Tübingen: N arr, 2003), p. 379. 65 Horowitz, “Racine’s Laws,” p. 140. Horowitz raises the important question of who will reign over Attica after Theseus. In place of her son’s reign, Phaedra substitutes a structure in which an alien power—personified by Hippolytus—would take the throne. The heroine is ready to usurp the rights of her own son, the legitimate lawmaker according to the “laws” of Troezen (line 359). It is also significant that this son never appears onstage, a sign that he has been divested of his voice. The rift between Phaedra and her son is obvious in the final act when, hallucinating, she is unable to recognize her children. This expresses the link between the betrayal of her maternal feelings and her sexual and political rebellion. Similarly, Theseus renounces his paternal love for Hippolytus and, in adopting Aricia at the end of the play, prefers a foreign child, the child of his enemies, to his own son.

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that broke society’s taboos, including incest.66 In elaborating that theory, Freud was seeking a moral and psychoanalytic explanation for the sociopathological behavior of neurotics. In Racine’s play, Hippolytus vacillates between the need for his father’s approval and the rebellious power of “a mad career” (Act I, scene 1) (fol amour; line 113). On one hand, the son emulates his father and implicitly declares himself his rival (for the mother), but on the other he has tender feelings for him. According to Freud, the coincidence between these two emotions lies at the origin of civilization. Yet this early seduction in childhood may give rise to sexual traumas that culminate in neurosis in the adolescent and adult. Freud considers the Oedipus complex a founding element of civilization but also an individual element in the child’s socialization. Laplanche and Pontalis define “Oedipus complex” as “an organized complex of amorous and hostile desires that the child feels for his parents. The so-called positive complex takes the form of the story of Oedipus Rex: desire for the death of the rival – the parent of the same sex – and sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. The negative complex takes the reverse form: love for the parent of the same sex and jealous hatred of the parent of the opposite sex. In point of fact, these two forms are found to varying degrees in what is known as the complete complex… . The Oedipus complex plays a fundamental role in structuring the personality and in orienting human desire.”67 The Oedipus complex cannot be reduced to a situation, but it explains how the child suddenly becomes conscious of the conflict between his desire and the law against incest created by the father. The threat of castration lies behind the father’s prohibition when father and son are rivals for possession of the mother. The son, then, perceives the law of the father as a prohibition against his libidinal drives. But the father will acquire the stature of an authority figure and will impose his presence by awakening the child’s fear of castration. What we see in Racine’s play is a conflict between the law of the father and Hippolytus’ desire, forces that appear antagonistic because they cannot be harmoniously united. Hippolytus ultimately revolts against his father, declaring him his rival and challenging the father’s power:

66 Sigmund Freud, “Totem und Tabu,” Fragen der Gesellschaft. Ursprünge der Religion, Studienausgabe, Vol. 9, 6th edn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1974), p. 339. 67 Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, s.v. “Complexe d’Oedipe.”


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While I, unknown Son of so brave a sire, am far behind Even my mother’s footsteps. Let my courage Have scope to act, and if some monster yet Has ‘scaped you, let me lay the glorious spoils Down at your feet; or let the memory. Of death faced nobly keep my name alive And prove to all the world I was your son. (Act III, scene 5) Et moi, fils inconnu d’un si glorieux père, Je suis même encor loin des traces de ma mère. Souffrez que mon courage ose enfin s’occuper; Souffrez si quelque monstre a pu vous échapper, Que je l’apporte à vos pieds sa dépouille honorable Ou que d’un beau trépas la mémoire durable, Éternisant des jours si noblement finis, Prouve à tout l’univers que j’étais votre fils. (lines 945–952)

When Hippolytus announces he is in search of his mother’s footsteps (in French, traces), he is motivated by the need to eliminate the father and to pursue the mother, so as to proclaim his right to sexual, political, and moral conquest. Yet he internalizes the paternal prohibition, which continues to torment him. The hero fears the father’s punishment, and this deep anxiety takes the form of a question: “What is my term and place of banishment?” (Act IV, scene 2) (Quel temps à mon exil, quel lieu prescrivez-vous? line 1140), a sign that he is conscious of his crime. The young man fears paternal abandonment, not only anticipating punishment but also pointing to the trauma he would suffer if his father were to leave him: “What friends will pity me, when you forsake / And think me guilty of a crime so vile?” (Act IV, scene 2) (Chargé du crime affreux dont vous me soupçonnez, / Quels amis me plaindront, quand vous m’abandonnez? lines 1143–4). In Totem and Taboo, Freud associates the son’s castration anxiety with the violation of the political, social, and moral order. But that revolt does not prevent the son from fearing the father and from being immobilized before him, apprehending his punishment. The process is twofold: Hippolytus takes on the role of rival but does not manage to free himself from paternal prohibitions, vacillating between paternal approval and protection – the voice of the law – and the demand for love. In fact, Hippolytus’ relationship with his mother is a failure: he does not succeed in replacing the father with two goddesses/mothers or in recognizing these mothers – “chaste Dian, and the Queen / Of Heav’n” (Act V, scene 1) (la chaste Diane, et l’auguste Junon; line 1404) – as a substitute for the paternal figure.68 68 According to Freud, matriarchy preceded the civilized patriarchal order (“Totem und Tabu,” p. 428). It would therefore signify a return to the beginning of civilization and to nature, known to Hippolytus through his Amazon mother.

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Because the son does not identify with the mother, who abandoned him when he was a child, he cannot relate to his maternal side. When he dies, the two goddesses fall silent, thereby illustrating Hippolytus’ lack of any maternal connection. That failure to find alternative mothers with which to identify shows that the protagonist has not managed to detach himself from the law of the father and that, despite the rift, he remains in a position of submission and dependence. He then inexorably repeats his father’s conduct by ravishing Aricia, reproducing the political and sexual circumstances and motifs of Theseus’ abduction of Phaedra, and clearly demonstrating the son’s incapacity to break free completely from the paternal heritage.

Individual Illness and Cultural Distress Racine’s protagonists not only threaten the integrity of the laws but also expose the artificiality and the permeability of classificatory boundaries.69 The force with which passion is imprinted and manifested in these characters harkens back to a time prior to civilized society, prior to prescriptions and prohibitions. Racine stages the persistence of a collective memory in his protagonists, that of a past when desires were not yet in conflict with the law. Phaedra’s revolt is inscribed in her nature, particularly since her brother, the Minotaur, was the result of a major cultural violation by which the “father” was annihilated and replaced by a substitute (a bull), which then left its imprint on the progeny. The Minotaur of Crete is a vestige, an incarnation, of that earlier time. It is therefore paradoxical that it is Phaedra’s future husband – killer of monsters – who overpowers the half-brother and abducts the heroine as his prey, even as he “monstrously” abandons the woman who had been promised him by the law (Ariadne). Let us note that incest is deeply rooted in that society, not only through Phaedra’s illegitimate love for Hippolytus but also before the creation of the civilized state, through Theseus’ passion for Phaedra after he had loved Ariadne. In abandoning one sister in order to ravish the other, he inserts himself into the eternal cycle of the production and destruction of liberated desire. Horowitz explains that the myth of Theseus killing the Minotaur symbolizes the end of the primitive world and the emergence of civilization, with Theseus as the precivilized father.70 But paradoxically, the civilized state is built on ravishment, incest, and the usurpative power of the “father,” who henceforth procures for himself the right to choose his love object and that of his subjects. Phaedra and Hippolytus revolt against that male law of the father of civilization by procuring for themselves the freedom to choose their love objects on their own.

69 See David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 19. 70 Louise Horowitz, “The Second Time Around,” L’Esprit créateur 38, 2 (1998): 24.


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The two protagonists are vestiges of an irrepressible past that returns again and again with no possibility of being transcended. Racine’s tragedies always depict a profound crisis of a political nature, revealed in the characters’ internal divide. The heroes’ psychological question “Who am I?” and the conflict between desire and law reveal the crisis, which is also social, at the heart of Racinian theater. We now need to consider the political significance of Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ melancholy, which problematizes the relation between the classical subject and the absolute state. Efforts at repression and its failure are a metaphor for the more general inhibition at the heart of the classical subject, who struggles to follow rigid rules of conduct in his wish for conformity and unity. In requiring self-effacement and submission to homogenized social models, absolutism deprives its subjects of all individuality. As Jean-Marie Apostolidès has shown, absolutism seeks to erect and aggressively maintain such uniformity.71 Phaedra’s oscillation between two tendencies – violation of Theseus’ law and respect for it – thus reflects a clandestine, indeed a repressed, challenge to absolutism and its doctrines and also to the classical subject who critically interrogates them. Racine is calling into question the legitimacy of the laws under Louis XIV. In the play, Theseus has procured legal authority by means of transgression, and he constantly violates, reformulates, or modifies the laws. In addition, the monarch abandons his subjects and leaves the country to engage in new wars and adulterous affairs. The kingdom is clearly unstable, as shown by his creation of new laws that are promptly rescinded so that others can be promulgated, and by the doubt surrounding the question of succession.72 The image of Theseus blends with that of Louis XIV in 1677 in Racine’s last secular play. The author implicitly evokes the constant modifications of the laws under the sun king, his creation of aggressive social models such as honnêteté, which impose on the classical subject repression, dissimulation, and the adoption of an imaginary identity. Phaedra’s crisis, in short, is that of the monarchical subject disengaged from her king, asking the troubling question “Who am I?” in a society in political and social crisis, and coming to realize that the apparent apogee of unity under Louis XIV – maintained, diffused, and glorified in public – is only a sort of chimera camouflaging the rifts within the country and outside it, and within a society where passions are in conflict with prohibitions.

Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le prince sacrifié. Théâtre et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p. 33. See also Greenberg, “Subjectivity and Subjugation,” p. 151. 72 The precariousness of the succession is made evident in the play when Theseus mysteriously adopts Aricia as his heir, a further usurpation on his part. He again permits himself to bend his laws and to alter the social identity of his subjects according to his whim. N ot only does Theseus reincorporate Aricia into the city-state, but he also declares her his “daughter,” the last performance of his political and social power, and of the power he possesses as absolute monarch to produce the identity of his subjects. 71


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The portrayal of Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ unresolved conflicts incites spectators to think about patriarchy’s zones of operation, about the phantasms of sexuality and about their own problematic identification with the law. In depicting the scotomizing crisis of his characters, Racine writes of the “internal opacity, … anxiety of being, exhausting confusion, and aimlessness” of patriarchal society in the seventeenth century.73 Hippolytus’ death acquires the symbolic meaning of a ritual against the “abject” being, who must be eliminated from the public sphere if future patriarchal authority is to be restored and guaranteed. Mitchell Greenberg explains that “Racine … moves from the larger political stage of an empire in crisis to the narrower, but analogous, ferment of the tragic hero who, becoming the victim of that world’s crisis, is immolated to expiate the sins of society, and, by so doing, restores order.”74 Patriarchy exerts its power over a scapegoat who is sacrificed to strengthen the bonds between subject and monarch and to put an end to transgression, “restore its purity” (Act V, scene 7) (rendre … toute sa pureté; line 1644) to society. The anthropologist Mary Douglas observes that a fear of alterity arises in purist regimes constructed on the repression of the body. Subjects create a symbolic “monster” that incorporates all prohibitions. “[The] paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of noncontradiction.”75 Efforts to repress all difference are coupled with an anxiety about contamination from and dissolution by a “monstrous” (or abject) entity that would abandon the predefined structures. Controlled ritual acts involving all members of society play an important role in a state that seeks to connect with the past, reinscribe it in the present, and assure its influence in the future even while shoring up its authority.76 It is in these terms that we can understand the punishment of the Racinian hero. Hippolytus is subjected to the fury of a sea monster summoned by Theseus to exercise a punitive function in the king’s place. By his very appearance, this sea monster suggests the hero’s transgression, since it is described as a “bull” (Act V, scene 6) (taureau; line 1519) armed “with formidable horns” and “yellow scales” (armé de cornes menaçantes; écailles jaunissantes; line 1518), symbolizing Hippolytus’ erotic desire. But in fact it is not the monster – a vestige of the past, under the control of N eptune and in the service of Theseus – who kills the hero but rather horses, symbols of civilization, that drag his body to its death:

Georges Poulet, “Racine et la pensée indéterminée,” in Re-lectures raciniennes, (ed.) Richard Barnett (Paris: PFSCL, 1986), p. 128. 74 Mitchell Greenberg, “Racine’s Oedipus: Virtual Bodies, Originary Fantasies,” L’Esprit créateur 38, 2 (1998): 109. 75 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 192. 76 Ibid., p. 65. 73


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I saw thy hapless son, I saw him, Sire, Drag’d by the horses that his hands had fed. ************************* Panting I thither run, and after me His guard, along the track stain’d with fresh blood That reddens all the rocks; caught in the briers Locks of his hair hang dripping, gory spoils! (Act V, scene 6) J’ai vu, Seigneur, j’ai vu votre malheureux fils Traîné par les chevaux que sa main a nourris. ************************** J’y cours en soupirant, et sa garde me suit. De son généreux sang la trace nous conduit, Les rochers en sont teints, les ronces dégouttantes Portent de ses cheveux les dépouilles sanglantes. (lines 1547–8, 1555–8)

The paternal and patriarchal “mark” – which is also the mark of civilization – is imprinted on the hero’s body through the red “wound” (Act V, scene 6) (plaie; line 1550) of his castrated and bleeding remains. The son is reduced to blood, the stamp of the father who asserts his authority as “the only one who has the right to leave his mark.”77 When Aricia perceives with horror the small scrap, “pale and disfigured” (Act V, scene 6) (sans forme et sans couleur; line 1579), that remains of the hero – which she will later be unable to identify – her terror indicates the force with which the sexual and political taboo has again taken hold under patriarchy. Patriarchy reinscribes its power on that castrated body and acts out its aggression and violence to the point of disfiguring, dismembering, castrating the son, finally reducing him to blood. That stigmatization marks the violent triumph of the father/ monarch, who annihilates all transgression in his subjects. Hippolytus’ death gives rise to and reinforces the fear of punishment in Theseus’ subjects. The bleeding remnants (dépouilles sanglantes; line 1558) not only testify to the Oedipal drama, in which the son is put back in his place by the father, but also contain an allusion to the “castration” of the classical subject, also vulnerable to the anxiety, control over his sexuality, and radical submission demanded by absolutism. N evertheless, as Olivier Pot remarks, the protagonist’s disfigured body cannot be completely annihilated but remains present as indestructible stigmata, the red traces of his spattered blood. That bleeding mark assumes a metonymic function: the red traces are Hippolytus. This fact reveals the tenacious existence of his body, which in a certain way persists even after the homicide and which even Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 26. Here again, the direct reference to blood can be read within the context of medical theories on heritage and “bloodlines.” By killing his son, Theseus deliberately ends his own bloodline and with it the usurpation of the throne and his own “illness” of political and libidinal transgression. 77

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the violence and terror perpetrated under patriarchy cannot entirely destroy. The “abject” being dies, but these red traces continue to remind Hippolytus’ retinue of his marginality, his transgression. In the end, Hippolytus’ disfigured body becomes a visual image that combines story and spectacle as a “sign” of remonstrance. It also contains a certain aspect of “voyeurism,” according to Pot, through the “mise en abyme of mimesis, where vision is always composed of a vision, itself the object of his listeners’ or spectators’ attention. Theramenes watches Aricia watching Hippolytus, as if the hero’s disfigured and unfigurable body could be seen only by the watched/watching gaze, as if, with the advent of the classical episteme, semiology (“saying the body”) could be conceived only outside discourse, beyond linguistic signs, at the site of a dead point of representation.”78 The narrative of the suffering body becomes a performance based on “a spectacular and real gaze … a procedure that rhetoric calls metalepsis.”79 The divide between a thing (Hippolytus’ body) and textual narration (by Theramenes) is part of a narrative in which language loses its power, but where the sensory (visual) “image” of the bleeding traces is the sign of a profound internal crisis, outside discourse and beyond the reach of the word’s liberating power. The image substitutes for the narrative, and the body – reduced to a trickle that stains “the grass all red / And reeking” (Act V, scene 6) (l’herbe rouge et fumante; line 1577) – gives rise to an almost spectacular “voyeurism” of that tragic scene. Fundamental to Aristotle’s idea of tragedy is pathos, that is, the necessity of suffering as one of the components of the tragic plot. As David Morris correctly states, human suffering is not seen as a shared and unavoidable human condition, nor is it merely represented in fatalistic terms: it is embedded in plot. “It is action or plot that creates the structure within which tragic pathos makes sense.”80 Plot constructs the sequence of actions that leads to the experience of suffering and inscribes the cultural contexts in which illness occurs. Greenberg has described classical theater as the “junction of the public and private sphere … [that] can be seen to relay, in a spectacularly seductive fashion, the dynamics of the law and desire as incorporated in plots of tragic familial strife.”81 Racine’s plot does not represent suffering as simply a shared condition of humankind, which would make Phaedra merely the victim of her family line (or, in modern terms, of genetics). Instead, pathos is created within a locus of connected actions that can be understood as a spatial, temporal, and social dynamic. We cannot efface the social context inherent in classical tragedy but must perceive the stage as a cultural site of key importance, since it becomes a point of intersection between the individual and society. 78 Olivier Pot, “La mort d’Hippolyte ou la défiguration silencieuse du langage,” PFSCL 45, 23 (1996): 612–13. 79 Ibid., p. 603. 80 David B. Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 207–208. 81 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 267.


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We could even say that, for Racine, mind/body illness is to a great extent a socially constructed malady and that tragedy unveils the anxiety and actions that shaped its course. It is thus truly psychosomatic in that the visible symptoms retrospectively uncover cultural tensions and distressing situations, which are set forth through the plot and resolved at the end of the play. Although hamartia (the tragic flaw) plays a role in Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ suffering and death, it is not simply an error in judgment that shapes the protagonists’ illnesses. Rather, there remains an unmistakable link between emotional stress and the cultural codes of conduct. If we are to understand how hamartia plays into mind/body illness, we must see that it consists of “speaking out” through the body, an act that is out of bounds in patriarchal society, a transgression of codes of conduct; it is a pronouncement that exposes the tensions and divisions that the subject is conditioned to suppress rather than uncover, a suppression that, however, ultimately fails. Tragedy also returns us to an arena where we as spectators construct meaning, and it allows us to become engaged in the action, to detect the covert origins of mind/body illness, without the mediating function of a narrator. The strong ritualistic component of Phèdre allows us to understand the play at a symbolic level, as a site of “veiled feelings rather than actual movements.”82 In Phèdre Racine not only informs but also uncovers, modifies, creates, and controls the spectator’s experience through the (visual and symbolic) “representation” of psychosomatic distress and its fatal consequences, exposing the mechanisms at work under the patriarchal reign of Theseus and implicitly, under Louis XIV’s absolutism. In Racinian theater, “the image” and “the imagination” become concrete forms of everyday perception, as the “representation” of the body. This is an affinity Racine shares with Spinozanism. In 1677 Spinoza wrote in his Ethics that “the human mind is the idea itself or the knowledge of the human body,” and that “the mind imagines a body.”83 Thought constitutes the source of the ideas of our modifications (idea ideae) and it perceives a corporeal experience as an image represented to the mind. Racine also presents that idea of a “mental image” or “mental model” linked to thought in the bodily sacrifice of Hippolytus, an idea that shows or reveals to the spectator that monarchical power is based on symbolic and ritualized images that produce and perform the king’s authority. In Aristotle’s theory, tragic pity is “both a cognitively grounded and an ethically charged emotion.”84 Emotions contain a cognitive element. Tragic pity allows us to judge certain aspects of the plot and to build an interpretation for ourselves based on a recognition of ourselves and on a conception of others. Likewise, the pity we experience for the suffering protagonists, whose tragic end serves the aims of Lilian R. Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany: State University of N ew York Press, 2003), p. 144. 83 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, (ed.) James Gotmann, trans. William Hale White and Amelia Hutchinson (N ew York: Hafner, 1949), pp. 99 and 98. 84 Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 227. 82


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patriarchy, brings with it a full awareness of the cognitive content of the play. We might imagine the possibility of our own suffering but we might also tap into the source of what makes the characters suffer. We can find this knowledge disclosed in the play if we bear in mind the cultural and political dimension of classical theater. Racine’s play does not give an unproblematic answer to questions of identity under the patriarchal order. Rather, it elaborates on the two characters’ apprehension in order to create an awareness. Racine makes visible what usually remains invisible: the structure of monarchical power, the precariousness and arbitrariness of the laws, the sacrifice of the subject (which comes to look like a castration), and the barriers to identification between the subject and monarch in the profoundly divided state of the time. Finally, Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’ suffering individual bodies become metonymies for a social, cultural, and political body in distress. Mind/body distress, far from being restricted to an individual illness, can be read as a collective disorder by virtue of its mimetic aspect and calls into question the apparent uniformity, harmony, and continuity of Louis XIV’s regime. Through the irreconcilable divisions within Phaedra and Hippolytus, Racine subversively disputes Louis XIV’s idea of a unified regime and portrays a country prey to incurable neurosis and already fragmented in its reality, its visions, its imagination, and its hallucinations.85

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After the failure of the play, which was ridiculed by Racine’s powerful enemies, the playwright abruptly left the stage in 1677, only to come back in 1688, when Mme de Maintenon requested two biblical plays from him, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), for her girls’ school at Saint-Cyr.

Conclusion Disorders of mind and body acquired a central place in seventeenth-century French literature because they stood in a complex relationship with questions keenly debated at the time and with dominant epistemologies subject to critical inquiry. Literary authors actively participated in the philosophical, medical, and ethical debates of early modern Europe and raised significant questions about the human constitution: monism or dualism, the relation between soul and body, the role of the passions, the imagination, and the humors, and the causes and symptoms of illness. Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine proclaimed the mind/body union through a depiction of disorders that we could classify as “psychosomatic,” physical ailments for which there exists no somatic cause. Attending to the theme of illness, they explored the relationship between physical suffering and mental distress. Even before the advent of psychoanalysis, mind/body illness constituted a discourse “not only [of] what is spoken but [of] what is silenced, and what is then imposed in its place.” Outward manifestations point to inner wounds. They recount the struggle between (failed) repression and a displacement of the emotions onto the body through various disorders, among them melancholy, diabolical obsession, hypochondriacal melancholy, and violent fevers. My reading of mind/body illness in the seventeenth century has been guided by the revolutionary moment that Descartes ignited and which served as the foundation for a new understanding of the human being that was to dominate the Western world for the next three centuries. Independent of genre and “literariness,” Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine engaged in a dialogue about health, sickness, matters physical and spiritual that crosses boundaries between medical thinking and a better way to understand the many contexts in which illness is placed. Most importantly, the four authors relate to each other as they make the case for antiCartesian thinking in both fiction and non-fiction. All four of them engage in a critical dialogue with rationalism and include in their investigation the impact binary thinking had both on modernist theories of (self-) control and on absolutism’s strong emphasis on the production of the self: the “human manufacturing” of a hierarchical mind/body split. Absolutism promotes a “purposeful striving against the natural.” Cartesian rationalism and absolutist politics share a fixation on the mind’s power to “fashion” oneself, to manufacture an “improved” human being based on Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 10. Larry Riggs, Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2005), p. 20.

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the submission of the body to the mind. The orientation of my study was therefore less the common literary qualities of the authors I discussed but rather the shared moment of cultural interrogation, which was independent of genre and that was preponderant in fiction as well as in non-fiction writers, among them Surin, and in philosophers such as Spinoza. In other words, the intense attention these authors devote to the mind/body phenomenon is a cultural occurrence that marks different domains in the seventeenth century, not limitedly only a literary one, and that constitutes an attempt to identify the ideological domains and cultural narratives in which dualistic theories were placed. Psychosomatic disorder serves as an imaginative construct in the works of the three fiction writers, while Surin’s text focuses on his real infirmity. The “fictions” of illness in Molière, Lafayette, and Racine invoke cautions to potentially dangerous somatic consequences of cultural narratives and show how a hierarchically-based mind/body split within societal codes and political ideologies can shape individual suffering. Their “histories” of distress are related to cultural clashes, political doctrines, and religious beliefs and explore the relationship between language and silence (“repression), covert suffering and overt distress. Amidst this urge to “tell” and “talk” about how the era’s dominant epistemologies buttressed hierarchical binary thinking, we can also place Surin. The latter represents his own forceful (and nefarious) submission to codes of control and strivings against the body within the Jesuit community, and he critically engages with the challenges of these efforts within the consolidating political body of absolutism. Illness teaches us about discontents with absolutism and the shortcomings of the mind/body split. Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine constructed a pathological “map” of the psychological, existential, moral, spiritual, and cultural messages within their society and redefined former holistic (humoral) medicine in a new progressive way. They provided us with a means to understand the challenging relationship between the individual and society, the self and the environment, interlocking scientific thought with cultural narratives, and braving the efforts of patriarchy to control and subject the body, the passions, and the imagination. While the question of gender and illness is an interesting topic in itself, and while without question women have been marginalized when it comes to “illnesses,” in this book I have offered a broader conceptualization. I deliberately There is much left to be done on the topic of women and illness, and in this study I could not give that matter the full attention required. In Ventriloquized Bodies, her excellent study of hysteria in the nineteenth century, Janet Beizer charts what was considered a common disorder afflicting women, which became part of a larger cultural phenomenon as well as a metaphor for everything that could not be expressed in a society of changing gender roles. On sex and illness, see also Thomas Laqueur’s Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Barbara Duden’s feminist history of female diseases in the discourses of the eighteenth century, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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chose to take a direction that focused more on a generalized human condition, as illustrated by my reading of La princesse de Clèves, where men and women are affected equally, and in my discussion of Phèdre, where Phaedra and Hippolytus suffer from a similar split between desire and law, expressed as melancholy. This direction is reinforced by my main argument that the four authors discussed in this book dissolve oppositional binaries – the dominant cultural belief of three centuries in the West – and adopt a holistic view of the human being in which mind/body, reason/emotion, and man/woman are not opposed or separated from each other. Where these texts touch on the question of gender is in their uniform debunking of masculine models of authority (and, concomitantly, of binary oppositions) within patriarchal regimes and rationalist epistemology. Their task is to oppose what Val Plumwood has called the “master model,” which is grounded in hierarchical dualisms. Hence they also transcend sexist ideologies. N evertheless, the importance of women and notions of gender is pivotal in the intellectual history of illness, and the mind/body antinomy associating mind/ reason with men and body/emotion with women has been the groundwork of recent scholarly work, to which I cannot devote the attention it deserves. I shall merely indicate here that this approach once more focuses on Descartes as a key and ambiguous figure. Feminist assessments of Descartes have considered his positive efforts to challenge gender notions and to overcome the “sexed mind.” Yet cultural historians and philosophers also argue that bodily difference did matter in the early modern period. Erica Harth explores how “bodily difference counted more than disembodied mind in the distribution of intellectual privileges.” The assertion of the disembodied mind in men and women remained a “discursive trap.” In her forthcoming study entitled Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France, Rebecca Wilkin reconsiders and challenges the dominant “feminist” readings of Cartesian philosophy articulated by Genevieve Lloyd and framed by Erica Harth. She revisits the French philosopher to allow for “a more congenial picture of the possibilities of Cartesian philosophy for feminism.” Likewise, I have deliberately omitted references to reader response theories, because I could not consider the full spectrum of that critical inquiry. These theories certainly deserve a separate consideration but are not germane to my work. Mitchell Greenberg has validly emphasized this approach in his discussion of Phèdre and Le malade imaginaire in Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2001). Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 23. Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press), p. 10. Rebecca M. Wilkin, Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 7. In her discussion of the correspondence between Descartes and the princess of Bohemia, Wilkin argues that it was Elizabeth who kept reminding Descartes of her sex (p. 321), that Descartes esteemed the value of her

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Within the Aristotelian tradition, melancholy can certainly be studied in relation to “genius” and creativity. Arguments that focus on gender and melancholy maintain that this illness was long understood as a predominant “masculine” illness, in opposition to hysteria, labeled a “female” malady. Juliana Schiesari asserts that “the melancholic position … dominates Western thought as a special prerogative for representing the alienated and creative individual, whereas for women it is normative, thus reducing women to the category of an essentialized and therefore inconsequential lack.” N onetheless, I have considered melancholy as a pathological illness in the seventeenth century that affected mind and body, men and women alike. The authors I have discussed also understand that the body – ignored, silenced, discredited in the seventeenth century – codetermines identity and activates the sense of “self.” The comparison with Spinoza’s philosophy as voiced in his Ethics is central to my study, for these authors, much like the Dutch philosopher, depict a definition of self that emanates from bodily manifestations, or, in other words, that results from a specific “body state.” Spinoza does not separate internal reality and external space as Descartes does, but perceives the experience of immaterial interiority as one in which “I think” proceeds from “I feel in my body.” In this view, memory, imagination, and sense perception do not provide confused or misleading information (as Descartes would claim), but are primary, useful agents that help construct consciousness and self-perception. Soma and psyche, emotion and intellect, are inseparable, and the body’s processes are not impediments to the rational mind. On the contrary, they are at the basis of rational thinking. Contemporary scientists and philosophers have deliberately sought to free themselves from Descartes’s legacy after three centuries of “error,” as the title of Damasio’s book would have it. Recent publications on Spinoza depict his longstanding dismissal as particularly grating, as his ideas are momentous for modern theories of the constitution and the functioning of the human being. The Dutch philosopher is now gaining currency due to the particularly compelling

intellectual achievements (p. 328), and that he even highly encouraged her to engage in serious study, which he considered the best distraction of “generous minds,” a category in which he included her (p. 329). Etienne Trillat demonstrates the relation between hysteria and melancholy in Histoire de l’hystérie (Paris: Seghers, 1986), p. 37. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 75. According to Wilkin, however, pathological illness constituted an embodied difference between men and women: “The pathologized melancholy, the melancholic whose symptoms were borrowed from the female disease, suffocation of the womb, tainted the prestige of the melancholic whose condition placed him inside of the ‘bounds of health’ and outside of the doctor’s authority” (p. 179).

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interest of recent thinking devoted to his writings.10 A new groundbreaking interest in Spinoza’s philosophy has emerged from the alliance between biology and philosophy with French and American thinkers alike increasingly connecting their views to Spinoza’s and rediscovering the Dutch thinker as a dazzling precursor of contemporary thought. Ever since the publication of Jean-Pierre Changeux’s Homme neuronal (Neuronal Man), thinkers such as Damasio, a reader very familiar with the philosopher’s works and in his thrall, have meticulously described the proximity between Spinoza’s thinking on the correlation of substances and recent discoveries in neurobiology regarding the affects and consciousness. These connections, which are currently being explored by certain neurobiologists, allow us to point out the influence of seventeenth-century mind/body perspectives on contemporary outlooks. While Anne Harrington, in her superbly written book, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008),11 downgrades Descartes’s importance to the history of mind/body medicine and highlights other “stories,” among them demonic possession and exorcism (which we have also considered) and Anton Mesmer’s dramatic performances of “animal magnetism,” I would argue for the radical influence of Descartes’s philosophy over three consecutive centuries. The Cartesian cogito ultimately succeeded in alienating us from Spinoza’s richly conceived and formulated ideas on this matter. It is only recently that this Dutch thinker is praised for having been among the first modern intellectuals to conceive of the human being in its union of body and mind, and in a way that markedly anticipates modern medical and psychological views. While it is impossible to list all the reasons of Spinoza’s erasure from the scientific and literary canons, I would like to offer two responses. The first lies in the difference in status between philosophy and science in the seventeenth century. Spinoza wrote his Ethics as a philosopher, and philosophy is a discipline constructed around ideas and hypotheses. By contrast, Descartes was a philosopher and a scientist, whose Discours de la méthode, Principia, and Méditations formulate theories for which he wishes to provide scientific proof. He combines science and philosophy through the method of doubt, through the establishment of facts, and through his many examples and explanations. Although Descartes provides only partial and inadequate proof, the scientific self-evidence of his postulates was appealing at the time – as it is in ours – because of its inherent idealism. He attempted to Among these recent works, let us single out Saverio Ansaldi, Spinoza et la Renaissance (Paris: Presse de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007); Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (N ew York: Schocken, 2006); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Chantal Jaquet, L’unité du corps et de l’esprit: Affects, actions et passions chez Spinoza (Paris: PUF, 2004); and Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (N ew York: N orton, 2006). 11 Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (N ew York: W.W. N orton & Company, 2008), pp. 20–21. 10


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regain control over the world by placing at the very center of philosophy and science the issue of how we know and how we could know in the future. The lingering presence of Descartes’s “isolated mind” within psychoanalytic thought is explored by Robert Stolorow, George Atwood, and Donna Orange, who argue that it is exactly the idealism inherent in the notion of an independent mind that attracted and continues to attract contemporary scholars whose struggle against materialism leads them to separate mind from both body and brain.12 While Descartes’s “isolated mind” was already removed from Spinoza’s philosophy, the Dutch philosopher also moderated the idea of a purposive and continuously growing intelligence. Instead, he proposed the far lesser seductive interpretation of an ultimately unintelligent causation of the universe. The second response lies in the “seductiveness” of Descartes’s quest of the absolute. Descartes establishes his philosophy on the foundations of the intellect, the will, and certainty, and asserts that human kind is capable of perfecting itself. That perfection is related to the soul’s capacity to reflect on its knowledge and to use it in the realms of science, medicine, and politics, but also to employ it to master one’s own being, one’s nature, and to move closer to the image of the absolute, the divine. For Descartes, it is the mind that distinguishes humans from the animals, which, devoid of abstract thought and the capacity to acquire knowledge for themselves, cannot transform their potentiality into acts. This does not meant that the quest for the absolute is absent from Spinoza’s theories. The Dutch philosopher sought to lead man to freedom and knowledge, but he formulated his point of view with the understanding that the soul is never isolated from the body, that the will might be ineffective in withstanding the violent passions, and that the “road of access [to truth] remains the affects.”13 Even while excluding free will from his theory, he asserts that freedom is a transformation of potential into action through knowledge. In the most radical and contentious sense, Spinoza also rejects the idea of a rational and transcendent God, and of an individual, immaterial soul that would survive independently after death. Spinoza and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia remained skeptical that the will could produce changes in the body, and Elizabeth pointed out that certain bodily conditions defy our ability to intervene through the power of the mind. N evertheless, a focus on the mind and a strong belief in the power of positive thinking remain in force even in modern society, not in mainstream medicine but in holistic or alternative medical practices. The mind/body connection has been deeply implanted in our thinking, along with the fundamental claim that the mind

Robert Stolorow, George Atwood, and Donna Orange, Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis (N ew York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 23–4. 13 Charles Ramond, Spinoza et la pensée moderne. Constitutions de l’objectivité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), p. 236. See his differentiation between potestas (arbitrary power) and potentia (potential) of the will in Descartes and Spinoza (pp. 219–35). 12

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possesses great powers to heal the body. Present-day mind/body medicine14 sends out empowering messages, arguing that we have direct control over our experiences and over how “to make sense” of illness. I would like to briefly sketch one of the aspects that have acquired cultural significance within alternative medicine, which is explored in Harrington’s recently published book: the belief in “the power of positive thinking.”15 This trend, which began within mainstream American religious culture, became “medicalized” in the 1970s, as new scientific research turned to the “physiology” of positive thinking. In the 1970s N orman Cousins asked, on the question of illness and recovery: “What about the positive emotions? If negative emotions produce negative chemical changes in the body, wouldn’t the positive emotions produce positive chemical changes? Is it possible that love, faith, laughter, confidence and the will to live have therapeutic value?”16 Current mind/body medicine offers remedies such as “laughter” treatments and studies stress hormones and the biochemistry of placebo responses. Its various discourses bridge the gap between “moral, religious, existential levels of meaning” and the authority of science and medicine.17 “Between 1997 and 2000, there appeared no fewer than five academic books on the placebo effect … . The main argument offered by this new literature was that the placebo effect was important above all for what it taught us about self-healing. It was not just a trick; it produced real (physiologically discernible) effects … . Rightly understood, it could be a source of patient empowerment and a means of enriching the doctorpatient relationship.”18 Recently, mind/body medical techniques advocating the power of positive thinking have been used in the treatment of cancer and AIDS. There have been testimonials of “fighting spirits” and of the efficacy of group support and other methods of self-healing. The popularity of “positive thinking” as an alternative route to health and happiness is indisputable: the widespread use of acupuncture, yoga, meditation, herbalism, coping skills training, stress treatment, and traditional Chinese medicine all attest to a general discontent with mainstream medical care and a search for alternative methods to “make sense” of illness and to “gain control” over it. What strikes me in these current approaches is the recurrence of key terms that resonate with seventeenth-century notions: the repeated use of “positive emotions,” “will,” “patient empowerment,” “fighting spirit” and, last but not least, 14 Mind/body medicine is the new “preferred” term for complementary or alternative medicine: it describes the interactions among the brain, mind, body, and behavior and examines how mental, spiritual, emotional, social, and behavioral factors can affect health. Its techniques for promoting health include group support, cognitive therapy, yoga, meditation, visual imagery, hypnosis, and other forms of mind/body treatments. 15 Ibid., pp. 103–38. 16 N orman Cousins, “Anatomy of Illness (as Perceived by the Patient),” New England Journal of Medicine 295, 26 (1976): 1459. 17 Harrington, The Cure Within, p. 254. 18 Ibid., p. 133.

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the spiritual aspect of healing. While today’s proponents of mind/body medicine usually dismiss Descartes as the philosopher who separated mind from body (or hardly mention him), their views have implicit connections with his ideas on health and healing, as developed in his letters to Princess Elizabeth. Confidence in the will’s role in curing our ills is primordial in Descartes’s theory of the passions and of the freedom of the mind. Furthermore, his recommendation to “master our passions” has gained credence in our society, as demonstrated by therapies that seek to induce positive emotions.19 Illness, in current alternative medicine, is once more a question of “will,” with the modification that we are now seeking to train the mind to focus on the body. One of the biggest questions remains: which discipline helps us best to cope with life and illness: biochemistry, with its explanation of ongoing chemical reactions, psychoanalysis, which seeks to provide comfort or produce meaning through “the talking cure,” or alternative medicine and its biocultural practices? While the answer may depend on the individual, I have emphasized throughout this book the intersection between and confluence of different discourses in the seventeenth century. Instead of two separate approaches to illness based on a “binary” division (between what we would now call the humanities and the sciences), we find in the seventeenth century reflections on mind and body by a set of authors who embrace a larger picture. Science, literature, and philosophy are deeply intertwined. These authors suggest a model that truly allows us to engage in an understanding of health, illness, pain, and suffering based on an integrated perspective on our human nature.

19 In developing his therapy, Descartes was himself influenced by the moral philosophy of the Stoics. Yet, as Wilkin has shown, it would be wrong to understand it simply as neoStoicism. See her Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth, p. 322.

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Index (References to illustrations are in bold) abandonment La princesse de Clèves 162–5, 170 syndrome, symptoms 162 abjection, La princesse de Clèves 168 absolutism 211 Louis XIV 125, 135, 210 vs individuality 1–2, 98 abyss, the 6, 46n116, 84, 85, 159, 160, 173 Académie Française 8 affects and consciousness 215 and emotions 183 experiencing 56 Freudian “rehabilitation” of 42 humoral 43 negative 110 Spinoza on 23, 25, 27, 55, 73, 216 Surin on 90 Albanese, Ralph Jr. 124, 159 Alexander, Franz, Psychosomatic Medicine 54 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 anger and Descartes 105 humoral explanation 105 illustration 106 in Le misanthrope 105, 107, 108–10 modern understanding of 107–8 Winnicott on 107–8 and yellow bile 105 Angst Furcht, distinction 123–4 in Le malade imaginaire 124 Anne, Queen of Austria 63 Apostolidès, Jean-Marie 2, 98, 205

Aristotle 10, 37, 208, 209, 214 Arnauld, Antoine 13, 16 Artaud, Antonin, Theatre and Its Double 125 Atwood, George 216 Auerbach, Erich 103 Augustine, St., Confessions 193 Averill, James 17 Baker, Gordon 17 Balint, Michael 127 Barker, Francis 91, 152 Barthes, Roland, Fragments d’un discours amoureux 167 Baudelaire, Charles on body-mind dualism 50 “Correspondances” 50 Bedau, Mark 20 Binet, Etienne Consolation et réjouissance 29 on melancholy 29–30 Bleuler, Eugen 79 blood importance of, Phèdre 182, 195–6 and theories of melancholy 196 Bodin, Jean, On the Demon-mania of Witches 39 body, the Descartes on 15, 152 fetishization, Le malade imaginaire 128–9, 132 as machine 15, 44 Phèdre 179–80, 181–2 regulation of 1, 157–8 seat of passions 152–3 sensory maps 83–4 site of mental conflicts 97, 179–80 see also imprints Borie, Jean 195

238


brain, melancholy of 27, 38, 41, 42, 121, 175 Bright, Timothy 27, 196 Treatise of Melancholy 30 Brody, Jules 192 Brown, Deborah 17 Burton, Robert 146, 175 Anatomy of Melancholy 30, 32, 74, 101 anger-melancholy connection 105 frontispiece 31 on mind-body dualism 32 on melancholy 30, 32, 33–4 Caillois, Roland 25 castration anxiety 202, 203 Certeau, Michel de 86, 87, 141 Heterologies 96 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, Neuronal Man 55, 215 Cogito, the, Descartes 13, 45, 54, 94, 156, 215 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 8 Colie, Rosalind 32 comedy ballets 121, 133, 136 consciousness, and affects 215 conversion 6, 10 Freud 53 Phèdre 178 Surin’s illness 67 Coste, Didier 141 Cottingham, John 21 Courcelles, Dominique de 146–7 courtier, conformist behavior 98 Cousins, N orman 217 Critchley, Simon 194, 195 Damasio, Antonio 25, 26, 50, 83, 90, 131, 180, 182 “body-minded brain” notion 111, 181 emotions, feelings distinction 55–6, 180–81 on emotions 153, 154 on sorrow 160 works Descartes’ Error 7, 111 The Feeling of What Happens 153n57, 181n13 Looking for Spinoza 7, 55

Dandrey, Patrick 42, 95 de Staël, Anne-Louise Germaine De l’Allemagne 51 on mind-body dualism 52 on the senses 52 death, in Le malade imaginaire 123 DeJean, Joan 140 Deleuze, Gilles 132 Della Rocca, Michael 26 Derzelle, Martine 127, 128 La Pensée empêchée 119 Descartes, Catherine 14 Descartes, René and anger 105 on the body 15, 152 mind-body dualism 13, 14–16 critics of 13–14, 19–20 the Cogito 13, 45, 54, 94, 156, 215 imagination, discounting of 120, 184 influence 215–16 mind, indivisibility 79 on the passions 16, 17, 70–1, 110, 218 reason, reliance on 20, 21 on the senses 15, 45, 46n121, 120, 152 soldiering 20 soul body, union 16 generous 4, 18, 19, 30, 66, 70, 92 weak, opposition 71 Spinoza’s criticism of 19–20 on the will 4, 18, 20, 71, 72, 110 works Discours de la méthode 13, 14, 21 Méditations 184 Passions de l’âme 4, 16, 18, 70, 72, 110, 149 Desgabets, Robert 13 desire, vs law, Phèdre 197, 198–9, 213 Douglas, Mary 206 Du Laurens, André 37, 38, 74, 121 Discours des maladies mélancholiques 27 on the imagination 184–5 on melancholy 27–9 Duncan, Marc 38 Dupré, Marie 14 Eckehart, Meister (Johannes) 85

Index ego, the, and narcissism 113 Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess 14, 16, 110, 216, 218 illness 19 Emelina, Jean 191 emotions 55 and affects 183 Damasio on 153, 154 feelings, distinction 55–6, 180–181 in La princesse de Clèves 153–4 manifestation 180–1 Spinoza on 23 erotic melancholy see love melancholy Ey, Henry 130–1 Faret, N icolas, L’honneste-homme ou L’art de plaire à la court 1 Fédida, Pierre 119, 127 feelings emotions, distinction 55–6, 180–181 origins 55–6 Rousseau on 48 Fénelon, François 85 Ferenczi, Sandór 135 Ferrand, Jacques 37, 146, 175 on mind-body dualism 34, 36 on female maladies 38–9 on love melancholy 183–4 on melancholy 34 works De la maladie d’amour ou melancholie erotique 34 Erotomania, title page 35 Ferreyrolles, Gérard 120 fever, causes 140 Ficino, Masilio 37 Foucault, Michel 64, 140 Francès, Madeleine 25 Francis II, King of France 171 François-Louis, Prince of Conti 63 Freud, Sigmund 7, 42, 97, 157 affects, “rehabilitation” 42 conversion 53 “Mourning and Melancholia” 135, 162 on the narcissist 113 primary-secondary processes 157 Totem and Taboo 201, 203 totemic hypothesis 201–2

239

and the unconscious 53 Fronde civil war (1648–53) 20, 63 Furcht, Angst, distinction 123–4 Furst, Lilian 9, 10, 53 Gaines, James 116, 133 galanterie 92 Galen 121 Garber, Daniel 14 Goldmann, Lucien 171, 193, 194 Gossman, Lionel 98 Grandier, Fr Urbain 61–2 Greenberg, Mitchell 2, 10, 125, 126, 134, 208 Greenblatt, Stephen 97 Grimm, Jürgen 136 Groen, J.J. 25 Grosz, Elizabeth 160 Guenancia, Pierre 16, 20 Guénoun, Solange 180 Guex, Germaine 162 Guibelet, Jourdain Discours philosophique 29 on melancholy 29 Gusdorf, Georges 88, 93 Guyon, Mme 85 Harrington, Anne 217 The Cure Within 215 Harris, Errol 26 Harth, Erica 14, 213 Hartman, Geoffrey 47–8 Harvey, William 196 Henry II, King of France 142, 173 patriarchy 143 heteroglossia, in Surin 10 Hippocrates 121 honnête homme, 1n2, 2, 98, 102, 109 honnêteté 1, 92, 98, 102, 205 S tanton on 1n2 Horowitz, Louise 104, 114, 116, 117, 163, 186n28, 172, 197, 201, 204 Houdard, Sophie 64, 80, 88 human nature, duality 193–6 humors, and illness 99 hypochondria definition 118–19 hysterical 38

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and the imagination 120, 130–1 Le malade imaginaire 99, 121, 122–3, 126–7, 131–2 and narcissism 127 nature of 119 hysteria 53n143, 119, 214

Kaps, Helen Karen 143 Keohane, N annerl 193 Kolakowski, Leszek 81 Koppisch, Michael 172 Krebs, Jean-Daniel 155 Kristeva, Julia 82, 159, 168, 173, 185–6

ideas, Spinoza on 26 Ignatius of Loyola, St, Spiritual Exercises 66 illness as anti-conformism 98–9 in comic theater 97 and humors 99 as “idiom of distress” 3, 98 La princesse de Clèves 139–40, 141 produced from within 196 representation of 1 Sontag on 59 S tanton on 171n144 see also Surin imagination Descartes’ discounting of 120, 184 Du Laurens on 184–5 and hypochondria 120, 130–1 and images Phèdre 183–92, 209 in La princesse de Clèves 166–74 in Le malade imaginaire 131 and love melancholy 183–4 and melancholy 28–9 Pascal on 46 and the passions 166–7 and representation 185 and the senses 184 in seventeenth-century medicine 184 Spinoza on 26–7, 32 and the superego 169–70 imprints, bodily 29, 36, 77, 78, 97, 142, 147, 150, 207 see also stigmata; stigmatization

La Rochefoucauld, Duc François de on mind-body dualism 42–3 Maximes 42, 113 labyrinth, symbolism 186n30 Lacan, Jacques 82, 83 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine 3, 6 and mind-body mimicry 142 La Comtesse de Tende 143–4, 145, 154 abandonment 164 La princesse de Clèves 104 abandonment 65, 162–3 fear of 163–4, 170 abjection 168 body mystery 140 as seat of passions 152–3 borderline in 173–4 death 172 and development of the novel 142 emotions 153–4 ending, interpretations 173n150 geographical location 172–3 illness 139–40, 141 mind-body mapping 144, 153, 154, 155 enigmatic presentation 142 feigned 147–8, 149, 150 love melancholy 146 and patriarchal society 143 repression 156–7, 158–9 stigmata 147 imagination 166–74 and memory 169 and repression 167 and the superego 169–70 Jansenism 158, 159–60 melancholy 140–1 patriarchy 164–5 flight from 171 La princesse de Montpensier 143, 144–5, 150, 151

Jacquinot, Barthélemy 63 Jansenism La princesse de Clèves 158, 159–60 Phèdre 193, 194 Jaquet, Chantal 24 Jay, Paul 87–8 John of the Cross, St. 85

Index Laplanche, Jean 202 Lapsley, James N . 66 law, vs desire, Phèdre 197, 198–9, 213 Le Breton, David 151 Le Brun, Jacques 77 LeDoux, Joseph 22, 55, 56, 90, 153 Lepage, Martin 186 Lhermitte, Jean 70 Lipowski, Zbigniew 9 Lloyd, Genevieve 213 Longino, Michèle 135 Lorimier, Renée-Claude 136 Loudun convent, demonic possession 38, 39–40, 41 Surin’s role 61, 62–3 Louis XIII, King of France 1, 2, 63, 92 Louis XIV, King of France 1, 2, 134 absolutism 125, 135, 210 arts patronage 8 intolerance of melancholics 100 Phèdre critique in 210 Theseus, comparison 205, 209 love melancholy 28, 34, 36, 38, 114 Ferrand on 183–4 and imagination 183–4 in La princesse de Clèves 146 in Le misanthrope 114 in Phèdre 175–6, 197–8, 213 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 136 Lyons, John 2, 44, 48 McDougall, Joyce 54, 75, 190 Theaters of the Body 9 Theaters of the Mind 9 McGann, Jerome 48 MacKenzie, Louis 158, 160 madness, melancholy, distinction 34 Maguire, Matthew W. 46 Malebranche, N icolas 14, 23 Cartesian dualism, divine link 21–2 The Search after Truth 21 mania, and melancholy 190 Marin, Louis 2, 75 Mauron, Charles 194 medicine, and melancholy 27–37 see also psychosomatic medicine

241

melancholics, Louis XIV’s intolerance of 100 melancholy 6, 13, 53n143 Binet on 29–30 and black bile 100 and blood 196 of the brain 27, 38, 41, 42, 121, 175 Burton on 30, 32, 33–4 creative value 37 diabolical origin 74 Du Laurens on 27–9 female, 37–42, 175n1 Ferrand on 34 Guibelet on 29 humoral 30, 32, 51n137, 74, 100, 105, 121, 122, 179 hypochondriacal 27, 30, 34, 38, 42, 97, 121, 122, 134, 211 and the imagination 28–9 La princesse de Clèves 140–1 Le misanthrope 100–17 and lovesickness 28, 34, 114 madness, distinction 34 and mania 190 as masculine illness 37, 214 and medical thought 27–37 monist perspective 37 and the passions 33–4 religious 30n69, 74 in society 196–7 Treatise of Melancholy 30 types of, 27–8, 30, 175, 199n60 virile aspect 41 women and 37–42, 213 see also Burton; love melancholy memory, episodic 186 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène 143 Mersenne, Marin 14 Mesmer, Anton 215 mind, the indivisibility, Cartesian 79 Spinoza on 25–6 Wordsworth on 49–50 mind-body dualism Baudelaire on 50 breakdown 56–7 Burton on 32 in Christian theology 66n22

242


de Staël on 52 ethical concerns 42 Ferrand on 34, 36 La Rochefoucauld on 42–3 in Molière 99 and Romanticism 47–52 Spinoza on 23–4 Surin’s rejection of 70, 82 see also Descartes mind-body illness, seventeenth century 211 mind-body mapping 29, 50, 55–6, 155, 181 La princesse de Clèves 144, 153, 154, 155 neurobiology 111 Phèdre 180, 182–3 Spinoza on 155–6 Surin 83–4 mind-body medicine 217–18 mind-body mimicry, Lafayette 142 “body-minded brain” notion 111, 181 Minotaur myth, symbolism 204 Mishrahi, Robert 25 modes concept, Spinoza 55 Molière 3, 6 mind-body dualism in 99 comic models 95–6 Le malade imaginaire 119–34 Angst 124 body fetishization 128–9, 132 death 123 hypochondria 99, 121, 122–3, 126–7, 131–2 imagination 131 as “theater of cruelty” 125–6 Le misanthrope 99, 100–18 anger in 105, 107, 108–10 autobiographical elements 136 ending, interpretations 104n27 love melancholy 114 melancholy 100–17 narcissism 112–13 political dimensions 136 royal patronage, loss of 136–7 Tartuffe, ban on performance 136 Morris, Catherine 17 Morris, David 208 Murray, Timothy 96 mystics 85, 86

narcissism and the ego 113 and hypochondria 127 in Le misanthrope 112–13 narcissist, Freud on 113 neurobiology, mind-body mapping 111 N ormore, Calvin 17 Ochmann, Frank 56 Odier, Charles 162 Oedipus complex definition 202 Phèdre 202–204 Orange, Donna 216 Orlando, Francesco 177 Paige, N icholas 62, 90 Pascal, Blaise 161 on human ignorance 45 on the imagination 46 Pensées 44, 193, 194 philosophy 44–5 on the senses 45, 46 on thought 44 on truth 45–6 passions, the causes of melancholy 33–4 Descartes on 16, 17, 70–71, 110, 218 and imagination 166–7 involuntary aspect 22–3 and the soul 17–18, 22 and the will 19, 22–3 patriarchy La princesse de Clèves 164–5 Phèdre 205–8 Pilet de la Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules 38, 39 Traité de la melancholie 40 placebo effect 217 plot, Phèdre 208 Plumwood, Val 213 Pontalis, J.B. 113, 202 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste see Molière precipice see abyss positive thinking, power of 217–18 psychic distress, manifestations 112 psychosomatic illness 54 causes 75

Index psychosomatic medicine 54 Racine, Jean 3, 6 Phèdre blood, importance of 182, 195–6 body, role 179–80, 181–2 mind-body mapping 180, 182–3 conversion 178 hamartia 209 imagination and images 183–92, 209 imagined past 186–9 Jansenism 193, 194 law vs desire 197, 198–9, 213 Louis XIV critique of 210 Theseus, comparison 205, 209 love melancholy 175–6, 197–8, 213 mania 189–90 Oedipus complex 202–4 patriarchy 205–8 plot 208 psychic death 190–191 repression 177–8, 200–201, 205 senses 176, 177, 179, 182, 191 reason Descartes’ reliance on 20, 21 and the senses 45, 84 Régis, Pierre-Sylvain 13 Reiss, Timothy 20, 21 repression 53 and imagination 167 La princesse de Clèves 156–7, 158–9, 167 Phèdre 177–8, 200–201, 205 see also conversion Richards, Robert J. 48 Richelieu, Cardinal 8, 63 Riggs, Larry 96, 107, 116, 117, 201 Ripa, Cesar, Iconologie 106 Romanticism and mind-body dualism 47–52 and new “self” 52 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques on child’s education 48–9 Emile 48 on feeling 48

243

on the senses 48, 49 on sensibility 48–9 Rouvroy, Louis de, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires 2 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 172 Saled, Renata 127 Sami-Ali, Mahmoud 113, 116 satyriasis 38 Scarry, Elaine 166, 167 Schiesari, Juliana 214 schisms, internal 6, 29, 46n116, 193 schizophrenia, Surin’s illness 79–80 Schmaltz, Tad S. 13, 21 Schmelzer, Mary 32 Schmidt, Jeremy 74 senses 22, 27, 44, 81 de Staël on 52 Descartes on 15, 45, 46n121, 120, 152, 152n52 and the imagination 184 Pascal on 45, 46 Phèdre 176, 177, 179, 182, 191 and the reason 45, 84 Rousseau on 48, 49 Spinoza on 83 Surin on 83, 84, 85, 89, 94 sensibility 52, 89 Rousseau on 48–9 Serroy, Jean 130 Shalom, Albert 89 Silesius, Angelus 85 Simon, Jean Robert 32 Smith, Gretchen Elizabeth 8, 136 society, melancholy in 196–7 somatoform disorders 5–6 see also conversion disorder Sontag, Susan, on illness 59 sorrow, Damasio on 160 soul, the Descartes on 4, 16, 18, 19, 30, 66, 70, 71, 92 medical interest in 43 and the passions 17–18, 22 Surin on 81–2 Spinoza, Baruch 5, 13 on affects 23, 25, 27, 55, 73, 216 on mind-body dualism 23–5

244


on mind-body mapping 155–6 Descartes, criticism of 19–20 on emotions 23 Ethics 14, 23, 25, 55, 73, 89, 132, 155, 209, 214, 215 on ideas 26 on the imagination 26–7, 132 on the mind 25–6 modern rediscovery of 215 modes concept 55 on the senses 83 Stanton, Domna on honnêteté 1n2 on illness 171n144 on La princesse de Clèves, ending 173n150 stigmata characteristics 146–7 in La princesse de Clèves 147 stigmatization, Surin’s illness 77 Stolorow, Robert 216 Stone, Harriet 172, 187 Strowski, Fortunat 161 superego 78, 191 and imagination 169–70 Surber, Christian 194 Surin, Jean-Joseph 3, 6 on affects 90 mind-body dualism, rejection of 70, 82 Cartesian terminology, use 71 exorcism, Loudun convent 61, 62–3 heteroglossia in 10 illness 63–94 mind-body mapping 83–4 conversion 67, 75 criticism of, by superiors 68–9, 72, 74 despair 73–4 dualism of souls battle 79 mystical experience 85 pain experienced 67–8 recovery 93–4 reflections on 87, 88 schizophrenia 79–80 sensory manifestations 84–5 stigmatization 77–9 suicide wish 76 symptoms 65

imaginary register, adoption of 82–3 monism 89 on the senses 83, 84, 85, 89, 94 on the soul 81–2 works Correspondance 78 Science expérimentale 59, 60, 63, 68, 69, 70, 73, 77, 82, 92 authenticity 88–9 autobiography 87, 92–3 experimental-experiential knowledge 90–91 narrative strategy 80–81 Triomphe de l’amour 86n81 Tellenbach, Hubert 13 Teresa of Avila, St 85 theater classical 10, 96, 208, 210 comic, illness in 97 Thirty Years War (1618–1648) 20 thought, Pascal on 44 Tilmouth, Christopher 32 transposition see conversion truth, Pascal on 45–6 Tulving, Endel 186 Ubersfeld, Anne 10–11 Lire le théâtre 96 on theatrical emotions 109–10 unconscious, the, and Freud 53 uterine furor 38 Valincour, Jean-Baptiste-Henri Du Trousset 140 Van der Schueren, Eric 158 Verhaeghe, Paul 200 Vigne, Anne de la 14 Wagner, Stephen 20 Weizäcker, Viktor von 88 Weyer, Johann 39 Wilkin, Rebecca 120, 184 Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth 213 will, the Descartes on 4, 18, 20, 71, 72, 110 and the passions 19, 22–3

Index Wilson, Elizabeth 165 Wilson, J. Cameron 108 Winnicott, Donald W. 54 on anger 107–8 women, and melancholy 37–42, 213

Wordsworth, William on the mind 49–50 preface, Lyrical Ballads 49, 50 writing, autobiographical 88

245

Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature

Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature

John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue (1618) (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare's England (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Translation in French and Francophone Literature and Film. (French Literature)

Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition

Masterpieces of French Literature

Psychosomatic

The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material

Early Detection and Management of Mental Disorders

Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material

Early detection and management of mental disorders

Early Diagnosis and Treatment of Endocrine Disorders

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Les cultures medicinales canadiennes French

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the 21 Century)

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Ethnic Literary Traditions in American Children's Literature

Diseases and Disorders in Infancy and Early Childhood

Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature

Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature

John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue (1618) (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare's England (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Translation in French and Francophone Literature and Film. (French Literature)

Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition

Masterpieces of French Literature

Psychosomatic

The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material

Early Detection and Management of Mental Disorders

Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material

Early detection and management of mental disorders

Early Diagnosis and Treatment of Endocrine Disorders

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Les cultures medicinales canadiennes French

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the 21 Century)

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

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