Vir melancholicus/femina tristis: Towards a Poetics of Women’s Loss

Abstract

The notion of melancholia as a gendered affliction began with Aristotle, who in his Problems (XXX), affirmed that it was a malady that afflicted “all great men.” Women, being essentially cold and moist, according to the theory of the humors, were unable, like the warmer and drier men, to become atrabilic ; that is, men were able to produce “black bile,” the agent of melancholia, whereas women were incapable of producing it. With the cultivation of the classics during the Renaissance, this Aristotelian notion was revived and enhanced by Marsilio Ficino, in his De vita (Book I), who “reconceived [melancholia] as a kind of wisdom,” and “who defined the affliction as the privileged subjectivity of the lettered” (Schiesari 131, 113). Thus, melancholia came to be conceived as a “blessed gloom”; it became the illness that caused great men—or men became great because of it—to become moral spokesmen for their community, to express loss and truth in terms of transcendent statements, and to “become exemplary of the ‘human condition’ “ (Schiesari 141, 265). Centuries later Sigmund Freud affirmed that the melancholic has a heightened sense of morality and “has a keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic … [and] it may be … that he has come pretty near to understanding himself ; we can only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind” (qtd. in Schiesari 5, 9, emphases mine). Juliana Schiesari, in her book The Gendering of Melancolia. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature , explains that this gendered concept of melancholia was a “cultural myth” that privileged the loss and lack of men over that of women. Simply put, men's loss was more significant than women's loss, such that the said notion of melancholia resulted in a discursive practice that excluded women. In the love lyric, for example, melancholia as a discursive practice allowed men to use women as metaphors for loss, at the same time that it devalued and divested women of their own subjectivities. Women, as biologically and culturally defined, could not be melancholic; they could only be “mournful” and thus they “were reduced to the banality and particularity of their existence” (“Introduction” 265). This conception produced, as I term it, a cultural dichotomy: Vir melancholicus/ Femina tristis. With regard to Spanish letters of the Golden Age, we can envision Quevedo, for example, as the type of melancholic described by Freud, in Quevedo's famous sonnet “Miré los muros de la patria mía,” ruminating on his decaying “muros,” his crumbling house, his curved staff, and frail sword, in order to lament the quick passage of time, man's mortal destiny, and, on an allegorical level, to lament the loss of empire.

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