Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature: Afterlives of the Nightingale’s Song 3031277201, 9783031277207

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AFFECT THEORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature Afterlives of the Nightingale’s Song

Marion A. Wells

Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Series Editors Joel Faflak, Western University, London, ON, Canada Richard C. Sha, Literature Department, American University, Washington, DC, USA

The recent surge of interest in affect and emotion has productively crossed disciplinary boundaries within and between the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, but has not often addressed questions of literature and literary criticism as such. The first of its kind, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism seeks theoretically informed scholarship that examines the foundations and practice of literary criticism in relation to affect theory. This series aims to stage contemporary debates in the field, addressing topics such as: the role of affective experience in literary composition and reception, particularly in non-Western literatures; examinations of historical and conceptual relations between major and minor philosophies of emotion and literary experience; and studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability that use affect theory as a primary critical tool. Louis Charland †, Western University, Canada Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut, USA Holly Crocker, University of South Carolina, USA David James, University of Birmingham, UK Julia Lupton, University of California Irvine, USA Kate Singer, Mount Holyoke College, USA Jane Thrailkill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Donald Wehrs, Auburn University, USA

Marion A. Wells

Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature Afterlives of the Nightingale’s Song

Marion A. Wells Middlebury College Middlebury, VT, USA

ISSN 2634-6311 ISSN 2634-632X (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism ISBN 978-3-031-27720-7 ISBN 978-3-031-27721-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Threnouses (Mourning Women or Lamenting Women), oil on board, 6” x 8”, 2005 by M. Zoie Lafis This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For John, Theo, and Toby with all my love

Acknowledgements

This book was written with the generous support of Middlebury College, whose leave policy allowed me to dedicate several semesters to writing at crucial junctures (including the long completion phase). The generous additional support offered by Middlebury’s Henry N. Hudson Chair in English Literature also allowed me to undertake necessary travel to complete research, including multiple visits to the British Library in London and the Folger Library in Washington, DC. I am extremely grateful for this crucial support. Many friends and colleagues have supported this work and its author over the years. Special mention must be made of the deep debt my work on Virgil owes to the late Dr. Don Fowler, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford until his untimely death in 1999. The impact of his generous and brilliant teaching continues to circulate in my work many years later and entirely exceeds the bounds of particular citation. I dedicate Chapter Four to him, with the proviso that any errors of Virgilian interpretation are entirely my own responsibility. In more recent years, I have benefited greatly from the work of Margaret Graver, William Reddy, and Barbara Rosenwein on the emotions, and Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed on affect theory. Many interlocutors have offered thoughtful responses to the ideas contained in this book, whether in the form of official responses to chapters or conferences papers, or simply in conversations over coffee. I’m grateful in particular to Elizabeth Fowler, Jamie Fumo, Pamela

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Hammons, Femke Molekamp, Lisa Schnell, and Julie Solomon for critical conversations that specifically targeted my work on the medieval and early modern emotions, and especially maternal grief. Helen King’s suggestions for revision of an article related to this book were especially helpful. The anonymous readers of an earlier version of Chapter Seven for the journal English Literary History offered insightful feedback for revision, as did the anonymous readers for Palgrave’s Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. I would also like to thank friends and colleagues at Middlebury College and Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English with whom I’ve shared many years of sustaining conversations: Febe Armanios, Cates Baldridge, Emily Bartels, James Berg, Susan Burch, Laurie Essig, Karin Gottshall, Jennifer Green-Lewis, Karin Hanta, Chris Keathley, Yumna Siddiqi, Carly Thomsen, and Catharine Wright. John Elder has been an especially close and careful listener and reader over the years, and his support and enthusiasm for all my projects, including this one, have sustained and encouraged me through many a writing desert. More recently, John Tallmadge has offered thoughtful and insightful interventions at crucial junctures in the evolution of the book. Many of my students have contributed their brilliant insights to my thinking about affect, gender, and emotion over the years, and I gratefully thank them all. Hana Matsudaira, whose thesis on affect and emotion in Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis coincided with the protracted completion phase of this book, deserves a special shout-out for helping me clarify my own thought about some of these issues as I tried to help her. Finally, I offer heartfelt thanks to my family, both here in Vermont and in the UK, for their unstinting support and seemingly genuine interest in the intricacies of my progress towards completion of this book. My parents maintained a lively and patient interest from afar in the progress of the book, forgetting nothing between conversations and celebrating at every milestone passed. Conceived at first as a project about maternal grief when my two boys, Theo and Toby, were small, this book grew with them, evolving into something with broader reach, but in which the figure of the mother continues to play a crucial role. My astonishment at the depths of emotion conjured by motherhood propelled the project into being and is woven deeply into the texture of the analysis contained in these pages. My husband, John, has helped not only on the sidelines as an unflagging supporter but also as an acute and philosophically challenging reader: his insights about key concepts in the philosophy of mind and

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language often helped me gain critical conceptual clarity that helped to shape the trajectory of the book as a whole. An earlier version of Chapter Seven appeared as “The Tears of Rachel: Lament and Affective Improvisation in Mary Carey’s Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Poems,” in ELH: English Literary History (Fall, 2019). The cover art features “Threnouses” (Mourning Women or Lamenting Women), oil on board, 6” x 8”, 2005, by M. Zoie Lafis. I’m very grateful to Zoie Lafis for permission to reproduce her beautiful painting.

Contents

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1

Introduction

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From Passive Matter to Embodied Affects: Gendering Emotions in the Classical Tradition

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Toward an Early Modern Affect Theory: Christian Stoicism and the Augustinian Will in Medieval and Early Modern Thought

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The Nightingale’s Song: Weaving Affects in Virgil’s Aeneid from the Trojan Women to Euryalus’s Mother

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4 5 6 7 8

“Though Me Were Looth”: Translating Affect and the Maternal Body in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale”

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“When You Are Gentle”: Emotional Exercitives and Affective Injustice in Taming of the Shrew

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The Tears of Rachel: Lament and Affective Improvisation in Mary Carey’s Life Narrative and Poetry

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Reflections on Everyday Affective Injustice

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Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Ugh, ach, argh, oy: those inarticulate, literally meaningless little interjections are the equivalent, on a less dire day, of moaning and keening. —Kathryn Schulz, Lost and Found

Who gets to be angry? Who is allowed fully to express her grief? Whose emotional expression is regarded as disruptive or transgressive, and why? How do literary texts in particular capture, complicate, mediate, or even reinforce these cultural norms? This book begins with the observation that while philosophical accounts of the emotions over time often seem to assume that each individual speaker has access to the same psycho-physiological structure for feeling and expressing emotion, individual experience of emotion in fact varies widely according to prevailing social norms.1 Like Barbara Rosenwein, whose book on emotional communities has been invaluable to my own work, I am interested in the ways in which emotions are inextricably tangled up with social contexts, both discursive and material, and in how that entanglement facilitates or impedes an individual’s access to emotional speech, or what William Reddy has usefully termed

Kathryn Schulz, Lost and Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), 69. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_1

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“emotives.”2 Accordingly, a central concern in these chapters will be the complex ways in which the social framework—or “habitus,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term—can cause feeling to become, or remain, radically dissociated, split off from access to first-person emotives.3 Bourdieu defines the term “habitus” as “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations.”4 Instead of positing a neutral arena of free “will,” Bourdieu assumes that the dispositions that constitute the habitus in which a person lives “are acquired through a gradual process of inculcation[;]... the dispositions produced thereby are also structured in the sense that they unavoidably reflect the social conditions within which they were acquired [italics in original].”5 Barbara Rosenwein draws on similar assumptions in her explication of the term “emotional community,” which for her is a “social community... created and reinforced by ideologies, teachings, and common prescriptions.”6 Like Bourdieu, Rosenwein acknowledges the repressive potential of the emotional community, remarking that “even the most ‘impulsive’ of behaviors is judged so within a particular context. If an emotional display seems ‘extreme,’ that is itself a perception from within a set of emotional norms that is socially determined.”7 And as a recent study of medieval emotions points out, even less consciously available feelings “could be shaped by a program of moral training captured by the habitus.”8 My contribution to these studies of emotional communities is twofold. First, I introduce a sustained focus on gender: I will be especially alert to ideologies of gender that inform and contour the emotional habitus operating for speakers in their particular communities. Rosenwein’s example of an emotional display’s seeming “extreme” in fact lends itself particularly well to a gender analysis, since female emotional expression is historically often considered “extreme,” for reasons we will explore in these chapters. We might consider these social constraints as operating similarly to what Miranda Fricker describes in her account of what she calls “testimonial injustice”: situations in which issues of class, race, or other identity factors detract from the social credibility of a speaker’s testimony due to systemic bias. Fricker writes that testimonial injustice is a “distinctively epistemic injustice... in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower [italics in original].”9 Similarly, I am concerned with what we might think of as affective injustice, in which someone is wronged in her capacity as a feeler because of gendered bias about the nature of female emotional expression. It is not just that she experiences the kind of “credibility deficit” that interests Fricker (although that may

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be in play too, as for instance in the attribution of the term “hysterical” almost exclusively to women), but that she anticipates such a negative social response to the feeling that she does not or cannot express it.10 In such a case, the speaker’s feeling may never rise to the level of fully formed emotion; instead, it may reside uneasily in the body as a kind of affective residue. The literary representation of this potentially painful tension between socially admissible emotion and less visible or legible affect constitutes the second major critical focus of the book, proving inextricable from my study of gendered feeling. Like Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker in their recent volume on medieval affect, I find it useful to adopt an intersectional approach to this historicized study of feeling, drawing both on the philosophical history of emotions from the classical to the early modern period and contemporary affect studies.11 The interplay between these approaches allows me to trace the impact of specific historical emotion concepts as they evolve, while also mapping the trajectories in these works of unstable and often unspoken or even prelinguistic feelings that I identify as affects. In this book, the central theoretical intersection between these two strands of analysis arises from the long legacy of Stoic emotion theory, which develops the concept of the so-called prepassions as intransigent bodily “feelings” that flood the body with an irresistible psychosomatic response but that might not receive the crucial cognitive “assent” (sunkatathesis ) to develop into what the Stoics regarded as true emotion.12 This early concept of the embodied prepassions resonates richly with recent work on affect, emphasizing in similar ways (though to different ends) the role of embodied feeling that may exceed available linguistic scripts as well as challenging contextual emotional norms. It is precisely within the overdetermined space between the prepassions and cognitive assent in Stoic theory, or between affect and emotion in more recent affect studies, that intersecting social forces of gender and power contour the kinds of feelings that find access to public—or even private—emotives.13 This liminal space, I suggest, maps naturally onto the space of the literary: navigating the difficult terrain between what is felt and what can only be expressed, if at all, with difficulty, these texts deploy dense nodes of subtextual intensity—whether prosodic, rhythmic, or thematic—that offer diverse and often polysemous iterations of meaning that may be quite at odds with the texts’ overt and more socially legible agendas. The transfer of focus to literary from philosophical works thus does more than just

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offer concrete “examples” of certain theoretical ideas about affect and emotion; it offers an analysis at a granular level of the very activity—or the inhibition of that activity—of affective translation. Philosophical and historical accounts of the passions consistently consider them ontologically liminal—that is, as occurring on a spectrum between body and mind, heart and head, self and other; via the intermediary work of “pneuma” (Latin: spiritus ), the soul and its instruments conduct tense and often mutually disruptive exchanges in response to passionate stimuli. Indeed, it is often “pneuma,” or spirit—discussed in more detail in the next chapter—that will prove the most dynamic site of affective intensity in many of the works I examine here.14 Susan James emphasizes the dual citizenship of the passions in both the phenomenological realm (where the “feeling of the joy itself is not in the outside world or in the body—it is in the soul”) and the physical realm of heat, cold, humors, pneumatic spirits, and so forth in the body.15 “Once we take account of their phenomenological as well as causal character,” James writes, “the passions, like nomads, traverse the border between perceptions and volitions, between passions and actions of the soul, between states that are, and are not, directly dependent on the body. Disorderly yet fascinating, they turn up on both sides of the line.”16 I extend James’s insight that the passions occupy a uniquely nomadic role within the body, where affect may become blocked or stuck, to explore their nomadic role between bodies, propelled by what Donovan Schaefer calls a “lattice of forces” outside fully conscious awareness.17 And while I agree with scholars who consider the passions as cognitively penetrable, I will argue that the degree of cognitive penetrability is both highly variable and suggestively entangled with social context and circumstance.18 The book circles around one primary emotion as an exemplary case study: grief, which many writers considered the most powerful but also the most feminine and potentially feminizing of all the emotions. As we will see, grief has a certain conceptual stickiness that connects it to other emotions, including anger, which Aquinas viewed as arising from sadness, or joy––grief’s opposite.19 For these reasons among others, grief presents itself as a particularly productive case study for a broader analysis of the gendering of emotional experience. More important for my purposes than philosophical accounts of any particular emotion, though, is the structural account of emotion itself: how it arises in the first place; how it gets metabolized (or not) in the mind; its physiological underpinnings— and potential attenuation into affect; its processing (or blockage) via

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language; and its unpredictable and destabilizing passage between bodies. From the tragic Stoicism of Virgil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3) to Chaucer’s Stoic-Petrarchan Griselda (Chapter 4) and the Stoic-inflected attitudes reflected in seventeenth-century poet Mary Carey’s work (Chapter 6), the Stoic view of the emotions as test cases for a certain conception of masculine coherence and boundedness conflicts with a dispersive model of feeling associated primarily with disruptive maternal affects. In each chapter, I aim to map both the impact of this long-lived Stoic legacy and its suppressed “Other,” the feminine (or feminized) affective trajectories marked by disruption, excess, and a transpersonal transmission that challenges notions of self-contained individual selves. As the terminology underlying the conceptualization of emotion suggests, emotions get connected early on to passivity and (thus) to femininity. The Greek word for emotion, pathos, from paschein, “to suffer or undergo,” is rendered in Latin as passio, from pati, “to suffer,” or affectus, from afficere, “to act upon, or influence.” Occasionally authors such as Augustine and Aquinas use the term motus, “movement,” although it is important to note that passionate movement is by definition always catalyzed by something external.20 English texts generally follow Latin sources, typically preferring “passion” or “affection” of the soul or mind. These terms all foreground the constitutive passivity of the emotions, their vulnerability to external forces, and the resulting penetrability of the self to external, invasive forces or objects—elements that align the emotions deeply with historical constructions of the feminine. This chapter and Chapter 2 chart the development of a view of passion as constitutively linked to femininity via an array of adjacent concepts, including softness, penetrability, and a tendency toward the dissolution of boundaries. As Sara Ahmed notes, “To be passive is to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering. The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others.... To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous.”21 The tendency to be profoundly shaped by what Martha Nussbaum calls “external uncontrolled objects” in the world is precisely what Stoic emotion theory aims to defend against in its policing of an unstable border between the intransigent prepassions and the cognitive assent anchored in individual subjectivity and represented by first-person emotives.22 The literary texts I examine dramatize the often unauthorized (by any guiding “subject”) passageway across that border

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through a dense network of rhythmic and thematic intensities that are the focus of my critical analysis.

From Affect to Emotion This classical and early modern view of emotion captured by the terms affectus or passio—as a feminizing experience of being acted on or influenced—intersects naturally with affect theory’s focus on forces that move us, but that may not be fully conscious or experienced subjectively as one’s own, and that may also be nonlinguistic.23 In this book, I will generally use the term “affect” to indicate a spectrum of feeling that arises at the intersection of what these texts consider soul/mind and body, in the energetic, fluid realm of pneumatic spirits where intentionality is cloudy and complex, and which as a result may not (or not yet) be available for full conceptualization or articulation. It will occasionally be useful to make a distinction between these embodied affects and “emotion” as a more fully conceptualized feeling available for linguistic articulation. I draw partially here on the lineage of affect theory articulated most influentially by writers such as Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough, who separate the terms “affect” and “emotion” entirely.24 On this view, affect is an autonomous set of bodily energies that are subpersonal and sublinguistic.25 For Massumi, affect is experienced primarily as intensity—embodied reaction that “is not semantically or semiotically ordered.”26 As such, it drives us toward or away from objects by a kind of compulsion that radically disrupts any sense of an autonomous and sovereign self.27 Emotion, on the other hand, is “qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits.... It is intensity owned and recognized.”28 In general, recent work in affect theory calls for a renewed focus on bodily energies and forces that sometimes precipitate into fully-fledged emotions but often operate invisibly behind the scenes. Affect names sites of disruption, “passages of intensity, a reaction in or on the body at the level of matter.”29 Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg offer the following as a useful working definition of affect: “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement.”30 As is well known, this conception of affect is indebted

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to seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s formulation of affectus, broadly defined as “the affections of the body, whereby the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, together with the idea of these affections.”31 Especially interesting for our purposes is Spinoza’s narrower definition of passion as a passive affect (affectus for him can be passive or active)—passive because its active cause is not the mind itself but, rather, some external force. For Spinoza, passions may be transformed into actions (active affects) when we are fully aware of them and understand their causation: “An emotion which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.”32 Without such knowledge, as Claire Carlisle writes of Spinoza’s view, “we simply suffer our emotions [italics mine]”—a passive state I argue is identified throughout these texts with the feminine.33 While Spinoza espouses belief in the transformative power of knowledge to shift a passion into an active affect, Massumi views affect qua intensity as radically unassimilable at the conscious, symbolic level and operating according to different logics.34 This view of affect as unassimilable at the semantic or semiotic levels has met with effective critique, particularly from Ruth Leys and Linda Zerilli, whose work has importantly influenced my own thinking about affect.35 Both Leys and Zerilli acknowledge in this strain of affect theory an important “critique of conceptual rationality as inherently situation-independent and disembodied,” but both robustly question its claim that affects are therefore necessarily nonconceptual and independent of intentionality or meaning.36 (“Intentional” here has the philosophical sense of being “about” something, as one is upset or angry about a particular thing.)37 Leys puts her finger on the nub of her disagreement with Massumi and those aligned with his work, arguing that they “posit [wrongly, in her view] a constitutive disjunction between emotions on the one hand and our knowledge of what causes and maintains them on the other, because according to them affect and cognition are two separate systems.”38 In her assessment of the anti-intentionalism implicit or explicit in affect theory indebted to Massumi’s work, Zerilli proposes a useful middle ground. Making a distinction between fully conscious propositional knowledge and conceptual forms of embodied experience, she suggests an alignment between affect and the “conceptual dimensions of embodied experience.”39 She argues that “what is unarticulated (i.e., prepredicative)... is not by definition nonconceptual” and consequently that “just because our affective experiences do not take propositional

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form... does not mean that these experiences are nonconceptual.”40 Instead, she insists on the “irreducible entanglement of thinking and feeling, knowing that and knowing how” within socially competent embodied comportment.41 Rather than entirely separate modes of experience, then, “affect and reason are understood to be mutually imbricated in modes of conceptuality, rather than distinct.”42 My argument will likewise assume that affect is not constitutively excluded from modes of conceptuality and intentionality, though its access to linguistic concepts may be limited for a variety of social and political reasons.43 In this sense, I situate my work in conversation with that of scholars like Sara Ahmed, Teresa Brennan, and Sianne Ngai, whose work, as Donovan Schaefer usefully writes, “insists on tracing affect as something felt, something that rises into embodied spheres of awareness.”44 Sara Ahmed’s discussion of affect as a potentially interpretable intensification of bodily surfaces highlights the theoretical payoff that attention to the transition between affect and emotion provides: I become aware of my body as having a surface only in the event of feeling discomfort (prickly sensations, cramps), that become transformed into pain through an act of reading and recognition (“It hurts!”), which is also a judgement (“It is bad!”). This transformation of sensations into an emotion might also lead to moving my body away from what I feel has caused the pain.45

Like Gregg and Seigworth, Ahmed is interested in those forces that drive us into movement toward or away from something (emotion: from Latin, emovere, “move out or away from”). But this passage also implicitly raises a question about the political ramifications of the affect-emotion spectrum: what happens when a body registers discomfort but cannot—is not allowed to—move away, when the “reconstitution of space” by either physical or linguistic means is socially prohibited?46 As we will see, Ahmed’s tracing of the movement from affect (sensation) to emotion qua judgment resonates strongly with the Stoics’ assessments of passion and prepassion—though they are invested in maintaining a strict boundary between the two, as Ahmed is not. As she points out, “Emotions clearly involve sensations: this analytic distinction [which she traces back to Massumi] between affect and emotion risks cutting emotions off from the lived experience of being and having a body.”47 Similarly, Sianne Ngai suggests that it is useful to assume that “affects are

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less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less ‘sociolinguistically fixed,’ but by no means code-free or meaningless.”48 It is, as Ngai argues, precisely in the transition—or failed transition—between the less formed and structured affects and the more fully conceptualized emotions that we can diagnose key moments of transformation or blockage.49 With Zerilli’s argument in mind, I will find it useful to explore the notion that affects may embody tenacious forms of knowing that under certain circumstances break through even the most rigorously repressive emotional habitus.50 They operate as modes of awareness in which conceptual capacities are drawn on passively rather than actively used in judgment, as John McDowell has argued in relation to certain perceptual experiences that do not rise to the level of judgment.51 I take Griselda’s dramatic and prolonged swoon in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale as an exemplary instance of such an affective breakthrough, clearly passively undergone by Griselda. Even in this dramatic breaking out of the “speaking body,” the intentionality of the gesture remains opaque; Griselda’s body registers and responds to something akin to the concepts of “strong distress” or “painful intensity,” though she never gives her feeling a name.52 The thwarting or weakening of affective intentionality in particular social circumstances such as this one offers a particularly stark analytical lens through which to examine the gendered pressures emotional communities may exert, wittingly or not.53 As William Reddy has provocatively put it, “Politics is just a process of determining who must repress as illegitimate, who must foreground as valuable the feelings and desires that come up for them in given contexts and relationships.”54 My task in these chapters will often be to trace the contours of socially illegible or unwelcome feelings, examining precisely those contexts and relationships that might cause the “semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions... [to] denature into affects.”55

Performing Emotives As I have indicated thus far, I will draw throughout this book on William Reddy’s concept of the “emotive” to gain critical traction on the dynamic relationship between affect, emotion, and the vocalization of emotion so central to the negotiation of these social contexts. When affective intensity tips into more fully conceptualized emotion language it becomes what Reddy calls an emotive—an (always partial) translation into words

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of widespread emotional activation. While Reddy does not use the term “affect,” his discussion of some of the thought materials informing the emotive as “automatic, semiconscious, or imperfectly glimpsed” indicates a very similar set of concerns.56 Here again it is helpful to think, as Zerilli suggests, of embodied experience as at least partially conceptual: emotives are in this sense at the very intersection of mute bodily sensation and discursive articulation. Virgil’s depiction of the “femineus ululatus” (feminine shriek) of the mothers in the Aeneid, the focus of Chapter 3, seems to exemplify the notion of a partially conceptualized, affect-driven emotive. It seems reasonable to assume that it is at this inflection point, between sensation/affect and emotive utterance, that the organizing and limiting effects not only of individual will but also of social cues enter the field and help to push those “incipient” affective intensities toward or away from one particular pathway.57 As Barbara Rosenwein has argued, readily available emotion scripts can tend to narrow and predetermine the range of feelings that can make their way into language in particular communities.58 However, emotives also always have the potential for contestatory departures from the accepted emotion scripts; they are “first drafts that press for reformulation,” even if “too often second drafts are not permitted.”59 Drawing on J. L. Austin’s distinction between performative utterances—utterances that name their own action (“I promise that...”)—and constative, or descriptive utterances, Reddy argues that while emotives initially seem descriptive, in fact “the exterior reference that an emotive appears to point at is not passive in the formulation of the emotive, and it emerges from the act of uttering in a changed state.”60 In this sense, “emotives are similar to performatives... in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions.”61 In other words, the phrase “I am angry” doesn’t just point to the anger, it performs a state of anger (and may alter the nature of the feeling in being uttered), and in this sense emotives are often both “self-altering” and “self-exploratory.”62 Given my focus on affective intensities that may be in excess of existing emotion scripts, I will also be concerned with the potential for the disruption of emotives by the unpredictable surfacing of bodily affects that may undermine or in some sense give the lie to the emotive. But these affective irruptions too may be contoured by social expectations:

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a swoon may be transgressive in certain ways but also acceptably “feminine”; maenadic bodily movements are similarly both transgressive and responsive to cultural scripts. In addition to their internal, “self-altering” effects, emotives also have powerful perlocutionary effects, working in different ways on their hearers, depending on whether an individual is the direct target of an emotive or simply its witness. As this last point suggests, emotives have “relational intent”: “To speak about how one feels is, very often, to make an implicit offer or gift, to negotiate, to refuse, to initiate a plan or terminate it, to establish a tie or alter it.”63 As a result of these performative and especially perlocutionary qualities, emotives often bring into play a complex range of material in which “very important relationships, goals, intentions, practices of the individual may be at stake.”64 Echoing my interest in the interrupted or partial transformation of affect into emotion, Reddy notes that the “translation” from activated thought materials into emotive is necessarily incomplete, and in this sense always at least a partial failure. This will be especially true in socially oppressive circumstances— for instance a context in which female lament is policed and legislated as socially disruptive (see Chapters 3 and 6). In an effort to deepen my analysis of the ways in which emotives, like emotions, do not occur in a vacuum but are instead subject to often intricate and intimate linguistic pressures from particular interlocutors or larger social and cultural forces, I expand my focus on the performative utterance to include Mary Kate McGowan’s work on exercitives.65 A subset of Austin’s performative utterances, exercitives announce “a decision that something is to be so, as distinct from a judgement that it is so; it is advocacy that it should be so, as opposed to an estimate that it is so.... Its consequences may be that others are ‘compelled’ or ‘allowed’ or ‘not allowed to do certain acts.’”66 Austin’s discussion of exercitives emphasizes the importance of the recognized authority of the speaker for the exercitive to be felicitous—a college president making an announcement about incidents occurring on campus, for instance (“there will be no loud music on campus after 11 p.m.”).67 While McGowan acknowledges that for an exercitive to be felicitous the speaker “must have authority over the realm in which the enacted permissibility facts preside,” she is more interested in the operation of what she calls “covert” or “conversational” exercitives; these are exercises of linguistic power that may be more provisional, intimate, and transient in their effects.68 Thus when Jane Austen considers the impact of

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the all-powerful Sir Thomas on his lowly and dependent niece in Mansfield Park, whom he is trying to persuade into marriage with the rakish Henry Crawford, she slyly writes: “‘Advise’ was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power.”69 In certain contexts, “advice” about what to feel and how to express that feeling is not merely advisory; it is coercive, shaming, instructive, forceful, even threatening. As this example suggests, my interest in McGowan’s insights into the linguistic work of exercitives lies in their possible application to emotives. I suggest that we think of “emotional exercitives” as utterances that specifically forbid, permit, narrow, or contour the articulation of specific emotives by certain speakers. Such emotional exercitives certainly might be in play in circumstances that I earlier identified as producing a kind of affective injustice. In these chapters, I will be attentive to moments in which linguistic moves on the part of one interlocutor—whether intimately connected to a listener or emerging primarily as a cultural influence in texts, sermons, or other artifacts—inhibits the translation of affective material into emotives. ∗ ∗ ∗ The book moves outward from classical philosophical sources into a focus on classical, medieval, and early modern literary texts. The first two chapters together establish a philosophical introduction to the central lineage of emotion concepts that intersects with the literary history I survey later in the book. Chapter 2 sets the scene for the book’s analysis of gendered feeling by examining the long-lived association between femaleness, passivity, and a kind of insuperable entanglement of the soul in embodied affects. If the female—and especially maternal—body comes to signify physical and psychic impressibility, the passions themselves represent a dangerous internalized femininity within a masculine mind–body composite struggling to maintain autonomy and coherence. The chapter traces the tenacious associations, particularly in Stoic theory, between emotion and a damaging psychic softness (mollitia). Of particular importance in Stoic theory is a felt need to isolate and contain that internal capacity to be broken or deeply touched by external forces. True emotion for the Stoics, as I explain, necessitated the subject’s “assent” to an incoming impression; only then could an emotion emerge that was considered appropriate to the occasion. The chapter explores the tension between this cognitively alive “assent” and the so-called prepassions, irrepressible bodily reactions to external events that ultimately give rise in

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Seneca’s work to a hybrid assemblage: a feminine, embodied, “animal” part of the self continually threatening the hegemony of rational assent from the inside.70 Chapter 3 explores the long afterlife of the Stoics’ preoccupation with the mind’s potential softness and vulnerability to impression from external items in the world, focusing on the gradual transition from Stoic “assent” to Christian will, particularly in the work of Augustine. As I show, Augustine’s view of the fallenness of embodied human life renders a meaningful distinction between prepassion and passion proper difficult to maintain; rather, he ranges these experiences on a spectrum similar to that extending between affect and emotion. The Stoic association between prepassions and feminine impressibility now emerges in an identification of emotional susceptibility with Eve, who personifies the psychic softness feared and abjected in Stoic theory. This chapter considers the literary mediation of this Christianized Stoicism in Petrarch’s work, which tellingly uses an idealized feminine figure to work through an anxious relationship with masculine apatheia. The chapter closes with an investigation of the work of “pneuma,” or spirit, in the psycho-medical works of the early modern period, showing that this rarified but still material intermediary force between body and soul becomes the site of what early modern texts repeatedly refer to as a problematic, excessive vehemence (roughly equivalent to affect theory’s notion of “intensity”). Chapter 4 examines female furor in Virgil’s Aeneid and draws heavily on the theoretical work of this chapter. Arguing that the Aeneid is a fundamentally Stoic poem, I show how the figure of the maenad continually undermines Stoic ideals by dramatizing the subjection of what Schaefer calls the “nonsovereign body” to the powerful sway of a furor both wildly disruptive and contagious.71 The affective force of furor, moving rapidly and unpredictably between bodies, complicates the Ciceronian notion of an “empire of the soul” at the same time as it disrupts the epic’s teleological drive toward political empire. Considering three central episodes featuring maenadic furor—the Trojan women’s attempt to burn the ships; Amata’s bacchic interlude with her women on the mountainside; and Euryalus’s mother’s grief-stricken response to her son’s death—I trace the development of an affective poetics centered on the specifically female cry, the ululatus, which I associate with the tragic song of the nightingale. This reading of Virgil’s Aeneid establishes an important framework for the book in its centering of a powerful but often dissociated female grief (and rage), which periodically floods the epic

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narrative with an affective intensity so disruptive that Aeneas himself, and later Ascanius, are momentarily displaced and alienated from their epic roles. It is primarily this little-studied legacy of Virgil’s tragic Stoicism, mediated through the female figure of the lamenting or quasi-maenadic mother, that I pursue through the book’s subsequent chapters. The book’s thematic interest in an affective poetics of maternity intersects in Chapter 5 with a story of translation that is itself tangled up with the Stoic treatment of the emotions. Picking up my analysis of Petrarch’s humanistic Stoicism in this chapter, I explore Petrarch’s Stoicization of Boccaccio’s story of Griselda, who in Petrarch’s version becomes an exemplar of Stoic apatheia represented for the edification of an elite coterie of male readers. Petrarch’s decision to translate the story into Latin and out of the “maternal” tongue of the vernacular hitches the metafictional issue of translation to themes within the story itself, as Griselda is “translated” (to use Chaucer’s word) from low to high social station only if she agrees to put aside her own “wishes and feelings” upon entering the marriage to Walter. I argue that Chaucer’s retranslation of the story back into the vernacular highlights both the mutual imbrication of affect and the maternal body and the troubling alignment of Petrarch’s project of translation with Walter’s brutal “assay” of the maternal body, offering a provisional, limited critique of Petrarch’s idealization of wifely apatheia. Chapter 6 undertakes the deepest dive into the coercive work of emotional exercitives, examining early modern marriage as the power structure that authorizes the husband, Petruccio, to limit and eventually erode Kate’s access to emotives until he appears to have interrupted the process of assent to outside impressions (that is, her will ) entirely. As he shifts from suitor to husband, his language concurrently shifts from seemingly benign banter to overtly regulatory exercitives that disclose their “taming” goal with increasing aggression, forecast early on by his ominous reference to Kate as a “second Grissel.” Kate’s own desperate appeal for access to emotives conveys how high the stakes are within the closed system of Petruccio’s emotional exercitives: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart / Or else my heart concealing it will break.”72 The chapter explores the mechanisms by which the social power of emotional exercitives extends into the intimate space of the body, as Petruccio’s control of Kate’s “stomach”—both as receptacle of food and producer of choler—initiates a wide-ranging assault on the integrity of her affectivepneumatic systems. While Petruccio is successful in disaggregating these

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systems, breaking apart what Timothie Bright calls the pneumatic “loveknot” that holds together mind and body, I argue that Kate’s voice maintains a vital connection to her dissociated affects, just as she herself suggests in the line quoted above.73 The closing section of Chapter 6 takes up a detailed analysis of the work of affective poetics in Kate’s final speech—its deployment of breath and rhythm to disrupt the semantic screen of compliance on show in the final scene. This analysis carries us into Chapter 7, where the organizing themes of the book—female lament, embodied affect, affective injustice, and an affective poetics that speaks, sometimes scandalously, against the constraints of an emotional community—come full circle in an analysis of the elegies of seventeenth-century writer Mary Carey. I examine the pressure that the strictures of Carey’s Calvinist emotional community place on her expression of intimate grief for her lost children, arguing that in her poetry—unlike in her devotional prose—she puts prosodic and rhythmic disruption to extraordinary use to voice a socially transgressive affective intensity. I suggest in my analysis of these poems that Carey’s stressed and unnatural use of punctuation and rhythms approximate what James Wilce calls in a different context a “crying voice” of oral lament, calling us back to the ululatus of Virgil’s maenadic mothers.74

Notes 1. Although I focus in this book on classical, medieval, and early modern literary representations of emotions, the notion that emotions are embedded in, and constituted by, the social groups in which people feel and express themselves is supported by current psychological research. See for example Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and especially Batja Mesquita, Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022). 2. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1; William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chap. 4. 4. Bourdieu, Outline of Theory of Practice, 78. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intro. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12. This quotation is from Thompson’s introduction.

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6. Rosenwein mentions Bourdieu’s term “habitus” in passing, indicating the quite close alignment between this concept and emotional community: “Emotional communities are similar as well to Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’: internalized norms that determine how we think and act and that may be different in different groups.” Emotional Communities, 25. 7. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 15. 8. Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds., Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9. 9. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20. 10. Fricker discusses the notion of “credibility deficit”—when a speaker “receives less credibility than she otherwise would have” as a result of intersectional prejudice concerning race, gender, class, etc. Epistemic Injustice, 17–22. 11. Burger and Crocker write that “pre-modern writings theorize affect and emotion in ways that show their inherent intersectionality.” Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, 2. 12. I develop the concept of the prepassions more fully in Chapter 2. 13. I discuss the distinction between affect and emotion in recent affect theory more fully below, 6–9. 14. “Intensity” is influentially aligned or even identified with affect by Brian Massumi in his seminal essay “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 27: “For present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect.... Emotion and affect—if affect is intensity—follow different logics and pertain to different orders.” 15. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 96. 16. James, Passion and Action, 96. 17. Donovan Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 24. 18. See, for instance, Simon Shogry, “What Do Our Impressions Say? The Stoic Theory of Perceptual Content and Belief Formation,” Apeiron 52, no. 1 (2019): 26–93. 19. “The emotion of anger does not arise except because of some sorrow endured [tristitiam illatam] and unless there is desire and hope for revenge [desiderium et spes ulciscendo].” Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I– II.46.1. Quoted and discussed in Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 152. 20. Thomas Dixon argues that Augustine distinguishes reliably between the term “affectus,” which he suggests denotes “acts of will” as opposed to the “passiones,” which “were not active movements of the will but

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21. 22. 23.

24.

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passive movements of the lower, sensory appetite.” Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 48. My reading of Augustine suggests however that the line is much more unstable between these terms and that affectus can often refer to the movements of the lower soul, including feelings we might consider close to the contemporary notion of “affect.” See, for example, De Civitate Dei 14.10, where he asks whether the first human beings “habebant affectus in corpore animali ante peccatum quales in corpore spitiali non habebimus, omni purgato habebant” (felt these emotions [affectus ] in their animal bodies before they sinned—I refer to the sort of emotions from which we shall be free in our spiritual bodies after all sin has been cleansed away). At 10.9 he also compares “emotions in their perverse form” (his affectibus pravis) to “diseases and convulsions” (tamquam morbis et perturbationibus). Augustine, City of God, books 12–15, trans. Philip Levine, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2–3. Martha Nussbaum, “The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions,” Apeiron 87 (2002): 148. Donovan Schaefer writes that “to study affects is to explore nonsovereign bodies, animal bodies, bodies that are propelled forward by a lattice of forces rather than directed by a rational homunculus.” Religious Affects, 24. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique, no. 31 (1995): 83–109. Massumi’s work inherits a lineage beginning with Spinoza and traveling most influentially through Gilles Deleuze’s work on affect, to which I refer more fully in Chapter 3. See also Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 548–67, for a skeptical account of affect’s potential to restructure social meaning. Confusingly, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio also finds it useful to distinguish between “emotions,” which can be “triggered and executed nonconsciously,” and “feelings,” which by contrast “pivot on consciousness,” quoted in Brian Ott, “Affect in Critical Studies,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. J. F. Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 6. Though he reverses the terminology, the distinction is similar. See also Silvan Tomkins, who as Ott points out, distinguishes between affect and feeling, emotion, or mood in terms of degree of cognitive awareness and persistence over time. Ott writes usefully that “affect is—in Tomkins’s view—not necessarily cognitively

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

activated, though it possesses the parasitical ability to co-assemble with cognitive, motor, memory, drive, and perceptual mechanisms” (5). Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 24. See Schaefer, Religious Affects, 65. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. S. O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4, quoted in Ott, “Affect in Critical Studies,” 9. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–2. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. R. H. M Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), 130. Spinoza, Ethics, 248. Claire Carlisle, “Spinoza: Part 6: Understanding the Emotions,” The Guardian, March 14, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/belief/2011/mar/14/spinoza-understanding-emotions. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 24–25. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 434–72; and Linda Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment,” New Literary History 46, no. 2 (2015): 261–86. Zerilli, “Turn to Affect,” 262. “Intentionality entails relationship of thought to the world of the power of the mind to represent and be about something—affect would be tantamount to a private language.” Zerilli, “Turn to Affect,” 269. Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 437. Zerilli, “Turn to Affect,” 281. Zerilli, “Turn to Affect,” 268, 280. Zerilli, “Turn to Affect,” 280. See also William Reddy, “The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day,” Emotion Review 12, no. 3 (2020): 168–178. Zerilli, “Turn to Affect,” 262. It is worth noting that even certain theorists indebted to the Spinozan “intensive force” theory of affect often signal possible connections between affect and emotion. As Ott points out, Lawrence Grossberg associates affect with the “prepersonal, asignifying ‘senses and experiences,’” but he also concedes that “our emotional states are always elicited from within the affective states in which we already find ourselves.” Ott, “Affect in Critical Studies,” 14; Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81. Elsewhere, Grossberg writes similarly that “I have always held that emotion is the articulation of affect and ideology. Emotion is the ideological attempt to make sense of some affective productions.” “Affect’s Future,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 316.

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44. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 32. See in particular Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); and Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 45. Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: or, The Impressions Left by Others,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, no. 2 (2004): 29. 46. I paraphrase Ahmed here, who discusses the impulse to move away as a “reconstitution of bodily space.” “Collective Feelings,” 29. 47. Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings,” 39n4. 48. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. 49. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. 50. Zerilli’s argument similarly seeks to find a way—drawing inspiration from Wittgenstein—to “describe the conceptual character of our prepredicative mode of being in the world.” Turn to Affect, 272. 51. John McDowell calls the passive operation of concepts in perceptual experience a reflection of “sensibility” to distinguish it from higher cognitive processes like understanding or judgment: “This mode of operation of conceptual capacities is special because, on the side of the subject, it is passive, a reflection of sensibility.” McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 62. 52. In Chapter 4 I develop Shoshana Felman’s notion of the “scandal of the speaking body” from her book of the same title, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). 53. Ngai writes similarly that the “unsuitability of these weakly intentional feelings for forceful or unambiguous action is precisely what amplifies their power to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular.” Ugly Feelings, 27. 54. William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of the Emotions,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 3 (June 1997): 335. 55. Fricker on “credibility deficit,” Epistemic Injustice, 17–29; the quotation is from Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. 56. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 101ff. 57. “Intensity is incipience, incipient action and expression.... It is also the beginning of a selection.” Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30. 58. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 20–25. 59. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 19. 60. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 105. 61. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 105. 62. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 63–111. 63. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 100–101. 64. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 102.

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65. Mary Kate McGowan, “Conversational Exercitives: Something Else We Do with Our Words,” Linguistics and Philosophy 27, no. 1 (2004): 93–111; and McGowan, “Oppressive Speech,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 87, no. 3 (2009): 389–407. 66. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 155. 67. I am indebted for this example to Mary Kate McGowan’s article “Conversational Exercitives,” 95. 68. McGowan, “Oppressive Speech,” 393. 69. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. and intro. Kathryn Sutherland; original intro. Tony Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 259. Sir Thomas attempts to coerce Fanny into marrying the rakish Henry Crawford while hiding the fact of his coercion. 70. See Chapter 4, n. 4, on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage. 71. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 24. 72. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 4.3.75–76. 73. Timothie Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, Containing the Causes Thereof, and Reasons of the Strange Effects it Worketh in our Minds and Bodies (London: John Windet, 1586); see also Chapter 3, n. 85. 74. James M. Wilce, Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): 23–25.

CHAPTER 2

From Passive Matter to Embodied Affects: Gendering Emotions in the Classical Tradition

It’s feeling that warps us, changes us, forges us, challenges us. It is far more difficult to give in to the softening than to stay behind a wall. —Emily Rapp Black, Sanctuary

This chapter aims to provide the philosophical underpinnings of the Stoic, or Stoic-inflected, lineage of emotion history that extends through the texts I examine in this book. My primary focus will be on Stoic emotion theory, and specifically, on the Stoics’ conception of an irresistible psychosomatic response to external stimuli, the so-called prepassion. But I begin by examining the long and crucial history of construing emotional response as a kind of internalized feminine softness or impressibility that renders the subject vulnerable to external, uncontrolled objects in the world.1

“Matter Too Soft a Lasting Mark to Bear”: Femininity, Passivity, and the Passions A long history identifying passivity itself with femininity undergirds the resulting connection between femaleness and passion.2 Freud’s musing on

Emily Rapp Black, Sanctuary, 132. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_2

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this connection vividly exemplifies its impact on characterizations of the feminine: “One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims.”3 In his Generation of Animals, Aristotle influentially argues for the existence of a formative active male principle and a receptive, “material” female principle: If we consider the question on general grounds, we find that, whenever one thing is made from two of which one is active and the other passive, the active agent does not exist in that which is made; and, still more generally, the same applies when one thing moves and another is moved; the moving thing does not exist in that which is moved. But the female, as female, is passive, and the male, as male, is active, and the principle of the movement comes from him. (1.21.9–14)4 If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia [menses] have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter [Gk. hyle]. (1.20.28–32)

The female’s passivity, in Aristotle’s view, arose from women’s closer association to the lower, passive elements of water and earth, as opposed to the male’s connection with the active elements, air and fire; accordingly, male bodies more readily concoct blood into its most ethereal form, pneuma, which is present in semen.5 As the process of applying vital heat to moisture, concoction is responsible for a broadly “digestive” process in the body that produces, at different stages, differently purified substances.6 Because of semen’s association with the higher elements, it is the “mover,” the formative principle, while the female’s less concocted blood, in the form of the menses, provides the primitive material of creation. This schema helps to explain why the female is generally presented as softer and more impressionable, whether animal or human: “In the case of [larger animals]... the female is softer in character, is the sooner tamed, admits more readily of caressing” (History of Animals , 9.608a.25); “with all other animals the female is softer in disposition than the male” (History of Animals, 9.608b.1.); “woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike” (History of Animals, 9.608.b.10).7 This view has great longevity, showing up in

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some form across the trajectory of texts I examine in this book. Thus, for example, Thomas Wright claims in his discourse on the passions of the mind in 1604 that “women, by nature, are enclined more to mercie and pitie than men, because the tendernesse of their complexion moveth them more to compassion,” concluding a few lines later therefore that “commonly [women] be inclined to such passions [those he has been discussing in the chapter].”8 Plato offers a very similar account of form and matter in the Timaeus , suggesting that “we may liken the receiving principle to a mother, and the source or spring to a father... and may remark further that if the model is to take every variety of form, then the matter in which the model is fashioned will not be duly prepared unless it is formless and free from the impress of any of those shapes which it is hereafter to receive from without.”9 Comparing the impression of the paternal “form” on matter to “those [presumably artists] who wish to impress figures on soft substances,” Plato again emphasizes the softness and impressibility of the “feminine” first matter.10 As we will see in this chapter and the next, classical and early Christian writers remained highly ambivalent about the material impressibility of the mind–body complex, offering harshly regulatory practices designed to distance the coherent (masculine) self from an abjected and impressible feminine one. At the same time, Aristotle admits that the passions—the pathem¯ ata— are precisely those things in respect of which we are moved rather than movers; they are potentially a source of passivity or softness within. In the Nicomachean Ethics , he distinguishes virtue from the passions precisely because in the one case we are moved, and in the other we are movers: By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain. . . . We feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a particular way. (Nicomachean Ethics , 2.4.5)

In De Anima Aristotle considers the question of the passions in relation to the body-soul connection, arguing that they are “all affections of the complex of body and soul” because “there seems to be no case

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in which the soul can act or be acted upon without the body” (De Anima, 1.1.403a). “It therefore seems,” he continues, “that all the affections of soul involve a body—passion, gentleness, fear, pity courage, joy, loving, and hating; in all these there is a concurrent affection of the body.... The affections of soul are enmattered formulable essences” (De Anima, 1.1.403a). Aristotle’s hylomorphism undergirds his double view of the passions as involving both physiological and cognitive aspects: the example Aristotle gives early in De Anima is anger, which the physicist would define as “a boiling of the blood or warm substance surrounding the heart” while the dialectician understands it as “the appetite for returning pain.”11 This influential passage is perhaps the clearest early example of Susan James’s conception of the passions as nomadic entities disrupting clear divisions between mind and body.12 It seems to be precisely the “enmattered” status of the passions that guarantees both their passivity and our susceptibility to being moved. More specifically, the passions are tied to the body through their enmeshment in acts of sense perception, particularly through the faculty of the phantasia, or imagination. As Jessica Moss argues, the Rhetoric “characterize[s] the passions as responses to how things appear,” thus suggesting a close association with the part of the soul that perceives.13 The passions register a psychosomatic response to incoming perceptions of an object that pleases, threatens, offers pain or joy, and in this respect the passions register a physical impression of that object. Aristotle describes perception with the aid of a simile that recalls Plato’s description of artists impressing form on soft matter: “By a ‘sense’ is meant what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter. This must be conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold” (De Anima, 2.12.424a). The stronger and deeper the impression, presumably, the more powerful the hold it exerts on the soul, and since women’s putatively cold, wet temperament renders them constitutively more impressionable (as the various discussions of female “softness” indicate), their disposition to be “more easily moved to tears” (History of Animals, 9.608b) and to succumb to passion more generally finds its structural correlative. Aristotle’s ambivalent recognition of the intrinsic passivity of the “enmattered” passions leads him to emphasize the importance of control. Exerting control over the passions allows one to moderate them rather than extirpate them, since, unlike the Stoics, Aristotle viewed the passions

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as potentially useful and appropriate when under the jurisdiction of reason. But it also prevents one from being carried away by passion like a person “carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power” (Nicomachean Ethics, 3.1.1110a). This picture of someone being “carried away” by passion as by a wind is Aristotle’s archetypal vision of a person whose actions are not voluntary and who has lost the ability to initiate the autonomous, self-directed movement proper to the soul. Whirlwinds, spinning tops, and wild horses running out of control similarly haunt the pages of the classical writers writing after Aristotle.14 As we will see in Chapter 4, Virgil deploys all these images to depict the overmastering danger of the passions. Plato offers an explicitly gendered hierarchy within the mortal soul in Plato’s Timaeus.15 As Catherine Newmark has argued, having established that the gods placed “terrible and irresistible affections” (Timaeus, 69c–d) in the mortal soul, Plato suggests a further division. In what is termed the thorax, they incased the mortal soul, divided the cavity of the thorax into two parts, as the women’s and men’s apartments are divided in houses, and placed the midriff to be a wall of partition between them. That part of the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and loves contention, they settled nearer the head, midway between the midriff and the neck, in order that being obedient to the rule of reason it might join with it in controlling and restraining the desires when they are no longer willing of their own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel. (Timaeus, 69e–70a)

The particular passions associated here with the higher “spirited” part of the soul are clearly masculinized—they are anger and the spirit of contention; those “desires” in the lower part of the soul are clearly identified with the lower appetites as feminine.16 Including the revered apartment located in the head, these “apartments” of the soul seem to correlate with the highly influential division of the soul Plato discusses in the Republic and elsewhere: the reasoning (logistikon), the spirited (thumoeides ), and the appetitive (epithum¯etikon).17 These latter categories will reappear in later medieval theories of the emotions as the “concupiscible” and the “irascible” passions of the sensitive soul. In the Republic, Plato seems to associate the appetitive part of the soul with grief and lamentation, referring to the “plaintive” part of the soul as that which is most affected by poetry. The problem with praising

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such poetry, he argues, is that it leads us away from conduct becoming of a man: “When in our own lives affliction comes to us, you are also aware that we plume ourselves upon the opposite [of abandonment to the pleasure of lamentation in tragedy], on our ability to remain calm and endure, in the belief that this is the conduct of a man, and what we were praising in the theater that of a woman” (Rep., 10.605d, italics mine).18 Seneca offers a similarly gendered reading of the soul in Letter 92 to Lucilius, commenting that the spirited part of the soul (animosam), while sometimes unbridled (effrenatam), is nonetheless “certe fortiorem ac digniorem viro” (certainly braver and more worthy of a man [vir]; Ep. 92.8).19

Masculine Coherence and Stoic Apatheia The association between femininity, softness, and the passions intensifies in Stoic thinking, which, despite later rejection of its more extreme forms, maintains a strong influence throughout the early modern period.20 Two Roman authors stand out in importance: Cicero and Seneca, who both provide material to which I will return throughout this book. We will turn to their work to explore how gendered notions of softness and debility are internalized within Stoic conceptions as feminine and abject characteristics deeply threatening to an idealized masculine apatheia and self-coherence. When first considering the proper name for the passions, Cicero toys with the Latin term morbus , “disease,” which he claims is the proper translation of the Greek path¯e. As Margaret Graver points out, however, the Greek term is more neutral, indicating something that is experienced or undergone rather than, necessarily, an illness.21 Cicero eventually argues that this agitation or disturbance of the mind is in fact best described as a kind of insania (literally “unwellness of the mind”). This discussion inaugurates an influential strain of thought in which the passions are pathologized as illness and disorder, something to be entirely extirpated from the mind and body.22 Specifically, this disease of the mind arises in those who lose control of the mind, who are “beside” themselves (“ex potestate”)23 : Itaque nihil melius quam quod est in consuetudine sermonis Latini, cum exisse ex potestate dicimus eos, qui effrenati feruntur aut libidine aut iracundia.

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Consequently there is nothing better than the usage of the Latin language, where we say that those who are unbridled in the indulgence of either lust or wrath are beside themselves. (Cicero, TD 3.5.11)24

Like Aristotle’s reference to someone carried away off by a wind, the comparison of the passionate person to an unbridled horse (effrenati) suggests a lack of control, a renunciation of proper autonomy. In his Phaedrus , Plato similarly uses the allegory of the charioteer who must firmly, even savagely, rein his two horses, which represent the two lower parts of the soul (the spirited and appetitive). But unlike Plato’s so-called partitionist theory of the soul, with its tension between rational and less rational parts, Stoic theory embraced a psychological monism, viewing the soul as a unified, material entity with a commanding faculty: the h¯egemonikon.25 The materiality of this soul is important, since it radically blurs the boundary between mind and body implicit in Plato’s theory: “For the soul, too,” Seneca writes, “is corporeal” (Nam et hoc corpus est; Ep. 116.5).26 As Seneca explains, the orientation of the whole mind itself changes once passion gains sway: Neque enim sepositus est animus et extrinsecus speculator adfectus, ut illos non patiatur ultra quam oportet procedure, sed in adfectum ipse mutator ideoque non potest utilem illam vim et salutarem proditam iam infirmatamque revocare. Non enim, ut dixi, separatas ista sedes suas diductasque habent, sed affectus et ratio in melius peiusque mutatio animi est. For the mind is not a member apart, nor does it view the passions merely objectively, thus forbidding them to advance farther than they ought, but it is itself transformed into the passion and is, therefore, unable to recover its former useful and saving power when his has once been betrayed and weakened. For, as I said before, these two do not dwell separate and distinct, but passion and reason are only the transformation of the mind toward the better or the worse. (De Ira, 1.8.2–3)27

Arguably, this monistic structure emphasizes the pervasive, built-in threat to the mind from its own internal processes. In his account of the natural weakness of the mind, Cicero initially seems to acknowledge that everyone is subject to disturbance of some kinds. But he also suggests that the danger lies in the part of us that is “soft” and “tender”: “Sed est natura in animis tenerum quiddam atque molle, quod aegritudine

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quasi tempestate quatiatur” (It’s natural that there should be some soft and tender element in our minds, something that would be shaken by distress as by a storm; TD, 3.5.12, italics mine). Almost immediately he catches himself and warns against too ready a tolerance of these “soft” and “tender” parts: Sed videamus ne haec oratio sit hominum adsentantium nostrae imbecillitati et indulgentium mollitudini, nos autem audeamus non solum ramos amputare miseriarum, sed omnes radicum fibras evellere. But let us be careful. It may be that these are the words of those who choose to indulge the weak and soft [mollitudini] parts of us. Let us be bold enough not only to prune away the branches of unhappiness, but to yank out its very roots. (TD, 3.5.13, italics mine)

The term mollis and its cognates appear widely in Cicero’s and Seneca’s works, where in addition to its primary meaning of “soft” or “pliant,” it has a secondary derogatory meaning—presumably because of the historical construction of femininity as “soft”—of “effeminate” and “weak.”28 Both senses (soft and feminine) appear activated in the passage quoted above.29 And both senses combine in the use of the term to denote the kind of softness associated with the tendency to capitulate to the “lowest” of the body’s desires: “Ubi animum simul et corpus voluptates corrupere, nihil tolerabile videtur, non quia dura, sed quia mollis patitur” (when pleasures have corrupted both body and mind, nothing seems to be tolerable, not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is grown soft; De Ira, 2.25.3). Seneca writes similarly in Letter 99 to Lucilius that a certain Marullus is managing his grief for the death of his young son molliter (literally, “softly”), for which Seneca believes he deserves “criticism rather than consolation” (Ep. 99.1). Seneca makes a similar kind of point in his De Consolatione Ad Marciam. Even though addressing a woman, he announces in the first highly gendered sentences of the text that he values precisely her distance “ab infirmitate muliebris animi” (from womanish weakness of mind), praising instead her “robur animi” (strength of mind).30 Stoic philosophy cannot compartmentalize these aspects of the mind, as Plato attempts to do, in the “women’s quarters” of the soul; given their pervasive quality, Cicero’s advice is to extirpate them entirely, violently yanking them out by the roots as one would a weed. Such dangerous

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softness is implicitly feminine in the passage quoted above but is later explicitly identified as “womanish.” Exhorting his listeners to rouse their virtue to combat distress (aegritudo), he writes: Aderit temperantia, quae est eadem moderatio, a me quidem paullo ante appellata frugalitas, quae te turpiter et nequiter facere nihil patietur. Quid est autem nequius aut turpius effeminato viro? Temperance will stand by you as well (or what is the same thing, selfcontrol; a bit earlier I called it frugality) and will keep you from doing anything shameful or depraved—and what is more shameful and depraved than a womanish (effeminato) man? (TD, 3.36)

The self-control that guards against a dangerous interior softness is lost in people who are “effrenati” or “ex potestate” (TD, 3.5); by definition, they have become effeminate. If we dig a little more deeply into the Stoic theory of the emotions, it becomes clear that as in Aristotle’s writing, the feared and femininized “softness” in the soul is not—or not always—metaphorical. It is materially produced in the soul’s receptive pneuma, and as such signifies the individual’s quite literal vulnerability and susceptibility to the world. “Pneuma,” translated in Latin texts as spiritus (and of course in English texts as spirit), is of crucial importance in understanding the psychic structure involved in the emotions. From the earliest Greek sources onward, pneuma was understood as originating in breathed-in air absorbed into the body. A “highly energized gaseous material” constructed of breath and inner heat (for Galen and his successors pneuma was comprised of air and blood), pneuma is understood in Greek medicine and philosophy as an animating substance closely aligned, and even sometimes identified with, the psyche itself.31 Pneuma was often thought to be primarily generated in the heart, the location of the Stoic h¯egemonikon, or “directive faculty,” from where it circulated throughout the body, animating “the intelligence, the voice, the sperm, and the five senses.”32 In the monistic Stoic tradition pneuma is identified with the soul, which is therefore a highly refined but still material substance not fundamentally separate from other parts of the body. As the highly enervated connective matter animating the body but also facilitating the dynamic interplay between external and internal worlds, pneuma is vitally connected to flows of tension that Sarah Kay likens to the tension of a violin string: “Every body,

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whether animate or inanimate, has its own tension, its own tuning.”33 As the conduit of forms of intensity that affect the body-mind from without as well as within, and as the material substratum of voice, pneuma will be a primary focus in our analysis of the trajectory from affect to emotion and emotive.

“Subject to the Will”: Assenting to Passion The Stoics understood the emotions as forms of (erroneous) belief. Margaret Graver usefully presents the mental event of belief as a twostage process, involving awareness of a proposition, called in Stoic texts an impression (Gk. phantasia; Latin, species ) and an assent to that proposition (Gk. sunkatathesis ; Latin, adsensus ).34 The initial, propositionbearing impression occurs in the psychic material of the pneuma “as a kind of print (t¯ uposis ) in the soul, like the print of a signet-ring in wax.”35 As Graver shows, pneuma was thought to have varying degrees of tension produced by the oppositional force generated by fire and air; higher tensile strength in the pneuma allowed the mind to resist shocks or impressions of various kinds more vigorously.36 The simile of the signet ring (recalling Aristotle’s use of the same simile to describe perception) emphasizes the Stoics’ view of the plasticity of the impressionable psychic pneuma; the more receptive, plastic, or “passive” the soul is, the deeper and more dangerously invasive the impression will be. A crucial step follows immediately upon the impression. The subject will either assent to the impression or not—either accept it as true, or not; if accepted as true, it will naturally produce a further belief: that a certain action is appropriate (such as mourning). So, for instance, the cause of distress “is identified as the agent’s belief that some serious evil is present, that evil being of such a kind that it would be appropriate for him to be pained by it.”37 As Graver explains, assent to this kind of impression constitutes an impulse (horm¯e) to act in a certain way; the impulse itself enacts approbation of the impression as true.38 At its heart, then, emotion is an act of will: as Seneca puts it, “non est eius impetus, qui sine voluntate nostra concitatur” (this is not a mere impulse of the mind acting without volition; De Ira, 2.1.4, italics mine).39 While emotion—in this case anger—does indicate a weakness of mind (“animi vitium”), it is a weakness of mind that is subject to the will and thus cognitively penetrable: “Ira praeceptis fugatur” (Anger may be routed by precepts; De

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Ira, 2.2.2). Cicero writes similarly that true emotion is volitional (voluntarium; TD, 3.83); the deep distress of mourning, for instance, can be removed with the removal of the false judgment about the issue (TD, 3.83). As has been noted, Seneca’s development of a notion of assent that hinges on internal volition develops a notion of “will” that provides an important stepping stone to Augustine’s influential development of the same term—voluntas —in a Christian context.40 As Brad Inwood notes, Seneca’s development of a capacity of mind to issue “self-directed commands... in pursuit of moral self-control and character development”41 seems to move the concept of will much closer toward what he calls “traditional will,” namely “a phenomenon of introspective consciousness” which “precedes and causes certain human actions.”42 Inwood’s primary source of support for this view is interestingly not the Letters, which are often adduced as evidence for a new conception of will, but the essay on anger (De Ira), in which the capacity of the mind to assent to an impulse or not emerges as a kind of blockade between the world and the mind. The freedom of this will is located precisely in the “indeterminacy of these internal volitions.”43 We will examine the impact of this Stoic legacy in Augustine’s work in more detail in the next chapter. Although it is possible to respond to an impulse rationally, with an appropriate, equable movement, this would not constitute true emotion; emotion is by definition an excessive impulse and in this sense a misuse of reason, according to the Stoics. Seneca’s comment in his Epistle 75 to Lucilius clarifies not only that emotions are excessive motions but that, if allowed to become habitual, they harden into disease: “Adfectus sunt motus animi inprobabiles, subiti et concitati, qui frequentes neglectique fecere morbum” (Passions are objectionable impulses of the spirit, sudden and vehement; they have come so often, and so little attention has been paid to them, that they have caused a state of disease; Ep. 75.12).44 We can certainly anticipate how this assessment of emotion as “excessive impulse” will inevitably be tied up with social norms and expectations. What counts as excessive will depend on norms in any particular emotional community; and given the underlying structure of emotion (predicated on receptivity and passivity of the psychic pneuma), any vehement response risks being dismissed as inherently and constitutively feminine. As Martha Nussbaum argues, Stoic emotion theory is tied up with issues of value––with, as she nicely puts it, “cherishings and disvaluings of

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external uncontrolled items.”45 Assenting to the proposition—the second stage of the belief process—that a lost cherished item, such as a beloved family member, is a great evil causes the passion (sorrow)—or more accurately, simply is that passion.46 The Stoic assessment of such an assent is revealing. To assent to the proposition that the loss of a family member is an evil is to acknowledge “the tremendously high importance of something beyond my control, an acknowledgement appropriately called ‘excessive’ because it transgresses the limits prescribed by right reason for our relation to things external.”47 Graver writes similarly that “in a rational being, external objects never merit uncompromising evaluation but integral objects always do.”48 For the Stoics, integral objects are those which arise within the sphere of the subject’s own control—as a result of the decision to act virtuously, honorably, or not. Thus Epictetus writes in his Handbook: “What is in our power is by nature free and unobstructed; what is not in our power is weak, enslaved, obstructed, and alien.... Test every phantasia by these rules, and if it concerns something that is not in our power, be ready to say, ‘this is nothing to me.’”49 External objects, even those which appear beneficial, such as wealth, power, reputation, and so on, are not intrinsically good. Virtue alone is truly good because “virtue is something unaffected by external contingency.”50 As Seneca puts it: “Ad hoc [vivendum] enim multis illi rebus opus est, ad illud [beate vivendum] tantum animo sano et erecto et despiciente fortunam” (For this [mere existence] he needs many helps; for that [a happy existence] he needs only a sound and upright soul, one that despises Fortune; Ep. 9.13, trans. Loeb, with emendation).51 Integral objects alone therefore “[are] worth choosing for [their] own sake; and virtue all by itself suffices for a completely good human life, that is for eudaimonia.”52 As we will see, Augustine influentially adopts a Christianized version of this view in his discussion of emotion. But the Stoic assessment of distress over something we cannot control as necessarily irrational and “excessive” seems somewhat circular and defensive—it is irrational only because we know we cannot control it, not because it is not inherently painful or disagreeable. Seneca’s rationale for setting aside grief illustrates this circularity particularly clearly: Sed si nullis planctibus defuncta revocantur, si sors immota et in aeternum fixa nulla miseria mutator et mors tenuit quicquid abstulit, desinat dolor qui perit.

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But if no wailing can recall the dead, if no distress can alter a destiny that is immutable and fixed for all eternity, and if death holds fast whatever it has once carried off, then let grief, which is futile, cease. (Consol. Ad Marciam, 1.6)53

This desire for defensive control is evident in the Stoic concept of apatheia (literally, “free from passion or emotion”), which seems a direct response to the dynamic pinpointed by Sara Ahmed: “The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others.”54 Fear of passibility—especially psychic passibility—is built into the Stoic rejection of mollitia as a disgraceful because feminine attribute. And since passibility is a material feature of the psychic pneuma undergirding the perception of, as well as emotional response to, external objects, the perceived need for internal vigilance is unsurprising. As we will see, this defensive internal vigilance lays the groundwork for a projection of a disparaged mollitia onto feminine bodies in general, and maternal bodies in particular—perhaps because of their innate porousness and intercorporeality.55 Seneca’s Latin paraphrase of the Greek apatheia is telling. He rejects the literal translation impatientia, on the grounds that it might connote a presumably feminizing inability to endure hardship or setbacks.56 The notion that women are impatient—in the sense of unsubmissive and rebellious—in their passions is an enduring one, which appears in Seneca’s own writing.57 Instead he suggests “invulnerability”: “satius sit aut invulnerabilem animum dicere aut animum extra omnem patientiam positum” (it may be better to say “a soul that cannot be wounded,” or “a soul entirely beyond the realm of suffering [patientiam]”; Ep. 9.2–3.). The goal of apatheia, then, is to place oneself decisively beyond the realm of the passive, patient, and implicitly feminized material soul that perceives the world feelingly, opening the subject up to suffering. Indeed, Seneca uses the image of the “wound” in his address to Marcia, both in terms of the “fresh” wound of her son’s death (“hanc... plagam”) and the allegedly healed over scar (“vulneris cicatricem”; 1.5) resulting from her father’s death. Taken to an extreme, the failure to control the wounding impact of “uncontrolled objects” in the world can lead to a full dissolution of the self. Cicero uses the etymology of the Greek word lupe (distress) to make this point:

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Omnibus enim modis fulciendi sunt, qui ruunt nec cohaerere possunt propter magnitudinem aegritudinis; ex quo ipsam aegritudinem lupe Chrysippus quasi solutionem totius hominis appellatam putat: quae tota poterit evelli, explicata ut principio dixi, causa aegritudinis; est enim nulla alia nisi opinion et iudicium magni praesentis atque urguentis mali. We must do everything we can to shore up those who are toppling over and unable to hold themselves together because of the depth of their distress: that is why Chrysippus believes that the very word lupe, distress, is derived from the “dissolving” [luein] of the person as a whole. But all of this can be eliminated, as I said at the outset, once the cause of distress has been laid open. (TD, 3.61, italics mine)

Nothing less is at stake, in the management of these incoming impressions, than the coherence (“nec cohaerere possunt”) of the self. As we have seen, Seneca and Cicero both repeatedly use a semiotics of softness (mollitia) and brokenness (e.g., TD, 4.13, humili et fracta [mean and broken]; Consol. Ad Marciam, 7.3, luctibus frangi [broken by grief]) to identify this threat to the coherence of the self as the passive and decisively feminine capacity of the soul to painfully internalize those uncontrolled, external objects in the world. Cicero nicely captures this nexus of concepts in his exhortation against fear: Nam videndum est in utrisque, ne quid humile, summissum, molle, effeminatum, fractum, abiectumque faciamus. For we must be careful in both cases that we are guilty of nothing mean [humile], submissive, soft [molle], effeminate [effeminatum], broken [fractum], and abjected.58 (TD, 4.64)

These qualities should be rooted out in one’s own soul, and in that of others: “Distress is mitigated,” Cicero writes, “when we confront mourners with the weakness of an effeminate soul” (cum obiicimus maerentibus imbecillitatem animi effeminati; TD, 4.60). As Nussbaum notes, “The dispositional state of a person who is prone to strong passions is a state that feels infirm, debilitated, lacking in solidity.”59 But such a state does not simply feel infirm; its weakness is understood as having a material cause in a slack pneumatic tension that produces a culpably feminine or feminizing pliancy and impressionability. The dispositional state

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Nussbaum describes is therefore not just infirm, but decisively and constitutively feminine. Despite the effort to externalize these qualities, Cicero does acknowledge that this abjected, feminine state is actually shared by all: “Est in animis omnium fere natura molle quiddam, demissum, humile, enervatum quodam modo et languidum” (As a rule, all minds contain naturally an element of softness, despondency, servility, a kind of nervelessness and flaccidity; TD, 2.20.47). This dialectic between the rejection and acknowledgement of a gendered, emotional interior underpins a recuperating homosociality in Cicero’s and Seneca’s texts, vividly illustrated below the passage just quoted. Cicero writes that the soul giving way to softness and generally behaving “like a woman” (muliebriter) can only be managed by “the guardianship of friends and relations” (vinciatur et constringatur amicorum propinquorumque custodiis; TD, 2.21.48). Not surprisingly, then, the target of both their writings is frequently the grieving woman—a kind of externalized version of the feared internal softness and impressionability of the soul. Seneca claims, perhaps because he has just spoken about the power of grief to break (frangi), that women are more deeply wounded by loss than men: “primum magis feminas quam viros... eadam orbitas vulnerat” (in the first place, the same bereavement wounds women more deeply than men; Consol. Ad Marciam, 7.3).60 Later in the essay he is yet more direct about the source of this weakness: Moderandum est itaque vobis maxime, quae immoderate fertis, et in multos dolores humani pectoris vis dispensanda. Quae deinde ista suae publicaeque condicionis oblivio est? Mortalis nata es, mortales peperisti. Putre ipsa fluidumque corpus et causis morborum repetita sperasti tam imbecilla materia solida et aeterna gestasse? Therefore you women especially must observe moderation, you who are immoderate in your grief, and against your many sorrows the power of the human breast must be arrayed. Again, why this forgetfulness of what is the individual and the general lot? Mortal have you been born, to mortals you have given birth. You, who are a rotting and dissolving [fluidum] body and often assailed by the agents of disease,—can you have hoped that from such weak material [imbecilla materia] you gave birth to anything durable and imperishable? (Consol. Ad Marciam, 11.1–2)

While Seneca’s point here is ostensibly to underline the inescapability of all human mortality, his language tells a different, and highly gendered,

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story. He is addressing someone who is both a woman and a mother, and his focus is on the birth of mortal bodies from the “dissolving” maternal body. Indeed, the modifier fluidum seems to echo Cicero’s disquisition on the etymologically related Greek word luein, describing as it does a moment—birth—in which boundaries between individuals collapse. In this description of the feminine building blocks of the body (“imbecillia materia”) Seneca’s language here also closely echoes Cicero’s point about the effeminacy of succumbing to pain: Opinio est enim quaedam effeminata ac levis nec in dolore magis quam eadem in voluptate, qua cum liquescimus fluimusque mollitia . . . The reason is that there is a kind of womanish and frivolous way of thinking exhibited in pleasure as much as pain, which makes our self-control melt and stream away through weakness. (TD, 2.2252, italics mine)

A few lines earlier, Cicero explicitly creates a binary distinction between what is slack and feminine and what is “virile” and strong: “Beware of anything base, slack, unmanly” (Cave turpe quidquam, languidum, non virile; TD, 2.22.51). In his account, Seneca seems to suggest that it is female and especially maternal bodies that epitomize the human capacity to be slack or not to cohere (“nec cohaerere,” TD, 3.61). For instance, the adjective imbecilla, used here to modify materia (weak material), also appears in multiple contexts (as quoted above) where it seems to connote a particularly feminine weakness in relation to powerful external impressions. Seneca may also be following Cicero, who writes that “ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget in altumque provehitur imprudens nec reperit locum consistendi” (weakness is by its nature self-indulgent and is carried out to sea without knowing it and finds no means of stopping; TD, 4.18).61 The metaphor of being “carried out to sea” indicates a general susceptibility to the world’s impressions, which, like strong tides, carry the subject far away. The maternal body is built of this weak material (“imbecilla materia”), which correlates with the weakness and self-indulgence of psychic pneuma associated with feminine mollitia (“nostrae imbecillitati et... mollitudini”; TD, 3.6.13), and is betrayed by those who mourn “excessively” (“maerentibus imbecillitatem animi effeminate”; TD, 4.28.60). The materiality of the Stoic soul permits this “weakness” to seep indiscriminately between what will later be considered the separate spheres of

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the mental and physical. This pattern of connected and cognate words suggests that it is the fluid and incoherent matter (materia) of the maternal body that persists in the unfortunate child. As Seneca goes on to describe him, man born of woman is “imbecillum corpum et fragile, nudum, suapte natura inerme, alienae opis indigens... ex infirmis fluidis que contextum et lineamentis exterioribus nitidum” (a body weak and fragile, naked, in its natural state defenceless, dependent on another’s help... a fabric [contextum] of weak and fluid [fluidis ] elements, shining only in its outer features; Consol. Ad Marciam, 11.3). Not only do the key adjectives recur in this passage, but the textual metaphor (the body is a fabric) suggests a provocative alignment between childbirth and the maternal labor of weaving. The child is woven out of the mother’s fluid body-like cloth—a cloth whose maternally sourced materiality guarantees its suffering passivity.62

Falling Bodies: Affects and the Stoic Prepassions This focus on the material connections between bodies is significant for the final piece of Stoic emotion theory that we need to unpack, which aligns strikingly with affect theory’s distinction between affect and emotion. As Graver points out, the Stoics viewed emotion as a two-stage process: initial sensory impression (phantasia) followed by an assent (sunkatathesis ) which both signals belief in the appropriateness of the desired action (such as revenge, or mourning) and itself constitutes qua the resulting “impulse” (horm¯e), the emotion. Given this structure, emotion is alleged to be reliably cognitively penetrable—it can be forestalled by appropriate rational response to the initial impression. But between the initial impression and the cognitively based assent there is a grey area that the Stoics must theorize: the immediate and spontaneous effect of the impression on the body. In his De Ira, Seneca emphasizes that true emotions are precisely those impulsory impressions that have gone through the process of assent: “Non est eius impetus, qui sine voluntate nostra concitur.... Haec non possunt fieri, nisi animus eis quibus tangebatur adsensus est (This is not a mere impulse of the mind acting without our volition.... These processes are impossible unless the mind has given assent to the impressions that moved it; De Ira, 2.1.5). But he then acknowledges that there are certain sensations that arise as a result of the impression that create a kind of passionate mental shock: “ictus animi” (De Ira, 2.2.2). He identifies

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these shocks with various embodied and uncontrollable reactions: shivering, blushing, dizziness, sexual arousal. Elsewhere Seneca refers to these initial blows as bites or stings: “non solum amissione carissimorum necessaries morsus est et firmissimorum quoque animorum contractio” (not only the loss of those who are dearest to us, but a mere parting, brings an inevitable bite [morsus ] and contraction of even the firmest souls; Consol. Ad Marciam, 7.1). Cicero also speaks of the bite (“morsus”) and little contractions (“contractiunculae”) occasioned by a distressing impression (TD, 3.83). Over these impressions, Seneca says, we have no control: “omnes enim motus, qui non voluntate nostra fiunt, invicti et inevitabiles sunt” (all sensations that do not result from our own volition are uncontrolled and unavoidable; De Ira, 2.2.1). For the Stoics, such sensations, though precursors to passions, are not true passions: “omnia ista motus sunt animorum moveri nolentium nec adfectus sed principia proludentia adfectibus” (they are all movements of a mind that would prefer not to be so affected; they are not passions, but the beginnings that are preliminary to passions; De Ira, 2.2.6). True passion, then, does not consist in being moved by these impressions, which we cannot help; it consists in willfully surrendering oneself to them (“permittere se illis”; De Ira, 2.3.2) and following their lead. These are, Cicero insists, mere disturbances of the body (“corporis hos esse pulsus”; TD, 2.2.2), while as Seneca emphasizes, the active impulse constitutive of passion can only be produced with the mind’s consent: “est enim impetus; numquam autem impetus sine adsensu mentis est” (it is an active impulse; an active impulse never comes without the consent of the mind; De Ira, 2.3.4). Making a point reminiscent of Spinoza’s distinction between passive and active affects, Seneca states that “the mind suffers them [the prepassions], so to speak, rather than causes them” (ista, ut ita dicam, patitur magis animus quam facit; De Ira 2.3.1, italics mine). The Stoic view of these bodily impulses—later termed “prepassions” or “propassions”—as operating outside of the claims of reason and regulated by the independent rhythms of body rather than mind chimes with Gregg and Seigworth’s working definition of affects as those “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing.”63 The examples Cicero and Seneca offer of such visceral forces align closely with Ben Highmore’s contemporary description of affect: “Affect gives you away. The telltale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of glee in their eyes.... Affect is... your personal polygraph test.”64 These irrepressible “bites” or “blows” of the soul

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manifest like the kinds of autonomic processes that Massumi identifies with inescapable surges of affect.65 Wishing to distinguish these “stings” from emotion proper, Seneca insists specifically that emotions are not, and should not be considered, autonomous: “nullique sunt tam feri et sui iuris adfectus, ut non disciplina perdomentur” (no passions are so wild and autonomous that they cannot be tamed by discipline; De Ira, 2.12.3). It is precisely the inescapability of these sensations that marks them as affect—and for the Stoics as distinctively and necessarily (given their cognitivist approach to the emotions) different from emotions. The danger for the Stoics in acceding to any potential claim that prepassions are a species of emotion is clear. As Donovan Schaefer writes: “To study affects is to explore nonsovereign bodies, animal bodies, bodies that are propelled skittering forward by a lattice of forces rather than directed by a rational homunculus.”66 Schaefer’s invocation of “nonsovereign” bodies acted on by affective forces helps us see what is at stake in the Stoic prepassion model. In Letter 92, Seneca draws on Virgil’s description of the Scylla in his construction of the human being as a “monstrous hybrid” (mixtum portentosumque; 92.9) made up of something with a human face (like that of the monster Scylla) but with forms of wild animals “tacked on” (fera animalia adiuncta sunt; 92.9). He reiterates a few lines later that the vessel of divine reason is fastened to “a sluggish and flabby animal” (animal iners ac marcidum; 92.10). This “animal” is responsible for precisely the softening and dissolving of the self we have explored earlier in relation to the passions: “voluptas [associated with the ‘animal’ parts]... dissolvit et omne robur emollit” (pleasure... actually dissolves the soul and softens all its vigor; 92.10).67 Imperious bodily sensations arising spontaneously and with no subjective input seem to threaten the very idea of a coherent and sovereign boundaried self and certainly threaten the conception of a self as securely organized by a governing faculty (the h¯egemonikon for the Stoics or the logistikon for Plato). Seneca’s metaphor of the Scylla to describe the hybrid figure of the human being suggests that the rejection of the “animalistic” aspect of the human composite is predicated on its assimilation to a monstrous femininity.68 Below the “human face” of the creature (“hominis facies”; 92.9) is a feminine body initially described as beautiful but becoming increasingly monstrous at each stage, concluding with a “wolf-like womb” (“utero commissa luporum”; 92.9). The wolf-like womb suggests a female sexual space characterized by rapacious greed—and indeed the

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womb will frequently be described as “greedy” in later medical texts.69 In this figurative context, that greed seems to denote specifically a promiscuous inability to filter out incoming impressions, a lax and nerveless (“enervam”; 92.8) psychic openness to the world that is construed or allegorized as a bodily, sexual openness. The feminized grotesque appendage seems to register the subject’s awareness of the otherness of the body, its capacity to feel and sense in ways not necessarily aligned with, or even consciously condoned by, reason. The deployment of this allegorical figure to absorb a disavowed weakness or softness confirms Alex Dressler’s recent argument in relation to Cicero’s writing that in Roman philosophy, “The vulnerability associated with women and things remains, but is relegated, by means of feminine personification, to a level below the threshold of the person.”70 Affect theory is particularly attuned to a model of self which “dislocates the anthropocentric perspective, opening up onto a multiplicity of animal ways of being organized around the variety of nature making up the bodies of different organisms.”71 Although Seneca’s metaphor ostensibly externalizes affective potential as “forms of wild animals,” the animallike assemblage in fact represents a feared internal animality (elsewhere aligned with an interior softness), which in turn figures the “multiplicity of animal ways of being” brought into focus by the body’s passionate responses. While Seneca may have in mind the passions proper rather than specifically the prepassions in this passage, the elaborate allegory pinpoints why the prepassions might pose a particular threat to the cognitivist account of emotions. Utterly other to the masculine, coherent self, they force acknowledgement of wholly nonrational impulses that arise outside the mechanism of control embedded in cognitive assent. Toward the end of his Timaeus , Plato famously describes the womb as an “animal within [women]... desirous of procreating children”; Seneca’s “monstrous hybrid” model of the human being attempts to project all passionate responses, and perhaps especially those unsurveilled by the will, into this abjected feminine “animal.”72 Although Seneca elsewhere states that no passion is either so wild or so autonomous that it cannot be controlled, this allegory specifically attributes wildness to the “animal” aspect of the soul (“fera animalia”), suggesting a crucial point of slippage between the “wild” prepassions and the passions themselves. True passion, as we have seen, always has cognitive content for the Stoics: it is a desire for revenge, justice, a longing for some specific

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outcome, and it is a response (falsely) condoned by the mind as appropriate in the circumstances. But these preliminaries to true passions, the prepassions, complicate the Stoic account of the passions.73 Despite Seneca’s confident theory of mental assent, these blows, bites, and stings from the outside cannot be so easily compartmentalized, particularly in view of the fact that the Stoics viewed the soul as a unitary, material entity—unlike the tripartite Platonic soul.74 Although assent—or its opposite—resides with reason, reason is only powerful as long as it is separate from the passions (“quam diu diducta est ab adfectibus”; De Ira, 1.7.3); once it is shaken or disturbed, there may occur a damaging and contaminating admixture (“si miscuit se illis et inquinavit”; if once she mingles with them and is contaminated; De Ira, 1.7.3), which makes control impossible. The mind is then fully under the sway of the disturbing agent (“ei servit quo impellitur”; De Ira, 1.7.4). This is precisely the outcome most feared and reproved by both Seneca and Cicero—the mind rendered passive, a thing moved rather than moving, compared to a body thrown over the precipice and pulled irrevocably (“irrevocabilis”) downward by its own weight (“et ad imum agat pondus”; De Ira, 1.7.4): Ut in praeceps datis corporibus nullum sui arbitrium est nec resistere morarive deiecta potuerunt, sed consilium omne et paenitentiam irrevocabilis praecipitatio abscidit et non licet eo non pervenire, quo non ire licuisset, ita animus si in iram, amorem aliosque se proiecit adfectus, non permittitur reprimere impetus. As a victim hurled from the precipice has no control of his body, and, once cast off, can neither stop nor stay, but, speeding on irrevocably, is cut off from all reconsideration and repentance which he might once have avoided starting, so with the mind—if it plunges into anger, love, or the other passions, it has no power to check its impetus. (De Ira, 1.7.4)

As Graver notes, Chrysippus is similarly “quite pessimistic about the possibility of restraining oneself, for he holds that emotions tend to be unstoppable once they have begun.”75 Following his figurative train of thought, Seneca writes that, like this body heaved from a precipice, the mind “plunges” (se proiecit ) into passions such as anger and love; with the figurative vehicle still sticking to his thought, he adds that its very weight (pondus suum) helps speed it to the bottom.

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Although Seneca reflects here on the passions (as distinct from the prepassions), his figurative language inadvertently creates a bridge between them. Later in De Ira, in a passage devoted to the unwilled prepassions, he offers “dizziness” when “one looks down from a precipice” (sequiturque vertigo praerupta cernentis; 2.2.2) as an example of a prepassion.76 In Letter 57 he uses the same example of a precipice, this time clarifying that this dizziness is not fear “but a natural affect which reason cannot rout” (sed naturalis adfectio inexpugnabilis rationi; Ep. 57.4). The difference between falling headlong off a precipice and feeling dizzy looking down from one seems less striking than the similarity—inevitable lack of control—between them. And with that use of the word adfectus in the letter, Seneca closes the gap between prepassions and passions, since here adfectus clearly denotes the kind of feeling he generally distinguishes as a prepassion, but elsewhere—including the passage in De Ira quoted above— uses to denote ordinary emotions.77 How should we understand the “weight” of the mind that keeps it “falling” in the tenor of Seneca’s simile? Figurative and literal meanings seem confusingly intertwined in the simile, but Seneca seems to be getting at precisely those unstoppable “animal” forces that he had previously compartmentalized as prepassions. That is, this striking image of the body falling through its own weight seems to convey more about Seneca’s topic than just the idea of an irreversible, almost mechanical movement. The simile instead gestures toward the silent but irrepressible forces affecting the body’s material being—a materiality earlier associated with its maternal origin—the heft of its being, which, at times, moves entirely regardless of our will. It is in these reactive movements that the heft of the body makes itself felt. And while Seneca and Cicero argue that the mind can still choose to assent, or not, to the proposition/impression, the latent content of that simile argues otherwise. The body is falling, no matter what.78 The boundary between the cognitively awake emotions and the irrepressible prepassions—or between what affect theory would call emotions and affects—emerges from Seneca’s figurative language as arbitrary and unstable, perhaps indicating that there remains an intractable or intransigent affective core hidden within the Stoic theory of the passions.79

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Eat Your Groans: Affect, Voice, and Emotive In addition to anger, both Cicero and Seneca focus on the emotion of grief as a particularly challenging case study for the Stoic theory of emotions. Discussion of the need to manage grief frequently incorporates references to softness, weakness, and “womanishness” that we have encountered before, including the claim that women and “uncivilized peoples” are more profoundly affected (“wounded” is the metaphor) by grief than men.80 Seneca’s persistent use of the metaphor of a wound in the consolations to Marcia and Helvia to signify the impact of grief seems to contradict the notion that one could or should be invulnerabilis (invulnerable) to emotion and indicates that grief is perhaps the emotion least susceptible of rational control (Ad Helviam, 3.1).81 He seems to concede as much later in the consolation to Helvia, offering a rare acknowledgement that grief is often overwhelming for all sufferers, not just women: Scio rem non esse in nostra potestate nec ullum adfectum servire, minime vero eum, qui ex dolore nascitur; ferox enim et adversus omne remedium contumax est. Volumus interim illum obruere et devorare gemitus. I know well that this is a matter that is not in our own power, and that no emotion is submissive, least of all that which is born from sorrow; for it is wild and stubbornly resists every remedy. Sometimes we will to crush it and to swallow down our cries. (Ad Helviam, 3.1)

The wildness (ferox) of grief recalls the wild animals “tacked on” to the rational soul as discussed in Letter 92; once again Seneca’s description of the passions seems to invoke the fear of a “nonsovereign” body caught in the grip of irrepressible affects. The effort to master these wild and alien forces involves trying to force them back inside: Seneca pinpoints the will (volumus ) as the instigator of a decision to “crush” the emotion and devour or swallow down our groans. The supposed ability to stifle groans by an act of will demarcates a boundary between strictly gendered approaches to grief in both authors: the nonlinguistic howl or shriek of grief becomes the sign of a feminine or feminized loss of control to a wild, animalistic affect. This striking image of swallowing one’s groans brings to the surface a persistent effort in these texts to police the connection between emotion and vocalization in the form of groans or laments that are

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always construed as feminine. As we saw earlier, voice is enmeshed in the circulation of pneuma and thus directly connected to the heart as a center of passionate intensity. It is precisely the overflow of pneumatic force into intense vocalization that Cicero seeks to disavow as shameful and effeminate. In the passage below, Cicero alludes to the story of Philoctetes, whose grave wound provoked chronic cries of pain which, in turn, ultimately prompted the Greeks to abandon him on the island of Lemnos: Sed hoc quidem in dolore maxime est providendum, ne quid abiecte, ne quid timide, ne quid ignave, ne quid serviliter muliebriterve faciamus, in primisque refutetur ac reiiciatur Philocteteus ille clamor. But the principal precaution is to do nothing in a despondent, cowardly, slothful, servile or womanish spirit, and above all to resist and spurn those Philoctetean outcries. (TD, 2.22.55)

Note the conflation here of that which is servile (“serviliter”) and womanish (“muliebriter”). Although Cicero specifies at one point that Philoctetes is not to be blamed for his shameful laments because he has earlier observed the shrieking (eiulantem) of his mentor Herakles, Philoctetes’s “outcries” have clearly branded him an effeminate and abject figure. The condemnation of his “clamor” suggests a gendered construction of the articulation of pain and sorrow that becomes pervasive in Cicero’s, and later Seneca’s, texts. A little below the passage quoted above, Cicero writes: “Sin erit ille gemitus elamentabilis, si imbecillus, si abiectus, si flebilis, et qui se dederit, vix eum virum dixerim” (If the groan is melancholy, weak, despondent, piteous I can scarcely give the name of man to him who has succumbed; TD, 2.22.57). We have encountered these adjectives, imbecillus (weak), abiectus (abject), and so on before in Cicero’s work. But the attack on specific kinds of vocalization as effeminate and unworthy of the “name of man” offers new insight into the role language will play in the Stoic management of the emotions. Commenting specifically on the role of the poets in normalizing lament, Cicero writes: Lamentantes inducunt fortissimos viros, molliunt animos nostros, ita sunt deinde dulces, ut non legantur modo, sed etiam ediscantur.

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They [the poets] represent brave men wailing, they enervate (soften) our souls, and besides this they do it with such charm that they are not merely read, but learnt by heart. (TD, 2.11.27, italics mine)

The poetic representation of the unmasculine labor of wailing serves not only to normalize male lament, it also further “softens” or enervates (“molliunt”) the souls of the hearers. The best security against sliding into this feminine softness, in Cicero’s view, is the guardianship of male friends and relations: Si turpissime se illa pars animi geret, quam dixi esse mollem, si se lamentis muliebriter lacrimisque dedet, vinciatur et constringatur amicorum propinquorumque custodis. If the part of the soul which I have described as yielding [mollem], conducts itself disgracefully, if it gives way in womanish fashion [muliebriter] to lamentation and weeping, let it be fettered [vinciatur] and tightly bound by the guardianship of friends and relations. (TD, 2.21.48)

In both his Tusculan Disupatations and his De Legibus, Cicero refers to legislation—codified via the so-called Twelve Tables, thought to have been inscribed in 451–450 BCE—specifically targeting feminine grief behavior. On a social level, then, these Tables attempt to provide exactly the kind of restraint that Cicero prescribes for individual men: Ingemescere non numquam viro concessum est idque raro, eiulatus ne mulieri quidem. Et hic nimirum est lessus, quem duodecim tabulae in funeribus adhiberi vetuerunt. Sometimes, though seldom, it is allowable for a man to groan aloud; to shriek, not even for a woman; and this no doubt is the form of wailing of which the Twelve Tables forbade the use at funerals. (TD, 2.22.55, italics mine)

Conceding that it is occasionally acceptable for a man to groan, but that even for women “shrieking” is forbidden, Cicero uses the same term—eiulatus —that he uses to name the shrieking of Herakles: “ipsum enim Herculem viderat in Oeta magnitudine dolorum eiulantem” (for he [Philoctetes] had seen the mighty Hercules on Oeta shrieking aloud in the extremity of his pains; TD, 2.7.19). Cicero’s attention to the story

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of Herakles is instructive, drawing as it does on the very poets alleged to make the groans of men acceptable. He quotes and translates into Latin fully forty-five lines of Herakles’s desperate speech from Sophocles’s Women of Trachis , from the moment after he puts on the pharmakon that Deianeira sends him—the robe poisoned with the blood of the centaur Nessus. He views the effect on him of what he calls this “robe of hell” (“veste... furiali”; TD, 2.8) as a radical feminization. He is dishonorably brought down, he says, by a female hand (“feminea... manu”) via the illness-bearing textile of the robe (“peste... textili”). Given the associations between femininity, weaving, and sexuality—associations that show up in Seneca’s reference to the child as a “fabric [contextum] of weak and fluid elements” as it were woven from its mother—the robe that engulfs his body may have uterine connotations, returning Herakles to a degrading dependence on the maternal body.82 At any rate, the pain turns Herakles into a groaning girl: Heu! Virginalem me ore ploratum edere, Quem vidit nemo ulli ingemescentem malo! Ecfeminata virtus adflicta occidit. Ah! Think of my lips uttering girls’ laments, Whom none saw groaning over any ill! Crushed is my manhood, fallen effeminate. (2.8.21).

These “girls’ laments,” presumably, are captured by the term eiulatus, a gender-specific term denoting women’s keening.83 The vocalization of pain in this extreme form marks Herakles’s final degradation, his transformation into a girl—the very opposite of the hypermasculine hero. In comments that help us piece together the gendered constraints operating within the emotional community that informs his work, Cicero quotes the relevant text from the Tables and comments on it: “mulieres genas ne radunto neve lessum funeris ergo habento.” Hoc veteres interpretes Sex. Aelius, L. Acilius non satis se intellegere dixerunt, sed suspicari vestimenti aliquod genus funebris, L. Aelius lessum quasi lugubrem eiulationem, ut vox ipsa significat. “Women shall not tear their cheeks, nor have a lessus at a funeral.” The older scholars, Sextus Aelius and Lucius Acilius, said that they did not completely understand this word, but inferred that it was some kind of

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mourning garment. Lucius Aelius explained “lessus” as a kind of sorrowful wailing, for that is what the word itself signifies.84

ˇ As Hannah Culik-Baird points out, Cicero defines “lamentation” as “aegritudo cum eiulatio” (suffering accompanied by shrieking) elsewhere in the Disputations, and a grammatical source claims that eiulo is the verbal form of the exclamation heu, meaning “alas.”85 The ululatus hovers between the articulate and inarticulate: it is an outpouring of emotion in vocalized but not semantically organized sound. In her exploration of the Greek cognate of ululatus––ololyga––Anne Carson comments on the essential gendering of this shriek, which is “a ritual shout peculiar to females.... No man would make such sound. No proper civic space would contain it unregulated.”86 Underscoring the grammarian’s idea that the ululatus is a vehicle for intense exclamation (heu in Latin), she writes: “These words do not signify anything except their own sound. The sound represents a cry of either intense pleasure or intense pain. To utter such cries is a specialized female function.”87 Seneca too emphasizes the connection between an overweening grief and the feminine ululatus. Like Cicero, he mentions the effort to legislate women’s grief, acknowledging in the consolation to Helvia that our “ancestors, seeking to compromise with the stubbornness [pertinacia] of a woman’s grief by a public ordinance, granted the space of ten months as the limit of mourning for a husband” (et ideo maiores decem mensum spatium lugentibus viros dederunt, ut cum pertinacia muliebris maeroris publica constitutione deciderunt; Ad Helviam, 16.1).88 Like Cicero, Seneca homes in on the ululatus as a sign of a failure to rein in the “wild” affective power of grief, exhorting Helvia to live up to her potential to be more than a woman—to be “one who has always lacked all the weaknesses of a woman” (16.2)—and to set aside lamentation: “Lamentationes quidem et heiulatus et alia, per quae fere muliebris dolor tumultuatur, amove” (But away with lamentations and outcries [heiulatus ] and the other demonstrations by means of which women usually vent their noisy grief; Consolatio Ad Helviam, 3.2). The derogatory use of the term mulier (compare Ep. 63: “illis mulierculis... vix retractis a rogo” [those little women who could scarcely be dragged from the pyre]) already signals Seneca’s disdain, as does the fact that it is the “dolor,” the grief itself, rather than the women, that is the grammatical subject of the sentence: in very un-Stoic fashion, the grief is controlling the women rather than the other way around.

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These passages in Seneca’s and Cicero’s texts indicate that the ululatus (or h/eiulatus ) functions as the kind of emotive interjection that linguists view as components of “affect bursts,” or “very brief, discrete, nonverbal expressions of affect in both face and voice.”89 Erving Goffman defines the interjection as “a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feelings, a bursting of normal constraints.”90 As an embodied affect burst, the ululatus seems almost to leap over the distinction between prepassion and passion, and past the process of cognitive “assent.” While it doesn’t quite seem to fall into the category of the prepassion (spontaneous tears, for instance), because lamentation is somewhat drawn out and has some cognitive content, it also isn’t a fully verbalized emotional expression (an emotive) of the kind that would truly count—for the Stoics—as the articulation of passion proper. Instead, as Chapter 4 argues in more detail in relation to Virgil’s explicit feminizing of the cry (“femineus ululatus”), the ululatus offers a singularly disruptive, wild response to the repressive account of emotions embedded in the classical tradition I have explored so far. In its wildness, the ululatus seems to emerge from, and give voice to, the animalistic part of the “monstrous hybrid” that is Seneca’s human being. In doing so, it recalls Seneca’s description of the grief of female animals: the mugitus (lowing) of cows and the wild and frantic (amens ) running about of mares (Consol. Ad Marciam, 6.2) at the loss of their young. In calling on the animal aspect of the soul, the ululatus enacts a powerful resistance to the Stoic masculine idealization of coherence and the command to harden the “soft and tender” parts of the soul by intentionally repressing strong feeling: “optimum... est et sentire desiderium et opprimere” (the best course... is to feel the desire and to crush it; Ad Helviam, 16.1–2). These chapters will explore the spectrum between silence and full emotive articulation, pausing with special interest on moments—such as the “femineus ululatus” in Virgil’s Aeneid, or the wild prosodic disruptions of Mary Carey’s poetry—that make visible the strain between affect and its translation. The female mourners described in this chapter may be taken as exemplary: instead of swallowing down their rage and grief (“devorare gemitus”), these despised women mourners as it were spit those feelings outward, as something too wild to be metabolized or absorbed into the body-mind. The ululatus is not swallowed down to be concocted into something more temperate, nor is it processed in the mouth into a verbal emotive; it retains its source in the bite (morsus ) or blow (ictus ) of immediate, excruciating contact between the self and

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a painful, wounding world. It is born of exactly that “irrational” cherishing of external goods diagnosed as pathological by Seneca, Cicero, and their Stoic forefathers, and it dramatizes a profound rebellion against that diagnosis.

Notes 1. Nussbaum discusses the Stoics’ view of emotions as arising from impromptu “cherishings or disvaluings of external uncontrolled objects in the world.” See “Stoics,” 148. 2. “Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear” is from Alexander Pope, “Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women,” in The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (London: William Pickering, 1851), line 3. 3. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” (1933), in Standard Edition of Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 22 (London: Hogarth, 1994), 112–35. Quoted in Holly A. Crocker, “Affective Resistance: Performing Passivity and Playing A-Part in the Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 54:2 (2003), 142. 4. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Aristotle are from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon and intro. C. D. C. Reeve (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 5. As Sophia M. Connell observes, the pneuma in semen is not innate, “but is a necessary result of fluid being heated up by the male animal’s soul after puberty.” Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 217. This connection between temperament and the passions is alive and well in Seneca’s De Ira—2.19.2–3—“it makes a great difference how much of the moist and the hot each person has within; the character will be determined by that element of which he will have a dominant proportion.... Fire is active and stubborn; a mixture of cold makes cowards, for cold is sluggish and shrunken.” Seneca, Moral Essays , vol. 1, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). 6. See Peter Eichman, “Sex, Blood, and Soul: The Transmission of Form in Aristotle’s Biology,” More Space (blog), 2007, https://echodin.net/pap ers/phil515/aristotle.pdf, for a more complete account of “concoction.” 7. Alex Dressler notes that Virgil’s commentator, Servius, writes in Aen. 4.638 that “divinities are said to be of double sex, so that they are male [mares ] when they are in action [in actu] and female [feminae] when they have the nature of passivity [patiendi habent naturam].” Quoted in Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7.

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8. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: Valentine Simmes, 1604), 40. 9. Plato, Timaeus 50.d in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1177. 10. See David Summers, “Form and Gender,” New Literary History, 24:2 (1993), 258, for a discussion of this passage in relation to artistic form. 11. Discussing this passage, Don P. Fowler remarks that “this dual physiological and cognitive aspect of the passion remains in modern discussions.” “Epicurean Anger,” in The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, ed. Susanna Morton Braund and Christopher Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16. 12. James, Passion and Action, 96. 13. Jessica Moss, Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 72. 14. See for example Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 13.13–14: “No one is able to rid himself of these and set his own soul free; just as, I fancy, things that get into a whirlpool are tossed and rolled without being able to free themselves from the whirling.” Discourses 12–30, trans. J. W. Cohoon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939); and Maximus of Tyre, 20: “Let love then be an appetite of the soul, but this appetite, like a spirited horse, requires a bridle.” Maximus of Tyre, Dissertations, trans. Thomas Taylor (London: C. Whittingham, 1804), 105–6. 15. Catherine Newmark, “Weibliches Leiden, Männliche Leidenschaften: Zum Geschlecht in älteren Affektenlehren,” Feministiche Studien (Stuttgart: Lucius and Lucius, 2008): 7–18; 10. 16. Newmark quotes the passage above and comments on its gendered hierarchization of the soul. “Weibliches Leiden,” 10. 17. See Simo Knuuttila’s discussion of the tripartite model of the soul in Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 7–13. Knuuttila stresses the cognitive penetrability of the emotions: “Although Plato stressed the differences between the reasoning and the non-reasoning parts, he did not think that the appetitive and emotional parts are irrational in the sense of being wholly noncognitive. They have representations of their own, and their acts can be construed as involving evaluative propositional attitudes.” Emotions, 9. 18. See Jessica Moss on the question of which part of the soul Plato is referring to here—overall the passage seems to include both spirited and appetitive parts, but as she notes, the appetitive part of most closely associated with the pleasure that Plato connects with poetry. “Appearances and Calculations: Plato’s Division of the Soul,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 34 (2008), 11–12.

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19. Seneca, Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920). 20. Daniel Gross discusses the wide-ranging impact of Stoic philosophy through the seventeenth century in “Apathy in the Shadow Economy of Emotion,” Chapter 2, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Stanley W. Jackson also notes the long-lived reliance on Stoic classification of the emotions through the end of the seventeenth century. “The Use of the Passions in Psychological Healing,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 45:2 (April 1990), 157. 21. Margaret Graver, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 79: “Pathos is often a broad and colorless term, roughly equivalent to ‘experience’ in English.” 22. Jackson notes that “in contrast to the Aristotelian orientation that the passions should be controlled, the Stoics tended to think that they should be done away with.” “Passions in Psychological Healing,” 157. 23. Christopher Gill, “Galen and the Stoics: Mortal Enemies or Blood Brothers?” Phronesis 52 (2007): 92. 24. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), with minor emendations. Hereafter cited as TD. 25. For an excellent discussion of the structure of the Stoic soul, to which I am indebted here, see Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), Chapter 1. 26. Seneca, Epistles 93–124, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). 27. As Brad Inwood notes, Seneca’s account of the mind explicitly rejects “the kind of Platonizing psychological dualism which one is so often tempted to lay at the door of Seneca the eclectic.” As we will see, Seneca does adopt a figurative, externalizing language to describe the soul that at times seems to adopt a Platonic partition, but as Inwood suggests, this seems a rhetorical strategy designed both to convey more vividly the psychological struggle Seneca is describing and to give him “verbal common ground” with which to engage with his opponents. Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 50. 28. See in particular Jonathan Walters for a provocative discussion of softness and masculinity: “Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 29–43. 29. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Chapelen-le-Frith, UK: Nigel Gourlay Press, 2020).

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30. Seneca, “To Marcia on Consolation,” in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1. 31. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 19. See also A. A. Long, “Pneumatic Episodes from Homer to Galen,” in The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture, and Medicine, Classical to Contemporary, ed. David Fuller, Corinne Saunders, and Jane Macnaughton, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science, and Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); and Geoffrey Lloyd, “Pneuma between Body and Soul,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13 (2007), 135–146. 32. Stefan Röttig: “The senses and the faculties of generation and speech are described as streams of pneuma (pneumata/spiritus) which flow from the Hegemenikon (which likewise consists of pneuma) like water out of a fountain and spread in all directions.” “Was Seneca a Monist or a Partitionist: Stoic and Platonic Theory of Soul and Emotion,” 2, https:// www.academia.edu/37436621/Was_Seneca_a_psychological_monist_or_ partitionist_Stoic_and_Platonic_Theory_of_Soul_and_Emotion. See also Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 21, on the role of the h¯egemonikon; and Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), Chapter 13, “Spiritus Phantasticus,” on the continuing role of pneuma in medieval psychology. 33. Sarah Kay, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 88. 34. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, Chapter 4. 35. Graver quotes Sextus Empiricus on the use of the signet ring simile, AM 7.228 (SVF 2.56), Cicero on the Emotions, 119; and Aristotle, De Anima, 2.21.424a17–24, Stoicism and Emotion, 226n32. 36. Graver notes the production of tension from the dynamic movement from “hot element to cold element and outward-moving to inward-moving force.” Stoicism and Emotion, 19. She writes of the varying degrees of tension: “Whereas impression is brought about by the external world and by the sensitive, motile nature of animate pneuma generally, assent is constrained only by the internal tension of one’s own stretch of pneuma.” Stoicism and Emotion, 64. 37. Graver, Cicero on the Emotions, 91. 38. For a clear and detailed explanation of the sequence of mental events leading to emotional action, see Graver, Cicero on the Emotions, 91–92. 39. I will develop the connection between Stoic assent and emerging notions of “will” more fully in Chapter 3. For comments on the crucial role of sunkatathesis in this development, see Charles H. Kahn, “Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine,” in The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed. John M. Dillon and A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 234–61.

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40. See in particular Brad Inwood, “The Will in Seneca the Younger,” Classical Philology, 95:1 (2000), 44–60 for a useful survey of the literature on Seneca as inventor of a protomodern notion of “will.” 41. Inwood, “The Will in Seneca the Younger,” 55. 42. Inwood, “The Will in Seneca the Younger,” 1, quotes A. Kenny to clarify the nature of “traditional will.” 43. Inwood, “The Will in Seneca the Younger,” 1. 44. Seneca, Epistles 66–92. 45. Nussbaum, “Stoics,” 148. 46. As Nussbaum points out, quoting Chrysippus, “‘It is belief itself that contains the disorderly kinetic element.’ Knowing itself can be violent.” “Stoics,” 153. 47. Nussbaum, “Stoics,” 154. 48. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 48. 49. Opening passage of Epictetus, Handbook, quoted in Charles H. Kahn, “Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine,” in Dillon and Long, The Question of “Eclecticism,” 253. 50. Nussbaum, “Stoics,” 132. 51. Seneca, Epistles 1–65, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917). 52. Nussbaum, “Stoics,” 132. 53. Seneca, “To Marcia on Consolation.” 54. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2–3. 55. See for instance Gayle Weiss’s discussion of maternal intercorporeality (a term she coins in this particular usage) in Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 2013). 56. Seneca, Ep. 9.2. In fact, he uses the term elsewhere to denote precisely the opposite quality—the uncontrolled nature of Julia’s grief in its early phases, “cum maxime impatientes ferocesque sunt miseri” (when wretches are at their most unsubmissive and most violent; Consol. Ad Marciam, 4.2). 57. See note 56 for an example of Seneca’s usage. Robert Kaster discusses the fact that from the Roman period onward, impatientia, construed as an inability to withstand any form of hardship, “was a defining characteristic of women.” “The Taxonomy of Patience, or When Is Patientia Not a Virtue?,” Classical Philology, 97:2 (2002), 133–144; 139. 58. Seneca connects the term “abject” to the lower part of the soul that he describes as “humilem, languidam, voluptatibus deditam” (lowly, sluggish, devoted to pleasure); this part is “enervem et abiectam” (nerveless and abject; Ep. 92.8–9). 59. Nussbaum, “Stoics,” 166.

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60. It is noteworthy that Seneca argues in this essay not for women’s intrinsic susceptibility but suggests that “minds are coloured by habit”: “paupertam, luctum, ambitionem alius aliter sentit, prout illum consuetudo infecit” (poverty, grief, and ambition are felt differently by different people according as their minds are coloured by habit; Consol. Ad Marciam, 7.4). And presumably women, as a result of social conditioning, allow their minds to take the impression of grief more deeply. 61. My attention was drawn to this discussion of imbecillitas by Alex Dressler’s note, Personification and the Feminine, 41n42. 62. See also Seneca, Ep. 92.13: “Nam hoc quoque natura ut quondam vestem animo circumdedit; velamentum eius est” (for nature has surrounded our soul with the body as with a sort of garment; the body is its cloak). The connection between childbirth and maternal weaving is a central focus in Chapter 4. 63. Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 1–2. 64. Ben Highmore, “Bitter after Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 118. 65. Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 1–2; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25. 66. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 24. 67. Seneca, Epistles 66–92, with minor emendations to Gummere’s translation. 68. The apparent partitioning of the soul into rational and irrational parts in this letter seems superficially to undermine Seneca’s Stoic psychological monism. But see note above for a view of his rhetorical use of Platonic tropes. 69. For instance, Helkiah Crooke extends the analogic connection between mouth and womb in his evocation of the womb as “greedy”: “And presently after the seeds are thus mingled, the womb... gathereth & contracteth it selfe. … And this it doth as being greedy to conteyne and to cherish, we say to Conceiue the seed. Moreover, least the geniture thus layd vp should issue forth againe, the mouth or orifice of the wombe is so exquisitely shut and locked vp that it will not admit the poynt of a needle.” Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), 262, italics mine. Although sometimes translated more neutrally as “belly,” the Latin word uterus primarily denotes “womb, uterus.” Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary. 70. Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 44. 71. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 25. 72. Plato, Timaeus, 91c. 73. Graver argues for the earlier provenance of the theory of the prepassions in Stoic writing, given its presence in the work of the Jewish commentator Philo of Alexandria, who could not have known either Cicero or Seneca. Cicero on the Emotions, 126.

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74. See Margaret Graver’s discussion of the Stoic view of the soul: “Stoic thought is also like our own in that it considers the mind to be necessarily a material thing and mental events to be of necessity physical changes in the world.” Stoicism and Emotion, 16. 75. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 62. 76. Seneca uses exactly the same example in a similar context in Letter 57 . Again addressing the question of adfectus —affects—which no courage can avoid, he mentions becoming “dizzy when [one] stands at the edge of a high precipice and looks down.” This is not fear, he clarifies, but a “natural affect” (naturalis adfectus; Ep. 57.4). 77. See, for example, Ep. 116.5: “Non puto te dubitaturum, an adfectus corpora sint” (you will not doubt, I am sure, that emotions are bodily things). 78. See also De Ira 3.1.4 for another use of the image of falling—a passion like anger, Seneca writes, “intensifies its vehemence more and more, like the lightning’s stroke, the hurricane, and the other things that are incapable of control for the reason that they not merely move, but fall ” (non eunt, sed cadunt, italics mine). 79. Nussbaum writes that “if it is true that emotion’s seat must be capable of many cognitive operations, there also seems to be an affective side to emotion that we have difficulty housing in the soul’s rational part.” “Stoics,” 152. 80. “Though they suffer the same bereavement, women are wounded more deeply than men, savage peoples more deeply than the peaceful and civilized, the uneducated than the educated.” Consol. Ad Marciam, 7.3. 81. Seneca, Ad Helviam Matrem De Consolatione, in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932). 82. For a discussion of Herakles’s symptoms in terms of female uterine melancholy, see Chiara Blanco, “Heracles’s Itch: An Analysis of the First Case of Male Uterine Displacement in Greek Literature,” Classical Quarterly, 70:1 (2020), 27–42. 83. For a fascinating discussion of the role of ululatus in Greek literature and culture, see Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), 125–129. ˇ 84. Cicero, De Legibus, 2.59. Quoted in Hannah Culik-Baird, Cicero and the Latin Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 183. ˇ 85. Culik-Baird, Cicero and the Latin Poets, 183; TD, 4.18. 86. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 126. 87. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 126. I explore the implications of the ululatus more fully in relation to Virgil’s Aeneid in Chapter 4 below. 88. Seneca seems to refer here to Numa’s laws (716–673 BCE), in which ten months is stipulated as the longest mourning period for any loss.

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The law does not offer the specifically gendered emphasis of Seneca’s interpretation. 89. Klaus Scherer, “Affect Bursts,” in Emotions: Essays on Emotion Theory, ed. S. H. M. van Goozen, N. E. van de Poll, and J. A. Sergeant (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), 161–93. Quoted in Cliff Goddard, “Interjections and Emotions,” Emotion Review, 6:1 (2013), 3. 90. Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Quoted in Goddard, “Interjections and Emotions,” 9.

CHAPTER 3

Toward an Early Modern Affect Theory: Christian Stoicism and the Augustinian Will in Medieval and Early Modern Thought

We call it a childish thing to weepe, and a womanish; and perchance we meane worse in that then in the childish; for therein we meane falsehood to be mingled with weaknesse. —John Donne, Sermons It’s almost as if we must metabolize the event in our bodies, as if we could eat an experience, swallow it whole, feel it churn in our bellies and bowels. —Emily Rapp Black, Sanctuary

Augustine provides us with an essential lynchpin between these classical, and particularly Stoic, theories of the passions and a Christian humanism that dominates theories of the passions through the early modern period. Many scholars have noted Augustine’s debt to the Stoics, and to Seneca in particular, so my account here will not aim to be comprehensive.1 Instead I will focus narrowly on the ways in which Augustine both inherits and bequeaths a view of passion as structurally gendered and as posing (especially in the form of grief) a dangerous challenge to the masculine coherence of the soul. This challenge is met by a crucial extension of the Stoic understanding of assent in responding to the prepassions—those initial physiological responses I have described as precursors to affects.2 I will argue that as the stakes of maintaining a barrier between body and soul rise, the function of Stoic “assent” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_3

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shifts, becoming a more fully developed will (voluntas ) tasked with mediating not just between the unruly, “animal” impulses of the soul and its reason, but between the soul and a material existence now considered irredeemably fallen.3 The feminization of that fallen materiality emerges in Augustine’s critical use of Eve as a figure for the mind’s wayward openness to passion—a figure who reprises the mental “softness” despised by Cicero and Seneca in a newly allegorical framework. In this new context, we will explore the long afterlife of the Stoics’ preoccupation with the soul’s (or mind’s) vulnerability to external, uncontrolled items in the world, looking ahead to early modern hybrid medico-philosophical texts whose focus shifts to managing the physiologic underpinnings of the passions.4 The acceptance in many of these texts of a physicalist account of the mind derives at least in part from Stoic materialism, often funneled through a Galenic reframing.5 Of particular importance in these later texts is the subtle “pneuma,” the knot that links body and mind, now recast as “spirit,” whose motile power undergirds the body’s reactivity to external forces that move it. Augustine’s familiarity with the Stoic concepts of the prepassions and assent is clear from his use of Aulus Gellius’s summary of the central ideas in his Noctes Atticae.6 Gellius’s text uses the occasion of a storm at sea to present Epictetus’s view on the distinction between prepassion and passion. According to Augustine, Gellius concedes in true Stoic fashion that even the wise man will suffer from the impact of immediate, irrepressible impressions (phantasia) occasioned by the terrifying circumstances of the storm, suffering as a result what the Stoics knew as prepassions: “his passionibus praevenientibus mentis et rationis officium” (as these prepassions inhibit the proper activity of mind and reason; CG, 9.4, with slight emendation). Gellius accurately presents the Stoic view that the crucial decision to assent (consentiri) to those prepassions is within the power of the wise to grant or withhold. But as he presents this argument, Augustine’s choice of language as he describes the storm at sea suggests that these prepassions have already tipped over into passions. He twice mentions that rather than simply going pale (an instinctive and uncontrollable response, as per Seneca’s definition), the philosopher goes pale through fear (“vi timoris expalluit”; “pavescat metu”). As Richard Sorabji shows, Augustine’s language seems to arise from a hint in Gellius’s own: Gellius shifts from pallescere (to grow pale) to pavescere, aptly translated by Sorabji as “to grow jittery,” which teeters on the edge of the emotion of fear while still staying within the field of

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the prepassion.7 At the end of his account, Augustine doubles down on his association of pallor with fear, arguing that the pallor is in fact evidence (“testimonio”; 9.4) of his terror: “non ita illud periculum perhorresceret ut palloris etiam testimonio proderetur” (he would not have been so intimidated by the danger as to betray his terror by the evidence of his pallor; CG, 9.4). The pallor gives him away, betrays his actual fear. Rather than arising from either a misunderstanding of Stoic doctrine, or an intentional split between animus (reception of impression and prepassion) and mens (judgment and assent) in Augustine’s terminology, as some have suggested, Augustine’s choice of terminology seems to indicate more straightforwardly a skepticism that any deep difference obtains between the jitteriness that might produce “pallor” and actual fear—that is, between the prepassion and the passion itself.8 Two implications arise from this blurring of the line between prepassions and passions. Firstly, Augustine’s skepticism about the difference between a jittery pallor and actual fear seems to critique the notion that the only thing of any real value are the so-called integral objects. We recall Epictetus’s exhortation: “Test every phantasia by these rules, and if it concerns something that is not in our power, be ready to say, ‘this is nothing to me.’”9 Augustine takes the philosopher’s pallor as a sign that after all he does consider loss of life to be loss of something good: Nam profecto si nihili penderet eas res ille philosophus quas amissurum se naufragio sentiebat, sicuti est vita ista salusque corporis, non ita illud perculum perhorresceret ut palloris etiam testimonio proderetur. For surely if the philosopher set no store by the things he expected to lose if the ship were wrecked, namely his life or his bodily welfare, he would not have been so intimidated by the danger as to betray his terror by the evidence of his pallor. (CD, 9.4)

Augustine seems to differ from the Stoics, then, in allowing the philosopher to feel something like an emotion at the impending loss of his life (which is reasonably considered a good); but he remains Stoic in his insistence that this mind will ultimately remain steady in spite of this fear: “Mens immota manet, lacrimae voluvuntur inanes” (His mind remains unshaken; in vain flow forth the tears; CD, 9.4). Setting aside Augustine’s apparent misreading of Virgil’s text here (modern commentators generally agree that the tears are Dido’s, not Aeneas’s), this evocation of the

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tragic end of the affair cannot but recall Augustine’s detailing of his own emotional subjection to the story of Dido in his Confessions. Unlike the remorseless Aeneas in this quotation, Augustine weeps copiously for Dido, and in so doing—in choosing mortal love over love of God—enacts what he calls a physical infidelity (“fornicatio”; Conf . 1.21) against God. This memorable subtext from within Augustine’s own work would seem to temper the moral certainty in the later passage.10 Secondly, if there is no substantial difference between the passions and the prepassions, the body’s influence over the emotions—already considered significant by the Stoics—increases. If Seneca would demarcate a clear line between the “animal” affects and reason, Augustine seems to suggest that the nonsovereign “animal” aspect of the affects is inevitably on the spectrum of emotional experience—much as critics like Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai consider affects and emotions as belonging to a spectrum rather than distinct spheres of experience.11 He specifically notes that prior to the fall Adam and Eve did not experience “affectus in corpore animali” (emotions in their animal bodies; CD, 14.10), suggesting that it is precisely those animal affects that gain force after the fall. Given Augustine’s continuing allegiance to the Stoic call for regulation of the emotions, the role of “assent” takes on an even greater importance. As we saw earlier, Brad Inwood argues that Seneca importantly develops the notion of assent—voluntas in Latin—to encompass the capacity of mind to issue “self-directed commands... in pursuit of moral self-control and character development.”12 Augustine intensifies this connection between passions and the will, but instead of making assent the arbiter of a distinction between prepassion and passion proper, he suggests that all passionate responses are from the beginning functions of the will in reaction to objects (beloved or despised) in a fallen world: Voluntas est quippe in omnibus, immo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt. Nam quid est cupiditas et laetitia nisi voluntas in eorum consensione quae volumus? Et quid est metus atque tristitia nisi voluntas in dissension ab his quae nolumus? The will is indeed involved in all [emotions], or rather, they are all no more than acts of will. For what is desire or joy but an act of will in sympathy with those things that we wish, and what is fear or grief but an act of will in disagreement with the things that we do not wish? (CG, 14.6, italics mine)

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For Seneca a breach of the will must always be a sign of avoidable psychic disarray. But for Augustine—and this is the profound distinction between them—this breach in the human experience is merely the sign of a fallen nature and thus as inevitable as it is regrettable. The somewhat different role of the will in this context comes into view when Augustine describes Christ’s experience of emotion, which he regards as a real result of his embodied nature: “Neque enim in quo verum erat hominis corpus et verus hominis animus, falsus erat humanus affectus” (for the human emotion in him who possessed a real human body and a real human mind was not feigned; CD, 14.9). Augustine emphasizes the chosen and volitional nature of Christ’s emotions, twice mentioning that he adopted them “cum voluit” (when he wished; CD, 14.9). For mortal beings living in a fallen world, however, freedom from all emotion is neither possible nor desirable, and we cannot always manage to follow our own will: “saepe illis etiam inviti cedimus” (we often yield to them [emotions] against our will; CD, 14.9). Once again, Augustine seems to engage with Seneca’s analysis in order to differentiate his own view. While Seneca argues that “omnes enim motus, qui non voluntate nostra fiunt, invicti et inevitabiles sunt” (all sensations that do not result from our own volition are uncontrolled and unavoidable; De Ira, 2.2.1), and therefore not true emotions, Augustine views the slide into theoretically avoidable emotion as part of what emotion is in a fallen world. The consequences of a fallen nature can be ameliorated but not eradicated by moral effort, an embrace of what Augustine calls “recta voluntas,” righteous or good will; by the same token, “perversa voluntas,” perverse or wrong will, drags a person more deeply into a turn (away from God) that is identical with sin. Augustine specifically remarks that the first evil act in human history was precisely “defectus... quidam ab opere Dei ad sua opera quam” (a falling away from the work of God to the will’s own works; CG, 14.11, italics mine). Paradoxically, then, to follow “recta voluntas” is in a sense to give up one’s own will, because right will is always a will “secundum Deum,” according to God. It is not so much the fact of the emotion, therefore, as the kind of emotion that is in question: Denique in disciplina nostra non tam quaeritur utrum pius animus irascatur, sed quare irascatur; nec utrum sit tristis, sed unde sit tristis.

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Consequently in our system we do not so much ask whether a religious mind will become angry, but rather what should make it angry, nor whether it will be sad, but what should make it sad. (CG, 9.5)

It is possible, for instance, to feel an appropriate “godly grief” (contristati fuerint secundum Deum [they were saddened according to God]; CG, 14.8). In Augustine’s view, the passions of the mind are allowable when “regulated and restrained to the cause of righteousness” (moderandas atque frenandas ut in usum iustitiae convertantur; CG, 9.5). Within the scope of God’s will, therefore, certain emotions are permissible, even requisite. In making this distinction, Augustine seems intentionally to intervene in the Stoic categorization of passion as an illness, a pathology (recall Cicero’s attraction to the word morbus and insania, finally landing on perturbatio). Only in communities of the wicked do we find emotions in their perverse form (“affectibus pravis”; CD, 14.10) that act like diseases and perturbations (“tamquam morbis et perturbationibus”; CD, 14.10). Given that it is not possible to live correctly in a fallen world without appropriate feelings of fear and grief, provided they are “secundum Deum,” someone who aspires to such a state achieves only what Augustine calls “immanitas” or savagery of mind, and “torpor,” stupor of body (CD, 14.9).13 While the intervention of Christ on the cross allows Augustine to accept godly forms of emotion (with Christ as the supreme model), the suspicion of interior softness (mollitia) that characterized Stoic writing remains. Now, however, it is directed toward any version of emotion that is concerned with the “will’s own works” (CG, 14.11). Rather than allowing our wills to be organized by and toward God, we allow— through excessive interior softness—ourselves to be pulled around by objects in the world. Indeed, it is those who turn from the Creator to the creature (to paraphrase Augustine’s words in De Libero Arbitrio) who become what we might call willful or self-willed. In the De Libero Arbitrio Augustine fills out the picture of what constitutes a perverse will in ways that will resonate through many of the writers I discuss in this book. The decision to follow one’s own will is characterized in De Libero Arbitrio as a turn from “divine things that are truly everlasting” toward “things that change and are uncertain” (DLA, 1.16).14 This turn is unequivocally identified with sin: “The will, however, commits sin when it turns

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away from immutable and common goods, toward its private good, either something external to itself or lower than itself” (DLA, 2.19). Augustine illustrates this in the Confessions specifically with reference to his experience of grief, which he regards as a willful cleaving to something that is not God. In book 4, after the loss of his friend, he writes: O dementiam nescientem diligere homines humaniter!...itaque aestuabam, suspirabam, flebam, turbabar, nec requies erat nec consilium. Portabam enim concisam et cruentam animam meam impatientem portari a me. What insanity is this, not knowing how to love humanity as it really is! . . . How I raged, I sighed, I swept, I was distraught! I had no peace, and no purpose! I was carrying about with me my shattered, bleeding soul; it could not endure being carried about by me. (Conf ., 4.7)15

This description recalls Cicero’s evocation of a “broken” and “abject” figure subject to powerful impressions from outside. The goal of Stoic apatheia, as I noted in Chapter 2, is to place oneself beyond the realm of the passive, patient, feminized body that perceives the world feelingly, and in doing so, opens the subject up to suffering. But whereas Stoic philosophy teaches the wise man to control this vulnerability through a rational rejection of passion, Augustine aims to recuperate that brokenness and vulnerability by placing it in God, thus making it whole again. “Only those who hold everyone dear, in the One who can never be lost, never lose anyone dear to them” (Conf ., 4.9). The mistake this time is not to feel, but to feel on a purely human level for other human beings who will surely die and who in some sense are already dying (Augustine’s frequent use of the future participle moriturus (about to die) chillingly conveys this point).16 Like his reaction to his friend’s death, Augustine’s reaction to the death of his mother illustrates what is at stake in his commitment not to cleave to the things of the world that arise and pass away (“quae oriuntur et occident”; Conf., 4.10). He chronicles his initial reaction as a battle between a “measureless grief” that wells up in his heart “ingens maestitudo” (Conf ., 9.12) and threatens to overflow (transfluebat ) into tears, and a “violent” effort to suppress them: “oculi mei violento animi imperio resorbebant fontem suum” (by the violent control of my mind my eyes suppressed

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the flow at its source”; Conf ., 9.12, italics mine).17 His son, Adeodatus, seems to enact the feelings that Augustine himself tries to repress: Tum vero ubi efflavit extremum, puer Adeodatus exclamavit in planctu atque ab omnibus nobis cohercitus tacuit. Hoc modo etiam meum quiddam puerile, quod labebatur in fletus, iuvenali voce cordis cohercebatur et tacebat. At the moment when she breathed her last, my boy Adeodatus cried aloud in his grief and was only checked by a concerted effort from all of us. Likewise, the part of me that was still a child kept slipping into sobs; but the mature voice of my heart checked and silenced it. (Conf ., 9.12).

The emphasis in these passages is on the effort to control and to silence; the verb coherceo (confine, repress, hold back) appears twice, applied to both the actual child and the part of himself Augustine considers childish (“puerile”). Both passages dramatize an effort to hold the self together against insurgent forces from within that threaten disintegration: grief wells up and threatens overflow in tears—the verb trans fluebat suggests a crossing of boundaries, met by vigorous efforts to reabsorb (“resorbebant”) this transgressive fluidity. Such feelings seem to belong to the same category as the visceral, autonomic forces that contemporary theorists associate with affects: they are symptomatic of an upsurge of embodied intensity that is not fully—or not at all—within the subject’s control. These passages clearly demarcate Augustine’s effort to refuse consent, or assent, in Stoic terms, to the affective upswelling within the body of potentially overwhelming forces—decried here as forces belonging to women and children. The threatened outpouring of tears is matched by Adeodatus’s vocalization, the planctus —a traditionally feminine genre— that is immediately shut down, recalling the ululatus reproved by Seneca in his Ad Helviam and decisively foreclosed in Virgil’s Aeneid.18 Implicitly, Adeodatus represents not just a childish response to grief but also a distinctively feminine one. Augustine’s emphasis on the dissolving material boundaries of the mourning self also echoes Seneca’s evocation of a weak and fluid maternal body as the material source of the always disintegrating (moriturus ) human frame: You, who are a rotting [putre] and dissolving [fluidum] body and often assailed by the agents of disease,—can you have hoped that from such

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weak material [imbecilla materia] you gave birth to anything durable and imperishable [solida et aeterna]?19

As Mairéad McAuley notes, Seneca even seems to conflate his mother’s nonvirginal, maternal body with its susceptibility to emotional wounds: “It is not from an intact body that your blood has now flowed; you have been struck in the very scars of old wounds” (Non ex intacto corpore tuo sanguis hic fluxit; per ipsas cicatrices percussa es; Ad Helviam, 15.4, italics mine).20 The fact that the mourned figure in Augustine’s text is also a mother solidifies the connection between mourning and the vulnerability of the maternal body, and as though to pinpoint the connection to Stoic thought, Augustine immediately deploys the Stoic keyword, mollitia, to decry the feminizing “softness” that dominates Stoic writing about the passions: “Increpebam mollitiam affectus mei et constringebam fluxum maeroris, cedebatque mihi paululum” (I reproached myself for the softness of my feelings, and I restrained the flow of lamentation, and it receded a little; Conf ., 9.2, italics mine). Elsewhere in the Confessions Augustine evokes this disparaged “softness” to critique his adherence to a woman over the church: “Sed ego infirmior eligebam molliorem locum et propter hoc unum volvebar, in ceteris languidus et tabescens curis marcidis” (But I was weaker than he. I chose the softer option, and only because of this I was in turmoil, sluggish about the worries that were wearing me down, listless about everything else; Conf., 8.2, trans. Loeb with slight emendation). The adjective marcidus (rotting, soft, languid) again recalls Seneca’s “animal iners ac marcidum” (Ep. 92.10), indicating an ongoing absorption of Stoic terminology to disparage the perceived weakness, languor, and softness associated with the capacity to succumb to emotion. Like Seneca, who flexes his power not just over his mother, but implicitly over his mother’s grief (“I do not doubt that I will have more power over you than your grief”; Ad Helviam, 2.1), Augustine deploys the suffering maternal body as a prop to stage his own fantasy of self-overcoming.21 What disappoints Augustine here is that an interior softness (“mollitia”) has allowed an external and purely human object (“haec humana”; Conf ., 9.31) to have too much sway over him—in Stoic terms, to imprint itself too deeply on his soul, creating a fresh wound (“vulnus recens”; Conf ., 9.30) that may allude directly to the “fresh wound” of grief Seneca perceives in his own mother (Ad Helviam, 3.1).22 Derailed by a burst of feeling, he is guilty of indulging a “carnalis affectus” (affection according

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to the flesh; Conf ., 12.13) that pivots the will toward its own objects— for its own reasons—rather than toward God.23 In mourning his mother immoderately (in his view), Augustine has taken on the characteristics of the female mourner—including perhaps even the fictional Dido, who also bears a fresh wound of love (“Phoenissa recens a vulnere Dido”).24 But unlike the Stoics, who see a failure to inhibit the prepassion as a lapse of reason, Augustine suggests that his attachment to his mother is inevitable, the “duly appointed lot of our human condition” (ordine debito et sorte conditionis nostrae; Conf ., 9.31). By the same token, however, it is his duty to turn his will back to God, transforming and cleansing the foulness of such affections (“talium affectionum immunditia”; Conf ., 4.6)—a process Katrin Ettenhuber calls “volitional redirection.”25 The rejection of this abjected, affective body and the alignment of the purified masculine soul with God is at the core of Augustine’s concept of recta voluntas. The gendering of the part of the soul as feminine that responds strongly to the things of the world, overturning the efforts of the will—or at least the recta voluntas—is more explicit elsewhere in his writings. In his De Trinitate, Augustine unpacks the psychological process of sinful emotional engagement with the things of the world using the Fall as an allegorical framework. Identifying three distinct stages—suggestio (suggestion), delectatio (pleasure), and finally consentio (consent)—he reads these stages against the biblical story of temptation in Eden.26 He identifies the temptation involved in the first stage, suggestion, with the serpent.27 Crucially, for our purposes, he associates delectatio, pleasure in the temptation, with Eve, who threatens to corrupt the higher-level rationality (Adam) which either consents, or not, to the temptation. Whenever, then, that carnal or animal sense [carnalis ille sensus vel animalis ] introduces into this purpose of the mind, which is conversant about things temporal and corporeal, with a view to the offices of a man’s actions, by the living force of reason, some inducement to enjoy itself, that is, to enjoy itself as if it were some private good of its own, not as the public and common, which is the unchangeable, good; then, as it were, the serpent discourses with the woman [tunc velut serpens alloquitur feminam; italics mine].28

Simo Knuuttila identifies Eve in this scenario as “the emotional level which tends to overestimate mundane things and to react positively to

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evil suggestions.”29 This reading aligns with Augustine’s discussion in the City of God and elsewhere of the part of the soul that is inevitably drawn to worldly, impermanent things: “amore subduntur eis et subditi iudicare non possunt” (their [human beings’] love for created things puts them in subjection—and those who are subjects cannot exercise the power of judgement; CG, 10.6). This capacity for subjection to created, worldly things, disempowering the judgment, is split off and identified as a principle of feminine impressibility, and to the extent that the masculine subject consents, the process is rescripted as one of seduction. In Stoic terms, the “weak” man who succumbs to emotion has been seduced by his inner mollitia—his inner Eve. Later medieval writers, including the commentator Geoffrey Babion, explicitly link delectatio with the prepassion, which in this context is “a sudden movement which does not involve deliberation about good and evil and which is a venial sin.”30 As the use of the term consentio suggests, Augustine’s tripartite scheme of emotional response owes a considerable debt to the Stoic theory of impression and assent. But the relatively neutral description of the imprint of a phantasia or stimulus in the psychic pneuma, with its potential to create an irresistible psychophysical response, the prepassion, has given way to a gendered allegorization of that response as the product of an infirm, feminized—because overly receptive or “soft”—fallen soul. The fundamental classical association between femininity and passivity, which winds its way through Stoic thought in the repetitive identification of the passions with a disparaged interior mollitia, merges decisively with this Christian identification of innate tractability—the openness to prepassion—with Eve. Augustine’s retooling of the psychic shocks of the prepassion into an inevitable first emotional reaction (not different in kind from more fully-fledged emotions) also blurs what for the Stoics was a crucial categorical distinction.31 As Knuuttila argues, those initial psychosomatic responses are now considered “initial emotions rather than precedents of emotions.”32 The shift from discontinuous categories to a spectrum fluidly leaking from one to the other invites a continuous process of projecting or denying an internalized but abjected femininity. Thomas Aquinas’s influential work on the passions continues to blur this distinction. In his schema, the passions, divided along Platonic lines into “irascible” and “concupiscible” categories, are situated in the sensitive appetitive part of the soul and are in constant contact with the intellective appetitive part, or the will (both situated in the appetitive faculty of the soul). The passions for Aquinas are, as Peter King argues,

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“a kind of ‘appetitive perception.’”33 As this suggests, true passions, according to Aquinas, are experienced only by embodied persons: They always involve some bodily change; passion strictly so called cannot therefore be experienced by the soul except in the sense that the whole person, the matter-soul composite, undergoes it. But here too we must distinguish: the bodily change may be for the better or for the worse; and it is in the latter case that the term passion is used more properly. Thus sorrow is more naturally called a passion than is joy.34

As Eric D’Arcy clarifies, the “bodily” changes Aquinas has in mind here correspond closely with the Stoics’ prepassions—going red with anger and pale with fear, experiencing a racing pulse, or bodily tension.35 But unlike the Stoics (and like Augustine), Aquinas does not view these bodily changes as categorically different from the passions—instead, they are part of what the passions are, or as Barbara Rosenwein puts it, they are “treated as the bodily concomitants of the passions themselves.”36 Even as the bodily and psychic aspects of the emotions grow closer together—the prepassions no longer categorically distinct from the passions—the stakes of an effortful restraint of the passions and concomitant disparagement of the body’s implication in feeling seem to increase in the Christian contexts of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s writings. For the Stoics, the coherence of the self is on the line; but for Augustine or Aquinas, the soul’s alignment with God (the effort to corral one’s feelings secundum Deum) and journey toward immortal life are at stake. In the context of fallen nature, Aquinas and Augustine both recognize the intrinsic difficulty of resisting these lower, bodily (feminine) reactions. The passions should be under the control of the rational appetite, or the will: “Even the lower appetitive faculties may be called rational to the extent that there is a sense in which they have some share in the life of reason.”37 Aquinas emphasizes, in Stoic fashion, that while we cannot control initial passions (those the Stoics would have termed prepassions), the will is responsible for giving consent to their continuance: “Although the will cannot stop the onset of concupiscence.... Nevertheless it is in the will’s power not to will to lust, or not to consent [consentire] to concupiscence. And so it does not of necessity follow the motion of lust.”38 As Charles H. Kahn observes, “Sunkatathesis in the Stoic theory of human action plays exactly the same role that ‘consensus’ and the ‘command of the will’ play for St Thomas.”39

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Aquinas clearly draws on Augustine’s description of the will, frequently calling on him as a primary source for his discussion of consent, and explicitly connecting the two concepts: “When Augustine ascribes consent to the reason, he takes it as embracing the will [“voluntas ”].”40 Aquinas seems to acknowledge the tricky bridge between body and mind involved in the function of will (qua consent), emphasizing that it is both an “act of cognitive power” but also analogous to “a felt experience.”41 Capturing the liminality of consent, wavering as it does between body and mind, self and object, he emphasizes consent’s treacherous role in moving toward the object: “To consent [consentire], however, is to sense with, and implies a certain union. Therefore it is for the will, which goes out to a thing, to consent, in the proper sense of the term [italics mine].”42 The sympathetic union of the will with the desired object, prompting consent to a potentially dangerous impulse, recalls Augustine’s allegorization of passionate response in the figure of Eve, and Aquinas seems to remind readers of precisely this passage in the De Trinitate: “According to Augustine, consent to pleasure [“delectationem”] belongs to the lower reason.”43 We recall that Augustine identifies delectatio, or pleasurable cogitation of an object, with Eve.44 Eve, then, represents the force of the affects, whether understood as prepassions or “first movements” of the emotions themselves—whose irruptions of intensity threaten to alienate the subject from her or his own agency. Although Aquinas certainly believes, like the Stoics, that the passions are cognitively penetrable, he also concedes that they may overcome the will by their vehemence. Sometimes, Aquinas writes, “when the passions are very intense, man loses the use of reason altogether: for many have gone out of their minds through excess of love or anger.”45 Similarly, writing of those “who become crazed or maddened through vehement anger or desire,” Aquinas observes that “There is no movement of reason within them and consequently none of will.”46 Broken down into its component parts, this statement suggests that the forcefulness with which the impression of an object affects the mind may erode or indeed erase the mind’s ability to form a cognitive judgment of that impression. In Stoic terms, the object has overridden the apparatus of assent and forced movement (for good or ill) on the body-mind of the subject. This focus on an irresistible, feminine intensity or vehemence links back to the irrepressible Stoic prepassions and forward to theories of affects as forms of intensity. As we will see in the next section, the identification of intensity as a feminine affective force helps to produce Petrarch’s fixation on a female figure

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associated with an “impression” (species ) whose intensity is derailing in its vehemence. Petrarch’s autobiographical speaker acknowledges the identification of Laura with his own derailment: “Profecto et illius occursus et exhorbitatio mea unum in tempus inciderunt” (There’s no doubt that my meeting with her and my going off course [exhorbitatio] happened at the same time).47 Using the same term (“exorbitant”), John Donne similarly reads Augustine’s grief for his mother as a case study in overly vehement, inordinate grief. He describes Augustine as delivering “vehement, and indeed exorbitant declarations of piety mixt with passion.”48 As Katrin Ettenhuber notes, “exorbitant” literally means “off track”; both writers associate going “off track” with an externalized feminine figure who seems to represent their own disavowed affects. While many medieval and early modern texts of course absorb these earlier philosophical models of the emotions directly, their dissemination—especially for literary texts—is importantly mediated by the work of Petrarch. In his Secretum (or My Secret Book), written as an autobiographical dialogue between a fictionalized Augustine and Petrarch himself, Petrarch places Augustine squarely in the Stoic tradition, quoting frequently from Cicero and a Stoicized Virgil. Augustine sets out to assist Petrarch in his struggle with what he eventually diagnoses as acedia (a medieval spiritual version of melancholy allied with despair). From the outset, Augustine places strong emphasis on the role of the will—“Voluntas igitur presto sit” (Therefore your will should be at the ready; 1.14.3)—in the battle with what he calls the “infection” (contagio) of the body. Recalling Seneca’s comparison of the emotions to the body falling by its own weight, Petrarch (through “Augustine”) describes the soul as weighed down by the body (“aggravat animam”; 1.15.5) and burdened by seductive impressions (the Stoic phantasia) of things from the physical world (“imagines rerum visibilium”; 1.15.5). The clearest connection with Augustine’s Christian Stoicism appears when “Augustine” attempts to show Petrarch the dire error of his attachment to Laura. Augustine pinpoints her mortality as the source of the error (“de muliere mortali”; 3.3.2) and wonders at Petrarch’s steadfast passion for her: “in tali ingenio tantam et tam longevam insaniam vehementer admirer” (I’m really amazed at such a strong and longlasting passion in a man of your intelligence; 3.3.2). Petrarch’s use of the Ciceronian word insania for passion here indicates that Augustine views Petrarch’s love as precisely the kind driven by a perverse rather than righteous will. As he clarifies a few passages later, this focus on a mortal,

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transient body is always an inappropriate vehicle for affective movement: “Cum effigiem morte variatam et pallentia membra conspexeris, pudebit animum immortalem caduco applicuisse corpusculo” (When you see her features transformed by death and her pallid limbs, you’ll be ashamed of having dedicated your immortal soul to a perishable little body; 3.3.4). The diminutive “corpusculo” (little body) is echoed by the dismissive diminutive “mulierculam” (little woman) a few lines later (3.4.1), where Petrarch again emphasizes the madness (“dementia”) of subjecting the soul to an (especially female) mortal being (“animum rebus subiecisse mortalibus”; 3.3.10).49 These exhortations filter into the closing hymn of the Canzoniere, where Petrarch turns against the love that he has been intricately recording for the previous 365 poems. In very similar language, Petrarch’s speaker refers to that love as “insania” (366.117) and regrets devoting a misplaced faith toward “poca mortal terra caduca” (a bit of deciduous mortal dust; 366.121). The rejection of Laura recalls Seneca’s projection of all things mortal onto the maternal body—constructed in his text as the quintessential “caducus corpusculus.” While the adjective caducus can mean “perishable” or “transitory,” it can also mean “falling” or “fallen”; under Augustine’s influence, whether explicit or unspoken, the female body in Petrarch’s texts comes to epitomize the transitory and fallen nature of mortal life. It emerges in the discussion that Petrarch has misguidedly been using Laura as a model for his own virtue. In order to explain this, he describes her in terms that resonate strongly with Stoic descriptions of ideal masculine virtue: “Adversus suam simul et meam etatem, adversus multa et varia que flectere adamantinum licet spiritum debuissent, inexpugnabilis et firma permansit” (She remained firm and impregnable despite her age and mine, and despite numerous other factors which could have softened a heart of steel; 3.6.1). This description also closely recalls Petrarch’s description of Griselda, the Stoic paragon who appears in Petrarch’s own adaptation (1373) of Boccaccio’s original story. As I will show in more detail in Chapter 5, Petrarch attributes Stoic masculine virtue to the maidenly Griselda: “nil molle nil tenerum cogitare didicerat, sed virilis senilisque animus virgineo latebat in pectore” (She had learned to entertain no soft, no tender thoughts, but a virile and elderly soul lay hidden in her virginal breast).50 Note in particular Petrarch’s use of the Stoic key words here, which seem to allude quite closely to Cicero’s line, quoted above: “Sed est natura in animis tenerum quiddam atque molle” (TD, 3.12, italics mine). Chaucer, who draws on Petrarch’s Stoicizing account

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of Griselda, creates in her a character who is similarly forced to adopt a “sad” demeanor—where “sad” has the Middle English meaning “rigid, unyielding; solid, not porous, without an opening, dense.”51 Chaucer’s Griselda is thus supposed to have a “heart of steel” like Laura’s. Exploring the use of personified feminine abstractions (such as philosophy, nature, or reason) in Roman Stoicism, Alex Dressler argues that masculinity is constructed first through the abjection of the subaltern feminine (as soft, yielding, corporeal, etc.) and then through its recuperation and reinstallation as a disembodied virtue.52 As he puts it: “As the form of representation of the non-person, who is defined by her exclusion from discourse, dynamic personification is the closest language can come to admitting the subaltern.” Male subjects, he suggests, “use personification to experience their as it were feminine constitution.”53 I suggest that Laura and Griselda represent two poles of such personification of ideal virtue and Stoic constantia; the flipside of this idealization is the soft, yielding, and vulnerable attributes of the feminine which this figuration specifically, but unstably, excludes. Both become instead a kind of mirror for the masculine soul. Admiring her “constantiam femineam” (3.6.1), Petrarch explicitly says of Laura: “Profecto animus iste femineus quid virum deceret admonebat” (There’s no doubt this woman’s spirit showed me what a man should do; 3.6.1), while Griselda is said to have a “virile” heart or soul within her feminine exterior. In both cases, the function of the personification seems to be to shore up the masculine self against precisely those upswellings of affect that threaten to overcome Augustine at the loss of his mother, or that over time have created a shameful “dementia” in Petrarch. In light of Augustine’s allegorization of Eve, the gendered personification at work in Laura and Griselda seems targeted to externalize and assert control—will—over that wavering capacity to let in wounding impressions from the world, exactly as Augustine accuses Petrarch of doing.

From Passions to Affects: Toward an Early Modern Affect Theory This Christian-Stoic view of the will as a vulnerable, porous bulwark against the power of worldly objects to draw the embodied soul away from God forms the structural basis of early modern theories of the passions. Edward Reynolds (Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man, 1647) representatively associates the corruption of passion

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from a natural and harmonious response to an “undue” corrupt one with the Fall. Before the Fall, he argues, “The action of Sense was not... ordain’d to touch the Affection, but to present it selfe primarily to the Understanding; upon whose determination and conduct, the Passions were to depend, to submit all their inclinations thereunto.”54 It is precisely the “undue” uses of the passions that mark them as fallen. Like Augustine and undoubtedly influenced by him, Reynolds also identifies Eve with what Augustine calls delectatio (pleasure); Eve characterizes that moment of softness or impressibility in the soul that allows the external object to lure us from the right path—to rouse undue passion in us: “The Object is any thing apprehended sub ratione Boni et Jucundi, as good and pleasant. For upon those inducements did Satan first stirre the desire of Eve towards the forbidden fruit. Shee saw that it was good for food, and pleasant to the eye.”55 Although Reynolds does not explicitly identify Eve with the prepassions, the reference to the “first stirr[ing]” of desire incurred by Satan indicates that he has the same psychological process in mind. In the introductory pages of his The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Thomas Wright clarifies that the “inordinate motions of the Passions” are “thornie briars sprung from the infected root of original sinne,” and within a page moves to discussing the “natural” intemperance of women.56 Recalling the power of a particular orator to “cause [his audience] shead aboundance of teares, yea and with teares dropping downe their cheeks, presently turne their sorrow into laughter,” he comments that this was at least in part because “the most part were women that heard him, (whose passions are most vehement and mutable) therefore hee might have perswaded them what hee listed.”57 These same women, he writes, “by nature, are enclined more to mercie and pitie than men, because the tendernesse of their complexion moveth them more to compassion. They surpasse men also in pietie and devotion; or as they acknowledge their weakenesse, and unablenesse to resist adversities, or any other iniurie offered.”58 Note the familiar connection between women, softness (“tendernesse”), and “vehement” passion; it is precisely the vehemency or intensity of the passions that gives them their Eve-like power to seduce the reason—and indeed seduction is often the term used, as though Augustine’s Eve is always in the background. Like Augustine, neither Wright nor Reynolds considers emotion as something that can be extirpated, pace Cicero or Seneca; Reynolds specifically argues that “the businesse of a wise man, is not to without them,

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but to be above them.”59 Reynolds highlights the emotions experienced by Christ, explicitly calling these prepassions rather than passions, and thus aligning Christ with the Stoic philosopher in Aulus Gellius’s storm: And therefore our Saviour himself sometimes loved, sometimes rejoiced, sometimes wept, sometimes desired, sometimes mourned and grieved; but these were not Passions that violently and immoderately troubled him; be he, as he saw fit did with them trouble himself. His Reason excited, directed, moderated, repressed them, according to the rule of perfect, cleare, and undisturbed judgement. In which respect, the Passions of Christ are by Divines called rather Prepassions, that is to say, Beginnings of Passions, then Passions themselves; in as much as they never proceeded beyond the due measure, nor transported the Mind to undecencie or excesse; but had both their rising and originall from Reason, and also their measure, bounds, continuance limited by Reason.60

Reynolds follows Augustine in asserting the reasonableness of moderate emotion in a fallen world. Such feelings, arising from reason, are not true passions in the Stoic sense—they are not pathological. There is also nothing passive about Christ’s “passion”; remarkably, he is said to produce these emotions deliberately in himself, and then to moderate and repress them according to his perfect judgment of the world. The emphasis on the voluntariness of these emotions is clear: nothing could be less like the abject, feminine slide into the passions outlined by Seneca and Cicero. The deliberate taking on of these passions (really prepassions) is in fact heroic. As did Augustine, Reynolds has clearly moved the bar that for the Stoics distinguished between prepassions and true emotion, placing it instead between “reasonable” emotion and disordered, excessive emotion. Moderate emotion is—perhaps paradoxically—the most rational response to a fallen world and its unhappy circumstances. Reynolds himself recognizes the similarity between his own position and the Stoics’, using the same model of virtuous masculine constancy as Augustine—Aeneas: Mens immota manet, lacrymae volvuntur inanes. He wept indeed, but in his stable mind You could no shakings or distempers find.61

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It is striking that both Augustine and Reynolds seem to misread the Virgilian passage in exactly the same way. In Virgil’s original, the vain tears (“lacriame inanes”) seem quite clearly to refer to Dido’s tears, as Dido pleads desperately for Aeneas to stay. Aeneas, however, remains unmoved. The original context thus shows a male hero resisting the emotional pull of a seductive female figure; in the later versions, both authors have internalized Dido. Her seductive but ultimately futile tears are now the hero’s own potential “shakings or distempers,” to be robustly repressed. Early modern texts on the emotions, including Reynolds’s Treatise, Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall, and Timothie Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586) demonstrate awareness of a lively but sometimes contradictory intersection between philosophical and medical views of the passions. At this intersection, as Stanley Jackson points out, concepts from the medical tradition can take on a moralizing flavor not always present in the original.62 One significant medical concept that dovetails productively with the early modern philosophical framework is the Galenic notion of the “non-naturals,” or non-innate factors in the individual and her environment that can contribute to disease or health. Deriving from a list of elements in Galen’s Ars Medica, the non-naturals gradually became codified as such in later translations of Arabic works based on Galenic texts.63 The six non-naturals were: air, sleep and wakefulness, food and drink, rest and exercise, excretion and retention of superfluities, and the passions of the soul. As Stephen Pender shows, the non-naturals “describe active and passive relationships between bodies and worlds... the effects of things external to the body on temperament and humoral balance.”64 Two implications arise from the inclusion of the passions in the list of “non-naturals.” One is the striking sense that the passions of the soul are not “innate,” but rather environmental, like air or food; this intensifies our sense of the passions’ liminality, suggesting in a different way that the passions are markers of our dependence on external things. They are, as Michael Schoenfeldt puts it, “both a product of and alien to the creature they inhabit.”65 The second, related implication is that also like food or air, the passions need to be metabolized, absorbed, and processed— their “content” either excreted or retained. At the very least, the passions’ status as “non-naturals” entangles them in the other vital physiological processes that involve managing the interaction between inside and outside in the service of a healthy solubility. Thus, the physician Everard

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Maynwaringe (1628–1699) notes in a section of his work entitled Tutela Sanitatis concerned with the impact of the passions that: When the soul . . . wanders away with a vehement desire to procure any thing most agreeable and delightful . . . concoction now is not so good, nor the appetite so quick; the Stomack calls not for a new supply. . . . Separation now is not so good, the extrementitious and nutritious part walk hand in hand together, and pass without due contradiction or examination: the watch now is not so strict at the Ports and privy passages . . . but promiscuously receives what presents itself.66

The vehement force of the passion acts as a blocking agent on the prized solubility of the body: because the mind is unable to process the incoming impression of the object, other processing ceases or is disrupted as well. In particular, the borders of the body are less secure. The description above evokes a newly sexualized version of the Stoic view of the laxness or looseness of psychic pneuma that leads to excessive openness to impressions; the corporeal “ports” and “privy passages” seem here conflated with a promiscuously open mind. The Stoic notion of the initiating “impression” gaining a too-easy access to an impressionable (and feminized) interiority has a long life in early modern texts, both explicitly medical, like Maynwaringe’s, and more clearly philosophical. Nicolas Coeffeteau’s influential Table of Humane Passions , translated into English in 1621, focuses on similar themes of coherence and stability, even drawing on the wax tablet imagery familiar from the Stoics’ description of the effect of the phantasia (impression) on the psychic pneuma: “The Will being toucht with the Love of her obiect, suffers it selfe to bee drawne to his image; and going out of it selfe, unites it selfe unto him to take his forme, like unto the waxe which receives impressions of the seale.”67 When the will allows itself to be drawn into the object, and to take its impress from the object, it places itself in subjection to those same impermanent and worldly objects taken up by Augustine’s perversa voluntas. To the extent that this image remains “stuck” in the body-mind, the mind is drawn, as Petrarch might say, “offtrack.” Likewise, Thomas Wright emphasizes (following Aquinas) that the will’s habitation of the same soul (the appetitive faculty) as the sensitive appetite causes it to follow that appetite into the world of objects: “Even so, the obiect that haleth the sensitive appetite, draweth withal, the Will,

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and inclining her more to one part than another, diminisheth her libertie and freedome.”68 As we saw in Chapter 2, in the Stoic texts the tenor of the enduring metaphorical vehicle of the wax tablet was psychic pneuma, the airy material that forms the impressible basis of the mind. The stronger the pneuma, the less susceptible it is to being prematurely impressed by, and entangled with, an object in such a way that the freedom to withhold assent to an impulse about it is diminished.69 Early modern texts also rely heavily on the equivalent to pneuma in Latin texts, spiritus , or spirit in English texts, to explain and describe the structure and impact of emotional reactions. In Stoic theory, pneuma was a hot, animating, rarefied substance believed to derive from breath, wind, and even the stars.70 This airy substance was the material basis of a unified mindbody complex. According to Galen’s influential pneumatology, pneuma was a “thin pure spiritous blood” concocted of both inhaled air and blood that circulated throughout the body.71 Galen further developed the pneuma into three types, the vital (heart), the psychic or animal (via the so-called rete mirabile to the brain), and the natural (liver), although the latter seems to have primarily come into focus for later Galenists.72 Natural pneuma undergoes progressive purification as it travels toward the brain—a purification that is interestingly considered a form of digestion: concoction will be the equivalent early modern term.73 Medieval Arabic texts seamlessly integrated these classical sources— especially Galen’s developments—into a newly religious context.74 What in the Stoic context was a sign of psychosomatic integration becomes in these Islamic or Christian texts the sign of precisely the necessary separation of body and soul. In his Canon of Medicine, Avicenna views breath as the manifestation of spirit, which he defines as “a refined form of bodily substance or fluid believed to act as a medium between mind and the grosser matter of the body.”75 It is, as he poetically writes, “a kind of very subtle body which penetrates all parts of the body and infuses them like the essence of a rose.”76 As Heather Webb puts it, “spirit could be conceived of as a hybrid entity, comprising a mixture of that which is innate, or proper to the body (the blood that had been refined and purified within the intimate internal spaces of the heart), and that which is foreign to the body (inspired air).”77 This view of spirit as a crucial psychosomatic intermediary working to keep, as it were, the soul’s hands clean, remains remarkably stable across the medieval and early modern medical tradition.

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The fifteenth-century Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino develops an erotic pneumatology that both draws on the model of the spirits as hybrid mediators within the body and extends this model to include a kind of relational mediation, in which the spirits of lovers commingle.78 In the first model, the spirits, which he describes in Galenic terms as “thin and clear, warm and sweet,” are both recipients and agents of affect.79 The spirits receive the imprint of an object as a result of vehement desire; these imprints, or phantasms, in turn have extraordinary transformative power within the body. The exemplary case study for the transformative power of the spiritual phantasm is a pregnant woman, whose “vehement thought moves the internal spirits and paints on them an image of the thing being thought about. The spirits similarly move the blood and express an image of the wine [the object they avidly desire] in the very soft matter of the fetus.”80 The spirits, in this model, are both moved and moving: subject to affective pressure and causing change in another body as a result of that pressure. The “soft matter” of the fetus seems now to replace the inner mollitia that for the Stoics was the site of similar pneumatic receptivity.81 As in the passage from Thomas Wright’s text, where the “tender infant” is harmed by the “vehement passions” of the “froward” and willful mother, maternal desire seems to epitomize the harmful power of the affects. In both texts, feminine “vehemence,” mobilized by and in the spirits, is associated with the destructive power of the affects both to pull in an object from the world and then imprint that object in transformative ways throughout the body. Ficino makes a similar claim about the lovers Phaedrus and Lysias, who are also caught up in vehement desire; in this case, the image of the beloved is absorbed literally into the “soft blood” of the lover, with the result that the blood is “imprinted with a certain likeness on the parts of the body, so that eventually Lysias will seem to have become like Phaedrus in some colors, or features, or feelings or gestures.”82 This Ficinian model has considerable longevity into the early modern period. Thomas Wright, for example, develops the theory of impression and mediation beyond vision to include voice and hearing: “If we intend to imprint a passion in another, it is requisite first it be stamped in our hearts: for thorow our voices, eyes, and gestures, the world will pierce and thorowly perceive how we are affected.”83 Such a view thoroughly complicates any notion of a contained and boundaried psyche, outlining a protomodern theory of affects that move unpredictably via the pneumatic pathways both out into the world and back into the heart. He continues:

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“The passion proceedeth from the heart, and is blowne about the bodie, face, eies, hands, voice, and so by gestures passeth into our eyes, and by sounds into our eares: and as it is qualified, so it worketh in us.”84 Timothie Bright (Treatise of Melancholie, 1586) spends considerable time describing the hybrid intermediary role of the spirit, which he calls “a true love knot, to couple heaven and earth together... [which] hath such indifferent affection unto both, that it is to both equally affected, and communicateth the body and corporall things with the minde, and spirituall, and intelligible things, after a sort with the body.”85 While the spirit is well positioned to act as an intermediary between the soul and its corporeal instruments, this hybrid space in which the mind moves the body and vice versa is precisely where affective disruption may occur. It is because the spirit is a “mixture, wherewith the Lorde tempered the whole masse in the beginning,” that it is vulnerable to different kinds of affective intensity arising within the body.86 Bright describes the two-way affective operation between mind and body in some detail: Nowe as it is not possible to passe from one extreme [i.e., body and soul] to an other, but by a meane, and no meane is there in the nature of man, but spirit: by this only the body affecteth the mind: and the body and spirits affected, partly by disorder, and partly through outward occasions, minister discontentment as it were to the minde.87

Although Bright emphasizes, as he must, that the spirits can occasion no permanent harm to the soul, he nonetheless indicates that the body’s perturbations, via the spirits, do reach and distemper the mind, if only temporarily. The spirits are essential to early modern conceptions of emotional activation. Bright’s description of the process, which draws on earlier models familiar from the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas, helpfully clarifies the function of the spirits: First occasions [of the perturbations] riseth from outward things, wherin we either take pleasure, or wherewith we are offended: this obiect is caried to the internall senses from the outward . . . if of such points, as it selfe liketh without their helpe it giveth knowledge thereof to the hart by the spirits, which either embraceth the same, impelled by the minds willing, or reiecteth it with mislike and hatred, according to her nilling.88

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In Ficinian mode, the passage refers to the object as though it is literally internalized, with the visualizing powers of the spirits in De Amore carrying an image from one place to another in the body. In Bright’s version, the spirits offer a direct conduit for the external object from the mind to the heart; they also seem instrumental in that action of “willing” or “nilling” that has supplanted Stoic assent. Although the grammar of the sentence is unclear, it seems that the “hart” enacts the willing or nilling sent to it alongside the object by the mind. Thomas Wright’s similar explication of the process by which an external object moves the interior of the body and mind demonstrates how the impact of the spirits on the heart also causes an alteration in the humors, which themselves alter the emotional landscape: First then, to our imagination commeth, by sense or memorie, some obiect to be knowne, convenient or disconvenient to Nature . . . presently the purer spirites flocke from the brayne, by certayne secret channels to the heart, where they pitch at the doore, signifying what obiect was presented, convenient or disconvenient for it. The heart immediately bendeth, either to prosecute it, or to eschewe it: and the better to effect that affection, draweth other humours to helpe him, and so in pleasure concurre great store of pure spirites; in payne and sadnesse, much melancholy blood, in ire, blood and choler.89

This passage helps to explain the hybrid nature of the passions: they generally begin as impulses of the sensitive soul, but via the vehicle of the spirits they quickly effect a material alteration in the body (via the humors), and it as at this point that they may truly be called “passions” (things acted upon).90 These affective forces travel in both directions via the “love knot” of the spirits: “When these affections are stirring in our minds, they alter the humours of our bodies, causing some passion or alteration in them.”91 By the same token, once the humors are stirred up by the passions, “they trouble wonderfully the soule, corrupting the judgement, and seducing the will.”92 Throughout this tradition, pneuma (or spirit) is centrally implicated in both the arousal of emotions and the circulation of their effects throughout the body; it registers external impact, conveys a cascade of physiological responses of varying intensity throughout the body, and is the primary means by which the mind (or soul) affects, or is affected by, bodily events. As we saw in the Chapter 1, affect has been usefully

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described as comprising “pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act.”93 The physiological modifications and alterations in the body carried out by the spirits—whether the retreat of heat from the heart in fear or the gathering of “pure spirites” in pleasure—fit this view of subpersonal affective disturbance. As we have seen, the passions are uniquely situated to act as cross-border infiltrators and messengers within the body-mind composite. Affected by the soul’s judgment, they in turn affect the soul with their somaticized turbulence.94 But early modern writers also emphasize the centrality of intentionality in conjunction with such disturbances. Spirit is the hybrid space of vehemence, where subpersonal affect meets, however imperfectly or obscurely, the intentional cognitive content of emotion in the mind. By the same token, the spirit is responsible for the eventual voicing of that emotion in the emotive, as Wright’s invocation of the diffusion of spiritual information throughout the pneumatic system shows: “Passion passeth not onely thorow the eyes, but also pierceth the eare, and thereby the heart; for a flexible and pliable voice... conveyeth the passion most aptly.”95 As we will see in Chapter 6 in particular, the role of voice as a potential aggressor in the administering of affective pressure from external sources will be particularly important. We will close with a brief look at the theologian and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), whose work exemplifies the long reach of the nexus of concepts we have considered into the seventeenth century. Like his admired intellectual precursor Augustine, Malebranche emphasizes that freedom of the will means a willing submission to God’s will: “Only to God should it subjugate its freedom; it should surrender only to the voice of the author of nature, to inner certainty, to the secret reproaches of reason.”96 But he also emphasizes just how difficult it is for fallen human nature to resist the pull of the passions. Malebranche is concerned with the impact of external objects on the brain via changes in the animal spirits—these impacts he calls “traces,” which occur in the impressionable fibers of the brain. Malebranche attributes the irresistible power of these traces in the brain to the Fall, arguing that: “with the body under the mind’s dominance, the soul could instantaneously arrest the disturbance in the brain’s fibers and the agitation of the spirits merely by considering its duty. But since the Fall this is no longer in its power.”97 In the context of considering the impact of the fall on these impressionable brain fibers, it is not surprising that Malebranche quickly develops a thesis that women’s brain fibers are softer and more delicate

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than men’s, more vulnerable to the traces wrought by external or internal objects, and thus more resistant to rational controls. Writing initially about infant brains, Malebranche remarks: “It must be remembered that its brain fibers are very soft and very delicate [molles et délicates ], and consequently, all external objects make very deep imprints in it [les impressions très profondes ].”98 A few pages later, he writes that the delicacy of brain fibers is “one of the principal causes impeding our efforts to apply ourselves to discovering truths that are slightly hidden.” Unpacking this point, he homes in on the structure of women’s brains in particular: “This delicacy of the brain fibers [délicatesse des fibres ] is usually found in women, and this is what gives them great understanding of everything that strikes the senses [tout ce qui frappe les sens ].”99 This designation of women’s brains as soft and malleable echoes the construction of the female as constitutively passive (and passionate), and of emotionality in men as a sign of interior effeminacy: “One finds men who are soft and effeminate [mous et efféminés ], incapable of penetrating or accomplishing anything.”100 As in the Stoic material we surveyed in Chapter 2, the focus in Malebranche’s discussion of internal impressionability comes to rest not just on the female body, but specifically on the maternal body. Malebranche’s particular focus in the section on the dangers posed by the soft brain fibers in the mother’s brain is the damage these may cause to her unborn child. He relates the apocryphal story of a young man who was “born mad, and whose body was broken in the same places in which those of criminals are broken.”101 The explanation for this state of affairs is that his mother had witnessed the execution of a criminal, and her brain fibers—vulnerable and delicate—took such a blow from the flow of spirits occasioned by this sight that they damaged, in turn, the “tender and delicate” brain of her child (“le cerveau tendre et délicat de son enfant”): “The child’s brain fibers, being unable to resist the torrent of these spirits, were entirely dissipated, and the destruction was great enough to make him lose his mind forever.”102 Mothers have the potentially dangerous power of “imprinting in their unborn children [d’imprimer dans leurs enfants ] all the same sensations by which they themselves are affected, and all the same passions by which they are agitated.”103 It is through the mediating vessel of the spirits that this transformation occurs. Impacted by the sight of violence, the spirits themselves flow in a “torrent” that replicates external violence within the body, dramatizing

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at a moment of crisis the affects’ insistence on breaking down the boundaries of the autonomous, sovereign self. This anecdote showcases not only the openness of the female mind to the impact of external items in the world, but also the potential destructiveness of the spirits within this vulnerable body—unhindered by either the material toughness of mind or heart praised by Stoic and later Christian writers in pursuit of an idealized coherence. This view of the maternal body as a vulnerable vessel whose innate passivity radically endangers the “tender” infant from its inception is not new, just newly integrated within a developing mechanistic view of the nervous body. As we saw earlier, the Stoics saw the mother’s body as the “materia imbecilla” from which the imperfect and dependent human being is wrought, subject to an inherited material weakness from which it must strive to remove itself.104 Whether we return to the Stoics’ assessment of the maternal body as “materia imbecilla” destined to produce weak matter in its turn; to Augustine’s allegorical reading of the passionate part of the soul as a kind of internalized Eve, and thus of the “prepassion” as a feminine impulse to be robustly repressed; or to Malebranche’s neurological reading of the maternal—or more broadly female—brain as softer and more malleable to external impressions, the mind’s primal vulnerability to uncontrolled external objects is coded as feminine. The focus on the danger the alleged native impressionability of the female mind-body composite poses for the dependent infant is important as an index of how and why the maternal body becomes a locus of anxiety about the disruptive power of the passions. But it is also indicative of a deeper anxiety about the fundamental vulnerability of the self to the impact of external objects that irresistibly impress the mind, jar and excite the spirits, block the “upward” process of external influences, and generally produce unruly affective disturbance in the desired coherence of subjective experience. As the energies that turn us, as Aristotle acknowledged, from agents to passive subjects, from movers to things moved, the passions are the focal point of an anxiety about the irreducible materiality and susceptibility of the mind. It is precisely the abjected and “feminized” interior space of the body-mind that prevents the “concoction” of these external impressions into more ethereal, less disruptive forms. In the story that Malebranche tells, the transport of passion is not limited to one’s “own” passion—if there is such a thing—but is predicated on our affective interdependence with others. The inbuilt correspondence that Malebranche perceives between the mother and child turns out to be a model

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for a more general mimetic susceptibility to the impressions caused by other minds. “Strong imaginations are contagious,” writes Malebranche, “They dominate weaker ones, gradually giving them their own orientation, and imprinting their own characteristics on them.”105 This kind of affective, mimetic alignment between persons is now called “entrainment” by neurologists, who study the different ways in which people’s nervous and hormonal systems can come into alignment when they live in close proximity.106 As Teresa Brennan argues in her study of what she calls the transmission of affect, the phenomenon of entrainment provides vital insight into the constructedness of the “self-contained Western identity.”107 In addition, Brennan argues that “to be effective, the construction of self-containment also depends on another person (usually the mother, or in later life, a woman, or a pliable man, or a subjugated race) accepting those unwanted affects for us.”108 These comments fit remarkably well with the use we have seen writers from the classical period through the seventeenth century make of the “soft,” feminine, and especially maternal, body to disparage any “trace” or mark that signifies dependence on, or vulnerability to, the other. The affects are the outward signs of those liminal traces—they are the scene of our undoing as securely boundaried selves. In the chapters that follow, we will trace the continuation of these concepts into classical, medieval, and early modern texts that explore the impact of the “feminine” affects on emotional communities straining, in various ways, to uphold a Stoic ideal of masculine coherence.

Notes 1. See for example Sarah Byers, Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. See Chapter 2 for a full discussion of the theory of the prepassions. 3. As Charles H. Kahn has argued, “Once the Stoic concept of ‘assent’ is taken over into Neoplatonic and Christian views of the soul as an immaterial entity, [it] will become the focal point of the concept of volition or ‘willing’ that we find in Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes.” “Discovering the Will,” 246. Other recent works that place the study of medieval or early modern emotion in a useful broad history include Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling;

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

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Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; James, Passion and Action; Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. As Stanley Jackson has argued, from “those times [i.e., the time of the Stoics] to the end of the seventeenth century, writers tended to follow the Stoics in seeking to reduce, classify, and logically define the passions.” “The Use of the Passions in Psychological Healing,” 157. Gill, “Galen and the Stoics,” 92. Gill acknowledges many important differences between Stoic and Galenic systems, but emphasizes that Galen’s approach to psychology is “essentially physicalist in approach”; he links this approach with the Stoics, who “argue explicitly for the corporeality of the soul and often characterize psychological processes such as perception or passions in physical terms.” Augustine recounts Gellius’s story in his City of God, books 8–11, Loeb Classical Library, trans. David S. Wiesen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Hereafter abbreviated CG and cited by book and section number. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 377–378. Sorabji considers this a “misunderstanding” of Stoic doctrine arising from the connection in Augustine’s mind between “pavor,” “pallor,” and “timor” (fear). Emotion and Peace of Mind, 379. Byers, on the other hand, argues that Augustine is aware of the distinction between passion and prepassion, but maintains a further distinction between “animus,” which receives the rational impressions and experiences the prepassion, and “mens,” which refers to the power of evaluating and judging those impressions, and thus is responsible for giving or withholding assent. While Augustine does support this distinction in some texts, as Byers notes, in others he does not, as for example in De Trinitate, where they are explicitly identified: “Quae mens vocatur vel animus,” 15.11. Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation, 66. Opening passage of Epictetus, Handbook, quoted in Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 253. David Wiesen notes, however, that “Servius interprets the passage in the same way as Augustine.” Augustine, CG, 9.4 n. 1. As we saw in Chapter 2, it is arguable that Seneca’s figurative descriptions of the prepassions already begin to erase a hard distinction between passion and prepassion. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27; Ahmed, “Collective Feelings,” 39n4. Inwood, “The Will in Seneca the Younger,” 55. Augustine quotes this language directly from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, where Cicero grudgingly concedes the point about “torpor” to his source, Crantor, but swiftly comes back to say that such a concession

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

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should not be allowed to excuse the indulgence of “nostrae... mollitudini” (our softness; TD, 3.6.12, italics mine). Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will , trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964.) Hereafter cited as DLA. Augustine, Confessions , vol. 1, ed. and trans. Carolyn J. B. Hammond, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). For example, Confessions 4.8: “nam unde me facillime et in intima dolor ille penetraverat, nisi quia fuderam in harenam animam meam diligendo moriturum acsi non moriturum” (for how else had that pain pierced me so easily and so deeply, if not because I had poured out my soul upon the sand by loving someone mortal [lit.: about to die] as if they were immortal [lit.: not about to die] italics mine). Augustine, Confessions, vol 2, ed. and trans. Carolyn J. B. Hammond, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Seneca, Ad Helviam, 3.2; see Chapter 4 below for my discussion of Virgil’s “femineus ululatus.” Seneca, Ad Marcia, 11.3. Mairéad McAuley, Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Vergil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 181. McAuley writes in relation to this passage that “Seneca subtly demonstrates his proper control and moral authority over his mother as her male relative.... The mother’s violated but chaste maternal body provides a ‘fruitful’ material, corporeal basis to guarantee Seneca’s own political and philosophical self-assertion back in Rome.” Reproducing Rome, 183. Conf. 9.12: “et quia mihi vehementer displicebat tantum in me posse haec humana, quae ordine et sorte conditionis nostrae accidere necesse est, alio dolore dolebam dolorem et duplici tristitia macerabar” (Also because I was very disappointed that human concerns had such influence over me, for they must occur, as the duly appointed lot of our human condition, I grieved with a different sort of grief at the fact of my own grief). Conf. 9.13, Loeb trans: “Ego autem, iam sanato corde ab illo vulnere in quo poterat redargui carnalis affectus” (these days my heart has been healed of that wound in which it could be held guilty of affection according to the flesh). Virgil, The Aeneid, ed. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 6.450.

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25. Katrin Ettenhuber, “‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’: Complicated Grief in Donne and Augustine,” in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (London: Routledge, 2013), 210. 26. See Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 169–170, for a discussion of this tripartite process. 27. Byers has argued interestingly that this terminology helps Augustine to fill in the gap between the Stoics’ cognitivist view of emotions and the seemingly extracognitive prepassion. As a “suggestion,” the impression is “action-inducing” and, given its connection with interior murmuring or whispering, contains “sentential content that has not yet received assent.” Perception, 38. 28. Augustine, De Trinitate, 12.12, in On the Trinity, vol. 7 of The Works of Aurelius Augustine: A New Translation, ed. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1872), 298. 29. Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 170. 30. Enarrationes in evangelium Matthaei, PL 162, 1294D. Quoted in Knuuttila, 179. 31. Knuuttila writes: “Augustine interpreted the first movements as reactions of the emotional part of the soul, and therefore regarded them as initial emotions rather than precedents of emotions.” Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 171. 32. Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 171. 33. Peter King, “Aquinas on the Passions,” in Aquinas’s Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 101–132. 34. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, trans. and ed. Eric D’Arcy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1a2ae.22–30, 6 n.e. 35. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a2ae.22–30, 6 n.e. 36. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 148–149. 37. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a.2ae.24.2. 38. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a2ae.10.3. 39. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 246. 40. Aquinas Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a2ae.15.2. 41. Aquinas Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a2ae.15.2.1. 42. Confusingly, Aquinas makes a distinction between “assent” and “consent” in this section, 1a2ae.15.1. For him assent is strictly part of the intellect, while “consent” “implies a certain settling of the appetite on one object.” Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a2ae.15.2. 43. See Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a2ae.15.4, n.3. 44. The passage seems to refer to Augustine, De Trinitate, 12.12. 45. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a.2ae.77.2. 46. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 1a.2ae.10.3.

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47. Francesco Petrarca [Petrarch], My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 3.5.11. 48. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 9:200, quoted and discussed in Ettenhuber, “‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation,’” 212. 49. See a similar dismissive use of muliercula in Seneca, Ep. 63.13. 50. Petrarch, Rerum Senilium XVI–XVIII, ed. Elvira Nota and trans. JeanYves Boriaud and Pierre Laurens (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013), trans. mine, 171. 51. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. sad, 3. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 52. Dressler, Personification and the Feminine; see especially Chapter 2. 53. Both quotations are from Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 95. 54. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule (London: Robert Bostock, 1647), 44. 55. Reynolds, Treatise, 166. 56. Wright, Passions, 2. 57. Wright, Passions, 3. 58. Wright, Passions, 40. 59. Reynolds, Treatise, 48. 60. Reynolds, Treatise, 49. 61. Reynolds, Treatise, 49. 62. Jackson, “The Use of the Passions in Psychological Healing,” 155. 63. For this point, see Jackson, “The Use of the Passions in Psychological Healing,” 158; and Saul Jarcho, “Galen’s Six Non-Naturals: A Bibliographic Note and Translation,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 4 (1970): 4, for a more detailed discussion of the relevant passage. 64. Stephen Pender, “Subventing Disease: Anger, Passions, and the Nonnaturals,” in Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Vaught (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 197. 65. Michael Schoenfeldt, “‘Give Sorrow Words’: Emotional Loss and the Articulation of Temperament in Early Modern England,” in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 144. 66. Everard Maynwaringe, Tutela sanitatis sive Vita Protracta, The Protection of Long Life and Detection of Its Brevity (London: Peter Lillicrap, 1664), 60–61. 67. Nicolas Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions with Their Causes and Effects, trans. Edward Grimeston (London, 1621), 166. 68. Wright, Passions, 58.

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69. Writing in an early modern context, Timothie Bright writes of the strength of the heart in terms that recall the Stoics’ concern with the strength or weakness of the pneuma: “Touching the frame of the hart, such as have bin most courageous have been of substance firme, compact, and of qualitie moderate, the poores neither overlarge nor narrow: in which points the temper and complexion have no use: but the frame alone.” Treatise, 85. 70. See Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 19: “Called fine-textured, an ‘exhalation of the solid body,’ it [pneuma] would seem to be a kind of gas, mingled with other body components but capable of separating from them.... In one sense pneuma is nothing other than a mix of fire and air, two of the primary elements or basic stuffs in the old four-elements scheme.” 71. Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. and intro. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 321. 72. Galen, On the Usefulness, 46–58. May clarifies that there is no hepatic equivalent to the “rete mirabile” to prove the existence of the natural pneuma, so Galen “was reduced to a mere suggestion that there might be some such corresponding substance as a natural pneuma” (49). 73. Agamben, Stanzas , 95. 74. See Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), on the importance of both Avicenna and Costa ben Luca (fl. 912 CE), 27. 75. Avicenna, Canon of Medicine, trans. Oskar Cameron Gruner (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 4.161. 76. Avicenna, Canon, 4.161. 77. Webb, The Medieval Heart, 28. 78. Webb develops an account of what she calls “intercourse vision” versus “impression” vision, both embedded in a pneumatological understanding of sight, in the poets of the dolce stil nuovo. The Medieval Heart, 62–63. 79. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. and intro. Sears Jayne (Dallas: Spring, 1985), 159. Jamie Fumo writes helpfully of the medieval notion of “fascination,” which also proceeds “through the stream of vision to a receiving object, which it infects.” “The Pestilential Gaze: From Epidemiology to Erotomania in The Knight’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 85–136, 117. She rightly associates this concept with the “Stoic-Galenic theory of extramission,” 116. 80. Ficino, Commentary, 164. 81. Mairéad McAuley notes the ancient origins of theories of maternal impression: “Often called ‘maternal impression,’ the theory that a mother’s mind could imprint, shape, or mould the embryo she carried inside

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82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

her had a wide and influential post-classical afterlife.” Reproducing Rome, 56–57. For a discussion of the later iterations of this concept, see Caroline Bicks, “Planned Parenthood: Minding the Quick Woman in All’s Well,” Modern Philology 103, no. 3 (2006): 299–331. Ficino, Commentary, 165. Wright, Passions, 174. Wright, Passions, 174. Bright, Treatise, 34. Bright, Treatise, 35. Bright, Treatise, 37. Bright, Treatise, 79. Wright, Passions, 45. Bright writes very similarly: “First occasion [of perturbations or passion] riseth from outward things, wherein we either take pleasure, or wherewith we are offended: this obiect it carried to the internall senses from the outward.” Treatise, 79. Wright, Passions, 8. Wright, Passions, 8. Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 1–2. For an insightful discussion of the essential cognitive component of early modern passion theory, see J. R. Solomon, “You’ve Got to Have Soul: Understanding the Passions in Early Modern Culture,” in Medicine and Rhetoric, ed. S. Pender and N. Struever (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 25–26. Wright, Passions, 175. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. and ed. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 357. Malebranche, Search, 361. Malebranche, Search, 125; Fr. text, 183. Malebranche, Search, 130; Fr. text, 191. Malebranche, Search, 131; Fr. text, 192. Malebranche, Search, 115. Malebranche, Search, 115. Malebranche, Search, 115; Fr. text, 165. Seneca, Ad Marciam, 11.3. Malebranche, Search, 161. See Brennan, Transmission, 9–10. Brennan, Transmission, 12. Brennan, Transmission, 12.

CHAPTER 4

The Nightingale’s Song: Weaving Affects in Virgil’s Aeneid from the Trojan Women to Euryalus’s Mother

This chapter will draw on my earlier discussion of the relationship between the Stoic prepassions and affects to explore the disruptive work of feminine furor in Virgil’s poem,1 with a focus on the contagious spread of furor through powerful feminine vocalization.2 All three episodes I consider here—the Trojan women’s attack on the ships; Amata’s Bacchic frenzy; and Euryalus’s mother’s lament—focus on a sudden irruption of affect rooted in profound grief and its close relative, anger. Because of gendered power structures in which the women are variously segregated, abandoned, and silenced, these emotions remain stuck as what Robert Pogue Harrison calls “irrelative” affects (“chaotic or unreappropriated emotivity”) that never quite find an “objective or socially shared language” but instead seep into the narrative as displaced and seemingly inhuman irruptions of furor.3 To the extent that these unintegrated affects remain marginalized and unarticulated, they provide an index of the subject’s lack of access to, or refusal of, the powerful symbolic apparatus that encodes them as pathological. These instances of unprocessed feminine affect not only push the female griever into maenadic or quasi-maenadic frenzy, they also thereby disrupt the generic structure of the epic, introducing uncontained tragic elements that destabilize the trajectory of the imperial narrative.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_4

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These tragic rifts in the narrative create space for the emergence of a kind of wild, sibylline poetics with the potential to challenge the Augustan values at the heart of the imperial quest for Rome. While often only loosely associated in terms of historical or narrative logics, these episodes create a dense assemblage of repeated words and images—a signature motif similar in function to Deleuze and Guattari’s ritournelle (refrain), which they define as “any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes. … In the narrow sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or ‘dominated’ by sound.”4 In its most intense form, this refrain culminates in the female shriek of grief, the ululatus. As I will discuss later in the chapter, the ululatus-refrain has deep textual associations with the song of the nightingale, whose mythic implications coalesce around both maternal grief and revenge.5 While several scholars have explored the Aeneid’s absorption of tragic intertexts via its deployment of ritual, I focus here on the trope of the maenad as a focal point for an affective poetics—a refrain—that disrupts the ideology and temporality of the epic narrative by intentionally invoking, calling in, the chaotic forces of death and loss in a kind of radical unmaking of the polis.6 As Don Fowler has argued, “The imagery of emotion in the Aeneid is overwhelmingly negative and Stoic.”7 Referring to the end of the Aeneid in particular, when Aeneas kills Turnus in an uncontrolled access of furor (“furiis accensus”; Aen., 12.946), Fowler writes that the poem “simultaneously assert[s] the absolute necessity of emotional control and its complete impossibility.”8 While broadly true, these statements do not quite account for the poem’s gendering of its presentation of emotional outbursts. Although furor can and does arise in both male and female characters in the Aeneid, its connection to direct action is highly differentiated according to gender. Unlike the brutal action undertaken on behalf of the imperial agenda by male actors in the poem (including Aeneas), female activity driven by furor tends to work against the military and political project of founding Rome and is often closely associated with maenadic frenzy. At the same time, this Bacchic frenzy is also associated with an affectively intense, mysteriously inspired poetic power that gestures toward occluded alternatives to the monolithic epic narrative. Rather than assume that the poem necessarily endorses the male characters’ critique of this feminine, furor-driven political disruption, I will highlight the female-centered reorientation of narrative perspective that these moments of affective disruption open up.9

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Cicero considers furor the diametrical opposite of Stoic wisdom and equanimity. As we saw in Chapter 1, he associates insania or “unsound mind” with an unbridled (“effrenati”; TD, 3.5.11) indulgence of emotion, be it lust or anger: people in such a state are said to be “ex potestate” (beside themselves; literally, “outside of their own control”) precisely because “non sunt in potestate mentis, cui regnum totius animi a natura tributum est” (they are not under the control of the mind to which the empire of the whole soul has been assigned by nature; 3.5.11).10 The political implications of this statement, relying as it does on notions of appropriate “imperial” self-governance, are particularly relevant to Virgil’s poem about the mythical backstory of imperial Rome. Relatedly, Cicero also notes that the Twelve Tables (the legal code created in Rome, 451– 450 BCE) explicitly distinguishes between those who suffer from insania, who may remain in control of their property, and those who are “frenzied” (furiosus ), who may not. It is as though those overtaken by furor must be dispossessed of their property because they have already been dispossessed of their full humanity.11 Perhaps for this reason, furor is even more damaging than simple insania for Cicero; while the latter is an unsoundness of mind, furor is “mentis ad omnia caecitatem” (a darkness of mind in all relations) which, as a temporary affliction rather than a structure of mind, can afflict the wise as well as the foolish person.12 In what follows, I will explore three episodes which dramatize in both their thematic content and their intricate webs of intratextual allusion the unsettling dispersal of female furor in the poem: the episode in which the Trojan women set fire to their own ships; Amata’s (and her female followers’) maenadic departure from their homes; and the culmination of these episodes in Euryalus’s mother’s “femineus ululatus” and lament.

In One Voice: Trojan Women on Fire In Aeneid book 5, the Trojan women set fire to their own ships in an access of furor apparently engendered by their long quest for a new homeland. This example of gendered furor clearly demonstrates that quasiBacchic female frenzy offers direct and destructive resistance to patriarchal governance. Nursing her ancient grudge (“antiquam dolorem”; 5.608), Juno sends Iris to stir up the women to this act in the form of one woman, Beroë. At the same time, however, the text suggests that the women are already weary of the journey and desolate about the loss of Anchises before she arrives (5.613). The text’s obfuscation of the source of

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the women’s emotional activation suggests the inadequacy of restricting the scope of emotion to specific individuals. Emotional activation in this incident instead seems contagious and temporally nonlinear, blurring the lines between individuals and episodes and recalling instead Schaefer’s depiction of affects acting on “nonsovereign bodies … that are propelled skittering forward by a lattice of forces rather than directed by a rational homunculus.”13 Such a view presents a threat to the hero-centered, linear narrative of empire, and the identification of the Trojan women with this unstable set of forces ultimately leads to their exclusion from the ongoing imperial journey. As Jeffrey Ulrich has recently pointed out, the female collective referred to as “Troades” (the Trojan women) or simply “matres” (the mothers) are associated by their distant, isolated placement on the shore with archetypal abandoned women such as Dido, or her Catullan precursor Ariadne: “at procul in sola secretae Troades acta / amissum Anchisen flebant” (But set far apart on the lonely shore, the Trojan women wept for Anchises’s loss; 5.613–14).14 These echoes suggest that in some sense the women have been proleptically abandoned, even before they are physically abandoned as the remnants who must be sacrificed to Aeneas’s onward journey.15 Ellen Oliensis has brilliantly argued that in this sense book 5 is a “failed attempt at curing or undoing Book 4. Book 5 hypercorrects the sexual congress of Book 4 by rigidly separating women from men.”16 And just as Dido was abandoned in Carthage, the Trojan matrons will be abandoned in Sicily. As I will show, however, this patriarchal, hierarchized separation is undone by the uncontrollable seepage of affect from one place to another, one body to another. At the start of book 5, female grief seems segregated, marginalized, willfully left behind; the true (male) “citizens” are elsewhere, engaging in the competitive games in honor of Anchises, the “certamina patri” (5.603).17 As Vassiliki Panoussi argues, “The exclusion of women from the affirming and unifying ceremonies described earlier results in their secession from the community. Ritual lamentation and mourning provide the context within which the women’s rebellion becomes possible.”18 There are already ominous hints that their unindividuated mournful collectivity has a rebellious, Bacchae-like quality. In particular, the fact that their lament is articulated by a single voice, “vox omnibus una” (such is the one cry of all; 5.616), uncannily recalls the communal scream (from the verb ololyza; Euripides, Bacchae, 1134) of the “horde” as Pentheus is attacked.19 The lament attributed to the “vox … una” begins with the exclamation “heu”:

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“heu! Tot vada fessis / et tantum superesse maris!” (Ah! For weary folk what waves remain, what wastes of sea!; 5.616–17) As we saw in Chapter 2, the transgressive form of lamentation associated primarily with women, the ululatus (“eiulatio”), is sometimes viewed as the verbal form of the interjection “heu.”20 This exclamation, which constitutes what linguists call an “affect burst,” begins to set the linguistic stage for the maenadic irruption of affect a few lines later. As Georgia Nugent has pointed out, thanks to Pyrgo’s speech, the Iliades are aware that Iris cannot be the true Beroë, whom she is impersonating.21 When the women are eventually said to be driven by furor (“actaeque furore”; 5.659) to set fire to the ships, then, their frenzy cannot simply be attributed to their delusional response to a divine figure; rather, the context suggests that Iris’s incendiary words kindle latent grief and resentment at all they have lost.22 But although Iris’s words resonate with the women’s grief, the externality of the apparent cause (Iris) seems to indicate that furor is also experienced as an outside force, passing between the women and erasing dividing lines between individuals. We might suggest that furor indeed behaves like affect rather than emotion, which Massumi argues is “autonomous to the degree which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is.”23 By contrast, “Formed, qualified situation perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense … expression of that capture.”24 The furor does not belong to any individual in this collective, nor does any of the women “capture” this feeling in a fully articulated lament. It seems relevant in this context that although the women are engaged in mourning rites, those rites are interrupted by Iris. As a result of this interruption, the women then engage in what Panoussi calls “sacrificial corruption,” snatching fire both from hearths within and the altars (“pars spoliant aras”; 5.661).25 In other words, the women’s initial effort to translate what Harrison calls “irrelative grief (i.e., chaotic or unreappropriated emotivity)” into the symbolic language of shared emotion is interrupted, letting loose the “dangerous pathologies” Harrison associates with failure to complete this transition.26 In his presentation of the Iliades’ furor, Virgil suggests that there is a moment of assessment or hesitation, as in the Stoic schema, between the initial blow or sting of the prepassion and the women’s capitulation to Iris’s prompting:

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At matres primo ancipites oculisque malignis ambiguae spectare rates miserum inter amorem praesentis terrae fatisque vocantia regna, cum dea se paribus per caelum sustulit alis ingentemque fuga secuit sub nubibus arcum. tum vero attonitae monstris actaeque furore conclamant rapiuntque focis penetralibus ignem.

But at first the mothers were gazing on the ships doubtfully [ancipites ] and with jealous eyes, wavering between [ambiguae] an unhappy yearning for the land now reached and the realm that called them with the voice of fate, when the goddess on poised wings rose through the sky, cleaving in flight the mighty bow beneath the clouds. Then, indeed, amazed at the marvels and driven by frenzy [furor], they cry aloud, and some snatch fire from the hearths within. (Aen., 5.654–60)

The women oscillate between their longing to rest and their awareness of the quest set for them, doubtfully wavering between the two options as Iris’s stirring words strike their minds. This moment of suspension is precisely where the Stoics would place a lightning-fast cognitive assessment of whether the emotion Iris/Beroë models—a kind of angry resistance—is appropriate for them. But Virgil substitutes a divinely inspired astonishment for deliberative judgment and a psychological fait accompli for assent. The women are “attonitae monstris” (amazed at the marvels; 5.559) and “actaeque furore” (driven by frenzy; 5.559) within the same line, as though to suggest the simultaneity of these two psychological facts. As she taps into the grief the women were already experiencing, Iris acts as the catalyst that nudges grief into rage. Even though they know better than to believe that this is in fact Beroë, their knowledge does nothing to modify the emergent furor, despite the Stoics’ confidence that the passions are cognitively penetrable. Although the women suddenly become very active: “conclamant rapiuntque … ignem” (they cry aloud and snatch fire; 5.660), these two active verbs bely the passivity of the women in this moment. They are catalyzed into movement by forces over which they appear to have no control, as the passive participles in the preceding line indicate (“attonitae,” “actaeque”); only then (“then indeed”) do the women spring into action. Although Seneca makes a clear distinction between passionate impulses (prepassions) that we cannot

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help (blushing, sexual arousal, dizziness, etc.) and emotion proper, he also considers anger reactions the most difficult to prevent from breaking through the cognitive process. In the opening sentences of De Ira book 3, he establishes that his goal is to “iram excidere animis aut certe refrenare impetus eius inhibere” (banish anger from the mind, or at least to bridle and restrain its fury; De Ira, 3.1). But when he describes the special quality anger has of intensifying its own vehemence (vim suam magis ac magis intendit; 3.1.4,) the figurative vehicles he chooses align anger with unstoppable natural events: “the lightning’s stroke, the hurricane, and the other things that are incapable of control” (haec non secus quam fulmina procellaeque et si qua alia irrevocabilia sunt; De Ira, 3.1.4). These irrevocable things (“irrevocabilia”) are so because “they do not merely move, but fall” (non eunt, sed cadunt; De Ira, 3.1.4). The same sense of the irrevocable fall arises in Seneca’s earlier use of the simile of the “irrevocabilis praecipitatio” (irrevocable fall) of a body hurled from a precipice to describe the mind’s fall into passion that we discussed in Chapter 2. Once the fall is underway, the weight of the body pulls it down willy-nilly (De Ira, 1.7.7). As I suggested earlier, this arresting simile gestures toward the silent but irrepressible forces affecting the mind as a material entity and inhibiting the will’s (voluntas ) capacity to form the judgment necessary for reasoned assent. In other words, the body’s reaction in anger is so powerful that it threatens to overtake the cognitive processing so central to Stoic emotion theory. The sudden appearance of the rainbow fits with the weather examples just noted in Seneca, as well as the avalanche (ruina) to which he later compares the actions of the “barbarians” whose “excitable minds” (mobiles animos; De Ira, 3.2.6) are easily moved by the mere semblance of injury (species iniuriae; De Ira, 3.2.6). These events are natural marvels (monstra) that subversively figure the impossibility of mortal control or resistance; once underway, there is no going back. The figurative use of uncontrollable weather events perhaps also sticks to the literal meaning of the past participle attonitae, “thundered at,” contributing to the sense that the women are infused by unstoppable environmental forces that both propel, and merge with, their own impulses. These forces seem to subdue the women’s own inner cognitive processing: while “astonished” literally means “thundered at,” the word also has the sense of “stun” or “stupefy,” tying back to the “stupefacta corda” (stunned hearts) of the women as they watch Iris seize the first flame. Where the Stoics see discernment and the option to give or withhold assent, Virgil sees irresistible, subpersonal compulsion.

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Virgil continues to employ Stoic imagery to depict the uncontrollable nature of this unleashed furor: “furit immissis Volcanus habenis / transtra per et remos et pictas abiete puppis” (With free rein Vulcan riots amid thwarts and brands; 5.662–63, italics mine). The personification of Vulcan to represent the fire seems intentionally to displace the agency away from the women: although they are raging, it is now “Vulcan” (or the fire) that rages (“furit”); this displacement fits with the Stoic view that once an agent has assented or capitulated to the emotion, she loses power over herself (in Cicero’s phrase “exisse ex potestate”; TD, 3.5.11). The imagery of the unbridled horse established by the insertion of the phrase “with free rein” (“immissis … habenis”) taps into a deep reservoir of imagery in Stoic, or Stoic-influenced texts that highlights the danger of passionate loss of self-control. Maximus of Tyre (fl. 2 CE), whose work shows strong Stoic influence, writes of eros as an appetite of the soul which “like a spirited horse, requires a bridle.”27 Drawing on Chrysippus’s account of emotions, Galen writes of uncontrolled passion that “it is as if some runaway horse carried off the rider by force.”28 Most immediately, Cicero describes those as “unbridled” (“effrenati”) who have lost control of themselves (“ex potestate”; TD, 3.5.11), and Seneca refers in the passage quoted above to the need to “bridle” (“refrenare”) the “impetus” (“force”) of anger (De Ira, 3.1). The women have become less than human in their shared subjection to this impersonal furor, precisely because they seem subject to, moved around by, a passion that no longer belongs to them as individuals but is instead unleashed into the environment. As a rush of intensity that breaks through the process of cognitive assent, furor captures the energy of affect rather than consciously experienced emotion; in Stoic terms it brings the irrepressible force of the prepassion into unmediated, destructive engagement with the world. Like the fire on the ships, this furor has raced through the ranks of the women. Seneca pinpoints anger as the passion that is particularly susceptible of driving a group to action en masse: Saepe in iram uno agmine itum est; viri feminae sense pueri, principes vulgusque consensere, et tota multitudo paucissimis verbis concitata ipsum concitatorem antecessit. Often in a single mass they rush into anger; men and women, old men and boys, the gentry and the rabble, are all in full accord, and the united body,

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inflamed by a very few incendiary words, outdoes the incendiary himself. (De Ira, 3.3)

The Trojan women act much like this mob, incensed themselves and rushing in unison for fire. In her discussion of the contagious nature of affect, Anna Gibbs writes that “bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear––in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion.”29 It is striking that both Seneca and Gibbs use the metaphor of fire to describe the powerful and implicitly dangerous spread of these feelings. In her discussion of Gibbs’s “contagion” model of affect, Sara Ahmed writes that “thinking of affects as contagious does help us to challenge an ‘inside out’ model of affect by showing how affects pass between bodies, affecting bodily surfaces or even how bodies surface.”30 Rather than assuming that emotions rise up in the individual along a predictable, hierarchical vector, Gibbs and Ahmed draw attention to the unpredictable, impersonal forces that move among bodies. As Teresa Brennan and Donovan Schaefer both emphasize, this view of affects disrupts “the foundational fantasy of the subject’s autonomous self-containment. Rather than individuated subjects, bodies are radically interconnected … constituted by a dynamic of transformative affective flows enfolding us in intimate proximity with other feeling bodies.”31 This notion of a dynamic affective flow puts considerable pressure on the Ciceronian model of the self, with its emphasis on the “empire” of the soul that must restrain unruly passion. The Trojan women thus pose a challenge not just to the imperial linear narrative headed by “pater” Aeneas, but also to this gendered “foundational fantasy” of a sovereign (“imperial”) self on which that narrative is predicated.32 This alternative affective model showcases the power of unmediated affect to dislocate what Schaefer calls “the anthropocentric perspective, opening up unto a multiplicity of animal ways of being.”33 And as though to demonstrate the link between the impact of furor on the women’s bodies and their adoption of “animal ways of being,” the poem describes their maenadic abandonment of the “civilized world for the world of the wild:”34 ast illae diversa metu per litora passim diffugiunt silvasque et sicubi concave furtim saxa petunt; piget incepti lucisque.

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But the women scatter in dismay over the shores here and there, and make stealthily for the woods and the hollow rocks they anywhere can find. They loathe the deed and the light of day. (5.676–77)

As Nugent remarks, this “mad flight … virtually assimilates [the women] to lower or bestial life forms.”35 Virgil’s text extends the metaphorical contagion imagery by a double reference to the fire as a “pestis”—a plague or illness (5.683, 5.699). It is as though the furor has flattened out the difference not just between human and animal bodies, but also between animate and inanimate bodies: Sed non idcirco flamma atque incendia viris indomitas posuere; udo sub robore vivit stuppa vomens tardeum fumum, lentusque carinas est vapor, et toto descendit corpore pestis, nec vires heroum infusaque flumina prosunt.

But not for that did the burning flames lay aside their unquelled fury [literally, “strength”]; under the wet oak the tow is alive, slowly belching smoke; the smouldering heat devours the keels, a plague sinking through the whole frame [literally, “body”], nor can the heroes’ strength, nor the floods they pour, avail. (5.680–84)

This passage figuratively recasts the ships themselves as versions of the “inflamed” bodies of the women and perhaps implicitly the men as well: the ship’s frame is described metaphorically as a body (“toto … corpore”), while the heat is compared to a plague or illness (“pestis”). Supporting this metaphorical construction of the ship as a sick body, the “tow” (“stuppa”) is said to be “alive” (“vivit”) and “vomiting” smoke (“vomens … fumum”). The conspicuous oddness of the metaphorical vehicle here— “plague” to describe fire—suggests a deeper figurative intention in the passage. The direct comparison of fire to illness does not have obvious poetic resonance, but in Stoic terms, passion is a kind of illness, and the figurative chain fire = passion = illness does make a rich sense here. Indeed, Cicero considered giving passion the name morbus as a translation of the Greek path¯e: “ego poteram morbos et id verbum esset et verbo, sed in consuetudinem nostrum non caderet” (I might have called them

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[the passions] diseases, and this would be a word-for-word rendering: but it would not fit in with Latin usage; TD, 3.4.7).36 This figurative chain suggests that the women’s furor is itself a kind of illness, making not just their bodies but the communal body of the Trojans sick and debilitated. Furor has spread contagiously via the spreading flames not just between animate bodies but into inanimate bodies as well, giving them a kind of uncanny vitality. If, as Sara Ahmed argues, certain objects may become “sticky” with affect as they circulate, the ships seem to become “sticky” with the women’s furor, which in turn causes them to transform suddenly from a symbol of male imperial purpose to one of startling female rebellion.37 Suddenly making visible the provisional nature of the ships’ meaning (en route for Rome as literal vehicles of the epic journey), the women’s furor is the engine for the creation of new, threatening meanings for these now ambivalently valued objects. Even when the women are chastened and humbled by the patriarchal representative, Ascanius, just lines earlier, the energy (viris ) of the fire—which is inextricably intertwined with the furor—remains indomitas, “unquelled” in the burning bodies of the ships. The implication of this submerged metaphor seems to be that even when the fire is apparently “out” in the women, when they have ostensibly returned from their Bacchic ecstasy, the unpredictable, contagious affect still lurks invisibly in the margins of the once robustly patriarchal but now furor-infiltrated ships. The subversive power of this lingering furor-as-affect shows up in Virgil’s decision to choose the same word (vis, meaning strength or force) to describe both the force that is “unquelled” in the heat and flames smoldering in the ships (“viris indomitas”) and the impotent strength of the heroes (“vires heroum”) to combat it—as well as the force with which Iris snatches the first firebrand (“vi corripit”; 5.641). This unquelled female power, however invisible, is too strong even for the more celebrated strength of the perhaps ironically termed “heroes.” The associations between the women’s maenadic behavior—and unquenchable power—in this brief episode and the more catastrophic maenadic behavior in Greek tragic sources suggest the extent of the threat here. Ellen Oliensis and others have pointed out the similarities between Ascanius’s behavior as he tries to call the women back to themselves and Pentheus’s hapless effort to remind Agave that he is her son in Euripides’s Bacchae.38 In an echo of the appalling violence of that episode, in which Agave and her maenad followers, believing Pentheus to be a wild animal, rip his body apart and return to the palace with his head as a

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trophy, Ascanius throws down his “empty helmet” as he tries to remind the Iliades of his identity, and by extension, their own: “en ego vester / Ascanius” (Lo! I am your own Ascanius; 5.672–3).39 In Stoic philosophy, the building of selfhood around what is conceived of as “one’s own” is captured by the complex concept of oikei¯ osis , variously translated as appropriation, endearment, or even annexation.40 Usefully dubbing this concept “ownness,” Alex Dressler writes that equivalent formulations in Latin “denote the process through which a living thing makes itself or is made ‘its own,’ comes to experience others as ‘its own,’ and thus ‘owns’ itself and others.” He adds that the opposite of the social self-building entailed by oikei¯osis is “nothing less than alienation.”41 Although the Trojan women have been isolated from the rest of the group, arranged in what proleptically figures an abandonment position, Ascanius now tries to reintegrate them by appealing to this concept of what is “one’s own”—a concept which relies on a stable sense of self, belonging, and a belief in the “shared rationality of the entire human race.”42 The mark of the women’s ostensible return to sanity is thus their recognition of “their own” kin (suosque mutatae agnoscunt; 5.679–80). Nonetheless, the echoes of the Bacchae here remind the reader of the potential for maenadic mothers to forget this sense of “ownness” and murder their “own” sons.43 They will of course eventually be disowned—marked as other—as Aeneas attempts to distinguish his own heroic self from the affective turbulence that overcomes him. The other salient tragic echo comes from within the poem itself. The powerful mixing of furor and fire in the burning of the Trojan ships brings the poem’s tragic female figure, Dido, back into the frame—albeit, as Oliensis points out, via “textual symptoms” rather than any conscious memorializing of her on the part of the women.44 Like the women of Troy, Dido is “subitoque accensa furore” (incensed by sudden madness; 4.696), and also like the women of Troy, she makes a transition (from painful struggle to death, rather than from doubt to violent action) facilitated by Juno’s avatar, Iris. In each case, the transition is heralded by the rainbow, which seems to signal an impending disruption of ordinary ways of being human. The return of the repressed Dido is also forecast by the dense implications of the opening of book 5, which shows Aeneas looking backward at the flames of Dido’s funeral pyre: moenia respiciens, quae iam infelicis Elissae conlucent flammis. Quae tantum accenderit ignem

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causa latet; duri magno sed amore dolores pollute notumque, furens quid femina possit, triste per augurium Teucrorum pectora ducunt. Looking back on the city walls which now gleam with unhappy Elissa’s funeral flames. What cause kindles so great a flame is unknown; but the cruel pangs when deep love is profaned, and knowledge of what a woman can do in frenzy, lead the hearts of the Trojans amid sad forebodings. (Aen., 5.3–8)

Aeneas is unaware at this point of Dido’s death, which is the hidden cause (“causa latet”) of this conflagration; but in some fashion the Trojans carry the pangs (“dolores”) of this tragic loss in their hearts, along with knowledge of the threat posed by a raging woman (“furens … femina”). Looking back at this fire, they fail to see the danger of the great fire that lies ahead, when the Trojan women—raging like Dido—set fire to the very ships on which they are currently sailing, and which torment Dido with their preparations for departure from Carthage. Virgil seems specifically to invite this analogy in the language of the threat Dido makes to Aeneas: “Though far away, I will chase you with dark firebrands” (sequar atris ignibus absens; 4.384). In the later episode, when Iris grasps the first firebrand, Virgil also uses the word “ignis”: “prima infensum vi corripit / ignem” (she first seized with force the deadly flame; 5.641). Unwittingly, the Trojan women pick up Dido’s furor with their own as they assume the firebrands and attack the ships. While it is mystifying to the Trojan men that the women should attack their own ships (hence Ascanius’s emphasis on their denial of “ownness”), it is less mystifying if we see contagious furor joining the Trojan women directly to Dido, belatedly driving them to wreak havoc on the source of her pain. The episode offers dramatic evidence that affects have their own temporality, operating at a level of causation independent of individual destinies and thus potentially threatening the linear arc of Aeneas’s own destiny narrative. As though “catching” some of this contagious feminine affective disturbance himself, Aeneas is described as “incensus” later in the episode (5.719), just as the ships are “incensas” (“incensas … navis”; 5.665)— and, more distantly, Dido is “accensa” (4.696). As Georgia Nugent remarks, “Such an emotional state is not only extreme; it suggests a certain affinity to the women who, in similarly extreme agitation, have just ‘inflamed’ the ships.”45 Although the women do not literally hack

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Ascanius to pieces or otherwise do direct violence to the Trojan men, the insinuating power of destructive affects to circulate between the previously segregated groups, creating new and threatening alliances, offers a threat to the hierarchical principles of patriarchy and helps to explain Aeneas’s eventual decision simply to excise the women from the group. (Even then, as we will see, it proves—significantly—impossible fully to excise them.) The inflammatory affect that the poem calls furor, and that in this episode at least has a clearly feminine lineage beginning with Dido, breaks down distinctions between men and women, human and nonhuman bodies, indicating that the hierarchical and contained subject of the imperial quest is indeed a “foundational fantasy” that is therefore just as fragile as the linear quest itself.46 Aeneas’s inner disruption is signified by the fact that he is so “shaken” (“concussus”) by the episode that he considers abandoning his quest: At pater Aeneas, casu concussus acerbo, nunc huc ingentis, nunc illuc pectore curas mutabat versans, Siculisne resideret arvis, oblitus fatorum, Italasne capesseret oras. But father Aeneas, shaken by the bitter blow, now this way, now that, within his heart shifted might cares, pondering whether, forgetful of his fate, he should settle in Sicilian fields, or aim to reach Italian coasts. (Aen., 5.700–704, italics mine)

The women’s incensing furor has disrupted Aeneas’s interior world so significantly that he actually considers opting for forgetfulness of his imperial destiny (“oblitus fatorum”)—opting, that is, for what appears to be the women’s choice.47 In forgetting his destiny, Aeneas repeats what he has done earlier with Dido. Called upon by Iarbas, Jupiter notices that the lovers are “oblitos famae melioris amantis” (forgetful of their better fame; 4.221) and sends Mercury to chide Aeneas in almost the same words: tu nunc Karthaginis altae fundamenta locas pulchramque uxorius urbem exstruis? heu! regnis rerumque oblite tuarum!

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Are you now laying the foundations of lofty Carthage, and building up a fair city, a wife’s minion? Alas! Of your own kingdom and fortunes forgetful! (Aen., 4.265–67)

Mercury’s scornful address to “uxorius” Aeneas deliberately invokes gendered expectations of masculinity: wearing a rich Tyrian robe, Aeneas seems the very epitome of the luxurious, effete figure evoked by Iarbas’s reference to him as “the Paris with his eunuch train” (ille Paris cum semiviro comitatu; 4.215). Forgetfulness of one’s duty is equated with female influence; this in turn results in a feminization of the heroic male figure and a subversion of the linear heroic narrative, which is characteristically stalled or paused during such an episode. Despite Aeneas’s efforts to leave Dido behind, he repeats his earlier behavior now, as though haunted by some internalized femininity from within. His lapse into this feminized state is marked by ritualized behavior more readily associated with grieving women: “tum pius Aeneas umeris abscindere vestem / auxilioque vocare deos et tendere palmas” (then good Aeneas rent the garment from his shoulder, and called the gods to his aid, lifting up his hands; 5.685–86). As Margaret Alexiou has shown, “violent tearing of the hair, face and clothes” was associated with ritual lamentation throughout antiquity and was certainly, eventually, targeted as an action associated with excessive female mourning.48 Indeed, Virgil only uses the verb abscindere twice in the Aeneid; the other occasion describes Dido in the act of tearing her hair as she watches the ships leave Carthage in the dawn: “terque quaterque manu pectus percussa decorum / flaventisque abscissa comas” (thrice and four times she struck her comely breast with her hand, and tearing her golden hair; 4.589–90). Together, Dido and Aeneas enact a violent grief ritual, as though picking up where the Trojan women were interrupted. As Gregory Nagy notes, the traditional feminine gestures of lament, including “tearing your hair, scratching your cheeks, and ripping your fine clothing,” are also expressions of “loss of control and order in one’s personal life [italics mine].”49 The assimilation of Aeneas to a lineage of women—beginning in Nagy’s account with Andromache—who lose control of their bodies and minds because of excessive emotion confirms the intense threat to the coherence of Aeneas’s imperial identity here: Aeneas is on his way to becoming a maenad himself.

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Aeneas’s gesture of holding up his hands also marks him in this moment as less than heroic: he is a helpless, and perhaps feminized, supplicant. Virgil uses the same language in Georgic 4 to describe Eurydice, as she falls helplessly back into the underworld. Driven by furor himself, Orpheus has turned around to look back at Eurydice against the orders of the gods. Eurydice’s parting gesture is to hold out her hands: “invalidas que tibi tendens, heu! non tua, palmas” (stretching out to you weak hands, yours, alas, no more; Geo., 4.498, italics mine).50 Aeneas is in Orpheus’s position at the beginning of book 5, looking backward toward Dido, but now he occupies Eurydice’s weakened position, the epithet “invalidas” indicating just how emasculating the power of female furor might be for this hero. As though to disable this threat, Aeneas decides he will follow Nautes’s advice and excise the weak elements from the Trojan group: longaevosque sense ac fessas aequore matres et quidquid tecum invalidum metuensque pericli est delige, et his habeant terries sine moenia fessi. Choose out the old men full of years and sea-worn matrons, and all of the company who are weak and fearful of peril. (5.715–16, italics mine)

It is as though Aeneas senses the potential for “weakness” or softness within himself and tries to root it out as Cicero suggests, by excising the dangerously “weak” component from his Trojan cohort.51 As Nugent argues, the neuter “quidquid invalidum” helps to blur the distinctions between male and female, weak and strong, that had previously been clearly defined in the poem: the “weak” group invoked by Nautes is now unmarked by gender.52 Aeneas’s decision to excise this group thus seems to be an effort to reinscribe the gender divisions undone by the undifferentiating feminine affect arising from the broken mourning rites. The poem appears to present Aeneas as successful in excising these troublesome elements of his cohort and, arguably, himself, as he attempts to remake an epic territory disrupted by furor. But as we will see in the later section of this chapter, the excision of the Trojan mothers is incomplete: one remains with the ongoing cohort, Euryalus’s mother, who in book 9 will reenact a scene very similar in effect to this episode in book 5.53

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Jeffrey Ulrich suggests that we read the ship-burning episode without assuming, as many critics do, that the poem wholeheartedly endorses the male characters’ own negative evaluation of the women’s actions, instead making room for the emergence of a “feminine alternative to the Augustan ideology of linear, progressive, and cursive time … within the brutal machinery of epic.”54 If we take seriously this suggestion, we must also take seriously the notion that the destructive feminine affects coursing through the episode provide the key to this alternative vision. In doing so, we explicitly depart from the assessment of a critic like Panoussi, who declares of the Trojan mothers that they “appear limited in their capacity to understand the collective mission and are therefore denied participation in it. What is more, their traditional role as ritual mourners is shown to endanger communal unity and the success of Aeneas’s mission.”55 The truth of the second statement does not necessarily entail the truth of the first; and while the male figures in the poem clearly do agree that the women’s activities threaten the success of Aeneas’s mission, the poem’s layered and complex presentation—against the grain of the imperial narrative—creates space for an alternative view.

Amata, Allecto, and the “Rabid Mouth” of Female Frenzy The Latin queen, Amata, enacts a challenge to the epic narrative that is similar to—though ultimately more far-reaching than—the Trojan women’s boat burning. If the Trojan women carry out a kind of unconscious revenge on Aeneas for his departure from Carthage, Amata continues the feminine resistance to Aeneas’s planned marriage to Lavinia through her passionate attachment to Turnus as a potential son-in-law. This episode develops the earlier one in its focus on a destructive female vocalization epitomized in the Bacchic ululatus on the mountainside and in Allecto’s “rabid mouth”: in both instances the women’s wild (specifically in the sense of non- or even antidomestic) utterances seem to unleash a lethal, unprocessed affect that infiltrates the interior states of the listeners to devastating effect. The transpersonal, “contagious” nature of this furor—passing as it does from Dido to the Trojan women to Amata (via the sibyl)—intensifies the pressure on any conception of a bounded, individual self, and paves the way for Euryalus’s mother’s climactic lament in book 9. As Teresa Brennan writes in her analysis of what she calls the “transmission of affect,” “We are not self-contained in our energies.

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There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment.’”56 It is precisely the collective and dispersive power of maternal furor that will prove so destabilizing to patriarchal and imperial norms in these episodes. Amata’s emotional state at the beginning of this episode immediately recalls that of the Trojan women, who are already mourning and anxious before Iris arrives. Before the arrival of the Gorgonian Allecto, who will further poison her, Amata is already said to be “cooking” in her “women’s” cares and anger: tacitumque obsedit limen Amatae, quam super adventu Teucrum Turnique hymenaeis femineae ardentem curaeque iraeque coquebant.

[she] sits down before the silent threshold of Amata, whom, burning, feminine cares and anger were boiling up [literally, “cooking”] concerning the arrival of the Teucrian and the marriage of Turnus. (Aen., 7.343–45)

The most obvious source of Amata’s “irae” is the proposed marriage between Lavinia and Aeneas, which would violate the planned betrothal between Lavinia and Turnus. This marriage has all the marks of a homosocial arrangement to secure political power; Latinus offers his daughter to Aeneas via his envoy, Ilioneus, and he does so on the advice of his father, Faunus. His reasons are overtly political: Faunus speaks the words of imperial ambition, promising him that the marriage between Lavinia and the stranger will produce progeny who will “exalt our name to the stars” (nostrum / nomen in astra ferunt; 7.98–99). Latinus rehearses these words verbatim in his response to Ilioneus. At the same time, however, as Eve Adler notes, Latinus uses the word “tyrannus” to describe Aeneas even as he offers Lavinia to him; as Adler argues, on this and the other occasion on which this word is used of Aeneas, “The speaker is in fact thinking of him as the usurper of Lavinia.”57 Not only does Aeneas’s usurpation of Lavinia have overtones of Jovian rape, pace Adler, it also removes a beloved “surrogate son” from Amata’s family.58 In an account of Latinus’s ancestry, the narrator tells us briefly that he had a son who died young: “filius huic fato divum prolesque virilis / nulla fuit, primaque oriens erepta iuventa est” (by heaven’s decree his son, his male descent, was no more, but had been cut off in the spring

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of early youth; 7.50–51). As Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy notes, “The fact that the boy is both dead and nameless makes him a candidate for replacement by adoption.”59 Although nothing much is made of this earlier loss, it is crucial that when we encounter her, Amata is already aligned with the volatile group of bereft mothers in the poem, including Euryalus’s mother; deep-seated maternal grief may reasonably be supposed to be among the “curae” stirring her up in this scene (“cura” can specifically denote cares arising from grief or sorrow). In this context, the displacement of a beloved future son-in-law is particularly painful: “Turnus, avis atavisque potens, quem regia coniunx / adiungi generum miro properabat amore” (Turnus, of long and lofty ancestry, whom the queen mother yearned with wondrous passion to unite to her as son; 7.56–57). The passion is only amazing or wondrous (“miro”) if the loss of their own son is forgotten. Virgil will use the adjective “femineus” again in book 9 to describe the cry of Euryalus’s mother (“femineo ululatu”). In both instances, the point seems to be to emphasize that there is something distinctively female about the emotional activity underway—just as he seems to domesticate Amata’s emotions by referring to them as “cooking.” In his commentary on this line, Servius glosses “femineae” as “inpatienti,” indicating, as Alison Sharrock notes, that for him “‘womanly’ is broadly equivalent to ‘unable to bear it,’ used in the negative sense of the inability to control the emotions, such as you would expect of a woman.”60 On the poem’s later clearly derogatory use of the word at 11.782, “femineo praedae … amore” (with a woman’s passion for spoil), Servius cross-references Amata, further adding that “femineo” connotes “inrationabili,” as though the very epithet “womanly” is enough to suggest something constitutively passionate and uncontrolled.61 But in this context, that connection between “femineae” and “inpatienti” also suggests a more active refusal to submit to male governance. (We might bear in mind Virgil’s description of the sibyl as “nondum patiens”: “At Phoebi nondum patiens, immanis in antro / bacchatur vates” [but the seer, not yet submitting to the sway of Apollo, storms wildly in the cavern; 6.77] italics mine.) Given that Amata is already “cooking” in cares, it cannot be the case that her emotion is wholly placed within her by Allecto, who rather seems to intensify or enable existing feelings with her poisonous, invisible snake. Allecto’s presence, like Iris’s, seems to indicate the subpersonal, self-intensifying nature of the affects that eventually take over Amata’s behavior.62 With this in mind, it is striking that Allecto is described

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at 7.505 as “pestis” (plague), just as the fire is called a “plague” in book 5; by the same token, Allecto brings the language of infection: she is “Gorgoneis Allecto infecta venenis” (Allecto, steeped in Gorgonian venom; 7.341). As the grammatical structure of lines 343–44 indicates, these powerful feminine affects seem to have subsumed Amata’s personal autonomy: the accusative “quam … ardentem” (whom … burning) indicates immediately that it is the “feminine” affects themselves that have the agency in this sentence rather than Amata herself.63 Nonetheless, the narrator states that in spite of these boiling cares, Amata’s soul is not yet aflame: “necdum animus toto percepit pectore flammam” (her soul has not yet caught the flame throughout her breast; 7.356). From a Stoic point of view, Amata seems poised in the moment of the prepassion; she is experiencing the bite and blow of her feelings of anger and frustration, but she is still (just barely) in control. Servius’s commentary supports this reading: “‘furentem’ autem ut furore teneatur; nam nondum furebat [italics mine]”; she is not yet raging.64 The tension between the lines’ grammatical structure—with Amata as object rather than subject of the verb—and the statement that she has not yet succumbed perhaps offers Virgil’s dark assessment of the Stoic prepassion: that it is always already too late to inhibit its evolution into passion proper. As we have seen, there is a long thread of thought from Chrysippus to Seneca indicating an acknowledgement that certain kinds of prepassions are extremely difficult to inhibit. Seneca’s assessment is typical—“There are certain things which at the start are under our control, but later hurry us away by their violence and leave us no retreat” (Quarundam rerum initia in nostra potestate sunt, ulteriora nos vi sua rapiunt nec regressum relinquunt; De Ira, 1.7.4). At this point, though, Amata still has enough control to formulate sentences to try to persuade Latinus. We are told she speaks to Latinus gently, in a manner appropriate for mothers: “mollius et solito matrum de more locuta est” (softly, and as mothers are wont, she spoke; 7.357). The bulk of her speech is built with rhetorical questions, and halfway through the speech she concedes a central point—that a “foreign” son in law may be fated for Latinus. But her rhetorical questions seem to signal an inability to engage fully with the actual source of the disturbance, as though true dialogue is impossible. Indeed, in this instance, there is no reply; the narrator moves directly to a statement that Amata has spoken in vain:

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His ubi nequiquam dictis experta Latinum contra stare videt, penitusque in viscera lapsum serpentis furiale malum totamque pererrat, tum vero infelix ingentibus excita monstris immensam sine more furit lymphata per urbem. When after trying in vain with words, she sees Latinus stand firm against her—when the serpent’s maddening venom has glided deep into her innards and courses through her whole frame—then, indeed, the luckless queen, stung by monstrous horrors, in a wild frenzy rages from end to end of the city. (7.374–77)

This passage crucially demonstrates the simultaneity of Amata’s failure to achieve her goals through “lady-like” speech (“solito matrum de more”) and the deepening hold of the “venom” that signals the onset of furor (“when … when … then”).65 It is as though the serpent manifests increasing affective intensity that Amata cannot herself consciously experience or acknowledge as her own when her words are ignored. Like the Trojan mothers, who were “attonitae monstris actaeque furore” (amazed at the marvels and driven by frenzy; 5.659) at a similar liminal moment, Amata is driven to rage (“excita”) and frenzy by “ingentibus … monstris.” Although the word monstrum is translated differently in the two instances, the use of the same word signals the same process: one in which the cognitive assessment required in the Stoic model of emotion is overridden by something powerful enough to feel like an unstoppable natural event. The failure of her gentle, feminine speech (“mollius”) seems to be the catalyst that drives Amata out of the house, first into the city and eventually into the “leafy mountains” (frondosis montibus; 7.387) as her own state becomes increasingly wild. The goal of Allecto’s maddening intervention is precisely to bring chaos to the domestic sphere in which Amata should rule peaceably: “quo furibunda domum monstro permisceat omnem” (so that maddened by the monster she may mix up [“permisceat”] the whole house; 7.348). In this sense, Allecto is fully aligned with the typical effects of maenadism, which, as Seaford notes, is imagined as “subversive of marital ritual and destructive of the household.”66 Later, Amata’s followers will also abandon their homes (“deseruere domos”; 7.394), indicating a similar abandonment or violation of their “ownness”

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that we saw operating among the Trojan women. As in book 5, when furor seeps through boundaries between segregated male and female groups, furor mixes up proper roles in the house, ultimately placing Amata outside the domestic space and leaving Latinus locked inside in silence, having abandoned his role as ruler: “nec plura locutus / saepsit se tectis rerumque reliquit habenas” (and saying no more, he shut himself in the palace, and let drop the reins of rule; 7.599–600). Like Dido, who describes herself as carried along by furor (“furiis incensa feror”; 4.376), Amata is whirled along by an embodied rage that overrides her ability to assent, later considered her will—the crucial barrier in Stoic thinking between animal and human (rational) behavior. Virgil uses a complex extended simile to compare Amata’s movements to those of a spinning top, driven on by “boys intent on the game” who urge it on with the whip (378–83). As Robert Rabel has argued, Virgil’s use of the spinning top to describe her wild movements suggests a link to the Stoic view of causation, best elucidated by Chrysippus’s use of a cylinder analogy to describe emotional activation: a push can get the cylinder rolling, but it is in the cylinder’s nature to roll.67 The person pushing, therefore, is a proximate or accessory cause, while the principal cause is the shape and character of the cylinder itself.68 As Rabel shows, Cicero develops the idea along similar lines, arguing in De Fato that the person who pushes the cylinder does not give it its volubilitas —or what Margaret Graver memorably calls “rollability” in her discussion of Stoic causation— which is inherent in its own shape.69 Similarly, when an external object imprints, or as it were engraves (signabit ) its appearance (species ) on the soul, encouraging an impulsive movement (including an emotional one), the agent still needs to give assent, and it is this which prompts the impulsive movement of emotion: “sic visum obiectum inprimet illud quidem et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem, sed adsensio nostra erit in potestate” (so a sense impression when it impinges will it is true impress and as it were seal its appearance on the mind, but the act of assent will be in our power [italics mine]).70 The nature of assent will depend, as we have seen, on the “internal tension of one’s own stretch of pneuma.”71 Graver continues: “knowledge (the epistemic condition of the wise) is linked to high levels of ‘tension’ or ‘tensile strength’ in the pneuma”; low tensile strength, by contrast, leads to ‘the character of mind that is too ready to accept impressions that lack proper justification.”72 Virgil’s use of the adjective femineus in this context suggests a highly gendered representation of “rollability” as a function of femininity; it implies a constitutive

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weakness in pneumatic structure in women that could lead to a “precipitate” character of mind.73 In other words, the narrator suggests that the principal cause of this queen’s furor is her built-in (“feminine”) susceptibility to “cares and anger,” arising from a gendered “rollability” that is only secondarily figured in the “monstrum,” Allecto.74 If Amata’s feminine, “gentle” speech fails either to move Latinus or to express Amata’s seething affect, she now shifts abruptly into a different kind of vocalization, one associated with the maenad. She is described as “fremens,” growling or shrieking in a manner that is often associated with nonhuman sound, and her articulation at this point is focused on the Bacchic interjection “euhoe!” As an “affect burst,” this interjection represents “a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feelings, a bursting of normal constraints.”75 Virgil’s phrase “sine more” has already suggested that Amata is stepping outside the bounds of normal constraints, and perhaps specifically verbal constraints.76 Her growling (fremens ) and shrieking (vociferans ) and singing (canit ) assert the primacy of the stifled but turbulent affects over controlled semantic meanings, and the Bacchic interjection simply marks the release of these affects in vocalization that is not quite human speech.77 Amata’s escalating speech infects her followers, the Latin matrons, who themselves deploy affectively intense articulation that exceeds semantic boundaries: “ast aliae tremulis ululatibus aethera complent” (some fill the sky with tremulous cries; 7.395, italics mine).78 These cries that are cast into the air (“ululatibus”) warrant a closer look. This cry denotes the most extreme form of gendered “affect burst.” As Anne Carson has shown, its Greek cognate, ololyga, is “a ritual shout peculiar to females. … No man would make such sound. No proper civic space would contain it unregulated.”79 Carson’s discussion of the ritual cry also associates it with intense, unregulated affect: “These words do not signify anything except their own sound. The sound represents a cry of either intense pleasure or intense pain. To utter such cries is a specialized female function.”80 Carson adds that the cry is associated with certain climactic ritual moments, or climactic moments in life, such as the birth of a child.81 Although Carson is not discussing Euripides’s Bacchae, this account of the ololyga cry fits precisely with his use of this term and its cognates to depict the maenads’ vocal cries. At the climax of the play, when a frenzied Agave, her eyes “rolling, wild,” fails to recognize Pentheus and tears him apart with the help of the other women, the verb used for the ritual scream derives from the cognate verb ololyzo: “The

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air was filled with cries: Pentheus moaned with all the breath he had in him, and the women raised the sacrificial shout [ololyzon].”82 This scream marks the peak of maenadic activity: it is a ritual cry, but it also denotes the dissolution of individual identity and the emergence of a single will among the women. And this moment marks, of course, not the birth of a child, but its murder. Robert Harrison writes (after Hegel) of what he calls “the empty voice of the animal,” which reflects pure, unmediated emotivity, “mere sounding.”83 By contrast, the interruption of vowel sounds by the introduction of consonants marks the critical rupture of the “pure resonance of the animal voice,” allowing for the “the formation of words, concepts, and the semantics of abstraction.”84 This interruption, in turn, “annuls the immediacy of things … and preserves that which it annuls in mediated form.”85 Harrison sees the creation of mediated space as a “desperate attempt to … gain distance from the corpse” and to “make the dead die within rather than die with the dead.”86 The ululatus, which Harrison specifically refers to as an instance of “pure resonance,” seems to mark the women’s (temporary) turn away from the mediated world of rational discourse and toward an animalistic, unmediated experience in which the boundary between the living and the dead remains dangerously unmarked.87 In the terms we have been using, the ululatus marks the explosive emergence of pure, subpersonal affect in voice: its immediacy is part of its destructive power—circumventing the socially constructed emotive and embodying furor itself. If patriarchal classical culture values highly regulated, “rational” speech, marked by self-control, women are associated with “shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament … and eruptions of emotion in general.”88 As we saw in Chapter 2, the overflow of intense pneumatic affect into vocalization as groans or lament is considered shameful and feminine, presumably because it betrays a weak and “precipitate” psychic structure (Cicero scornfully invokes the “clamor” of Philoctetes or the “eiulatio” of Herakles as examples of effeminate outcry). Cicero specifically points out that the “eiulatio” is forbidden at funerals “even for women”: “eiulatus ne mulieri quidem” (TD, 2.22.55). The ululatus is thus both disruptive to political structures and the sign of social powerlessness; though it never reaches the level of a true emotive, it is a vehicle for powerful and even destructive affective forces. As I argued earlier, the ululatus enacts a resistance to the Stoic ideals of coherence and apatheia, giving voice to the embodied, animal aspect of the human hybrid even as it signals a loss of

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self-containment and individuality. As a vocalization that hovers between speech and singing, human and nonhuman, the ululatus puts pressure on the hegemony of rational logos; as Sarah Kay writes, “human singing inevitably modifies, inhibits, or even annihilates the intelligibility of the word as logos.”89 Although the Latin matres do not articulate any specifically revolutionary position, the catalyst for their rebellious departure from their homes is Amata’s perception of her violated maternal rights (“iuris materni”; 7.402) and the affective injustice that forces her to speak only “in the custom of mothers.”90 The revolutionary aspect of the mothers’ vocalization is rather its contribution to the emergent ululatus-refrain, the sonorous signifier of the “femina furens.” If Allecto represents in part furor’s ability to intensify its own vehemence (pace Seneca’s treatment of anger), her dream visit to Turnus in the guise of an old woman whom he addresses condescendingly as mater (mother) seems to dramatize that capacity by reprising in a more violent key Amata’s own fall into furor. Turnus advises Allecto scornfully to leave the matter of war and peace to men: “bella viri pacemque gerent quîs bella gerenda” (7.444). This bald announcement of women’s exclusion from the world of politics instantly enrages Allecto, whose maenadic traits then appear—she rolls her flaming eyes (like Amata) and speaks “rabido … ore” (with rabid mouth; 7.451). Her decisive inflaming act in Turnus’s dream is to hurl (“coniecit”; 7.456) a torch at his breast, much as Iris hurls the torch at the ships (and Dido threatens Aeneas with “atris ignibus”; 4.384). The final overlap between the scenes is the extended simile comparing Turnus’s intensifying madness (insania) to a cauldron threatening to boil over: “exsultantque aestu latices, furit intus aquai” (the waters dance with heat, within seethes the liquid flood; 7.464). The cauldron imagery connects back to the “cooking” (coquebant ) cares within Amata; within the simile itself, the verb choices “exsultant” and “furit” seem curiously misaligned with the figurative vehicle (boiling water), but Amata, on the other hand, “furit lymphata per urbem [italics mine]” (where the root of “lymphata,” lympha, water, connects Amata directly to the boiling waters in the cauldron), and ecstatic dancing is often associated with Bacchic rites.91 Especially because the exchange occurs in a liminal dream state, the episode reads like a displaced and condensed replay of the experience of Amata, who first acts as a concerned mother, attempting to reason with Latinus “solito matrum de more” (according to the custom of mothers; 7.357), but then erupts into frenzied vocalization when her concerns remain unheard by her king husband.

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Allecto’s speech “rabido ore” to Turnus represents the final intensification of Amata’s vocalization, dramatizing the danger that the Bacchic matrons pose to the social fabric. This displacement marks the failure of Amata’s affective burden to get itself translated into an emotive for use in dialogue with her husband; instead, it becomes a nightmarish and phantasmagoric manifestation of unintegrated and “irrelative” affect marked by the quasi-bestial “rabid” mouth. As though to emphasize the bestial nature of the contagious furor, the madness contained in the “rabido ore” is transferred directly to the Trojan dogs, which Allecto fills with a sudden frenzy, “subitam … rabidem” (7.479). A few lines later this madness has clearly taken hold: “rabidae … canes” are in hot pursuit of the stag whose killing will catalyze war between the Trojans and Latins. The extension of the madness of the mouth to the dogs suggests that female vocalization associated with furor—often aligned with the ululatus—is not fully human, or at least may readily denature into the cries of an animal. (The same verb is applied to the dogs howling at Hecate’s approach in book 6: “visaeque canes ululare per umbram / adventante dea” [dogs seemed to howl as the goddess approached]; 6. 257, italics mine.) The killing of the stag also has the dreamlike quality of condensation and displacement displayed by Allecto’s encounter with Turnus. If Allecto’s dream encounter with Turnus replays the bursting out of maternal fury from the controlled domestic space, the attack on the androgynous stag seems to replay a disturbing attack on both the maternal body and its offspring. The stag’s body is shot through the “uterum” (belly or womb) as well as the flank (“ilia”); other “feminine” traits include a submissiveness associated with entry into the domestic sphere: it is “patiens” (7.490) and returns to the house (“domum”) each night. The woven garlands entwined in its horns (“mollibus intexens ornabat cornua sertis” [she [Silvia] adorned it, twining its horns with soft garlands]; 7.488) are feminizing in their “softness” and adornment, but also look forward to the decoration on Pallas’s bier specifically (“molle feretrum / arbuteis texunt virgis”; 11.64–65, italics mine); these echoes link the stag’s wounded body to the mors immatura theme in which androgynous young men suffer violent yet eroticized deaths.92 The rupture of those youths from the maternal figure is also echoed here in the stag’s untimely removal from its mother (“matris ab ubere raptum”; 7.484, italics mine). The series of youthful deaths include Lausus, Euryalus, Pallas, and of course Turnus himself. In the background, arguably, is Latinus’s own unnamed son, also cut off in his youth: “primaque oriens erepta iuventa est” (cut

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off in the spring of early youth; 7.51, [italics mine]. Note the use of versions of the same verb: eripio, from ex-rapio).93 At the same time, the anthropomorphized behavior of the stag after its wounding seems to prefigure the maternal lament associated with those untimely deaths; the stag moans (“gemens”) and fills the house with a plaint (“questuque … tectum omne replebat”; 7.501–2) that looks forward to Euryalus’s mother’s lament in book 9 (“caelum dehinc questibus implet”; 9.480). This highly condensed sequence reveals the latent content of Allecto’s “rabid” speech as the wounded maternal-reproductive body, whose violation produces both destructive violence and mournful lament. The body of the stag seems to dramatize the disturbingly fluid power of affects to mix up (permiscere) what the poem wants to keep separate. A final note before turning to the culminating scene in this series. The other female figure in the poem described as having an “os rabidum” is the sibyl. Like the mothers in the other scenes that we have encountered thus far, she is described in maenadic terms: “At Phoebi nondum patiens, immanis in antro / bacchatur vates … tanto magis ille fatigat / os rabidum” (6.77–79, italics mine). The fact that the sibyl resists Apollo (“nondum patiens”) through Bacchic raving suggests that the furor is hers and not inspired in her by the god; indeed, it is as though the god tries to overcome or even appropriate for his own ends the power of this furor— “fatigat / os rabidum, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo” (he tires her raving mouth, tames her wild heart, and moulds her by constraint; 6.79–80). Panoussi links the sexualized language in this scene to the larger maenadic theme of female “resistance to the bridal transition,” which in turn connects the sibyl to Amata, whose rabid anger stems from her resistance to the planned marriage between Lavinia and Aeneas.94 Just as Amata’s speech breaks the bounds of wifely norms, so the sibyl’s frenzied speech mirrors her desperate effort to fend off the sexually invasive “breath” of the god.95 We could also read the scene as a violent appropriation or mastering of powerful female speech. If we understand Allecto as the furor-driven mouthpiece for Amata, the echoes between the scenes suggest that Amata gains a displaced and dissociated sibylline power from the “irrelative” affects driving her. But it is an impersonal, chaotic power that stems directly from the systematic suppression and marginalization of “femineae … curaque iraque”; as such, it has destructive as well as truthtelling properties, both prophesying and instigating a violent revenge for the attack on the maternal bodies at the heart of these scenes. Her speech,

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through the vehicle of Allecto’s “rabid mouth,” makes the sibyl’s bloodsoaked prophecy come true and is a dark indicator of the power of the refrain we will come to associate with the nightingale’s song.

The Nightingale’s Song: Women’s Weaving and the “Ululatus” of Tragedy Like the Roman matrons who flock to Amata’s side on the hillside (and like Dido before them), Euryalus’s mother begins her transformation into a maenadic state as a result of the intervention of Fama, “rumor.”96 She reacts by flinging away her weaving and adopting several quintessentially feminine “mad” behaviors: nuntia Fama ruit matrisque adlabitur auris Euryali. at subitus miserae calor ossa reliquit, excussi manibus radii revolutaque pensa. evolat infelix et femineo ululatu scissa comam muros amens atque agmina cursu Prima petit … Rumor speeds with the news and steals to the ears of Euryalus’s mother. Then at once warmth left her hapless frame: the shuttle is dashed from her hands, and the thread unwound. Forth flies the unhappy lady and, with a woman’s shrieks and torn tresses, in her madness makes for the walls and foremost ranks … (9.475–79)

As Richard Seaford notes, “Dionysiac frenzy typically causes women to abandon their weaving and go out to become warriors and hunters.”97 While the mother does not actually become a warrior or a hunter, she does exit the domestic sphere and enter the military one, with potentially damaging (to the military operation) consequences. In so doing, she disturbs—as the Trojan mothers and Amata also did—the traditionally gendered division of spaces and roles, marking this rift with her “femineus ululatus.” The mother’s maenadic traits have a long lineage in the poem, as we know. As presumably one among the group of Trojan grieving mothers who set fire to the ships in Sicily, Euryalus’s mother should, as far as we know, have remained in the newly founded city of Acestes. But she reappears in book 9, where she is explicitly said (by Nisus) to be the only

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one of the mothers who accompanied the Trojans to Italy: “neu matri miserae tanti sim causa doloris, / quae te sola, puer, multis e matribus ausa / persequitur, magni nec moenia curat Acestae” (And let me not, boy, be the cause of such grief to your poor mother, who, alone of many mothers, dared to follow you to the end, and does not care for great Acestes’s city; 9.216–18).98 The mother’s embodiment of the powerful affects earlier attached to Dido, the Trojan women, and most recently Amata and her avatar Allecto dramatizes again their diffusive energy and their disregard for boundaries securing temporalities, identities, and other coherent and stable unities. These lines are significant in their portrayal of the mother’s body in the grip of the powerful impulsive impression she receives (in Stoic terms). No sooner has the rumor entered her ears than the mother’s body starts to give way (“calor ossa reliquit”; 9.475) and she drops her weaving. The use of the past participles for both the shuttle being dashed from her hand and the thread unwound (“excussi”; “revoluta”) suggests, as with the Trojan mothers, that she is passive in this moment, despite her striking actions. Her body reacts, but she is not in charge. Even the verb “evolat” suggests that she is propelled forth by affective forces not under her control that drive her into movement toward or away from something; suggestively, Virgil uses the same verb in the same position in the line to describe Amata.99 The very number of allusions to other raging female figures in this section indicates that the “femina furens” feared by the Trojans as they leave Carthage is disseminated throughout the remainder of the poem along unpredictable affective networks rather than residing in any one individual. The body’s reaction is also evident in the line itself: as Alison Sharrock points out, too, the hiatus in the phrase “femineo ululatu” “selfreferentially enforce[s] a catching of the breath before the onomatopoeic howl.”100 Just as the thread unspools, so this cry unspools, unwilled, out of the mother’s body. Indeed, the alliteration and assonance linking revoluta and ululatu suggest that it is, perhaps paradoxically, the unwinding of the thread that frees the voice in its “feminine” scream, as though the affective care applied to the weaving takes a new and dangerous turn once the weaving is prematurely interrupted. If the weaving symbolizes a silent working of maternal affect into fabric, the dropped and unraveling weaving figures a rip in that affective framework—and the stepby-step temporality of the work—and a premature return to nonsemantic, unmediated articulation.101

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As we have seen, the term ululatus generally denotes a usually feminine (though sometimes also subhuman) inarticulate wailing in response to overwhelming crisis, sometimes connected with extreme life moments, such as the birth of a child.102 As in the case of the Latin mothers, it can also mark the overturning or threatening of patriarchal norms. The usually pejorative epithet femineus, though almost superfluous in relation to the ululatus, recalls the earlier “feminae curaeque iraeque” (7.345), bringing Amata into focus again as a precursor to the mother in this scene.103 Once again, Virgil signals that there is something specifically “feminine” about the emotional reaction underway in this scene. It is worth noting that the only other place in the poem in which Virgil uses the phrase “femineus ululatus” is in his description of the scene immediately following Dido’s death. In this scene too, the work of Fama immediately precedes the cry: “concussam bacchatur Fama per urbem. / lamentis gemitusque et femineo ululatu / tecta fremunt” (Rumor riots through the startled city. The palace rings with lamentation, with sobbing and women’s shrieks; 4.666). The female personification of rumor (Fama) seems to fulfill a role similar to that of the fire in the episode with Trojan mothers; it figures the uncontrollable spread of affectively charged material (like an illness, or a fire), foregrounding affect’s ability to undo or overstep the physical boundaries of individual interiority. Although the mother’s voice will be suppressed precisely because of the subversive power that links the “femineus ululatus” directly to the cries of Dido’s and Amata’s maenadic women and (in)directly to the “os rabidum” of the sibyl, her invocation of tragic, chaotic elements will not so easily be suppressed. The mother’s connection to the maenadic tradition is importantly enhanced by the Homeric background to this scene. Emphasizing the close association between maenadism and tragedy’s central theme (the destruction of the household), Seaford reads Andromache’s two maenadic exits, in books 6 and 22, when she fears for Hector’s life, as forming “a uniquely tragic strand of Homeric narrative.”104 The description of Euryalus’s mother’s response to her son’s death is modeled closely on the latter episode in Iliad 22 when Hector’s mother, Hecuba, and his wife, Andromache, learn of his death. Perhaps surprisingly, Virgil aligns Euryalus’s mother more closely with Andromache than with Hecuba. Like the mother, Andromache is positioned securely within the precincts of female domesticity, and like the mother, she is weaving when she hears what she believes (correctly) is the voice of Hecuba crying out. Like the

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mother, she drops her weaving when she hears the sound of her motherin-law’s lament (in the Aeneid it is Fama, or rumor, that comes to the mother’s ears) and rushes to the walls. Virgil signals the close association between the mother and Andromache by attaching the same phrase to both in his poem (“calor ossa reliquit”; 3.308, 9.475).105 In the Aeneid, Andromache experiences this deathlike shock not because she has seen someone dead whom she imagines to be alive, but for the opposite reason, as Aeneas approaches her at Buthrotum. Nonetheless, the woven gifts Andromache gives Aeneas have ominous implications arising from their original context in the Iliad—as Andromache awaits news of Hector—that will be borne out in the mother’s experience. Sean Signore has usefully drawn attention to the importance of Homer’s presentation of Andromache as “equal to or like a maenad [mainadi ¯ıs¯e] (22.460)” when she rushes to the walls, a phrase used only once in the Iliad.106 He compares this to the parallel phrase “like a god,” a key phrase in the aristeia of the warrior hero, suggesting that Andromache enters a “preternatural” and heightened state equivalent to that of the warrior at the height of his heroic exploits.107 Andromache’s heightened or special state is indicated by her deathlike faint: “Blackness of night covered her eyes; she fell / backward swooning, sighing out her life” (6.550). Rather than foregrounding her supernatural strength, the episode begins with an embodied gesture—fainting—that suggests both complete affective overload and a radical loss of self. Andromache herself describes the near-death experience as it arises: “I feel my heart rise, throbbing in my throat. / My knees are like stone. … I die / of dread that Akhilleus may have cut off Hektor”(532–36).108 The social aspect of this loss of self is indicated by her casting off of her headdress, which she “let … fall, her hood / and diadem, her plaited band and veil,” just as she herself “fell / backward.” As Seaford notes, this casting off of the headdress marks the symbolic “undoing of Andromache’s marriage” through “the reversal of an element in the ritual process.”109 The undoing of the headdress recalls Amata’s call to the Latin women to “loosen the fillets from their hair” (“solvite crinalis vittas”; 7.404) as a signal of their entrance into a maenadic state. The “complete undoing of [Andromache’s] composure” that Gregory Nagy sees in this gesture (including sexual composure or restraint) continues into Andromache’s return to consciousness: when she returns from this quasi death, she speaks her lament “in a burst of sobbing.”110

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Because Andromache is a kinswoman and not a professional mourner, her lament falls into the category of a góos rather than a thrênos , and thus is “merely wailed” rather than sung.111 As Margaret Alexiou points out, the góoi in Homer are restricted to kinswomen, and unlike the laments of professional mourners, are not set pieces, but “improvisations inspired by the grief of the occasion.”112 The góos thus fulfils James Wilce’s more general definition of lament as both an improvised public performance rather than a private, scripted one, and a fundamentally corporeal event, using sobbing, wailing, and embodied gesture as part of its text.113 Wilce describes traditional lament as “melodic weeping with words,” a form of speech that emphasizes its continuity with embodied gesture, and that typically relies on a “crying voice characterized by pharyngeal constriction and ‘cry breaks.’”114 In relation to Greek culture in particular, Nagy writes similarly that “the physical aspects of crying are all integrated into the singing: the flow of tears, the choking of the voice, the convulsions of the body, and so on, are all part of the singing.”115 It is striking that Andromache’s deathlike swoon, her temporary loss of soul (literally, “she breathed forth her soul [psyche]”), prefaces not only “arguably the most artistic and elaborate of all the laments quoted in the Iliad,” but also the longest.116 The episode is important as a framework for the scene in Aeneid 9, because it illustrates how affective intensity can usher a person of marginalized status and power both out of gendered personhood—with all the social constraints that implies—and into a new and potentially threatening or transgressive rhetorical and embodied space. As scholars have emphasized, female laments in Greek culture “were felt to be sufficiently threatening to society, whether as spurs to violent revenge or as challenges to the value of dying for the state, that they were officially restricted through legislation.”117 “Female lament,” Marco Fantuzzi writes, “is often presented as beyond the control of and hostile to male political power.”118 The words that come to Andromache amid her sobbing seem to derive a special kind of power from the overlay of unprocessed, or “irrelative,” to use Harrison’s terms, affective intensity. Similarly, Euryalus’s mother’s “femineus ululatus” is a vehicle for unprocessed affective power as she rushes into the ranks of the soldiers to fill the sky with her tragic plaints (“caelum dehinc questibus implet”; 9.479). Unlike Andromache, Euryalus’s mother is mourning a young, untried soldier who succumbs to untimely death (mors immatura). Euryalus is the first in a series of such dying young warriors, including Lausus, Pallas, and Turnus. We have been prepared for the suffering and death of these

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figures by the proleptic death of Silvia’s stag, that strangely androgynous creature hounded to death by the maddened Trojan dogs. Euryalus is the beloved of the older warrior Nisus, and the description of his body in death is highly eroticized, as though this violent death is a substitute in a tragic vein for a sexual consummation: talia dicta dabat, sed viribus ensis adactus transabiit costas et candida pectora rumpit. volvitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus it cruror inque umeros cervix conlapsa recumbit: purpureas veluti cum flos succisus aratro languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo demisere caput pluvia cum forte gravantur.

Thus was he pleading: but the sword, driven with force, passes through the ribs and rends the snowy breast. Euryalus rolls over in death; over his lovely limbs runs the blood, and his drooping neck sinks on his shoulder, as when a purple flower, severed by the plough, droops in death; or as poppies, with weary neck, bow the head, when weighted by a chance shower. (Aen., 9.431–37)

Several epithalamic texts lie behind this double simile, including Catullus 11.23–24, which compares the speaker’s beloved to the “flos, praetor eunte postquam / tractus aratrost” (flower … when it has been touched by the plough passing by), as well as a Sapphic epithalamion, now a fragment, describing a purple hyacinth trodden by shepherds.119 In this brutal perversion of the epithalamic motif, the boy’s wound is implicitly compared to the female “wound” of defloration. Even the color purple of the figurative flower is active: it frequently denotes the color of blood, thus referring back to “cruor,” and suggestively recalls the process by which the sought-after purple dye was extracted—by crushing and killing certain shellfish.120 As Claire Stocks notes, “producing purple— be it purple dye or purple blood—is a costly, life and death affair.”121 The feminizing implications of the purple flower (and of the epithalamic imagery in general) are intensified by the verb “languescit,” which seems to belong to the lexicon of the “soft” and effeminate man identified by Craig Williams.122 As Fowler argues, the passage as a whole seems to suggest a perversion or disruption of traditional marriage: the epithalamic imagery is horribly out of place in the battlefield, where it signifies death rather than the sexual consummation of a wedding.123

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The ambiguity of Euryalus’s position (warrior, but effeminate and delicate; beloved, but the younger male beloved of another warrior rather than a wife) seems to complicate his mother’s position as mourner. In keeping with her allusive association with Andromache rather than Hecuba, her response also mirrors that of her son’s lover, Nisus: they both want to follow him into peril––“quave sequar” (9.391), “quo sequar”(9.490); they are both described as “amens” (9.424; 9.478); both invoke Euryalus by name; and both call on the Rutulians directly to kill them, implicitly in place of Euryalus. The inter- and intratextual allusions to both Nisus and Andromache enable an intensification of maternal love, which at Euryalus’s death becomes all-encompassing and category defying: his mother is everyone Euryalus has ever loved, the grieving woman par excellence. In this respect too, the mother is similar to Andromache, who reminds Hector that he is her “father, mother, and brothers, as well as her bedmate.”124 For Virgil the quintessential female mourner is the mother rather than the wife: as Don Fowler suggests, “[the mother] stands for all the wailing women of epic and tragedy, all those who have to bear the aftermath of their men’s epic deeds.”125 The shared element in both Homeric and Virgilian contexts that seems to cement the women’s exits as a maenadic one—the dropped weaving— warrants closer examination. Weaving is closely associated with female labor more generally in classical texts. As Laurie O’Higgins has argued, “In some respects a web was like a child … an offspring knit together with material of the woman’s own making, with a gestation period in which the two are intimately linked and a separation at birth.”126 As we saw in Chapter 2, Seneca uses the trope in his description of the human being as a fabric constructed from weak (maternal) materials: “ex infirmis fluidis que contextum et lineamentis exterioribus nitidum” (a fabric [contextum] of weak and fluid [fluidis ] elements, shining only in its outer features; Ad Marciam, 11.3). In an important article, Ann Bergren explores the mutual imbrication of sexual reproduction and sign making via the art of weaving.127 Arguing that “Greek women do not speak, they weave,” Bergren points out that given women’s lack of institutional power, the “woman’s web would seem to be a metaphorical speech, a silent substitute for her lack of verbal art.”128 But the underlying analogy with bodily reproduction suggests that the point is more complex; as Bergren suggests in reference to the myth of Philomela and Procne, women’s lack of access to social power limits them to “tacit weaving,” but the myth also powerfully testifies to “the magical

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power of a silent web to speak.”129 In Ovid’s rendering of this myth, Philomela’s weaving of “purpureas … notas” (purple marks; Met., 6.577) produces a silent but powerful “carmen miserabile” that propels her sister, Procne, into a maenadic state. She too produces an ululatus (“exululatque euhoeque sonat”; Met., 6.597) as she prepares to commit violent revenge on her husband through the body of their shared child.130 Here the connection between weaving and reproduction takes a perverse and deadly turn. The lack of mediation signaled by the ululatus blurs crucial boundaries between the living and the dead, self and other; in a deadly identification with her sister, Procne violently reproduces the “purple marks”—symbol of Philomela’s suffering—on the body of her child. Prior to Philomela’s transformation into the nightingale, she enacts the ultimate revenge against the patriarchy: her weaving is the catalyst for the crime (“nefas”; Met., 6.613; literally, “unspeakable act”) of prompting a father unwittingly to consume the body of his son and heir. Like the maenads’ grief turned revenge against Orpheus, Philomela’s unmediated grief contagiously sparks violent action in her sister.131 Virgil’s treatment of Euryalus’s mother similarly suggests a direct connection between her weaving—or its interruption—and the role of the “femineus ululatus” as a powerful conduit for disruptive, contagious affect. Once again, the Homeric subtext is instructive. When Andromache leaves the domestic space in book 6, Hector directly instructs her to return home, and “to attend to [her] own handiwork / at loom and spindle”—to return, in other words, to her “woman’s” work. But when Andromache does return, as Seaford points out, she brings a proleptic mourning with her into the house132 : She made her way in haste then to the ordered House of Hektor and rejoined her maids, Moving them all to weep at sight of her. In Hektor’s home they mourned him, living still But not, they feared, again to leave the war or be delivered from Akhaian fury. (Iliad, 6. 578–83)

This lamentation, Seaford remarks, “unlike normal lamentation, seems to contribute to the inevitability of Hektor’s death. Hektor indeed never returned home.”133 Andromache is later shown weaving a folded purple cloth patterned with flowers when she hears the ominous commotion from the walls.

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But the wife had not yet heard, Hektor’s wife, for no true messenger had come to Her and told her the news, how her husband was Standing his ground outside the gates. She was weaving a web in the inner room of the lofty palace, a purple fabric that folds in two [diplax] and she was in-working [en-passein] patterns of flowers [throna] that were varied [poikila].134

Gregory Nagy points out that the word for the woven flowers in this scene is throna, which in Theocritus and elsewhere can signify love charms: “Each flower in the sequence of flowers woven into the web is a love charm, an incantation that sings its own love song.”135 Nagy describes Andromache in this scene as “narrating her own sorrows by way of pattern-weaving, as expressed by the verb en-passein, synonym of poikillein (‘pattern-weave’).”136 Turned away by Hector in her first attempt to the leave the domestic space and influence the world of men, Andromache returns to weave a silent version of her love and proleptic mourning into her cloth. Later, in her lament, she references women’s weaving again: Ah, there are folded garments in your chambers, Delicate and fine, of women’s weaving. These, by heaven, I’ll burn to the last thread In blazing fire! They are no good to you, They cannot cover you in death. (22.600–604)

If the weaving is figuratively akin to gestation, the building of a body, the premature loss of the actual body seems mirrored in the abandonment and destruction of the weaving. At the same time, the love and proleptic loss of love that is worked into the weaving is prematurely released, as a powerful but thwarted affect, an ululatus that signals the pain of love that has lost its intentional object. Virgil signals his awareness of the complexity of Andromache’s weaving scene by deliberately though briefly invoking the Homeric original in his description of the woven gifts she offers Aeneas in book 3: “nec minus Andromache, digress maesta supremo, / fert picturatas auri subtemine vestis” (Andromache, too, grieving at the last parting, brings robes figured with inwoven gold; 3.482–83, italics mine). As Nagy points out, the

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adjective picturatas derives from the noun pictura (picture), which is cognate with poikillein; picturatas thus “refers to a kind of fabric work that highlights the virtuousity of patterning.”137 Virgil’s word subtemine highlights the transverse weaving of the woof or weft, which intersects with the longitudinal weaving of the warp; it may interlace with the woof by running beneath it, as the term suggests. The association between weaving and silencing, in both Homer’s and Virgil’s texts, perhaps suggests that a silent, affective narration is encoded as it were against the grain in the weaving, embedded “subtemine”. I associate that silenced narration with embodied affects, those “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” that are unarticulated but not therefore nonconceptual, not wholly lacking intention.138 That silenced, partially conceptual narration emerges as a kind of pure voice with a potentially “magical power”—the ululatus—when the weaving that contains it is abruptly abandoned.139 The episodes we have considered foreground moments in which women’s emotions are silenced, segregated, or dismissed. When Amata’s boiling “cares and anger” are ignored, her speech turns into growling and her followers fill the air with their ululation. In this scene, the act of holding unprocessed affect is likened to weaving; the mother, like Andromache, pours her love and her anticipatory mourning into her weaving, which in-weaves (en-passein) these unspoken feelings. Like Andromache, Euryalus’s mother also refers back to her own weaving in her lament, suggesting that mourning has been proleptically sewn into her work. Directly addressing Euryalus’s severed head, she laments the fact that (like Andromache and Hecuba) she cannot administer funeral rites to her son, as mothers traditionally would: Nec te tua funere mater Produxi pressive oculos aut vulnera lavi, Veste tegens tibi quam noctes festina diesque Urgebam, et tela curas solabar anilis. Nor did I, your mother, escort you to your grave, or close your eyes, or bathe your wounds, shrouding you with the robe which, in haste, night and day, I toiled at for your sake, beguiling with the loom the sorrows of old age. (9.486–89)

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The mother specifically tells us that her weaving has a consolatory function (“curas solebar”), suggesting again that the weaving itself contains curae which, as in Amata’s case, threaten to break through behavior customary for mothers. Although neither she nor the narrator describes her weaving, the description of Andromache’s weaving haunts the episode: the flowers that are “in-woven” into Andromache’s cloth are in-woven instead into Virgil’s description of Euryalus’s body, compared to the hyacinth and the poppy, with the purple color of Andromache’s weaving appearing as the dye-like “purpureus flos,” signifying blood. The weaving of women seems to constitute a kind of material poiesis, one that Virgil mines here in his own poetry, even as he erases the description of Euryalus’s mother’s weaving. It is perhaps relevant to note that Orpheus, exemplar of masculine poetry, consoles himself for his loss of Eurydice with his music: “ipse cava solans aegrum testudine amorem / te, dulcis coniunx … canebat” (he, solacing love’s anguish with his hollow shell … sang of you, sweet wife; Geo., 4.464). The echo suggests again an analogy between female weaving and male poetry. While the mother specifically bemoans her inability to shroud his “artus avulsaque membra / et funus lacerum” (mangled limbs and dismembered body) with her woven cloth, the poet has already enveloped those same limbs with his poetic textile. Virgil’s poetry both appropriates these unwoven cries and defuses their power—much as Apollo overmasters the “os rabidum” of the sibyl and instead fills his own house with her voice. Nonetheless, in Virgil’s tragic descriptions of the untimely deaths of Eurylaus and others, the signature of the mothers’ weaving voice remains. In addition to Euryalus, the other prominent virginal youths who die young, Lausus and Pallas, also enjoy some kind of significant association with maternal weaving at their deaths. At the death of Lausus, for instance, “transit et parmam mucro, levia arma minacis, / et tunicam molli mater quam neverat auro, / implevitque sinum sanguis” (the point pierced the targe—frail armour for one so threatening—and the tunic his mother had woven for him of pliant gold; blood filled his breast; 10.817–19). The pliant or soft gold of the tunic—“molli auro”—picks up the lexicon of softness we noted in the description of Euryalus, linking Lausus, however briefly, to the world and bodies of women. It also prefigures a similar woven garment associated with the death of Pallas, a cloak which Dido had made for Aeneas: “ipsa suis quondam manibus Sidonia Dido / Fecerat et tenui telas discreverat auro” (Sidonian Dido … had once herself with her own hands wrought for him, interweaving the web

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with threads of pliant gold; 11.66–67). Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy has suggested that Dido becomes a kind of substitute mother for Pallas in this moment; having wished that she could be mother to a “parvulus Aeneas,” she plays in absentia for Pallas the role that Euryalus’s and Lausus’s mothers played for them in death.140 These objects, woven against the grain by mothers or surrogate mothers, include silent, in-woven affects— of love, longing, and proleptic mourning. Despite the ultimate silencing of these narratives, their signature elements speak through Virgil’s treatment of these premature deaths: as in Euryalus’s death, the throna reemerge when Pallas is compared to a “mollis violae seu languentis hyacinthi” (soft violet or drooping hyacinth; 11.69); the language of mollitia, in particular, threads through the weaving like the transverse gold threads, harking back to the Stoic association between softness, femininity, and emotionality. Aeneas’s consigning of this woven mantle to the flames, like his effort to excise “quidquid invalidum” in Sicily, suggests an ongoing—but the text suggests, futile—effort to cut away his own interior mollitia. These instances all seem to point to an association between maternal weaving and embodied feelings that usually remain unspoken or unspeakable in a public context. The structure of these episodes suggests that interruption of this kind is accompanied by a short-circuiting of emotional processing that produces powerful but highly unstable affect—feelings which overwhelm their possessor and produce a potentially contagious furor in those around the speaker. The language which describes the mothers’ shrieks suggests a further alignment with tragedy: ..............et femineo ululato scissa comam, muros amens atque agmina cursu Prima petit, non illa virum, non illa pericli Telorumque memor, caleum dehinc questibus implet. with a woman’s shrieks and torn tresses, in her madness makes for the walls and the foremost ranks—she is heedless of men, heedless of peril and of darts; then she fills the sky with her plaints. (Aen., 9.478–80, italics mine)

The ululatus modulates into questibus that fill the sky, a phrase that alludes to the passage in Georgic 4, in which Virgil uses the same phrase to describe the song of the nightingale:

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Qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator observans nido implumis detraxit; at illa flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet. Even as the nightingale, mourning beneath the poplar’s shade, bewails the loss of her brood, the churlish ploughman hath espied and torn unfledged from the nest: but she weeps all night long, and, perched on a spray, renews her piteous strain, filling the region round with sad laments. (Geo., 4.511–15, italics mine)

The nightingale’s song functions here as the vehicle in a simile describing Orpheus’s mourning for Eurydice; linked to this passage by the identical phrase “questibus implet,” the mother’s complaint allows her to reappropriate this powerful maternal voice from Orpheus—who, we recall, was brutally torn apart by the maenads in the midst of their Bacchic orgies, ostensibly because he turned away from love (of women) and marriage rites, but perhaps also because he mined a maternal, maenadic poiesis of loss embodied by the mournful nightingale. Certainly, this motive is implied in Ovid’s version of this scene, in which the women directly attack the bard’s mouth: “et hastam / vatis Apollienei vocalia misit in ora” (and hurled her spear straight at the tuneful mouth of Apollo’s bard; Met., 11.7–8). Meanwhile, Ovid designates the maenads’ own vocalization as an ululatus which finally succeeds in drowning out the voice of Orpheus (“Bacchei ululatus / obstrepuere sono citharae”; 11.17–18). This little scene makes explicit the displaced competition between the “vox ipsa” (Geo., 4.525) of the male poet and the silenced, in-woven text attributed to the woman. In the person of Euryalus’s mother, the female mourner reengages with the “carmen miserabile” borrowed by Orpheus and later used to such terrible effect by Ovid’s Philomela. As Bartolo Natoli points out, the verb implere is often used in relation to poetry, suggesting that the complaint has a vital connection to poetic production.141 Despite the nightingale’s reputation in texts of natural history for its sophisticated, modulated, and musical song, the voice is nonetheless nonhuman, lacking semantic specificity even while it produces a “carmen miserabile” (Geo., 4.514) notable for its affective intensity. The nonsemantic nature of the cry is perhaps essential to its function as a signifier of affective intensity that exceeds available emotives but remains

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an explosive power in the body. Gail Holst-Warhaft has shown that the words used for the mourning patterns of female members of the Kululi people are related to the call of the dove: “Sa-yelema is considered ‘the original sound form expressive of the sad state of loss and abandonment that is beyond the resources of talk.’”142 Nicole Loraux has noted that the nightingale is associated both with “feminine lament” and with tragic contexts connected to women—she mentions in particular the Danaids, Electra, Antigone, and Cassandra as figures associated with the nightingale in Greek tragedy.143 Since the nightingale’s song is denoted in Greek tragedy by the verb elelíz¯ o, cognate of oloyga, the nightingale’s song and the “femineus ululatus” seem closely aligned, if not identified.144 When Antigone invokes the nightingale’s song in Euripides’s Phoenician Women, she, like Amata and the mother, does so as part of a maenadic episode: I rush forth a bacchant of the dead [b¯ akhe nek¯ uon] Hurling my mantilla from my tresses And loosening my luxuriant saffron-colored robe, A mournful escorter of the dead. ........... Poor woman, what keening you raise [elelíz¯e]! What bird then on oak’s or Fir tree’s lofty mane of leaves Will come to sing with lonely mother’s plaint In concert with my woes? (Euripides, Phoenician Women, 1489–92; 1514– 18)145

The nightingale invoked here seems like an aspect of Antigone’s own maenadic keening.146 As in the other instances we have considered, for Antigone the ululatus is both affectively powerful and a sign of blocked access to social and political power. As a vocalized affect burst, it sidesteps what Adriana Cavarero refers to as the “devocalization” of logos through voice’s subjection to the semantic system; in her effort to recreate the original sonic power of the voice, Cavarero herself turns to the nightingale for inspiration: “Incapable of speech, nightingales on the other hand continue all their life to emit thousands of love songs in infinite variations.”147 It is precisely the repetition of the song-like wail of the ululatus through the spaces of this poem that marks the movement of female furor,

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creating a dispersive refrain that works against the epic labor of containment, consolidation, and teleological progress by threatening to undo the boundary between the living and the dead. Euryalus’s mother’s entrance into the public space of the battlefield stages a remarkable intrusion of a long history of embodied female lament into the space of epic. She brings with her not just the weight of literary history, but specifically the force of female embodied affect, whose intensity has temporarily transformed the subject into a maenadic figure freed of the usual conventions and customs that constrain Greek or Roman matrons. As the association with the keening nightingale makes clear, the strain these wailing women introduce is specifically a tragic strain, invoking in particular the destruction of the oikos so central to Greek tragedy. Drawing on the same embodied female creativity embedded in and figured by the weaving, the shriek is imbued with the brute physical force of the creative body and, thanks to the intricate intratextual echoes with other maenadic episodes, seems to give voice again to the “rabidum os” of both Allecto and the sibyl. Unlike the sibyl, who is managed and mastered by Apollo (“ille fatigat / os rabidum, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo”), the mother manages her own movement from ululatus to lament. As a result, the lament retains the perlocutionary effect singularly lacking in the sibyl’s somewhat mechanical prophecy: Hoc fletu concussi animi, maestusque per omnis It gemitus, torpent infractae ad proelia vires. Illam incendentem luctus Idaeus et Actor Ilonei monitu et multum lacrimantis Iuli Corripiunt interque manus sub tecta reponunt. At that wailing their spirits were shaken, and a groan of sorrow passed through all; their strength for battle is numbed and crushed; and as thus she kindles grief, Idaeus and Actor, bidden by Ilioneus and the sorely weeping Iulus, catch her up and carry her indoors in their arms. (Aen., 9.498–502)

The mother’s listeners seem utterly emasculated and undone by her lament. They are shaken (“concussi”) and broken (“infractae vires”), just as Aeneas is “concussus” by news of the Trojan women’s firing of the ships (“casu concussus acerbo”; 5.700).148 As in the earlier episodes, the affective power of the woman or women is identified with fire: while

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the mother is kindling (“incendentem”) a contagious grief among the soldiers, the Trojan women use literal fire that matches their internal furor to destroy the ships: “furit immissis Volcanus habenis” (With free rein Vulcan riots; 5.662); Amata is similarly proleptically “ardentem” even before Allecto inspires her venom into her, and her burning state seems highly contagious: her women are said to be “accensas furiis” (kindled with fury; 7.392). The metonymic description of Vulcan’s having “free rein” on the Trojan ships as the fire engulfs them ironically prefigures the end of Latinus’s control of his kingdom; beset by the husbands of the women rioting in the woods with Amata, Latinus describes himself and his people as broken, like the soldiers in this later scene (“frangimur heu fatis,” “alas, we are broken by fate”), before giving up the reins of power: “nec plura locutus / saepsit se tectis rerumque reliquit habenas” (And saying no more he shut himself in the palace and let drop the reins of rule; 7.599–600). While Latinus “saepsit se tectis” (shut himself in the palace), Euryalus’s mother is forcibly placed back inside (“corripiunt interque manus sub tecta reponunt”; 9.502). The echoes and connections noted above suggest that this almost violent snatching up (“corripiunt”) of the mother is prompted in no small part by fear of her destructive power. Even Servius’s commentary on this line suggests a degree of defensiveness on his part about the peremptoriness of her removal from the scene, claiming that the point of “snatch” is “haste” rather than “injury”: “quod autem dicit ‘corripiunt,’ non iniuriae est, sed celeritatis, id est raptim tollunt”(italics mine).149 The goal is not injury, but speed: and yet the speed suggests accelerating and urgent concern. The concern about her emasculating and demoralizing effect on the soldiers is explicit, but the deeper concern emerges from this intricate web of allusions. The mother’s grief, unwound from her like the threads from her weaving, is incendiary; even as she is dragged inside, Ascanius is already overwhelmed with tears (“multum lacrimantis Iuli”). Nothing less is at stake here than the “foundational fantasy” of secure and boundaried masculinity outlined by the Stoic philosophers. Virgil’s depiction of the power of unprocessed affect suggests that it circulates in uneven, unpredictable, and uncontrollable ways between and within bodies—as it circulates within Amata but then instantly transfers to the other matrons, and as it moves among the Trojan mothers until they have quite literally set the ships—burning like bodies—on fire. Perhaps more dramatically, as the temporally disjunctive transfer (via Iris) of furor from Dido, the “femina furens” abandoned by the Trojans, to the Trojan

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mothers indicates, affective affinities disrupt or even dislocate political and geographic boundaries, creating what Deleuze and Guattari would call new assemblages of power, whether actual or potential. Even as the energy of the ululatus pushes a marginalized figure like Euryalus’s mother into a transgressive politicized position outside the domestic space, its power collapses organizing binaries between inside/outside, oikos/polis, masculine/feminine and epic/tragedy. Like the fire that sticks figuratively to feminine furor throughout the poem, this submerged and dispersive affect has the power to destroy the oikos from within; its generic home is tragedy, whose subject is the unraveling—often, as Seaford points out, the self -unraveling—of the oikos.150 We witness in the episodes I have explored an arc in which Aeneas struggles to externalize and abandon the guilty remnants of his own brokenness and impressibility in book 5, remnants whose intransigence appears in the irrepressible tears called forth out of Ascanius’s body by the mother’s complaint in book 9. The allusion to the nightingale brings sharply into focus the subversive potential of the ululatus-refrain, making visible the traces of a tragic map quite different from, and subversive of, the imperial map leading from Troy to Rome. This affective map shows nodes of intensity lighting up around episodes of unmanageable, unspeakable furor, highlighting an insuperable dependency on environmental forces and “constituted by a dynamic of transformative affective flows” beginning with, and forever figuratively connected to, the maternal body.151 The soldiers’ almost comic haste to push Euryalus’s mother back into the oikos seems to confirm—at the ironic expense of the imperial agenda—the absolute impossibility of shoring up the affective power she unleashes in response to loss.

Notes 1. My reading of Virgil’s Aeneid is in the most general—but profound— ways indebted to the generous and brilliant teaching of the late classical scholar Don Fowler (1953–99), whose insights inform my thinking about the poem beyond the bounds of citation. I dedicate this chapter to him. 2. I use the term “vocalization” rather than speech because I am particularly interested in nonsemantic cries, including the ululatus, which is occasionally given the epithet femineus but is in any case almost always feminine; on the derogatory connotations of this adjective, see note 60, below. See Margaret Graver on the evidence that the prepassion theory was already present in early Stoicism, Stoicism and Emotion, chap. 4.

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3. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58. Harrison is writing specifically about the relationship between ritualized language and the “psychic crisis engendered by loss,” 57. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 323. The term “assemblage” has technical meaning in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, indicating a multiplicity of elements in particular but flexible combination, not tied to any essential unity. Unlike the unity, which can only function with specific component parts, “assemblages are more like machines, defined solely by their external relations of composition, mixture, and aggregation. … An assemblage is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole.” Thomas Nail, “What Is an Assemblage,” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017): 22. I suggest that the dense intratextual allusions organized around the ululatus create a textual assemblage (a refrain) that disrupts the epic terrain in part by making visible the temporary and provisional (rather that divinely fated) nature of its contours. 5. See Nicole Loraux’s fascinating discussion of the Greek lament sound “aiai,” which occurs in “moments of high lyric density” and “passages of intense emotion” in the tragedies she considers. This analysis intersects closely with my examination of the song of the nightingale as the vehicle of intense, unmediated affect. See The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 37. 6. For the connection between tragedy and ritual, see Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). For the role of the maenad in the Aeneid, see especially Vassiliki Panoussi, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 4, “Maenad Brides and the Destruction of the City.” See also Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. A. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 7. Fowler, “Epicurean Anger,” 33. 8. Fowler, “Epicurean Anger,” 34. 9. My goal in this respect is similar to Jeffrey Ulrich’s effort to go beyond “sympathy and giving voice to the women of the Aeneid” in his “Vox Omnibus Una: A Reassessment of the Feminine Voice in Aeneid 5,” Vergilius 67 (2021): 140. For further elaboration of Ulrich’s highlighting of an alternative female-centered narrative, see p. 111 below. By contrast, Vassiliki Panoussi argues in relation to the first episode I consider, when the Trojan matrons set fire to the ships, that “the women appear limited in their capacity to understand the collective mission and

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

are therefore denied participation in it. What is more, their traditional role as ritual mourners is shown to endanger communal unity and the success of Aeneas’s mission.” Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 172. While Panoussi’s reading of this episode in other respects is rich and rewarding, I find this final analysis of the women’s role inadequate. Virgil’s construction of a web of linked episodes suggests a much more robust challenge to the poem’s ostensible imperial agenda, as the later sections of this chapter will try to show. Galen quotes Chrysippus as making very similar claims about emotion and loss of sanity, suggesting that Cicero is drawing on traditional Greek sources for this point. Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, ed. and trans. Phillip de Lacy (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1978–84), 274–75. Cicero, TD, 3.5.11. Cicero, TD, 3.5.11. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 24. Ulrich, “Vox Omnibus Una,” 141. For more detail on the allusions to the abandoned Ariadne in Catullus 64, see Ulrich, “Vox Omnibus Una,” 150. See Georgia Nugent for an exploration of the women as “reliquiae,” in “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women’ in Aeneid V,” Arethusa 25, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 278. Ellen Oliensis, “Freud’s Aeneid,” Vergilius 47 (2001): 57. Georgia Nugent remarks that the women are “constructed as the quintessential Other. … The women are isolated, excluded, and mournful.” “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 267. Ulrich makes the interesting point that although the women are excluded from the male competition of the games, Ascanius belatedly emphasizes their citizenship and belonging in response to the catastrophe of the burning boats. “Vox Omnibus Una,” 151. Similarly, Nugent asks pointedly, “In what sense, really, are women cives ?” “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 280. Panoussi, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 166. Euripides, Bacchae, ed. and trans. by David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). On Ascanius as a version of Pentheus, see Oliensis, “Freud’s Aeneid,” 58–59. ˇ Culik-Baird, Cicero and the Latin Poets, 183. Seneca’s rendering of the noun as “heiulatus” when he chides Helvia to put away feminine “lamentations and outcries” (Ad Helviam, 3.2) also nods toward this etymology. Nugent, “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 281. Panoussi writes similarly that the women “rebel at Juno’s instigation; yet her intervention capitalizes on the emotions of grief and rage at work during the ritual ceremony.” Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 159. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35.

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

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Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35. Panoussi, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 169. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 58. Maximus of Tyre, Dissertations, 105–6. Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis , 332–33. Anna Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect,” Australian Humanities Review 24 (2001), accessed May 20, 2022, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/, 1. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 37. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 65. Schaefer borrows the term “foundational fantasy” from Teresa Brennan, Transmission, 12–15 (“The Foundational Fantasy and the Affects”). Brennan, Transmission, 12–15. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 25. Panoussi, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 169. Nugent, “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 268. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King, ed. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 232n2. Note that as Henderson points out in this note, Cicero does not quite get this right; the Greek word nosos would be the equivalent of morbus, while pathos is rendered by Latin perturbatio. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 29–51, which offers “an approach to thinking through affect as ‘sticky.’ Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (29). Certainly, furor in this poem is sticky at a kind of intratextual level, connecting widely separated characters, episodes, and incidents as it circulates unpredictably in the poem. Oliensis points out that Ascanius repeats Pentheus’s language in his “en, ego vester Ascanius,” (5.672). “Freud’s Aeneid,” 59. See Oliensis on the odd superfluity of the adjective inanis (empty), which points to a haunting allusion to Pentheus’s decapitation. “Freud’s Aeneid,” 59. See Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 3–4; and Jacob Klein, “The Stoic Argument from Oikei¯ osis,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 50 (2016): 143–200. Klein translates the term as “appropriation.” He offers a useful general definition: “A thing or person is said to be oikei¯ on when it belongs to one either by kinship, as in the case of family, or by possession, as in the case of property” (149). Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 3–4. David Sedley, “Oikei¯osis,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed February 15, 2023, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/ thematic/stoicism/v-1/sections/oikeiosis.

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43. See also Mairéad McAuley’s reading of this episode in her Reproducing Rome, 82. 44. Noting this connection, Oliensis points to different textual symptoms from the ones I focus on here—specifically, she notes the connection between the torches (“faces”) that Iris sees in her dream of Cassandra (and the ones the women actually pick up) and the torch carried by Clytemnestra in Dido’s dream. As I suggest, Dido’s own reference to chasing Aeneas with “dark firebrands” seems a more direct link to the women’s eventual actions. “Freud’s Aeneid,” 59. 45. Nugent, “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 270. 46. Nugent notices that crucial “lines of demarcation waver momentarily,” “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 270. I would merely add that the text presents the agent of this wavering as the unstoppable force of affect, suggesting that any lines of demarcation can only be temporary, provisional, and subject to change. 47. Nugent in “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 273, notices the association between Aeneas’s state here (“concussus”) and the impact of Euryalus’s mother’s lament on the soldiers, who are “concussi” (9.498). 48. Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 6. Alexiou refers to Chrysostom’s later reference to these actions as evidence for their continuing and controversial presence in the mourning ritual: “What are you doing, woman? … Would you tear your hair, rend your garments and wail loudly … without regard for your offence to God?” Quoted in Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 29. 49. Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 66–67. 50. Vergil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916). 51. “Sed videamus ne haec oratio sit hominum adsentantium nostrae imbecillitati et indulgentium mollitudini, nos autem audeamus non solum ramos amputare miseriarum, sed omnes radicum fibras evellere” (But let us be careful. It may be that these are the words of those who choose to indulge the weak and soft [mollitudini] parts of us. Let us be bold enough not only to prune away the branches of unhappiness, but to yank out its very roots). TD, 3.5.13, with emendations; italics mine. 52. Nugent, “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 270. 53. As Nugent notices, Euryalus’s mother reappears in book 9 as the “only one” of the mothers who leaves Sicily with the Trojans. “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 271. 54. Ulrich, “Vox Omnibus Una,” 139. Ulrich goes on to argue that “the Trojan women actively choose to abandon linearity and a telos-directed

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60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

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model of time, preferring instead to integrate their trauma through incorporation into a new community” (143). Panoussi, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 172. Brennan, Transmission, 6. Eve Adler, Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 213. McAuley, Reproducing Rome, 326. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy points out that tradition gives Latinus two sons who outlived him; Virgil’s avoidance of this traditional account suggests a wish to create in Amata a bereaved mother searching for a substitute for her dead son. “Dido, Pallas, Nisus, and the Nameless Mothers in Aeneid 8–10,” Classical Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2018): 204. Another tradition presents Amata as the murderer of this son or sons, which of course places an entirely different light on her connection to this passing reference to a dead child: see Elaine Fantham, “Allecto’s First Victim: A Study of Vergil’s Amata Aeneid 7.341–405 and 12.1–80,” in Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context, ed. Hans-Peter Stahl (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2009). On balance it makes sense to assume that despite the ambiguity Virgil is intentionally aligning Amata with other bereft mothers. Alison Sharrock, “Womanly Wailing? The Mother of Euryalus and Gendered Reading,” EuGeStA 1 (2011)L 59. Sharrock writes in addition that the adjective “femineus” usually has a “slightly, sometimes highly, pejorative implication” (58). Noted by Sharrock, “Womanly Wailing,” 59. Mairéad McAuley gives Allecto’s snake venom a “distinctly allegorical or metaphorical cast,” indicating a psychological rather than supernatural source for Amata’s madness. My interest in the scene derives from a sense that a psychological reading also does not quite work: the furor both is and is not inside Amata; it does and does not “belong” to her. Reproducing Rome, 82. The case is structurally identical to Dido’s submission to burning love in book 1. Just as Cupid in the guise of Ascanius works his fire into Dido’s bones (“ossibus implicet ignem”; 1.660) when Dido is already “furentem,” so Allecto “ossibus implicat ignem” (7.355) when Amata is already “ardentem.” Maurus Servius Honoratus, In Vergilii carmina comentarii [Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil ], ed. Georgius Thilo (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1881). McAuley points out that this “improper” (sine more) raging contrasts with her contained and implicitly “ladylike” speech earlier—“solito matrum de more.” Reproducing Rome, 78. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 333.

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67. Robert Rabel, “Vergil, Tops, and the Stoic View of Fate,” Classical Journal 77, no. 1 (1981): 30–31. 68. For discussion of rollability and proximate and auxiliary cause, see Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 63–66. 69. Rabel, “Vergil, Tops,” 30–31; Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 63–66. 70. Cicero, De Fato, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 43. Quoted in Rabel, “Vergil, Tops,” 30. 71. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 64. 72. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 65. 73. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 65. 74. Rabel writes: “Allecto furnishes merely the proximate and auxiliary cause of the queen’s anger, the beginning of motion according to De Fato.” “Vergil, Tops,” 31. 75. See my discussion above, 48. Quoted in Goddard, “Interjections and Emotions,” 15. 76. McAuley, Reproducing Rome, 78. 77. Panoussi notes that “as the ritual unfolds, the queen raises her voice progressively higher (locuta, 357; vociferans, 390; canit, 398; clamat, 400).” Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 131. For me the point is not just that she raises her voice but that her speech becomes progressively less semantically structured and closer to pure “animal voice” (see below). Although Virgil notes that Amata is using the Bacchic rites as a cover (“simulato numine Bacchi”; 7.385), Amata’s frenzy itself seems unfeigned. 78. Panoussi notes how close the language in this passage is to an early description of the Theban women in the Bacchae. Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 131. 79. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 126. 80. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 126. 81. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 125. 82. Euripides, Bacchae, 1131–33. 83. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 64. 84. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 65. 85. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 65. 86. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 65. 87. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 66. 88. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 126. 89. Kay, Medieval Song, 5. 90. McAuley argues that Amata “fuses the personal and the political, stirring up the other matres to revolt against authority by invoking her affronted ‘maternal right.’” Reproducing Rome, 327.

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91. Elaine Fantham similarly notes that we find in the cauldron simile the “developed counterpart” of the “metaphor of Amata’s cares and passions ‘stewing’ the burning woman.” “Allecto’s First Victim,” 140. See Panoussi’s note on the link between the word “lymphata” and Bacchic drunkenness, 127n21. 92. On the mors immatura theme, see Don Fowler’s essay “Vergil on Killing Virgins,” in Homo Viator: Essays in Honour of John Bramble, ed. Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, and Mary Whitby (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1987), 158–98; and Marion Wells, “Completing the Virgilian Marriage Plot: Ariosto and the Broken Flowers of Epic,” Italian Studies 65, no. 1 (2010): 7–32. 93. Carstairs-McCarthy discusses this “nameless son” in “Dido, Nisus, and the Nameless Mothers,” 203. 94. Panoussi, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 140–41. For an excellent discussion of the sexual overtones of the scene, see Susan Skulsky, “The Sibyl’s Rage and the Marpessan Rock,” American Journal of Philology 108, no. 1 (1987): 56–80. For a discussion of the sibyl’s mouth and associated imagery, see Emily Gowers, “Vergil’s Sibyl and the Many Mouths Cliché,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 55 (2005): 170–82. 95. Skulsky discusses the connections between pneuma, breath, and a kind of mystical impregnation of the Sibyl in “Sibyl’s Rage,” 60–63. 96. See Panoussi on the maenadic aspects of Fama, Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy, 137. 97. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 333. 98. As Nugent points out, this presentation of the mother as the “only” one who accompanies the Trojans turns out to be inaccurate, as more mothers appear to mourn for Pallas in book 9. “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 271. 99. Noted by Philip Hardie in his commentary in Vergil: Aeneid Book IX (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7.387. See also Ahmed, “Collective Feelings,” 29. 100. Sharrock, “Womanly Wailing,” 57. This article is the most important interlocutor for me in this section of the chapter, though Sharrock is not explicitly interested in the kind of emotion that produces “femineus ululatus,” or why it appears here in particular. 101. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 65. 102. See Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 125. 103. Sharrock notes that “one might almost say that it is hard for something to be described as belonging or pertaining to a woman, where that belonging is either inherent or, from the point of view of the speaker, is necessarily connected with the specific gender, without it having a negative connotation.” “Womanly Wailing,” 59. 104. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 336.

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105. See Hardie, Virgil: Aeneid Book IX , 9.475. 106. Sean Signore, “Andromache as Maenadic Warrior,” Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, and First Drafts@Classics@, April 2010, https://chs.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ signore_maenadic.pdf, 5. 107. Signore, “Andromache as Maenadic Warrior,” 5. 108. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1974). 109. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 333. 110. Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, 69. He writes in relation to Andromache’s casting off of her headdress: “So long as a woman’s kr¯edemnon is in place, her sexuality is under control just as her hair is under control. When the kr¯edemnon is out of place, however, her sexuality threatens to get out of control.” 111. Alexiou, Lament and Ritual, 12. 112. Alexiou, Lament and Ritual, 13. 113. Wilce, Crying Shame, 23–25. 114. Wilce, Crying Shame, 36. 115. Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, 66. 116. Both of these observations in Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, 69. 117. Sheila Murnaghan, “The Poetics of Loss in Greek Epic,” in Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World, ed. Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 205. As Murnaghan notes, the most significant legislation was enacted by Solon in the sixth century BCE. 118. Marco Fantuzzi, Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 244. 119. I am broadly indebted for this discussion of the mors immatura to Don Fowler’s essay “Vergil on Killing Virgins,” 158–98. 120. Claire Stocks, “Dying in Purple: Life, Death and Tyrian Dye in the Aeneid,” Proceedings of the Vergil Society 28 (2013): 178–79. Stocks notes that the combination of white and purple, as in the example here, is closely associated with the death and dying of young men; she notes that the process used to extract the dye from the sea mollusks involved crushing and killing them. 121. Stocks, “Dying in Purple,” 181. 122. Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 128. 123. Fowler, “Vergil on Killing Virgins,” 191. 124. Rebecca Muich, “Pouring Out Tears: Andromache in Homer and Euripides” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2010), 46.

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125. Don Fowler, “Epic in the Middle of the Wood: Mise en Abyme in the Nisus and Euryalus Episode,” in Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations, ed. Alison Sharrock and Helen Morales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 107. Similarly, Nicole Loraux writes that “a mother’s mourning, like that in Richard III, contains all others.” Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 64. 126. Laurie O’Higgins, “Bitter Constraint? Penelope’s Web and ‘Season Due,’” in Women’s Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, ed. Matthew Dillon, Esther Eidinow, and Lisa Maurizio (London: Routledge, 2017), 156. 127. Ann L. T. Bergren, “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought,” Arethusa 16, nos. 1/2 (1983): 74. 128. Bergren, “Language and the Female,” 72. 129. Bergren, “Language and the Female,” 72. 130. Ovid, Metamorphoses Books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller and revised by G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. 131. Procne’s reaction is notably similar to Amata’s: her grief is real (“furiisque agitata doloris”; Met., 6.595), but she uses the Bacchic rituals as a cover (“simulat”; 6.596); compare Aen. 7.385, “simulato numine Bacchi” (feigning the spirit of Bacchus). She also “boils with rage” (exaestuat ira; 6.623). 132. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 338–39. 133. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 339. 134. Iliad 22.437–41. I use Gregory Nagy’s helpfully literal translation, from Homer the Preclassic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 274. 135. Gregory Nagy, Homer the Preclassic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 275. 136. Nagy, Homer the Preclassic, 276. Nagy emphasizes that while poikillein is sometimes considered to mean “embroider,” it actually indicates work that is woven into the cloth, not added as decoration afterward (274). 137. Nagy, Homer the Preclassic, 276: “Vergil’s reference here to Andromache’s woven fabrics actually evokes the Iliadic scene when she is pattern-weaving her web, right before the moment she finds out that her husband, Hector, has died on the battlefield.” 138. Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader, 1–2. 139. Bergren, “Language and the Female,” 107. See below for a discussion of the speech’s perlocutionary power. 140. Carstairs-McCarthy, “Dido, Nisus, and the Nameless Mothers,” 207. 141. Bartolo Natoli, Silenced Voices: The Poetics of Speech in Ovid (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), 70. Natoli draws attention to Pliny’s discussion of the nightingale, 10.43. Virgil’s immediate source for

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142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147.

148. 149. 150.

151.

the phrase appears to be Lucretius, where it also denotes a specifically maternal, though nonhuman, longing and crying. In De Rerum Natura book 2, Lucretius describes the mother cow’s desperate search for her lost calf (“amissum fetum”; 2.358), focusing on her cries (“querellis”; 2.358), which fill (“complent”; 2.358) the whole wood. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924. Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 21. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, chap. 10, “Mourning Nightingale.” Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 63n15. Euripides, Phoenician Women, ed. and trans. David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Loraux quotes and discusses the second of these passages in Mothers in Mourning, 63. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 63. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. and intro. by Paul A. Kottman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 133. See Nugent, “Vergil’s ‘Voice of the Women,’” 273, and n. 46 above. Honorautus, In Vergilii carmina comentarii, 9.502. See Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 357–58: “Most extant tragedies centre around the destruction, real or threatened, of the household (in most cases the destruction is real, is self-destruction—violent conflict within the family—and involves the confusion of gender roles.” Schaefer, Religious Affects, 65.

CHAPTER 5

“Though Me Were Looth”: Translating Affect and the Maternal Body in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale”

There’s no doubt this woman’s spirit showed me what a man should do. —Petrarch, Secretum

In the previous chapter, I offered a reading of Virgil’s Aeneid as a fundamentally Stoic poem shot through with a disruptive affective intensity associated early on with a maternal body driven by both grief and rage. Virgil’s depiction of the feminine ululatus as a version of the mythic song of the nightingale establishes a powerful literary and philosophical touchstone for later works, even in the absence of direct imitation. In his discussion of the pervasive presence of Virgilian influence in medieval texts, Christopher Baswell writes that Virgil’s work “penetrated the language and imagination of the Church Fathers” so thoroughly that “even where Virgil is explicitly rejected, his presence in the language and thought patterns of the Latin Fathers and later writers is inescapable.”1 Chaucer’s knowledge of Virgil’s work, both at the generalized level to which Baswell refers and at the level of specific revisions of “romance” Virgil in particular, is well attested.2 In this book, I focus on a less wellknown aspect of Virgil’s legacy, a tragic Stoicism which “simultaneously

Francesco Petrarca, My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 175. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_5

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assert[s] the absolute necessity of emotional control and its complete impossibility.”3 This version of Stoicism owes its repetitive focus on the dangerous emotional lability of the mother in part to the strain of Stoic writing we examined in Chapter 2. That highly gendered account of feminized emotional lability reappears influentially in Petrarch’s Secretum, in which the Stoicism of a fictionalized Augustine draws as heavily on Virgil’s authority as on Cicero’s or Seneca’s.4 This chapter seeks to unpack Chaucer’s meditation on that complex legacy, filtered through Petrarch’s Stoic rewriting of Boccaccio’s story of Griselda, a maternal figure whose radical affective repression seems, in Chaucer’s revision, ultimately to offer a critique of the Stoic ideals embraced by Petrarch’s text.5

Clothing and the Translation of Affect As several recent critics have noticed, the variations on the story of Griselda tend to dramatize the relationship between two intertwined themes: translation and clothing.6 In his translation of Boccaccio’s version, the final tale in the Decameron (1353), into Latin (Seniles 17.3), Petrarch explicitly links the two themes when he metaphorically refers to his own translation from Boccaccio’s native Italian as a form of reclothing: “quam quidem an mutata veste deformaverim an fortassis ornaverim, tu iudica” (Whether the change of vestment has disfigured it or perhaps adorned it, you be the judge).7 The fact that the tale itself is marked by Griselda’s literal sartorial transformations (“subito transformatam”; l.168) signals early on the parallel between literal clothing and the figurative and changeable vestments of language, and between the “true” story and the body of Griselda herself, in all her nakedness.8 Chaucer picks up this identification in his description of the newly betrothed Griselda: “the peple hir knew for hire fairnesse, / Whan that she translated was in swich richesse” (ll. 384–385, italics mine).9 As others have noted, this transformation is not gender neutral.10 Following Dante, Petrarch associates the vernacular with the maternal (“nostro materno eloquio”; 1) and Latin with the elite group of male readers for whom the new version is explicitly intended.11 Dante’s association of the vernacular with maternity and nursing in his De Vulgari Eloquentia sets the scene for what Dolores Warwick Frese calls the “explicit thematics of maternal suckling” that first Petrarch, and then Chaucer, introduce as markers of the affective crises of Griselda’s story.12 The association of the vernacular with “mother’s milk” suggests its greater

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proximity to primal physical and affective experiences that may prompt the child’s first linguistic forays—and indeed Dante promotes the vernacular as “more noble” than what he calls the “gramatica” because it is “natural to us.”13 If Griselda’s later separation from her children suggests a violation of that “primary linguistic community,” Walter’s initial “translation” of her from village to court looks retrospectively like a chilling precursor of the later violation.14 My intervention in this exploration of the nexus of textuality, maternity, and translation in the story concerns specifically Petrarch’s introduction of a Stoic element in this crucial moment of “translated” clothing. In Petrarch’s version, but not Boccaccio’s, Griselda explicitly asserts that she is setting aside her own “wishes and feelings” (voluntates affectusque; l. 251) at the same time as she submits to the exchange of clothing. Griselda understands that she is to be disciplined in the ways of Stoic apatheia by a forcible relinquishing of control of her own feelings to the will of her husband. If, as Daniel Gross argues, “apathy signifies … a realistic and fully engaged assessment of how one’s power is differentially constituted and exercised,” it follows that “the perfectly tranquil person desires nothing more than his or her social position affords.”15 Walter’s experiment seems premised on the demand that a wife demonstrate perfect tranquility in relation to a social reality in which she has no right to an autonomous assessment of outside impressions (no right to what the Stoics would call “assent”). This experiment is conducted in conjunction with Petrarch’s relocation of the story into Latin, the language of the “gramatica.” This chapter will argue that Petrarch’s Stoicization of Boccaccio’s story constructs an ideal of apatheia predicated on the forcible interruption of the wife’s internal process of assent (in the Stoic sense of sunkatathesis). Such an interruption guarantees that disruptive affects will never gain the cognitive assent necessary for expression as emotives. Chaucer’s learned Clerk responds to the Stoic undercurrent of Petrarch’s translation through his own complex repositioning of Griselda within the “maternal” garb of the vernacular. If Petrarch’s version of the story seeks to set aside the “maternal” clothing of the tale even as the story pivots around a maternal body both spectacularized and concealed, the Clerk’s version uses the “impurity” of translation back into the mother tongue to smuggle in transgressive affects belonging to the forbidden “wishes and feelings” at the same time as it highlights the power of embodied maternity in the tale itself.16 Drawing on my earlier discussion of Stoic prepassions, I will suggest that despite Walter’s relentless

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disciplinary program, unmediated maternal affect (prepassion) emerges explosively in the affective crisis of a prolonged and deathlike swoon that links Griselda metatextually to the swooning, grief-stricken Andromache. The “scandal” of the speaking body, as Shoshana Felman puts it in a different context, breaks through the coverings, linguistic and otherwise, that aim to quiet it.17 In this sense, the story’s ending is profoundly anti-Stoic, aligning Stoic apatheia not so much with self-control as with a patriarchal domination encompassing not just the gender but also the class politics in the tale. Unlike Petrarch’s version of the tale, which naturalizes and universalizes the lesson of the tale, the Clerk’s tale highlights the socially conditioned costs of a demand for Stoic apatheia. Petrarch’s identification of clothing and affectus does not appear in his source, Boccaccio’s Decameron. The narrator, Dioneo, remarks instead: “La giovane sposa parve che co’ vestimenti insieme l’animo e’ costume mutasse” (The young bride seemed to change her mind and her manners along with her clothes [italics mine]).18 When the first crisis of the story occurs, and Gualtieri gears up to remove her child from her, Griselda makes an unremarkable comment about caring only for her husband’s happiness. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that Boccaccio’s Griselda has not discarded her emotions, but merely driven them inward. When she learns of Gualtieri’s intention to remarry, she “grieved bitterly inside” (forte in sé medesima si dolea) but works to maintain a serene countenance (con fermo viso si dispose a questa dover sostenere).19 She struggles to hold back her tears when she hears of the new wife’s imminent arrival (“non senza grandissima fatica … ritenne le lagrime”).20 Finally, Dioneo indicates that (unlike her counterpart in Petrarch’s version) Griselda has not put aside her feelings with her old status (and clothes): “Come che queste parole fossero tutte coltella al cuore di Griselda, come a colei che non aveva cosi potuto por giù l’amore che ella gli portava, come fatto avea la buona fortuna” (his words pierced Griselda’s heart like so many knives, for she had not been able to put aside the love she bore him in the same way that she relinquished the good fortune she once had).21 Petrarch’s systematic removal of these references to Griselda’s internal, though hidden, feelings, underlies a transformation of Griselda into an increasingly perfect Stoic exemplum. Not only does she not show emotion, but she now has—or performs having—no feelings to hide. One implication of this requirement on her has a Wittgensteinian cast: if one has no scope to express one’s emotions as emotives, can one truly be said

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to experience them as true emotions?22 Is a “private language” of the emotions really a language at all? Or would such private feelings rapidly denature into nonlinguistic affects that eventually only reside in mute embodied form?23 A similar set of questions will arise in the next chapter in relation to Kate, whom Petruccio sets out to make a “second Grissel.” More broadly in Petrarch’s staging of the story, the language describing the instability of the human condition (“nulla hominum perpetua sors est”; l. 305) and Griselda’s continuing equanimity in the face of her complete reversal of fortune (“Mansit illa cum patre paucos dies equanimitate atque humilitate mirabilia”; l. 337) foreground key Stoic ideas and terms. As Leah Schwebel argues, the Clerk’s passive-aggressive burial of Petrarch in the prologue to the tale prefigures a more general erasure of Petrarch’s version and return to a vernacular text in the style of Boccaccio.24 If Petrarch’s Stoicizing version of the story enacts a translation of Griselda’s affective experience into the wishes of her husband, with little or no residue of the internal feeling still so much in evidence in Boccaccio’s narrative, Chaucer’s newly Englished version seems to draw attention to disavowed feelings associated with that affective translation.25

Assent and the Scandal of the Speaking Body Walter’s offer of marriage to Griselda rests on the condition that she allow him to subject her to whatever trials he chooses without her manifesting any emotional response: “quicquid tecum agere voluero, sine ulla frontis aut verbi repugnancia te ex animo volente michi liceat” (whether you will permit me to do whatever I wish with you, without any resistance in your face or your words; ll. 155–57). This requirement resurfaces when Walter approaches her to announce his intention to remove their second child from her (as he did the first) under the false pretext that the people resent the children’s low birth on the maternal side. Given that the purpose of Walter’s marriage from his people’s point of view is to ensure the production of an heir, his claim that his people are unhappy especially “since she proved herself fertile” (presertim ex quo te fecundam cognovere; l. 241) is conspicuously odd. Walter moves to defuse the political danger allegedly posed by this fertile body but also announces his expectation that she not show emotion: “Id tibi prenuncio ne e subitus dolor turbet” (I tell you this lest the sudden sadness should disturb you; l. 247). Although

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veiled as a considerate forewarning, Walter’s statement clearly has exercitive implications: her task is not to betray any emotion at this attack on her maternity. Griselda’s response to this request offers a retrospective analysis of his original demand, brilliantly conflating the transformation through dress with affective submission: “nec consensum meum queras. In ipso enim tue domus introitu ut pannos sic et voluntates affectusque meos exui, tuos indui: quacumque ergo de re quicquid tu vis, ego eciam volo” (You should not seek my consent, because in entering your house I discarded my wishes and feelings along with my clothes: I have assumed yours. Just so, whatever you desire, I desire, in every situation; ll. 250–52).26 Griselda’s use of the word “consensus” may recall the Stoic notion of sunkatathesis (assent), picked up by Aquinas’s later “consensus.”27 Given that Walter is quite clearly not really asking for her consent, Griselda’s reference to the possibility of consent (or assent) seems deliberately to invoke the Stoic or Stoic-influenced concept in order to clarify exactly what she has given up. The process of assenting or consenting to an incoming impression, and thereby allowing an emotion to emerge, is blocked, because Griselda has outsourced this mechanism of control to Walter. Petrarch applauds this move as a Christianized version of Stoic resignation to the vagaries of fortune. He tells the story not primarily to create an exemplar for women and wives, but to urge his readers “to imitate her womanly constancy, so that they might dare to undertake for God what she undertook for her husband” (legentes ad imitandam saltem feminem constanciam excitarem, ut quod hec viro suo prestitit, hoc prestare deo nostro audeant; ll. 398–99). The “Clerk’s Tale” critically explores this Stoic ideal. The Clerk’s version of this passage registers the presence of the Petrarchan line that identifies Griselda’s “affectus” with the clothes she has discarded, but it does not reproduce either Petrarch’s or Boccaccio’s version of this line. Instead, the Clerk offers a translation that seems to act as a kind of gloss or commentary on Petrarch’s text: “For as I left at hoom al my clothing When I first cam to yow, right so,” quod she, “Left I my wil and al my libertee, And took your clothing. Wherefore I yow preye, Doth your pleasaunce; I wol youre lust obeye.” (ll. 654–58, italics mine)

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Chaucer’s other main source, the anonymous French translation of Petrarch’s version, Le Livre de Griseldis , faithfully translates Petrarch’s addition to the original: “Quant j’entray, il ne’s riens plus vray, ou seul de ta maison, je devesty mes robes et aussy mes voulentez et vesti les tiennes” (When I entered over the threshold of your house—there is nothing more true—I stripped off my clothes and also my desires and dressed in yours; ll. 234–36).28 Rather than claiming that she has checked her own feelings with her clothes at the door, Chaucer’s Griselda crucially clarifies the ethical implications of this loss. The Clerk’s emendation draws attention to the Christian revision of Stoic assent in Augustine’s notion of voluntas, or will, which is so closely associated with the emotions as to be almost identical: “Voluntas est quippe in omnibus (i.e., motus), immo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt” (The will is indeed involved in them all [the emotions], or rather, they are all no more than acts of will; CD, 14.6). As Augustine makes clear in his De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis (On the Free Choice of the Will ), the will is the central locus of ethical action. One acts correctly if one follows “recta voluntas” rather than “perversa voluntas,” but the only mechanism for this choice is the internal decision-making mechanism of consent. In one of the Clerk’s most striking departures from his Latin original, then, he seems to turn Petrarch’s moralizing against him: as a condition of what Glenn Burger usefully calls the “affective contract” of medieval marriage, Griselda no longer has access to her God-given and freely acting “will.”29 The Clerk’s treatment of Griselda’s “will” as a focal point in the nexus of power, assent, and initial impulsive impressions that may or may not lead to emotions is clearly Stoic in origin, routed through Augustine; but the Clerk’s immediate source for his chosen translation of this key phrase may be Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy Chaucer translated. Lady Philosophy describes the movement of the soul away from and toward particular objects, depending on their desirability, as a function of free will. In doing so, she cements the connection between the ancients’ understanding of passion as a movement of the soul toward or away from a good or evil object and the function of the will so central to Christian morality. Chaucer’s own translation of the Consolation of Philosophy offers this rendition of the central passage: yis quod she þer is liberte of fre wille. ne þer ne was neuer no nature of resoun þat it ne hadde liberte of fre wille. For euery þing þat may naturely vsen resoun. it haþ doom by whiche it discerniþ and demiþ

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euery þing. þan knoweþ it by it self þinges þat ben to fleen. and þinges þat ben to desiren. and þilk þing þat any wyZt demeþ to ben desired þat axeþ or desireþ he and fleeþ [thilke] þing þat he troueþ ben to fleen. (Consolation, 4392–99)

Philosophy then makes the crucial statement: “Wherfore in alle thinges that resoun is in hem also is / libertee of willyng and of nillynge [italics mine]” (Consolation, ll. 4400–4401).30 Boethius’ “libertee of willyng and of nillynge” is closely echoed in Griselda’s “my wil and al my libertee,” as well as in her earlier promise: “I wol no thing ne nil no thing, certain, / But as yow list; noght greveth me at al” (l. 646–47). Boethius’s original Latin—“libertas arbitrii”—clearly also signals his indebtedness to Augustine’s Stoic-inflected view of free will.31 The verb Chaucer translates as “decerneth” here, “dinoscit,” indicates a process of discernment in which the individual rationally chooses the good, and in doing so chooses God.32 Within this framework, Walter’s manipulation of Griselda’s free will appears not just tyrannical but an ungodly effort to dismantle the ethical core of human rationality. Brian Massumi’s recent commentary on the role of the will in relation to the affects offers a useful contemporary commentary on the relationship between will and feeling. For Massumi, will functions primarily to veto or limit the direction of affective forces: “Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions that reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed.”33 Affects that do not pass through the gatekeeper of the will remain in suspension in what Massumi views as a kind of virtual realm: “Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiences and tendencies, is a realm of potential.”34 Under normal circumstances, he writes, “Out of the pressing crowd an individual action or expression will emerge and be registered consciously.”35 Griselda’s forced foregoing of her will guarantees that her affective energies remain in the virtual realm— until a trigger occurs that overwhelms that system and the virtual pushes itself uncontrollably (and unconsciously) into the actual. In this respect I depart from Glenn Burger’s reading of Griselda’s marital “sober steadfastness” as “an emotive with powerful effects in the world” that contributes to the production of a “durable emotional community.”36 While Burger

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does acknowledge the Clerk’s excavation of “the affective costs involved in the construction such a social expression of emotion as ‘natural,’” I argue that the text’s focus on Griselda’s will-lessness indicates that her lack of access to the mechanism of emotive construction is the tale’s primary point.37 As I suggest below, the Clerk’s persistent and arguably subversive choice of the adjective “sad” to describe her connotes both a conditioned emotional deadness and the existence of virtual affects that will disrupt Griselda’s performance of patience, albeit temporarily. In its focus on the blocking of individual will, the “Clerk’s Tale” highlights the relationship between power structures and access to feeling in his framework for the tale. While all versions of the tale of course present the match between Griselda and Walter as unequal, Chaucer takes pains to emphasize the affective implications of this inequality at the outset, establishing a metafictional analogy for this affective instability in the relationship between the Clerk and the Host. Petrarch’s text briefly relates Janicula’s reaction to Walter’s request for the hand of his daughter: Inopino negocio stupefactus, senex obriguit, et vix tandem paucis hiscens, Nichil, inquit, aut velle debeo aut nolle nisi quod placitum tibi sit, qui dominus meus es. Stunned by this unexpected proposition, the old man froze; he could barely murmur this reply—“I must neither desire nor shun anything, except what may be pleasing to you, who are my lord”. (157–58)38

Following the version in Le Livre, Chaucer’s version places greater stress on the affective implications of Janicula’s affective unfreedom: This sodeyn cas this man astoned so That reed he wex; abayst and al quaking He stood. Unnethes seyde he words mo, But only thus: “Lord,” quod he, “my willing Is as ye wole, ne ageines your lykinge I wol no thing, ye be my lord so dere. Right as yow lust governeth this matere. (ll. 316–22)39

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The physical symptoms of suppressed feeling Chaucer describes here— turning red, shaking, difficulty speaking—are instances of the irrepressible feelings called prepassions by the Stoics. Not yet quite emotions, they are psychophysical responses to certain external impressions that fully bypass cognitive control.40 Until these prepassions receive cognitive assent, they do not count for the Stoics as real emotions. Like modern descriptions of affects, ancient descriptions of prepassions indicate that they are embodied, prelinguistic responses whose intentionality is often obscure. The significance of Janicula’s affective responses simply never makes it into words (“unnethes seyde he wordes mo”). The Clerk’s choice of the adjective “abayst” is strikingly pertinent here. From the verb abaishen, the word means “to be upset, perplexed, or embarrassed,” often from sheer surprise,41 but its etymology (from Old French abaissier, “to bow down, be subject”) indicates a complex nexus of feeling and power. Janicula’s affective responses, those embodied prepassions that simply emerge in his redness and quaking, are profoundly connected in their impacted embodiment to his low social status. Because Janicula immediately denies his own capacity for assent, which in Seneca’s writing is translated as voluntas, or “will,” his affects remain submerged and perhaps literally abject (cast away); according to his subaltern status, he repeatedly deflects the decision about his own affective process to his superior: “my willing / Is as ye wole.” Something similar happens when Walter asks for Griselda’s “assent.” He first claims that both he and her father support the marriage, though we have already seen that his wishes simply subsume the father’s. He subsequently assumes that his wishes will similarly subsume Griselda’s: “It lyketh to your fader and to me / That I yow wedde, and eek it may so stonde, / As I suppose, ye wol that it be so” (ll. 345–46). Walter’s “I suppose” here is disingenuous, prefacing a coercive speech that clearly presumes Griselda’s acquiescence. But thise demandes axe I first, quod he, That sith it shall be doon in hastif wyse, Wol ye assente, or elles yow avyse?

I seye this, be ye redy with good herte To al my lust, and that I fely may, As me best thinketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

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And never ye to grucched it, night ne day? And eek whan I sey “ye,” ne sey nat “nay,” Neither by word ne frowning countenance? Swere this, and here I swere our alliance.

Wondringe upon this word, quaking for drede, She seyde, “Lord, undigne and unworthy Am I to thilke honour that be me bede; But as ye wol yourself, right so wol I. And heer I swere that nevere willingly In werk ne thoght I nil yow disobeye, For to be deed, though me were looth to deye. (ll. 348–64)

While Chaucer follows his French source in emphasizing the stifled affective responses of Janicula, his rendering of Griselda’s response emphasizes the language of “assent” in order, I have suggested, to spotlight the StoicAugustinian stakes of Walter’s request. Walter has married Griselda on the condition that she hand over her will, or her capacity to discern good from bad objects, deserving of positive or negative emotions. Sara Ahmed remarks that “the relation of subjects to objects as a relation of will, or as a willing relation, has most often been thought in terms of property. For example, Hegel defines property as ‘a person putting his will into an object.’”42 The unconventional wedding ceremony noted by Burger and others actually focuses on the transformation of Griselda into an object— property—filled by the will of another.43 Like Kate, defined in Taming of the Shrew as Petruccio’s “goods,” Griselda has become Walter’s property specifically in the sense that she has been forced to give up autonomy over her own assessment of her feelings: whatever she initially feels, she may not transform this feeling into an emotive.44 Perhaps intuiting the deeper request that she not only not articulate an emotive but that she not pursue the inner process of assenting to it, Griselda adds “thoght” (“in werk ne thoght”; l. 363) to Walter’s requirement that she not disobey by “word ne frowning countenance” (l. 356).45

Translating Feeling: Bodies, Loathness, and Death However, even in this early statement of Griselda’s absolute submission to Walter, the Clerk’s translation smuggles in a disruptive note. Chaucer

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follows Petrarch’s text quite closely in this crucial passage, including the extension of Griselda’s promise from “werk” to “thought,” but he adds the complicating clause “though me were looth to deye,” which implicitly contradicts the foregoing claim that Griselda will not even think anything that disobeys Walter’s will. The subjunctive clause smuggles in the hypothetical possibility of resistance at the level of feeling. The parallel clause in Petrarch’s text differs slightly from the Clerk’s rendition of it, raising the question of whether it is Chaucer or his learned Clerk who mistranslates here in the restoration of the “body” of the tale to its maternal vernacular: “nec tu aliquid facies, et si me mori iusseris, quod moleste feram” (Nor will you do anything to which I would object, even if you command my death; ll. 160–61). It is not death that is the object of the hypothetically unwilling consent, as in Chaucer’s version, but the demand itself, the “anything” which Walter might be pleased to ask of her. While she may ostensibly be willing to accept death, this clause suggests that her feelings may contradict this willingness—and it is fitting that these potential feelings are shifted into the subjunctive mood. The mistranslation is the more striking since it is not present in Chaucer’s French source, which translates the Petrarchan Latin very closely: “ne tu ne feras ja chose, et me feisse mourir, que ne je seuffre pacienment” (nor could you do anything, even make me die, that I would not suffer patiently).46 The word “loth” (MED, “hateful, displeasing, unpleasant”) has Germanic origins indicating a repulsion, hatred, or sorrow in relation to something, and is related to the modern English verb “loathe” and the adjective “loath,” meaning unwilling or reluctant.47 Griselda’s hypothetical feelings of “loathness” complicate her stated aspiration to absolute obedience, opening up a space between her performance (her “seeming”) and her disavowed feelings. The fact that this structure employs the subjunctive mood and a dative indirect object (“it were [to] me looth”) further distances Griselda from a feeling that seems to arise impersonally in relation to her. In an intriguing parallel in the tale that follows the Clerk’s and offers a fabliau-style reprise of some of its themes, the Merchant describes May’s reaction to January’s importunate lovemaking, which begins (again with relevant parallels to the “Clerk’s Tale”) with an enforced stripping scene. Anon he preyed hire strepen hire al naked; He wolde of hire, he seyde, han som pleasaunce,

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And seyde hir clothes dide hym encombraunce, And she obeyeth, be hire lief or looth. (ll. 1958–61)

As in the “Clerk’s Tale,” where it is Walter’s “lust” which matters, here it is the “pleasaunce” of the older husband, January, which directs the scene; in both cases, the young wife must remove her own clothing in a gesture that signals her obedience to her older husband. In the “Merchant’s Tale,” the young wife’s feelings, her pleasure or loathness, are relegated to a subjunctive clause (“be hire”), and later dismissed as something the narrator cannot speak to: “I dar nat to yow telle … wheither hire thoughte it paradys or helle” (1964). Emma Campbell argues that the activity of literary translation potentially undermines the authority of the prior text by restaging “an historical set of norms in a manner that is at once traditional and disruptive.”48 This disruptive potential is especially apparent, she argues, in translation from Latin texts into the vernacular, since “it is the vernacular (rather than Latin) which is thereby inscribed as the language of cultural authority, upsetting the linguistic hegemony that traditionally invests Latin with greater cultural value than vernacular discourse.”49 In a story that dramatizes the project of translation in both its linguistic and social meanings—the Clerk translates Petrarch’s tale, but Griselda is also “translated” (l. 385) into her new, rich clothing and setting—that disruptive potential may be especially apparent or intentional. Griselda’s affectus, translated away with (and like) Griselda’s old clothes, are implicitly identified with the “mother tongue,” also translated away by the elite and exclusively masculine “sermo patrius.”50 Whether or not Chaucer, or his Clerk, intentionally mistranslates Petrarch here, the effect of this mistranslation is to allow a return of potentially disruptive affects within the “maternal” tongue. As David Wallace notes, no translation is entirely pure, “because no translator can guarantee perfect transfer between languages.”51 In reversing Petrarch’s translation from low to high, and under the guise of perfect “obeisaunce” to the Host, the Clerk deploys the impurity of his translation to smuggle in—through the grammatical backdoor of a subjunctive clause—precisely those messy feelings that Petrarch’s translation sought to exclude. Like the blushing, quaking, and difficulty speaking, the uprising of “loathly” feelings about dying belong to the affective realm of the Stoic prepassions. They are intransigent feelings that Seneca describes as

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“inevitabiles” (“inevitable” or “unstoppable”): “Omnes enim motus, qui non voluntate nostra fiunt, invicti et inevitabiles sunt” (For all sensations that do not result from our own volition are uncontrolled and unavoidable; De Ira, 2.2.1). Chaucer’s text suggests perhaps that this feeling of “loathness” is likewise an intransigent (“inevitabilis”) bodily feeling in relation to death that arises for Griselda in spite of her conscious decision to submit to Walter, a “disturbance of the body” that cannot be translated away with her clothes. Griselda’s floating “loathness” and the “quaking” and blushing that she and her father experience are instances of what Sianne Ngai might call “ugly” feelings—weakly intentional affects lacking the explicit objects of fully experienced emotions. If, as Ngai argues, such weakly intentional feelings are unsuited to producing clearly defined actions or goals, this is “precisely what amplifies their power to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular.”52 We might compare Griselda’s hypothetical “loathness” to Gawain’s instinctive flinching when the Green Knight first brings down his axe to kill him (“he schranke a lytel”)––a gesture that aligns him with the animal body of the fox, who also irresistibly shrinks from the blade.53 This bodily gestures denote a corporeal feeling which, whilst it does not rise to the level of an emotive (Gawain certainly does not assent to it), moves the body nonetheless. Griselda’s shrinking is not visible here, but at the climax of the story her body will move even more dramatically than Gawain’s to express its (not her) buried feeling. In the preamble to the marriage, it is clear that Walter’s “question” about consent to his terms, like his “question” about Janicula’s consent, is not really a question but a demand rooted in power. To paraphrase Jane Austen, his questions are the questions of “absolute power.”54 In this context, his questions function as emotional exercitives. Exercitives, we recall, announce “a decision that something is to be so, as distinct from a judgement that it is so; it is advocacy that it should be so, as opposed to an estimate that it is so. … Its consequences may be that others are ‘compelled’ or ‘allowed’ or ‘not allowed to do certain acts.’”55 Emotional exercitives, then, are utterances which aim to allow or disallow the breakthrough of certain feelings into fully fledged emotives. Though these statements are couched as questions, Walter has already shown in dialogue with Janicula that these are rhetorical questions that simply assume the answer “yes.” “Wol ye assente”; “be ye redy … To al my lust”; on her answer to these questions, the marriage rests: “Swere this,

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and here I swere our alliance.” While Walter’s own performative utterance—“I swere”—may be truly such, in the sense that he utters it freely, Griselda’s is not; her answer, like Janicula’s, bears witness to stifled affects that simply are not allowed to surface: “quaking for drede, / She seyde … here I swere.”56 When Griselda swears, her performative utterance is notably contoured by bodily affects that—for now—do not rise to the surface in speech. But they do hint at what Felman calls the “scandal” of the speaking body. Because speech is grounded in the body, “The speech act cannot circumvent the organic, the bodily, at the moment in which it appears to represent or correspond to an intention.”57 The scandal, Felman argues, “consists in the fact that the act cannot know what it is doing [italics in the original].”58 In the example of marriage in particular, which both Austin and Felman take as their central example of the speech act of promising, “The promise is the speech act that is understood to compel the body to comport itself, in constancy, towards the other [italics mine].”59 The unconventional marital speech act in this tale puts special pressure on the performative intersection of the cognitive and the bodily, because it is conditional on a prior promise (“swere this, and here I swere our alliance”; l. 357) to block the conduit between bodily affect and cognitively based emotion. Griselda’s speech act forces the body to sign away its own affective life. But as Judith Butler asks, “Does language have the power to comport the body in the way that it decides?”60 In fact, Griselda’s potential or virtual “loathness”—her irresistible yet unacknowledged bodily fear—already intrudes into the very scene of promising.

Frames of Reference: Power and “Pley” References to institutional and social power also frame the tale, forging a surprising alignment between Griselda and the narrator/translator, the Clerk himself.61 The Host’s opening gambit in the prologue to the tale seems to encourage this identification immediately: “Sir Clerk of Oxenford,” our Hoste sayde, / Ye ryde as coy and stille as dooth a mayde / Were new espoused, sittinge at the bord” (ll. 1–3). Griselda will soon be a “new espoused” wife, and her silence (“coy” derives from Latin quietus ) and stillness—in the sense of tranquility—will be key features of her married persona. This pseudohumorous hailing of the Clerk interpellates him into a competitive environment—named by the Host as a “pley”—which weaponizes aggressive humor in an effort to police the

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gender performance of the pilgrims, as we see even more dramatically in the case of the Pardoner. Chaucer’s pilgrim narrator highlights the importance of acceptable gender performance in the Host’s “game” in his own faux-naïf report that the Host himself “of manhode him lakkede right naught” (“Clerk’s Prologue,” l. 756). After his attack on the Clerk’s manhood, the Host immediately exerts his power over him—a power which, however transient and improvised, nevertheless has a real impact on the experience of these travelers: For Goddes sake, as beth of better chere. Telle us som mery tale, by youre fey! For what man that is entred in a pley He nedes moot unto the pley assente. (ll. 7–11, italics mine)

Having entered into the Host’s “game,” the Clerk now needs to abide by, “assente” to, the rules constitutive of the game. Doing so involves changing his demeanor, his “chere,” and conforming to a specified tone: “mery.” Walter’s attention to Griselda’s “chere” highlights its importance for him, too: “Hir meke preyere and hir pitous chere / Made the markis herte han pitee” (ll. 141–42). Having created the field in which these social arrangements play out, the tale-telling “game” itself, the Host also establishes himself quickly and repeatedly as the figure with the highest social capital in that field.62 In the general prologue the Host emerges first as the pilgrimage’s “gyde” (l. 804), and as the pilgrims’ own “assent” (l. 777) to his plan increases his standing among them, so his power over them increases: “he wolde been oure governour / And of oure tales juge and reportour / … And we wol reuled been at his devys” (ll. 813–16). His stated goal is to make the pilgrims merry: “But ye be merye, I wol yeve yow myn heed” (l. 782), and the tales told in the game must therefore conform to his goal of merrymaking: by this criterion will they be judged. And the Host repeats twice that anyone who is “rebel” to his “jugement” will pay the price (literally, “of the pilgrims’ expenses”). This frame material is important because of the connection Chaucer establishes between Griselda and the Clerk. Like the Clerk, Griselda is asked to “assente” to a kind game, the social game of marriage: “Wol ye assente, or ells yo avyse?” (l. 350). As we will see, assent is later required for another game that builds on her initial assent, this time the mind game of stealing away the children and submitting them to a supposed death:

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“this wol I, quod he, / That ye to me assente as in this thing. / Shew now youre pacience in youre werking / That ye me highte and swore in your village / That day that maked was our mariage” (ll. 493–97, italics mine).63 In this later context it becomes clear that it is specifically in relation to the language-game of assent that the forbearance or obedience required is named as patience, the quality for which Griselda is the exemplar par excellence. Although patience and apatheia are not identical, they are closely related; for medieval monastics, patience and cognate virtues were part of the praxis of virtue that led to the achievement of apatheia: “To arrive at apatheia requires the cultivation of several monastic virtues: patience, long-suffering, and self-mastery,” along with a “holy fear” of God.64 I will return in more detail below to the ambivalently gendered history of patience informing this tale, but for now it is enough to recall that the root meaning of patience comes from the Latin pati, to suffer, or undergo; to be patient is to be the moved rather than the mover, object rather than subject, and to be animated by the will of another rather than one’s own. But while we are told that Griselda’s patience extends to making no show of resistance to Walter’s removal of the child (“she noght ameved / Neither in word or chere or countenaunce”), the Clerk adds a note of hermeneutic caution: “For as it semed, she was nat agreved [italics mine].” Like the Clerk, who performs “bettre chere” on command, Griselda performs patience; but unlike Petrarch, who offers no hint that “seeming” is involved, the Clerk gestures here at the performativity of Griselda’s “pacience.” Building on that hint, the Clerk will allow his own patience with Walter to run thin during the course of the tale, expressing at different points frustration and even horror at Walter’s actions. Like the Host, the Marquis has absolute power in the running of these games: he is the “governor” whose “jugement” is absolute. These parallel demands for “assente” from the Host and the marquis help to render less plausible the reading of Griselda’s acquiescence as signifying primarily a radical and suprarational expression of divine faith; the Host’s beery bullying and all-too-mundane presence in the background cannot but reduce the Marquis’s stature, and at the very least, tarnish the potential religious allegory.65 The fear and hope of the Lord associated with ascetic striving toward an apathetic state must be fundamentally compromised by the worldly use of power by both the Host and the Marquis.66 While the Host pressures the Clerk to change his “chere” and make sure to offer a “mery” tale rather than one that might bore his listeners, or

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even worse make them “[their] olde sinnes wepe” (l. 13), Walter likewise militantly polices Griselda’s “chere” (“For now goth he ful faste imagining / If by his wyves chere he mighte see, / Or by bire word aperceyve, that she / Were changed”; ll. 598–600) to make sure she does not betray any actual sadness at the disappearance of her children. (Failure to do so might presumably make Walter weep for his sins, too.) In both cases, it is the power of the “governor” figure that forces these affective shifts or silences. Walter is first attracted by Griselda’s “obeisaunce” and “reverence” toward her father, presumably because these qualities presage well for her subservience to him. Chaucer uses very similar vocabulary to indicate the Clerk’s similar subservience to the “governor” in the field of “pley”: This worthy Clerk benignely answered: “Hoste,” quod he, I am under your yerde; Ye han of us as now the governaunce, And therfor wol I do yow obeisaunce. (ll. 21–24)

The phrase “under the yerde” appears in only one other place in the Canterbury Tales , where it applies to the “mayde child” whom the Merchant’s wife “may governe and gye” (“Shipman’s Tale,” l. 95) at will.67 With its additional sexual connotation (“yerde” can signify “penis”),68 the phrase indicates the Clerk’s hyperbolic conformity to the emasculated role assigned him by the Host, which suggests in turn the conscious performativity of his response.69 Even the adverb “benignely” aligns him with Griselda, who even in extremis modulates her voice: “And thus she seyde in hire benigne voys, / ‘Far weel, my child; I shall thee nevere see’” (ll. 554–55). Griselda’s and the Clerk’s “benign” and muted response to social coercion seems designed to emphasize the chilling effect of social power on affective expression. In the English version of the tale, Walter’s power—his ability to exercise his will—centers on the term “lust,” which appears no fewer than twelve times in this tale. The closest runner-up in the Canterbury Tales is “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” at five repetitions of this word; the wife’s first use of the word occurs when she describes her experience with her old husband: “for winning wolde I all his lust endure” (l. 416).70 Here “lust” seems close to its contemporary meaning of “strong sexual desire,” and

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she has positioned her own investment (in “winning”) as similar to a prostitute’s. As this usage suggests, while the Middle English word “lust” can mean simply “desire, wish, or will,” it also has strong pejorative connotations involving pleasure, including sexual pleasure.71 In the “Clerk’s Tale” the word is used in a similar way to clear Griselda of any charge of inappropriate desire: “For povreliche y-fostred up was she, / No likerous lust was thurgh hire herte y-ronne” (l. 214–15). Since “likerous” usually has a primary meaning of “lascivious” or “amorous,” the claim seems to extend beyond a point about Griselda’s not having a taste for luxury, to encompass her sexuality as well: she is perfectly chaste. Walter, on the other hand, is allowed free rein for his desires: “on his lust present was al his thought, / As for to hauke and hunte on every syde” (ll. 80–81), and it is during his hunting expeditions that Walter first sets his sights on Griselda: Upon Grisilde, this povre creature, Ful ofte sythe this markis sette his ye As he on hunting rood paraventure. (ll. 233–35)

When Walter sets up the conditions of his marriage—namely, that his wife’s will will be subject to his—he uses the word himself: “I seye this, be ye redy with good herte / To al my lust” (ll. 351–52). In this sense, Walter’s “lust” seems equivalent to one of the perturbationes that disturb and distort the mind in the work of Cicero and the writers who follow him; Cicero’s term for the perturbation that involves inappropriately vehement desire for a future enjoyment is “libido,” as opposed to the more neutral voluntas, or wish. Notably, both Petrarch’s version and the Livre de Griseldis use the more neutral term in the context of Walter’s demand—voluntas and voulenté. The Clerk’s relentless focus on Walter’s free exercise of his “lust,” in all its senses, perhaps indicates an additional subversive translation choice on the part of the Clerk.

Willing and Nilling: Virtual Affects and the Loss of “One’s Own” The achievement of perfect wifely apatheia in Griselda’s story, albeit extreme, registers a grim reality of medieval marriage. By the logic of the legal rule of coverture, the wife’s “will” is subject to her husband’s,

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and its erasure is written into medieval law as an erasure of her separate personhood. Thus William Blackstone argues in his Commentaries on the Laws of England: “For this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself [italics mine].”72 For similar reasons, the wife cannot truly be said to consent to anything during the marriage, as John Vavasour writes: “Her act and will is void during the marriage.”73 In the context of later advice manuals, Edmund Tilney’s advice to the husband to “by little and little … steale away [his wife’s] private will, and appetite so that of two bodies there may be made one onelye hart” may stand as exemplary.74 A little later in the text, after Walter has removed both her children, this project of “stealing” seems complete: it seemed thus, that of hem two Ther nas but o wil; for, as Walter leste, The same lust was hire plesance also. (ll. 715–17)

In accordance with this legally sanctioned loss of will, the abandoned space of Griselda’s “wil and libertee” is annexed by Walter in an appropriative move by which she becomes quite literally his own—just as he refers to his “owene peple dere” (l. 143). As we saw in Chapter 2, in Stoic philosophy, this building of selfhood around what is conceived of as “one’s own” is captured by the complex concept of oikei¯ osis, variously translated as appropriation, endearment, or even “annexation.”75 Walter gains an enhanced sense of his own personhood even as Griselda gives up hers, as she reminds him when he reveals his intent to remove her daughter: My child and I with hertely obeisaunce Ben yours al, and ye mowe save or spille Youre owene thing. (ll. 502–4)

And similarly when he broaches the subject of removing their son: “Ye been oure lord, doth with youre owene thing / Right as yow list” (ll. 652–53, italics mine). It is not only the “thing” but the “owene” that is important here: what Griselda recognizes in her almost contractual

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language is that she has become part of Walter’s “own-ness”—dramatized by the ritualistic removal of her own clothes and adoption of his.76 The charge that Griselda’s abnegation of will here represents a deliberate and perverse choice thus radically underplays the role of the power structures in Griselda’s habitus in robbing her of autonomy.77 As we will see in the next section, Walter’s appropriation of Griselda’s interior space mirrors Petrarch’s own appropriation of the figure of the perfect wife as an abject figure representing the passivity, materiality, and softness that must be dominated in the service of masculine affective management.78

Androgynous Apatheia: Prosthetic Defenses Against Emotion The cultural significance of Griselda’s transformation into a model of feminine inaction, or patience, is complicated by the gendering of Stoic apatheia in Petrarch’s text. In its project to transform Griselda into a paragon of Stoic apatheia, Petrarch identifies her apparently unmoved, impassive interiority with an idealized masculinity. In an odd departure from his emphasis on her as a young and virtuous maiden, Petrarch suddenly describes her inner robustness as “virile”: “omnis inscia voluptatis, nil mole nil tenerum cogitare didicerat, sed virilis senilisque animus virgineo latebat in pectore” (ignorant of all comfort, she had learned not to dream about soft and tender things: a mature, manly spirit lay hidden in her virginal breast; ll. 117–18, italics mine).79 While she is a young and beautiful maiden on the outside, her inner soul (“animus”) is that of an old man (“virilis senilisque”). Chaucer seems to feel the oddness of this claim, emphasizing instead a kind of firmness over the supposed “tenderness” of youth: But thogh this mayde tendre were of age, Yet in the brest of hir virginitee Ther was enclosed rype and sad corage. (ll. 218–20)

In a similar vein, Petrarch also emphasizes that she has known nothing soft or tender (“mole nil tenerum”) in her young life. The implications of this gendered praise seem clear: what is soft and tender is also “feminine” rather than virile; it is associated with luxury (voluptas ) rather than plain

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virtue, or what Cicero influentially calls frugalitas (frugality or temperance). In the context of Petrarch’s text in particular, these terms seem clearly to allude to Stoic discussions of the wise man’s ideal apatheia. For instance, in his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero uses exactly these adjectives to describe the vulnerability of the soul to the particular emotion he is discussing, aegritudo, sadness or distress: “In animis tenerum quiddam atque molle, quod aegritudine quasi tempestate quatiatur” (Our souls have a strain of tenderness and sensitiveness [literally: softness] of a kind to be shaken by distress as by a storm; TD, 3.6, italics mine). He expands even more fervently on the potential dangers of this vulnerability of the soul late in book 4, where it becomes clear that this “softness” is gendered feminine: “Nam vedendum est in utrisque, ne quid humile, summissum, molle, effeminatum, fractum abiuctumque faciamus” (For we must be careful in both cases [in relation to fear, metus, and distress, aegritudo] that we are guilty of nothing mean, submissive, soft [molle], unmanly, broken or abject; TD, 4.64). As we saw in Chapter 2, the adjective mollis and its cognates had connotations in Latin literature not just of generic tactile softness, but specifically of effeminate softness as a supposed instance of a too-yielding temperament. It was dangerous to be touched by something (or someone) in just the double sense of that word in English.80 As Sara Ahmed writes in a different context: “To be passive is to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering. The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others.”81 A function of social hierarchies and power, the “feminine” role is identified as the patient, enduring one: thus in the Roman context, the male youth who suffers penetration by another male is said to suffer or undergo a woman’s experience: “muliebria pati.”82 It is not just that “firmness” undergirds the Stoic model of a virtuous life, then, but that this quality shores up a certain heteronormative ideal of masculinity, one readily associated with the second meaning of “sad” as impermeable. Failure to check the emotions properly, in other words, isn’t just a failure of virtue, it portends a catastrophic slide into effeminacy; as Cicero writes: “Quid est autem nequius aut turpius effeminato viro?” (what is more vile or disgraceful than a womanish man?; TD, 3.36). A paradox emerges: Griselda is at once associated with the feminizing “patientia” of the woman or penetrated partner whose role is to receive rather than to act, and with the “corage” to endure associated with

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patience as a (masculine) virtue (and opposed to the “impatientia” identified with women in Roman texts).83 For Aquinas (following Augustine), the danger specifically to be absorbed by the exercise of patience is the danger of tristitia (sadness or dejection) in the face of hardship.84 As Robert Kaster has shown, patientia is in fact a paradoxical and polarized term in Roman texts, balanced between a commendable endurance and a shameful complaisance.85 In its positive form, patience is closely related to fortitude (Cicero develops this alliance, followed by Aquinas) and demonstrates an ability to endure hardship that is perceived as inevitable or overwhelming: “That which endures and sees to the end what is already at hand is called patientia,” while a lack of that ability, impatientia, “was a defining characteristic of women.”86 In social contexts, however, patientia is “almost always implicated in establishing hierarchy and expressing differentials of power.”87 In this sense, it is women and enslaved people who are associated with patientia, because they have diminished or nonexistent powers of personhood. In the extreme case of the enslaved person, the patientia is a function of their status as a “being with no effective will of [their] own, no capacity for asserting autonomous choices proceeding from a set of pre-defined goals.”88 This description of course fits Griselda rather closely. The central difference between these male and female identified versions of patience rests on the voluntariness of the submission. Hewing closely to the positive (masculine) Roman conception of patience, Aquinas quotes Cicero’s definition of true patience: “This is why Cicero when he defines patience calls it the voluntary, prolonged endurance of what is laborious and difficult in the interest of honour and profit [italics mine].”89 Chaucer’s own Parson draws on this tradition, possibly drawing directly on Aquinas: “The philosopher seith that pacience is thilke vertu that suffreth debonairely alle the outrages of adversitee and every wikked word” (l. 660). For the Parson, of course, Christ is the ultimate exemplar of patience: “That suffred Crist ful paciently in al his passioun.”90 And for Christ, as for the heroic male figures in the Roman tradition who endure hardship voluntarily, the emphasis is on the freedom of their will to endure; Christ’s suffering is among other things a symptom of his great power (Augustine: “It follows then that we possess these emotions by reason of the weakness of our human condition; yet this was not so with the Lord Jesus, whose very weakness derived from his power” [CD, 14.9]).91 Chaucer’s word “debonaire” (meaning originally

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“of good race”) perhaps also indicates a connection between this masculine version of patience and power. This gendered polarity within the history of patience as a concept helps to explain the strangely androgynous description of Griselda in Petrarch’s text. She represents the masculinized internal ideal (aligned with fortitude) encased in a highly vulnerable, suffering feminine body. She has the inner robustness of the Stoic wiseman and is thus, according to Petrarch, “supra sexum” (superior to her sex; l. 124); though young and feminine outwardly, her virtuous frugality distances her from all that is “molle” or “tenerum.”92 Chaucer’s reference to her “rype and sad corage” picks up and maintains some of these qualities: “rype” certainly transfers the meaning of “senilis” clearly enough. But the Clerk’s choice of the adjective “sad” to translate Petrarch’s virilis sets this version apart from the Latin version as well as the French translation, which closely follows Petrarch’s original: “courage meur et ancient” (mature and ancient courage; l. 69). The most pertinent meaning of “sad” seems to be “firm, steadfast, faithful” (MED, 1), which is how the word is consistently glossed by editors in the “Clerk’s Tale”; but having surveyed the meanings of mollis and tenerum in Petrarch’s Latin, we can also see that the meaning “rigid, unyielding; solid, not porous, without an opening, dense” (MED, 3) also seems operative.93 At the same time, however, MED 5a, “unhappy, sorrowful,” and 5b, “expressive of sorrow,” cannot be entirely extirpated from the potential connotations of the word, even in a narrative context that appears to exclude them. Like “lust,” “sad” seems to be something of a key word in the tale; while no other tale in the collection uses the word more than once, the “Clerk’s Tale” has nine occurrences of the word, eight of them describing Griselda. Walter seems to require of Griselda that she undertake precisely a performance of this idealized masculine virtue, this apatheic “sadness” whose desired meanings are to be held in place by his rigidly enforced and powerful “lust.” Petrarch mentions that she is noted for the “gravitas” of her speech (l. 177), and later during the marquis’s absence she steps in to resolve disputes with “gravibus responsis tantaque maturitate et iudicii equitate” (such authoritative responses and with such maturity and equity of judgment) that she seemed heaven-sent. This description, and especially the emphasis on “gravitas,” whose solemnity seems aligned with “sad” in its various forms, seems calibrated to refer us back to the claim that Griselda has capacities the narrator associates with masculinity and maturity.

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At the end of Petrarch’s text, it emerges that Griselda is indeed useful primarily as a model for men whose own fragilitas (fragility) God brings to light through the trials he imposes: Sed ut nobis nostra fragilitas notis ac domesticis indiciis innotescat. Habunde ego constantibus viris asscripserim, quisquis is fuerit, qui pro deo suo sine murmure paciatur quod pro suo mortali coniuge rusticana hec muliercula passa est. But [God tests us] so that our fragility might be shown to us by clear and familiar signs. I would have rated among the most steadfast of men one of whatever station who endured without complaint and for God what this little country wife endured for her mortal husband. (ll. 401–5)94

In Petrarch’s text, the patience demonstrated by Griselda is actually a model for masculine virtue, set up to manage anxiety about “our”—that is, male—fragility. The capacity to be broken (fractus) in some way is precisely what haunts Cicero’s meditation on the grief-stricken or otherwise impassioned and weakened male. This anxious masculinity conjures a version of its own fragility and projects it into the diminutive female (muliercula—“little woman”) in order to test (assay) its strength and then reintroject its “corage” as masculine. Petrarch deploys a very similar strategy in his Secretum, in which he uses (his construction of) Laura’s virtue to hold in place a model for his own: Adversus suam simul et meam etatem, adversus multa et varia que flectere adamantinum licet spiritum debuissent, inexpugnabilis et firma permansit. Profecto animus iste femineus quid virum deceret admonebat. She remained firm and impregnable despite her age and mine, and despite numerous other factors which could have softened a heart of steel. There’s no doubt that this woman’s spirit showed me what a man should do (italics mine). (6.2, italics mine) Contra autem illa propositi tenax et semper una permansit, quam constantiam femineam quo magis intelligo, magis admiror.

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She on the other hand has always remained firm and single-minded; the more I understand this womanly constancy, the more I admire it (italics mine). (6.3, italics mine)95

Exploring the use of personified feminine abstractions (such as Philosophy, Nature, or Reason) in Roman Stoicism, Alex Dressler argues that masculinity is constructed first through the abjection of the subaltern feminine (as soft, yielding, corporeal, etc.), and then through its recuperation and reinstallation as a disembodied virtue.96 As he puts it: “As the form of representation of the non-person, who is defined by her exclusion from discourse, dynamic personification is the closest language can come to admitting the subaltern.”97 Male subjects, he suggests, “use personification to experience their as it were feminine constitution.”98 Petrarch’s interest in using the story to shore up emotional “softness” in his masculine readers suggests a similar use of “Griselda” qua personification of patience, as evidenced at the very end of the tale, when he claims to be less interested in finding similarly “patient” wives than in encouraging his readers (“legentes”) to imitate her constancy (“ad imitandam saltem femine constantiam”).99 In the letter he sends to Boccaccio after realizing that his friend has not received the first three letters collected in Rerum Senilium 17, Petrarch dramatizes the reading process by describing the radically different responses of two male friends. The first is overcome with emotion (“subito fletu preventus substitit”), and after making an effort to firm up his mind (“firmato animo perlecturus”), his reading is again interrupted by groans.100 Later, Petrarch gives the story to a friend from Verona, a “man of ability” (“ingenioso”).101 This man seems to represent the “sadness” required of Griselda: “He read the narrative from beginning to end without stopping once. Neither his face nor his voice betrayed the least emotion.” The language here concerning his expression (“nec frons obductior”) and voice (“nec vox fractior”) recalls Walter’s instruction to Griselda that she behave always “sine ulla frontis aut verbi repugnantia” (l. 156).102 Despite Petrarch’s apparent praise for the mildness (“mitissimum”) of the first reader, the language of “softness” (“mollissima corda,” the softest heart) indicates the danger, from a Stoic points of view, of being too readily touched.103 The response of this intelligent friend dramatizes the work of the cognitive assent in inhibiting the process from prepassion to “irrational” emotion from accelerating: “Ego etiam, inquit, flessem … nisi quod ficta omnia credidi et credo”

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(I too could have wept, he said. … but I believed and still believe that the whole story is fictional).104 The cognitive work of the mind intervenes (“credo”) to allow this reader to recognize that since this is a work of fiction, it is not worth his tears. This demonstrates precisely Cicero’s belief that Reason, who is “queen and mistress” of everything, should power down the “soft and servile” part of the soul (TD, 2.48).105 In both Petrarch’s and Chaucer’s versions of the tale, Griselda seems to function as an androgynously structured model of patience or constancy who is also Walter’s “owene thing”—his “property” as well as a prosthetic and dissociated part of himself through which he can virtually manage the pain and suffering associated with fear and (fear of) death. The scene is set for this appropriation of Griselda as a kind of affective prosthesis at the beginning of the story. Walter’s liegemen urge him to find a wife, reminding him that in spite of his youth, he is subject to death like all mortal beings: Nulli muneris huius immunitatis datur, eque omnibus moriendum est; utque id certum, sic est illud ambiguum quando eveniat. … Libera tuos omnes molesta solicitudine, ne si quid humaniter forsan accideret, tu sine tuo successore abeas, ispi sine votivo rectore remaneant. No one is exempt from this duty; all must die. And while so much is certain, no one knows when death shall come. … Free all your [people] from this nagging worry, lest, if anything mortal should befall, you might leave no heir. (ll. 80–90)

Chaucer reproduces the gist of this passage quite closely, with one of Walter’s men warning him, And though youre grene youthe floure as yit, In crepeth age alwey, as stille as stoon, And deeth manaceth every age, and smit In ech estaat, for ther escapeth noon. (ll. 120–23)

There is nothing comparable in Boccaccio’s original version, where Gualtieri is simply concerned about the difficulty of finding a compatible wife and thus puts off the task—Dioneo even remarks that he should have been considered wise for this evasion (“di che egli era da reputar

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molto savio”). Although his vassals are said to urge him to find a wife in order to provide an heir, the incorporation of the Stoic memento mori seems to be a significant and deliberate addition to the framework of the story that Chaucer adopts from Petrarch. Before the birth of her first child, Griselda satisfactorily performs her function of distancing Walter from encroaching signs of mortality. She attains the status of a quasi-allegorical figure, whose goodness and wisdom endear her to all. Like the personified Philosophia or Sophia in Roman philosophy, she appears as an almost transcendent feminine principle whose “wyse and rype words” and “jugements of so greet equitee” create the impression “That she from heven sent was, as men wende, / Peple to save and every wrong t’amende” (ll. 438–41). This role suggests an elevation above the usual role of women, with a hint of exaltation that aligns her specifically with the intercessory figure of the Virgin Mary; as James Wimsatt has argued, the opening stages of Griselda’s “translation” to her elevated status seem to allude to the annunciation and coronation of Mary, both of which are repeated in a different key at the end of the story to mark her reinstatement back into this exalted role.106 In this role, Griselda seems to partake of the illusory immortality that perhaps allows Walter to perpetuate his fantasy of his own immortality.

Assaying “Sadness” in the Pregnant Body The crisis in this system arrives, not coincidentally, with Griselda’s pregnancy and childbirth. Although no overt commentary is offered in either Petrarch’s or Chaucer’s texts, the timing of Walter’s “merveillous desyr, his wif t’assaye” (l. 454) is clearly crucial. Although Griselda has fulfilled exactly the function assigned to her by the people, namely, to prove herself “nat bareyne” by producing an heir, this success is precisely what catalyzes Walter’s inexplicable and seemingly uncontrollable desire to “assaye” her.107 In both Petrarch’s and Chaucer’s versions, Walter begins his “assaye” when the child has finished nursing: Cepit, ut fit, interim Walterum, cum iam ablactata esset infantula, mirabilis quedam quam laudabilis doctiores iudicent cupiditas, satis expertam care fidem coniugis experiendi altius et iterum retemptandi.

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As can happen, a desire—which the learned would call more amazing than worthy—took hold of Walter, when the child was weaned, to test further the already proven faithfulness of his dear wife, and to repeat the test again. (ll. 192–94)

In Chaucer’s text the timing of the test is a little more specific: Whan that this child had souked but a throwe, This markis in his herte longeth so To tempte his wyf, hir sadnesse for to knowe, That he might out of his herte throwe This merveillous desyr, his wyf t’assaye. (ll. 540–44, italics mine)

The implication of Chaucer’s “souked but a throwe” suggests not, as in Petrarch’s text, that the child has finished nursing, but that Walter has interrupted and foreshortened this nursing period (no mention of the timing is offered in the French text). Unlike either the Latin or French texts, the second child is said to have had a wet nurse (“from the brest / Departed of his norice,” l. 617–18), suggesting that the Clerk is highlighting the catalyzing role of maternal breast feeding in the tale. What is it about his wife’s transformation into a nursing mother that triggers Walter’s “merveillous desyr” to “assay” her, and specifically her “sadnesse”? Walter’s desire to “knowe” his wife’s “sadnesse” is generally glossed as a desire to test or make sure of her “firmness” or “steadfastness.” But knowing her sadness could also indicate a desire to find out about or make known her sadness in its more transgressive sense (given his instructions to her) of “sorrowful,” as though the issue of Griselda’s sadness comes to a crisis alongside her pregnancy.108 The language of the “assay” recalls the medieval hunting ritual of “assaying” the deer, when (as in Gawain and the Green Knight ) the thickness of the deer’s fat is tested and measured by insertion of fingers into the hide.109 Walter’s discovery of Griselda is of course embedded in his practice of hunting: “this povre creature / Ful often sythe this markis sette his yë / As he on hunting rood paraventure” (ll. 232–34); even the phrase “povre creature” seems to assimilate Griselda’s body to the bodies of the hunted animals. If the fitness of the hunted animal qua quarry is assayed in relation to its fat, the fitness of Griselda qua wife is assayed in relation to her sadness: both qualities are necessary for the pleasure of the lord as he surveys what is

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“his owne.” But whereas the dead body of the animal has been sacrificed to the hunt, Griselda’s maternal body inexorably builds a response to the assay over time; nonetheless, the analogy suggests that Walter is enforcing a kind of deadness in the body of his wife. As in Gawain and the Green Knight , where the “assay” of the knight intersects even more clearly with the ritual assay of the hunt, the “assay elicits proof of the animal in the human,” and specifically the “animal that values [its] own life.”110 If Griselda has managed to forego her own life, her own natural “loathness” in relation to death, her maternal body nonetheless represents the threat that she will register a kind of animal grief in relation to her children’s lives. As Caroline Walter Bynum has argued, for medieval religious writers the quintessence of maternity is not just the work of the womb in carrying the child, but also the work of nursing, which represents the labor of caregiving and love. For Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, nursing breasts are “a symbol of the pouring out toward others of affectivity or of instruction [italics mine].”111 Not surprisingly, the language of “softness” that the Stoics associated with femininity and emotionality becomes closely identified with this maternal work.112 Summing up her findings about the use of maternal imagery in devotional writing, Bynum writes that males in the twelfth century “held consistent stereotypes of femaleness as ‘compassionate’ (either ‘weak’ or ‘tender’), and … they saw the bond of child and mother as a symbol of closeness, union, or even the incorporation of one self into another.”113 Reading maternity in the light of Stoic assessments of maternal bodies as “weak” or “tender,” it seems likely that the vision of the nursing mother in particular would trigger deep anxiety about dependency and vulnerability within the masculine subject. Particularly given the breasts’ association with the “pouring out towards others of affectivity,” the stance of the nursing mother might indeed threaten the foundation of a masculinity predicated on the denial and reviling of affective relations based on need. When Cicero entertains the thought of a “womanish” (“feminea”) attitude toward either pain or pleasure, the imagery of dissolution—“qua … liquescimus fluimusque mollitia” (through which we melt and dissolve through softness; 2.22.52)—seems figuratively connected to the affective porousness of the mother–child nursing relationship. As a result of her pregnancy, Griselda is no longer “sad” in the sense of impermeable or solid: the childbearing and nursing body advertises its porosity and (in Bakhtin’s terms) grotesque lack of boundaries or barriers:

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“The grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. … The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world.”114 Griselda’s nursing breasts clearly meet this description, which is perhaps why Walter cuts off the nursing period for his first infant and substitutes a nurse for the second. In any case, by the end of the tale, Walter’s long running assay seems successful in returning Griselda to her former “impermeable” state. After removing her children, Walter waits until she is beyond childbearing years before bringing his own daughter back, ostensibly as his new young bride. On this occasion, Griselda is described as outwardly “ay sad and constant as a wal” (l. 1047), an odd simile that refers us back to precisely the meaning of sad as “solid, not porous, without an opening.”115 This sense of “sad” aligns with Stoic goals of imperturbability of course; in one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca recommends that the wise man engird himself with an “inexpugnabilis murus,” an impregnable wall (Letter 82), presumably to guard against affective impressions of various kinds. If nursing motherhood calls attention to what Glenn Burger calls “the abject bodily residue rightly discarded by a properly masculine spirit”—and I would importantly add Stoic to the properly masculine ideal—Walter’s “assaye” focuses on returning her to her sexless (supra sexum) role as the Stoic model for secure masculinity.116 As a tale focused on a highly gendered form of translation, this closing down of affective porousness is inevitably linked to language, as though Walter is attempting to shore up the constancy of language itself along with the body of his wife. If, as Dante and Petrarch after him suggest, the nursing mother is the source of a natal, vernacular language, that language seems closely aligned to what Julia Kristeva has termed the “semiotic.” Associated with the rhythms of the mother’s body (which in turn are what render it open, fungible, and “grotesque”), semiotic processes may disrupt fully articulated language and symbolic constructs. A discourse in tune with the semiotic “allows itself to be changed by affective rhythm. … Rhythms, alliterations, condensations shape the transmission of message and data.”117 The semiotic, as this passage suggests, is attuned to the rhythm of poetic language, with its potential flouting of grammatical and metrical rules.118 As Gary Cestaro argues in his reading of Dante’s distinction between the “lingua materna” and the “gramatica,” the “grammarian’s intent to draw a line [between the nursing body and the discipline of the “gramatica”] … entails nothing less than a

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metaphorical rejection of the nurturing female body.”119 Describing the disciplinary work of the “gramatica” on the maternal vernacular as an effort to codify its linguistic “dispersive flow” by “fixing rules, drawing boundaries, and thus excluding words, structures, accents, dialects,” Cestaro helps us see the overlap between Petrarch’s linguistic project and Walter’s harshly regulatory response to the “dispersive flow” of Griselda’s nursing body.120 Petrarch’s project to translate the story of Griselda into the language of the “gramatica” is thematically implicated in Walter’s punishment of the maternal body, and the Clerk’s return to the “mother tongue” in his retranslation of the story must engage with the treatment of the maternal body within the story as a linguistic as well as bodily crux. The Clerk’s tendentious decision earlier to translate virilis as “sad,” with its multiple meanings, including those explicitly at odds with Walter’s intention, indicates a decision to allow transgressive affective meanings to seep into the story in spite of Walter’s effort to erase them. A similar slippage in the English “sad” occurs when the sergeant appears to take Griselda’s daughter: “And in her barm this litel child she leyde / With ful sad face, and gan the child to blisse” (l. 551–52). When the son is removed from her in similar circumstances, Griselda is said to have “suffred this with sad visage” (ll. 693). Petrarch’s Latin word in this instance is tranquilla: “tranquilla fronte puellulam accipiens” (taking the little girl with a tranquil countenance), which serves to reinforce Petrarch’s general Stoicization of Griselda: tranquility is of course a key Stoic concept at the heart of Petrarch’s teaching about the vicissitudes of fortune in his De Remediis—one essay is entitled “De tranquillo statu.”121 The French text is close to Petrarch’s: Griselda is described as bearing the sergeant’s removal of her first child “de plein front” (with a calm face; ll. 198–99) and of her second “benignement” (benevolently; l. 244).122 With its consistent meanings of “quiet,” “calm,” “still, “untroubled,” “peaceful,” and the like, “tranquilla” is a more semantically stable word than Chaucer’s “sad,” and certainly less open to polysemic, conflicting interpretations.123 And although the narrator repeatedly emphasizes that Griselda’s outward demeanor reflects her apparent conformity “by hire countenaunce” (l. 924) to Walter’s will, the Clerk interjects his own commentary when he records the news of Walter’s apparent annulment of the marriage: “I deme that hire herte was ful wo” (l. 753). As though glossing his own choice of the word “sad,” the Clerk implies here that she is not just “sad” in the condoned sense but actually sad in the sense of sorrowful. At least for Aquinas, patience is precisely the virtue that

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protects against tristitia, sadness—so it is in Griselda’s overcoming, or even eradication of, sadness that she most perfectly fulfils her function. But a further hint that Griselda’s inner world has shifted in Chaucer’s version is implied by her revision of her earlier claim that she will not err from Walter’s will “in werk ne thoght”; now she merely promises that “it shall nat be / evere in word or werk I shal repente / That I yow yaf myn herte in hool entente” (l. 859–61). With “thoght” conspicuously missing from the list, it is as though Griselda merely promises to keep performing. If Griselda’s pregnancy and the nursing of the children are what precipitate Walter’s “merveillous desyr” to “assaye” or “tempt” her, the telos of that desire appears to be a complete removal of Griselda from the scene of patriarchal reproduction.124 In his rejection speech, Walter instructs Griselda “thilke dowere that ye broghten me / Tak it again, I graunte it of my grace” (l. 807–8). In both Petrarch’s version and the French translation, the Livre de Griseldis, Griselda seems to know how to read this reference to her dowry figuratively: At quod iubes dotem meam mecum ut auferam, quale sit video, neque enim excidit ut paterne olim domus in limine spoliata meis, tuis induta vestibus ad te veni, ad te veni, neque omnino michi alia dos fuit quam fides et nuditas. But since you command that I take my dowry with me—I note what sort it is, and it was not lost when I came to you, stripped of my own clothes and reclothed in yours, on the threshold of my father’s house. I brought you no dowry but faith and nakedness. (ll. 315–17, italics mine)

The French version similarly reads “ne en tout n’aportay avec toy autre douaire que foy et loyaute” (no other dowry at all did I bring to you other than faith and loyalty; l. 324).125 Chaucer’s Clerk makes a couple of significant changes. His Griselda at first reads the reference to the dowry as a reference to her old clothes, a connection none of the other Griseldas makes: But ther as ye me profre swich dowaire As I first brought, it is wel in my minde It were my wrecched clothes, nothing faire, The which to me were hard now for to find. (ll. 848–51, italics mine)

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At the same time, Chaucer’s Griselda also adds an important detail to the abstract qualities she brings: not just nakedness and faith, as in the sources, but “feyth and nakednesse and maydenhede” (l. 866, italics mine).126 Having listed these three qualities, Griselda then immediately strips off Walter’s fine clothes, uttering performatively: “here again your clothing I restore, / And eek your wedding-ring, for everemore.” A few stanzas later she seems to bring together the old clothing, so oddly referenced earlier, and the inserted quality of maidenhead. She asks to substitute one of Walter’s smocks for her own “lost” one, “in guerdon of my maydenhede, / Which that I broghte, and noght again I bere” (ll. 883–84, italics mine). In other words, the dowry (what she brought) is not the old clothes, but her virginity, in payment of which she will take a smock belonging to Walter to cover her maternal womb. And as Dinshaw notes, Griselda’s tone in this exchange, especially when she comments “Ye koude nat doon so dishonest a thing” (l. 876) is “aggressive,” suggesting perhaps long-buried affect surfacing specifically around the question of her violated womb.127 If she has “misplaced” her clothes, it is not because she has temporarily forgotten where she put them; rather, the loss of the clothes stands in for a more difficult grief that she cannot access, because it is hidden in the empty space of her disallowed “wil and libertee” (or affectus) that she took off with her own clothes. Unlike the old clothes, which conceivably could be retrieved, her lost virginity cannot be, and this is why she has to wear Walter’s smock, signifying his permanent appropriation of the space of her womb: she specifies that it is because her womb has borne children that she cannot go naked from Walter’s house. As though to emphasize this point, Chaucer (unlike Petrarch) specifies that even when Janicula finds the old clothes, they do not fit properly now: And with her old cote, as it mighte be, He covered hire ful sorwefully wepinge. But on hire body mighte he it nat bringe, For rude was the cloth and she more of age By days fele than at hire marriage. (ll. 913–17)128

This language of growth and “increase” perhaps alludes to her body’s enlargement during pregnancy, and thus helps to signify again the impossibility of returning unmarked to one’s former identity.

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Lee Patterson understands Griselda’s removal of Walter’s clothes as a return to freedom: “Wearing his clothing, she must obey; without it, she is free. … Once out of that world [of monarchical power]— and clothing—Griselda can and does comment on the fickleness of the sovereign’s will.”129 It is certainly true that the investiture in Walter’s clothing marks her submission to his will. But it is important to recall that what she puts away with her own clothing are “voluntates et affectus” (wishes and feelings) in Petrarch’s version, and “wil and libertee” in Chaucer’s version, where “will” indicates the subject’s ability to assent to impulsive impressions and convert them into emotions. Because Griselda now also associates her old clothing with her lost maidenhead, she seems to imply that her maidenhead was lost at the same time as her ability to freely desire something. Like May in the “Merchant’s Tale,” she is stripped in subjection to the “lust” (or “pleasaunce” in the “Merchant’s Tale”) of her husband, and like May, she “obeyeth, be hire lief or looth.” If we are inclined to read January’s treatment of his young wife as little short of rape, the parallels between the two stories suggest that Griselda may be reading her own loss of maidenhead similarly.130 She cannot, as Patterson suggests, simply become “free” once she has taken off these clothes, because she lost something profound and irretrievable while she wore them, and the focal point of that loss, the part of her body she spectacularizes to represent it, is her womb. This loss—signified by the larger body that has borne children—prevents her from simply retrieving her own feelings and wishes where she left them, and it is for this reason that her old clothes “were hard now for to finde.” The womb covered with Walter’s smock becomes, in this complex structure, a bodily signifier of affects to which she has no access: a sadness (in the sense of the forbidden tristitia) that she has “mislaid,” for both her lost virginity and her ostensibly lost children.

“Swowning … Lyk a Mother”: Interrupted Promises In the final scene, we witness the full disruption of Griselda’s earlier speech act (the promise of patience) by the maternal body.131 When she learns that Walter has kept the children “prively” in Bologna, Griselda’s body seems to take over, pushing her out of a consciousness that cannot accommodate the accompanying affects:

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Whan she this herde, aswowne doun she falleth For pitous joye, and after hire swowning She both hire yonge children to hire calleth, And in hire armes, pitously wepinge, Embraceth hem, and tendrely kissing, Ful lyk a mooder, with hire salte teres She batheth both hire visage and hire heres. …………………………………………… “O tendre, or dere, o yonge children myne, Your woful mooder wende stedfastly That cruel houndes or some foul vermyne Hadde eten yow; but God of his mercy, And youre benigne fader, tendrely Hath doon yow kept;” and in that same stounde Al sodeynly she swapte adoun to grounde.

And in her swough so sadly holdeth she Hire children two, whan she gan hem t’embrace, That with greet sleighte and greet difficultee The children from hire arm they gonne arace. (ll. 1079–1103, italics mine)

Chaucer uses words associated with swooning (including “swough,” “swowne,” and “traunce”) five times during this episode, during which Griselda appears to have two discrete episodes of fainting or passing out: “aswowne doun she falleth” and “Al sodeynly she swapte adoun to grounde.” Her body takes the lead here, shutting down consciousness in an explosion of affective energy that seems to short-circuit her ability to translate feeling into words. We noted earlier that in situations of extreme pressure both Griselda and her father exhibit what the Stoics understood as prepassions— “inevitable” affective movements that never get translated into emotive form because the rational subject does not “assent” to them. If Griselda inadvertently betrays something like fear or dread in her “quaking,” and hypothetically indicates a potential feeling of “loathness” in relation to death, those affective energies are vigorously shut down. She promises to marry Walter, and she agrees to align her wishes with his, up to and including his wish for her own death. But the body’s perturbation gets itself expressed anyway in its own oblique language—which is not necessarily nonconceptual because it is nonverbal. The body’s dramatic swoon

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is a powerful physiological prepassion which forcefully shuts down the possibility of assent; perhaps for this reason, Griselda is able to continue to hold onto her children from within this moment of unconsciousness. While I sympathize with Glenn Burger’s suggestion that this scene brings us “face to face with the possibility that such intense pain and maternal love was [sic] the real feeling that defined who Griselda truly is,” I suggest that this is not “Griselda’s” “real feeling” because full cognitive access to this feeling is blocked by her habitual substitution of her husband’s will (assent) for her own, and for this reason lives at the level of affect rather than emotion.132 Instead, the swooning maternal body acts independently of “Griselda”’s consent and outside the bounds of autonomous control. The swoon represents precisely the burst of dissociated intensity associated with unintegrated affects. But it is also helpful to recall Linda Zerilli’s account of affective response as a form of embodied coping which, while not propositional in form is not necessarily therefore fully nonconceptual, but rather embedded within the “irreducibly conceptual character of all embodied experience.”133 Griselda’s swoon represents a form of embodied behavior that may at first glance appear nonconceptual, because “she” is not in control; but the swoon itself speaks, as though the body is trying to get something difficult said despite the lack of cognitive integration of these feelings. It is not coincidental that it is in this scene that Griselda reminds us most forcefully of her classical forebears. Her swoon vividly recalls Andromache’s dramatic and prolonged deathlike swoon when she has reason to suspect Hector’s death. Andromache herself considers her swoon a kind of death (“I feel my heart rise. … I die of dread that Akhilleus may have cut off Hektor”), just as Griselda indicates a willing embrace of death: “Now rekke I never to ben deed right here” (l. 1090). This scene is dramatically focused on Griselda’s body specifically as a maternal body: she cries salt tears over her children’s faces and hair, she holds them tightly (sadly), and of course she swoons when she first hears of their continued existence. Signified by the now empty (but once full) womb, the force that sends her to the floor releases the energy of the thwarted affects that she has been forced to set aside as a condition of marriage in her earliest performative promise (“I swere”). The word “swapte” (from “swappen”) intensifies the second swoon; she doesn’t merely fall to the ground, but rather violently throws herself to the ground (“swappen” can mean “strike,” “attack,” “stab,” or “throw [one’s body to the ground]”).134 There is no firstperson agent here who does the throwing. In this moment of almost

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violent collapse, when her body seems to be fully in control, Griselda takes hold of her children “sadly”: “And in her swough so sadly holdeth she / Hire children two (italics mine).” The full subversive meaning of “sad” in the tale emerges in the way she holds her children—as an adverb rather than an adjective. That shift from adjective to adverb signals the shift into embodied gesture, and like Andromache’s swoon, Griselda’s faint also propels her into an affectively charged language that we have never heard from her before: she addresses her children directly with exclamations that give her speech the force of an affect burst: “O tendre, o dere, o yonge children myne” (l. 1093). However, Griselda’s access to emotive speech proves limited. Unlike the female falcon who swoons and falls in a very similar way in the “Squire’s Tale,” Griselda seems limited by “hire humble voys,” despite her body’s dramatic, even aggressive performance. Canacee is in possession of a magic ring that allows her to understand—to translate—the voices of birds: “for right anon she wiste that [the fowles] mente, / Right by hir song, and knew al hire entente” (ll. 399–400).135 And indeed, after the falcon awakens from her “swough” she proceeds to narrate her suffering in great detail “right in hir haukes ledene” (l. 478), or language, which Canacee instantly understands. While Griselda does directly address her children, she does not speak again after the second, more intense swoon. Her instinctive grip on her children during her swoon (“in her swough”) is so tight that it is only with “sleighte and greet difficultee” that they can be torn from her (“arace”). Are they torn from her because the children are afraid? Is she hurting them? Or does Walter simply want to reclaim them from her maternal grip? Like “swapte,” “arace” has violent connotations, including “tear by force,” “lacerate,” or “eradicate,” indicating the violence of Griselda’s deprivation. Nothing comparable happens with the children in either the French of Latin sources, just as neither source places the same degree of emphasis on the intensity of Griselda’s swoon (in Petrarch’s text she is only “pene gaude examinis”––almost faint from joy; l. 385, italics mine).136 The Clerk’s version seems to emphasize both the intensity of Griselda’s explosive feeling and the violence of her stolen motherhood: for while she is described as behaving “ful lyk a mooder,” she is not really their mother at this point—Walter has substituted his own sister for her during their attachment years. David Wallace notes in passing in relation to this scene that it “seems that Griselda contains a world of private feeling.”137 But as Wittgenstein has shown in his private language argument, something can only

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be said to be private if it can potentially be made public, and what this scene suggests is that Griselda’s feeling is so deeply buried in her body as a result of her emotional habitus that these feelings are not accessible or legible enough to translate into an articulable emotive.138 Griselda never says anything that remotely accounts for her intense bodily reaction. And as we have noted, her most forceful gesture—the sad embrace of the children—occurs when Griselda is unconscious, in her “swough.” Unlike the falcon’s suffering, which is magically translated by a sensitive female listener, Griselda’s affect remains largely locked away even from her, emerging only as an embodied intensity that falls, grasps, and weeps, but does not really speak its truth. The similarity between her swoon and Andromache’s also highlights the differences: she is never in a supranatural, quasi-maenadic state, but is instead still tightly bound by the conventions of marriage, still referring to Walter as her children’s “benigne fader” (l. 1097). By contrast, when the falcon finds herself in an all-female environment in which her “haukes ledene” can be readily understood, she moves beyond the swooning and self-wounding into a therapeutic process that begins with a dense narrative of her suffering and concludes with healing action on the part of Canacee: Canacee hom bereth hire in hir lappe And softely in plastres gan hire wrappe, Ther as she with hire beek hadde hurt hirselve. (“Squire’s Tale,” ll. 634–36)

Whereas the falcon is wrapped in therapeutic “plastres” and plied with healing “herbes preciouse” by Canacee and her women, Griselda is immediately rewrapped in the very clothes that both she and we have identified with her loss of access to her own emotions: Thise ladyes, whan that they hire tyme say, Han taken hire and into chamber goon, And strepen hire out of hire rude array, And in a cloth of gold that brighte shoon, With a coroune of many a riche stoon Upon hire heed, they into halle hire broghte, And ther she was honoured as hire oghte. (ll. 1114–20)

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The world of Walter closes around her again, shutting down the explosive affective energy of the swoon. The second violent removal of the children coincides with this second stripping and reclothing, and this time the consolidation of the patriarchal family seems complete.139 When Griselda emerges from her second swoon she is said to be “abaysed” (l. 1108) (“embarrassed” or “abashed”): the same adjective is applied to her father early in the story, where it indicates how social class silences affective expression. Griselda has been reabsorbed back into her husband’s house (from her father’s) and her “rude array” has been permanently discarded. The erasing of Griselda’s grip on her children indicates that this “swoon” marks the end of the maternal crisis in the story and thus the end of Griselda’s opportunity to regain access to her maternal feelings. While the affective thickness of the Clerk’s “impure” translation of her story perhaps dramatizes in its own density the inevitability and power of bodily affects, the folding up of Griselda in the “cloth of gold” finalizes the silence of her maternal body back within the “wal” of Stoic apatheia. This quite literal wrapping up of Griselda’s story also recalls the silencing of Euryalus’s mother, whose connections with Andromache we explored in Chapter 3. Like the soldiers on the battlefield whose minds are badly shaken (“concussi animi”) by the mother’s shriek, and who weep and groan listening to her lament, the bystanders at Griselda’s climactic swoon are also profoundly affected by the scene: on many a teer on many a pitous face Doun ran of hem that stoden hire bisyde; Unnethe abouten hire mighte they abyde. (ll. 1104–6)

And just as the mother is unceremoniously swept back “inside” (“Corripiunt … sub tecta”) in the hands of Idaeus and Actor, Griselda is taken by the courtly ladies back into her chamber to be redressed by their hands: Thise ladyes, whan that they hir tyme say, Han taken hire and into chambre goon, And strepen hire out of hire rude array. (ll. 1114–16)

Operating according to the parallel rules of his own emotional habitus, the Clerk moves swiftly from this wrenching conclusion to a resumption

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of the kind of “mery” cheer demanded by the Host: “I wol with lusty herte fresshe and grene / Seyn yow a song to glade yow, I wene” (ll. 1173–74). Whatever we decide about the vexed questions of the placement and “voice” of the envoy, its invented rhyme scheme creates a poetic “forme fixe” that relentlessly repeats the same rhymes throughout the envoy to create what Howell Chickering calls an overwhelming “sound pattern.”140 Despite the apparent play of ironies in the envoy, the rhyme scheme encases the tale as surely as Griselda is re-encased in her fine “array.” Like Griselda, who rises “abayst” from her swoon, the Clerk’s ability to undermine the performance of his own storytelling “patience” is clearly over, and the ideology of marriage predicated on a wife’s apatheia is reinscribed by the Host’s determinedly antifeminist reading of the tale: By Goddes bones, Me were lever than a barel ale Me wyf at hoom had herd this legend ones. (ll. 1212b–e)

Notes 1. Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32. 2. See Baswell’s discussion of “romance” Virgil in the works of Chaucer, Virgil in Medieval England, chap. 5, “The Romance Aeneid.” 3. Fowler, “Epicurean Anger,” 34. 4. See Chap. 3, 71–74, for more detail on the gendered Stoicism of Petrarch’s Secretum. 5. My interpretation of Griselda’s “loathly” feelings aligns closely with Sianne Ngai’s interest in what she calls “ugly feelings,” in the book of the same name. Ngai’s interest in “the less object- or goal-directed, the intentionally weak and therefore politically ambiguous feelings” that she associates with “affects” rather than emotions is closely aligned with my focus in this chapter. Ugly Feelings, 26. 6. See especially Emma Campbell, “Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation,” Comparative Literature 55, no. 3 (2003): 191–216; Leah Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 47, no. 3 (2013): 274–99; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), chap. 5, “Griselda Translated.” See also Dolores Warwick Frese, “The Buried Bodies of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch: Chaucerian

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

‘Sources’ for the Critical Fiction of Obedient Wives,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 249–56, for a discussion of Chaucer’s treatment of the translation from Latin into the vernacular. Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles, 17.3.43–44, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 111. Subsequent line references to Petrarch’s tale will be to this edition. Dinshaw’s reading of the tale focuses on the application of Jerome’s use of the image of the veiled woman as allegorical text to Griselda: “Jerome’s hermeneutic parable focuses on woman’s body underneath the clothes—the wisdom, the truth of the text under the letter—as the means of the increase and multiplication of the faithful.” Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 142. My focus will be on the tale’s use of language to express, conceal, or in some sense construct first-person statements of feeling. Geoffrey Chaucer, “Clerk’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales, ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 105–35. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent line or page references to this tale and others will be to this edition. Dinshaw writes: “Translation takes place on a feminine body, as it does as well in Troilus and Criseyde. … It is a masculine hermeneutic gesture performed on the woman, on the text.” Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 133. Campbell in “Sexual Poetics” reads the sexual politics of translation in the light of Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender. Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda,” 277–80, also discusses the gendering of the vernacular, highlighting Boccaccio’s Dantesque orientation toward the vernacular as an orientation toward women. David Wallace discusses the violence implicit in Petrarch’s rhetorical tropes of dressing and undressing: see Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 274–75. Compare Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1.6, for reference to a mother tongue: “maternam locutionem.” As Thomas Paul Bonfiglio points out, this is the first reference to the concept of a mother tongue: see Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker (New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 73. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 150, references the “brotherhood of literate men” that constitutes Petrarch’s audience. Frese, “The Buried Bodies,” 254. See Dante, De Vulgari, 3: “I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica.”

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13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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Dante goes on to argue that this maternal language is “more noble,” because “it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial” (3). Dinshaw similarly writes that “Dante, in his De vulgari Eloquentia, associates the vernacular with mothers and nurses, and it is precisely this vulgar language—‘babytalk,’ as Robert Hollander has called it, or ‘woman talk,’ which amounts to the same thing—that Petrarch turns away from.” Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 149. See also Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 289, on the “primary linguistic community” of the mother tongue. Dante, De Vulgari, 3. Steven Botterill clarifies that “gramatica” usually means Latin, but specifically “Latin as written by the best poets” (90n1). Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 289. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion, 68. David Wallace writes that “every translation contains a trace of impurity because no translator can guarantee a perfect transfer between languages.” Chaucerian Polity, 287. Shoshana Felman, Scandal. See especially the afterword by Judith Butler, which emphasizes the ways in which the body interrupts or subverts the intentionality of the speech act: “The speech act cannot circumvent the organic, the bodily, at the moment in which it appears to represent or correspond to an intention.” Scandal, 116. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. and ed. Wayne Rebhorn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 333. For the Italian text, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Amedeo Quondam, Maurizio Fiorilla, and Giancarlo Alfano (Milan: BUR Rizzoli Classici, 2022), 1634. Boccaccio, Decameron, 335; Italian text, 1640. Boccaccio, Decameron, 336; Italian text, 1641. Boccaccio, Decameron, 337; Italian text, 1643. Ludwig Wittgenstein discusses the concept of the private language in his Philosophical Investigations, §§244–71, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Sianne Ngai describes her own analysis of the transition from affect to emotion in terms of “passages whereby affects acquire the semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely denature into affects.” Ugly Feelings, 27. Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda,” 285–99. Schwebel argues that “it is not in vague, verbal echoes that we see the ghost of Boccaccio’s original work in the Clerk’s Tale, but in Chaucer’s methodical undoing of the editorial adjustments that Petrarch first made to Decameron X.10.” “Redressing Griselda,” 275. Sources and Analogues, 120, translation slightly emended. See chap. 3, 71.

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28. Le Livre de Griseldis, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 154–55. Subsequent line references to this tale will be to this edition. 29. Glenn Burger, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 145– 47. 30. Both quotations from Chaucer’s Translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Richard Morris (London: N. Trübner and Co., 1868). 31. Richard Sorabji writes: “It has been suggested that the phrase ‘free choice of the will’ (liberum arbitrium voluntatis ) originates with Augustine, who uses it extensively in his On Free Choice of the Will. From this account of Latin terminology, it looks as if Boethius is reading Augustine’s Latin expression back into an earlier Greek debate, when he talks of free choice of the will.” Emotion and Peace of Mind, 321. 32. See Calvin G. Normore, “The Unity of the Good,” in Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, ed. Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri (New York: Springer, 2002), 32. 33. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 29. 34. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30. 35. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 31. 36. Burger, Conduct Becoming, 183, 186. 37. Burger, Conduct Becoming, 189. 38. Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles, 116. 39. This closely follows the description in Le Livre Griseldis, 146: “Dont li bon homs, qui riens ne savoit de ce fait, fut moult esmerveilliez; et tout rougis et esbays, en tremblant, a paine pot dire: “Riens,” dist, “sire, vouloir ne doy que ce qui te plaist, qui es mon droiturier seigneur.” 40. See Chap. 2, 37–43. 41. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. abaishen, 1. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/ m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 42. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 41–42. 43. As Sara Ahmed puts it more abstractly, “Objects are emptied of will by being given the content of a subject’s own will.” Willful Subjects, 41–42; Burger, Conduct Becoming, 145. 44. The contrast between this submission and Walter’s unconfined willfulness going into the marriage is marked. While the idea of marriage itself arises from his “peple,” the particulars of the marriage are entirely his own to contour: “Wherfore of my free wil I wole assente / To wedde me” (150). 45. Dinshaw also notes that Griselda ups the ante here “as if rising to a perceived challenge or proving that she is in fact stronger than even he requires.” Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 136.

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46. Le Livre de Griseldis, 146–147, lines 123–24. 47. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. loth, 1. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 48. Campbell, “Sexual Poetics,” 197. 49. Campbell, “Sexual Poetics,” 197. 50. See Bonfiglio, Mother Tongues and Nations, chap. 4, “From Sermo Patrius to Lingua Materna.” 51. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 287. 52. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. 53. Gawain and the Green Knight , ed. and trans. James Winney (Peterborough, CA: Broadview, 1995), Fitt 4, 91. 54. Austen, Mansfield Park, 259. Sir Thomas attempts to coerce Fanny into marrying Henry Crawford while hiding the fact of his coercion: “‘Advise’ was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power.” 55. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 155. 56. Griselda seems to see through the requirement that she not express outwardly any emotion in word or expression to the true demand, which is that she not actually even register that emotion mentally, presumably because Walter will do so for her: “heer I swere that nevere willingly / In werk ne thoght I nil yow disobeye” (l. 363, italics mine). 57. Judith Butler, afterword to Felman, Scandal, from 116. 58. Felman, Scandal, 67. 59. Butler, afterword to Felman, Scandal, 118. 60. Butler, afterword to Felman, Scandal, 118. 61. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 135, notes the parallel between the Clerk and the “newly betrothed heroine of this tale,” but primarily sees it as evidence of the Clerk’s reintroduction of the woman’s point of view into the text. Glenn Burger writes similarly that the “Host short-circuits any easy performance of Petrarchan masculine feeling and humanist fortitude, instead portraying the Clerk as if he were an inexperienced young woman in need of direction from the real men who rule him.” Conduct Becoming, 174. The main point of the alignment for my reading is the similar intersection of hierarchical power and emotional exercitives in relation to the Clerk and Griselda. 62. The terms of this analysis draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of social capital in The Field of Social Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 63. See Linda Georgianna, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent,” Speculum 70, no. 4 (1995): esp. 805ff. My reading differs from Georgianna’s, which views Griselda’s assent as exceeding the terms of Walter’s legalistic demands, but in “every sense free” (805). 64. Andrew J. Summerson, Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 65–66. Summerson offers

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65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

a helpful analysis of the absorption of Stoic notions of apatheia into the Christian context. See David Aers, Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England 1360– 1409 (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002), chap. 2, for a compelling argument against the religious reading of Griselda’s story. David Wallace also notes that given the viciousness of Walter, he cannot be equated with God but could be compared to a plague. Chaucerian Polity, 282. The Christian “comes to apatheia through ascetic effort perfected by grace.” Summerson, Divine Scripture, 26. Chaucer, “The Shipman’s Tale,” in Poetical Works of Chaucer, 188–94. Dinshaw also notices the reference to the Host’s “yerde,” noting that his “obeisaunce” to the Host echoes Griselda’s to Walter. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 136. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. yerde, 5, accessed September 4, 2023, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. Lee Patterson notes the performativity but underappreciates the effect of power in his reading of Griselda: “The Necessity of History: The Example of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” in Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 187–210. Chaucer, “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales, 105–135. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. lust, 2–3, accessed September 4, 2023, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1:430. Quoted in Elizabeth Fowler’s discussion of the implications of couverture for married women’s agency in “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70, no. 4 (1995): 770. Quoted in Fowler, “Civil Death,” 771. Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship (1558), ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 112. Quoted in Frances Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 45. See especially Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 3–4; and Jacob Klein, “The Stoic Argument from Oikei¯ osis,” 143–200. Klein translates the term as “appropriation.” He offers a useful general definition: “A thing or person is said to be oikei¯ on when it belongs to one either by kinship, as in the case of family, or by possession, as in the case of property” (149). Sarah Catherine Byers discusses Augustine’s use of the Stoic concept of oikeiosis in “Augustine’s Debt to Stoicism in the Confessions,” in

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77. 78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

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Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, ed. John Sellars (London: Routledge, 2016), chap. 4. Lee Patterson claims that Griselda’s “change in clothing … signifies a deliberate act of self-abnegation.” “The Necessity of History,” 197. Alex Dressler’s description of the use of the feminine in Roman philosophy aligns closely with my point here: “Women are/must be made primarily passive and embodied; passivity and embodiment, qua ‘effeminacy,’ are not a part of/must be excluded from the experience of the dominant Roman; the effeminate or subaltern figures of women there are/become the proper objects of male domination.” Personification and the Feminine, 2. Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles, 114–15. See Eve Sedgwick: “The same double meaning, tactile plus emotional, is already there in the word ‘touching’; equally it’s internal to the word ‘feeling.’” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 17. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotions, 2. The phrase comes from Jonathan Walters, “Invading the Roman Body,” 33. In his discussion of perseverance, Aquinas strikingly invokes the language of softness using the same Roman phrase “muliebria patientes” in reference to characteristics (and persons) that are opposed to perseverance, “for to be soft means to yield easily to touch.” Summa Theologiae, 2b. Q.138. Indeed, Aquinas says that patience is associated with courage as a subordinate to a major virtue. Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae.136.4. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae.136.1: “Unde Augustinus dicit, quod patientia hominis est qua mala aequo animo toleramus, idest since perturbation tristitiae, ne animo iniquo bona deseramus, per quae ad Meliora perveniamus.” For Chaucer’s Parson, patience is specifically a “remedie agayns Ire”: the patient person “is nat wroth for noon harm that is doon to hym”. “The Parson’s Tale,” l. 658. The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1933), 296. Kaster, “The Taxonomy of Patience,” 137. Kaster, “Taxonomy of Patience,” 139. He also notes that in Virgil’s Aeneid “the very notion of female (‘femineum’) can adequately be glossed by impatiens alone” (139). Kaster, “Taxonomy of Patience,” 138. Kaster, “Taxonomy of Patience,” 138. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Q.136, italics mine. This view of Christ’s patience seems directly related to the medieval absorption of Stoic apatheia into a theory of divine apatheia. See Summerson, Divine Scripture, 26.

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91. For the Parson, as for Aquinas and Augustine, it is important to distinguish true patience from mere acrastic nonresponsiveness. When he emphasizes the relationship between obedience and patience, therefore, the Parson also clarifies its connection to righteousness: “Obedience generally is to perfourme the doctrine of God and of his sovereyns, to whiche hym oghte to ben obeisaunt in all rightwisnesse” (“Parson’s Tale,” Poetical Works of Chaucer, 675, italics mine). 92. Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles, 115. 93. Glenn Burger (Conduct Becoming, 175) also homes in on the Clerk’s use of “sad,” but with a different focus. Burger emphasizes the positive connection between sadness and the virtue of steadfastness, which arises from “a productive synergy between the sexes and the gendered roles they inhabit within the married estate.” Conduct Becoming, 182. 94. Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles, 116–17. 95. Petrarch, My Secret Book, 174–76. 96. Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, esp. chap. 2. 97. Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 95. 98. Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 95. 99. Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles, 128. 100. Petrarch, Rerum Senilium, 195. 101. Petrarch, Rerum Senilium, 195. 102. Petrarch, Rerum Senilium, 195. 103. Petrarch, Rerum Senilium, 195. 104. Petrarch, Rerum Senilium, 195. 105. Very similar instruction on how to respond to painful texts or circumstances is offered by the sixteenth-century Stoic Justus Lipsius in his influential De Constantia (1584): “An tu virtutem ullam in mollitie et abiectione animi esse censes? Utne ingemsicas? Ut suspires? Ut verba fracta et tertiata cum lugente misceas? Erras” (Do you suppose there is any virtue in softness and baseness of mind? In how you groan? In how you sigh? In how you share broken, stammering words with someone who mourns? You’re wrong [italics mine]). Justus Lipsius’ Concerning Constancy, ed. and trans. R. V. Young, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 389 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2011), 56–57. 106. James Wimsatt, “The Virgin Mary and the Two Coronations of Griselda,” Mediaevala 6 (1980): 187–207. 107. Dolores Warwick Frese also discusses the significance of the “lactic markers” for the removal of the children. “The Buried Bodies,” 254. 108. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. know, 7; and s.v sad, 5. https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 109. See William Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 147–48, for a discussion

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118.

119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

124.

125. 126.

127.

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of the symbolic conflation of the hunting “assay” with the testing of Gawain’s integrity as knight. Marvin, Hunting Law, 157. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 261. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 269. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 284. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 26. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. sad, 3d. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/dictionary Burger, Conduct Becoming, 179. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 65. Kristeva develops her notion of the semiotic in conjunction with Freud’s concept of primary processes. Black Sun, 264n24. Gary P. Cestaro writes similarly: “For as Kristeva shows in her theory of the semiotic body, poetry is precisely what challenges and upends linguistic rules, normative syntax, and rational categorizing—in a word, grammar.” Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 55. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, 55. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, 55–56. Petrarch, Remedies for Fortunes Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation of De Remediis, vol. 1, essay 90, trans. Conrad Rawski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 90. Le Livre de Griseldis, 153, 155. While Petrarch concedes in passing that Griselda may have been sad (tristis ), he immediately claims that she was unaffected by the news (inconcussa). For an account of this removal in relation to Griselda’s allusion to Job, see Allyson Newton, “The Occlusion of Maternity in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Routledge, 2013), 63–77. Le Livre de Griseldis, 159. Dinshaw also notes that the line is “augmented by Chaucer to include her virginity,” indicating “a figurative equation between her faith and her naked, inviolate body.” More generally, Dinshaw argues that Griselda “reads herself as an allegorical image. … But at the same time she gives us a sense of what it feels like to be made into a figure of speech.” Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 146–47. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 147.

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128. Chaucer seems to draw on the Livre de Griseldis here, which specifies similarly that the old clothing does not fit because Griselda “estoit devenue grande et embarnie” (l. 346). 129. Patterson, “Necessity of History,” 201. 130. For a fuller discussion of the allusions to rape in the “Merchant’s Tale,” see Elaine Tuttle Hanson, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), chap. 9. 131. Burger notes similarly that the double swoon creates a context in which “the Clerk allows us to see how Griselda might also embody a pre-social, pre-individual affective remainder that has the potential to produce ‘an upheaval of thought’ on the part of the Clerk and his readers.” Conduct Becoming, 183. 132. Burger, Conduct Becoming, 186. 133. Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect,” 273. 134. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. swappen, 1 and 3. https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary 135. Chaucer, The Squire’s Tale, in The Poetical Works of Chaucer, 154–163. 136. Le Livre de Griseldis, 128–29. 137. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 288. 138. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§244–71. 139. Newton argues similarly that Walter strives to remove all traces of maternal influence from his lineage, establishing a patriarchy that “ensures the smooth, uninterrupted transmission of phallic power in lineage and succession.” “Occlusion of Maternity,” 69. 140. Howell Chickering, “Form and Interpretation in the ‘Envoy’ to the ‘Clerk’s Tale,’” Chaucer Review 29, no. 4 (1995): 360.

CHAPTER 6

“When You Are Gentle”: Emotional Exercitives and Affective Injustice in Taming of the Shrew

“Advise” was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power. —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park I never yet did hear / That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear. —William Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3.219

Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew maps out in particularly stark terms, from its title onward, the early modern effort to control and restrain female access to emotive language. More specifically, the play dramatizes Petruccio’s successful effort to limit the “shrew”’s ability to articulate her anger in words—that is, to form the kind of emotive that is considered especially transgressive for a female speaker. In this sense, then, the play acts as a particularly clear case study for examining the culturally specific structure of gendered affective injustice—the effort to discredit or even block female emotive speech. Drawing on my reading of Chaucer’s account of Griselda in the previous chapter, I will explore the play’s representation of the attempt to fashion Kate as a “second Grissel” whose enforced Stoic patience aims to eradicate her own will—in the sense of emotional assent—in favor of her husband’s. Building on Mary Kate McGowan’s discussion of the specific type of speech act called “exercitives,” or utterances that, in McGowan’s words, “determine what is permissible in a certain realm,” I will argue that Petruccio’s persistent © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_6

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use of what I am calling “emotional exercitives” ultimately deprives Kate of the ability to express her own feelings in her utterances, that is, to utter agential emotives.1 The play crucially makes clear that Petruccio is only successful in this endeavor because of the link between conversational or “covert” exercitives and the systemic gender oppression of which his utterances are a part—specifically, in this case, the early modern system of marriage.2 As Petruccio gains increasingly institutionalized exercitive power over her, Kate’s access to emotive expression dwindles into embodied and largely impacted affect which nonetheless, I suggest, finds alternative, disruptive pathways through the prosody of her final, puppet-like speech. While I agree with Michael Schoenfeldt’s important claim that the early modern period embraces a “Neostoic privileging of self-control, whereby physical and psychological health is imagined to derive from the capacity to control rather than vent emotion,” I argue that this ideal is deployed differentially in highly gendered ways.3 As the play shows, Petruccio uses his patriarchal privilege as well-connected suitor and then husband to enforce Kate’s emotional self-control while himself performing emotional selfindulgence, ensuring that she has no access to the emotives that would allow her to vent potentially toxic affective buildup.

Performing Power in the Induction As numerous critics have noted, the Induction of Taming of the Shrew provides significant insight into the play’s later treatment of the intersection of power and gendered identity.4 Planning to “practice” (Induction 1.32) on the drunken Sly to induce him to believe he is not a beggar but a “mighty lord,” the Lord plans steps to ensure he will “forget himself” (Induction, 1.37).5 A crucial element of their plan to restructure Sly’s reality is the presentation of the page, Bartholomew, as his lady wife: Tell him from me, as he will win my love, He bear himself with honourable action Such as he hath observed in noble ladies Unto their lords by them accomplished. (Induction, 1.105–8)

Bartholomew’s performance of femininity foregrounds the subordination of “her” will to his: “What is thy will with her?” (Induction, 2.100).

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His obedient echoing of Sly’s language confirms his status as lord. Sly: “Are you my wife, and will not call me husband?” (Induction, 2.101). Barth: “My husband and my lord, my lord and husband; I am your wife in all obedience” (Induction, 2.103). Indeed, it is the mere existence of a beautiful “wife” that first prompts Sly to exclaim, “I am a lord indeed” (Induction, 2.7). This playacting emphasizes not only the contingent, discursive nature of identity, but also (and relatedly) the predication of a fragile masculinity on a gendered linguistic hierarchy—apparent not only between Sly and his echoing “wife,” but also between the powerful lord and the socially inferior and dependent Sly: “He is no less than what we say he is ” (Induction, 1.67, italics mine). This gendered linguistic control of reality will be central to Petruccio’s “taming” of Kate. As a foil to Kate, Bianca proves her mastery of the social codes of femininity by adopting a subordinate posture reminiscent of Bartholomew’s (and of course, like Bartholomew, the actor playing Bianca is also a boy): she speaks to her father with all the reverence and submissiveness required of contemporary conduct handbooks: “Sir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe” (1.1.81).6 Far from echoing her father’s or suitors’ words, or suiting herself to their pleasure, Kate enters into a stichomythic flyting contest with Petruccio, in which she more than holds her own until she runs up against Petruccio’s discursive social power, which I analyze below. Prior to engaging with Kate, Petruccio confides to the audience his plan to exert linguistic control over her: Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly washed with dew. …………………………………………… If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks As though she bid me stay by her a week. If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day When I shall ask the banns, and when me married. (2.1.168–78)

Like the Lord in the Induction, Petruccio announces his intention to take full discursive control of Kate’s reality. Most significant in this speech is his announcement of an intention to inhibit Kate’s ability to refuse him: he will not allow her to “bid [him] pack”; he will not allow her to “deny

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to wed.” As we will see, it is not that he will prevent Kate at first from uttering these or similar words, but rather that he will ensure they have no real effect in the world: in the terms developed by J. L. Austin, his statements will deprive her words of their perlocutionary force. In doing so, they effectively silence her by creating linguistic conditions such that her speech, though uttered, is not heard as meaningful assertion.7 Later, once he and Kate are married, his linguistic silencing will become more overt, as his authority over her is institutionalized and socially accepted.

“Will You, Nill You”: Linguistic Silencing and Emotional Exercitives Kate is at first more than equal to parry Petruccio’s aggressive word play in this scene. She jumps on his puns with bitter alacrity: P: Women are made to bear, and so are you. K: No such jade as you, if me you mean. (2.1.198–99)

And she is quick enough to finish his lines with a smart rebuff. These echoes of Petruccio’s speech are not the meek, obedient echo of the ideal wife (as per Bartholomew), but instead mocking, punning echoes that work to subvert or ironize Petruccio’s intended meanings: P: Should be?—should buzz. K: Well ta’en, like a buzzard. P: O slow-winged turtle, shall a buzzard take thee? K: Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard. (2.1.204–6)

But as he had earlier threatened, Petruccio redescribes Katherine, at first just to herself: For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, But slow in speech, yet sweet as springtime flowers. (2.1.238–39)

Clearly Kate’s speech is neither sweet nor slow. Such bald manipulation of the relationship between signifier and signified poses what at first

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appears to be a mere private annoyance to Kate, who frankly tells him off: “Go fool, and whom thou keep’st command” (2.1.250). But statements that pose as (albeit) ironic constative (descriptive) utterances in context are in fact closer to the type of performative utterance that Austin calls exercitives, precisely because they deliberately do not describe an actual state of affairs, but rather coercively try to reframe reality according to the speaker’s own desires or agenda. Exercitives advocate that something should be so rather than estimate that it is actually so; their goal may be to compel, allow, or disallow certain acts.8 Petrucchio’s language in this scene has exercitive force in the sense that it creates expectations and rules—whether or not Kate initially follows them—for her possible responses, deliberately disrupting the intentionality of her utterances and thus effectively attenuating the fit between her words and the world. Drawing on David Lewis’s analysis of gamelike features of language, Mary Kate McGowan likens a conversation to a rule-driven game, in which each player makes certain moves, and each move has exercitive effect on what may come next.9 Up until this point in their conversation, the two players seem to be on a level playing field. But just before Baptista’s appearance in the scene, Petruccio abruptly changes the tone and the nature of their conversational “game,” revealing a new and powerful hand: Thus in plain terms: your father hath consented That you shall be my wife, your dowry ’greed on, And will you, nill you, I will marry you. (2.1.261–63)

The shift Petruccio calls a use of “plain terms” actually reveals the power behind his exercitives—a patriarchal system that renders women “chattel.” His declaration that “will you, nill you, I will marry you” has exercitive force because it is embedded in the oppressive context he describes: a financial bargain between himself and Kate’s father. As Sara Ahmed notes (drawing on Max Weber), “Power involves the capacity to carry out an action despite the will of others. … Power could be understood in terms of the expression ‘willy nilly’ (related to the Latin expression nolens volens ) which refers to something that is done with or without the will of the person concerned.”10 Petruccio’s statement thus crucially defines his power as the ability to overrule utterly the will, which we have analyzed historically as a form of emotional “assent,” of his antagonist,

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Kate. This power intensifies in the explicit exercitive he utters just as Baptista enters the scene: “Here comes your father. Never make denial ” (2.1.271, italics mine). Making good on his promise to the audience, Petruccio’s move here establishes the answer “no” as impermissible in this particular language game. What the audience knows, but Kate does not, is that a conversation has already taken place between Petruccio and Kate’s father—a conversation that explicitly discusses the material advantages to both of them of this match. Petruccio presents himself as a desirable suitor: P: You knew my father well, and in him me, Left solely heir to all his lands and goods, Which I have bettered rather than decreased. Then tell me, if I get your daughter’s love, What dowry shall I have with her to wife? B: After my death the one half of my lands, And in possession twenty thousand crowns. P: And for that dowry I’ll assure her of Her widowhood, be it that she survive me, In all my lands and leases whatsoever. (2.1.114–21)

Although Baptista claims, in addition, that Petruccio must also obtain Kate’s love, Petruccio immediately replies, “That is nothing. … For I am rough, and woo not like a babe” (2.1.128). Kate’s love does turn out to be nothing, in the sense that Petruccio’s deployment of verbal coercion (“roughness”) creates a linguistic environment in which she can neither meaningfully affirm nor deny the existence of love on her own behalf. Petruccio’s linguistic manipulation gains a new force in the presence of others who constitute a public for what was previously a private, and seemingly inconsequential, exchange. In this newly public sphere, Kate realizes that Petruccio’s exercitives have real social force. His adjuration to “never make denial” becomes her reality, as her father chooses to skirt past her distress, which he nonetheless does see: “Why how now, Katherine— in your dumps?” (2.1.276). The expression “in the dumps” refers to a “fit of melancholy or depression,”11 and thus clearly signals that Baptista has seen his daughter’s emotion, which she subsequently expresses as anger: “You have shown a tender fatherly regard, / To wish me wed to one half-lunatic” (2.1.278). Petruccio’s response carefully both cancels Kate’s emotive and signals the futility of her offering further resistance.

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He first resumes his discursive reconstruction of her identity, now explicitly invoking the figure of Griselda: “She is not hot, but temperate as the morn. / For patience she will prove a second Grissel” (2.1.286–87). Interestingly, he does not claim here that she is a second Grissel, but rather that she will prove one, where “prove” has the sense of being tested or assessed (recalling the marquis’s “assay” of Griselda)12 ; in the context of the allusion to Griselda the implicit reference to trial or testing has a sinister exercitive force, implying that, as in that case, Kate will have no choice but to check her independent “desires and wishes” at the door. Secondly, but no less damagingly, he denies the truth of her public statements by claiming that her “shrewish” behavior is purely performative, an agreed-upon act: ’Tis bargained ’twixt us twain, being alone, That she shall still be curst in company. I tell you, ’tis incredible to believe How much she loves me. (2.1.296)

This move is analogous to Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever’s example of linguistic silencing in their book Bad Language, in which a director times a shift to improvisatory playacting to obscure an actor’s claim she has been poisoned. In similar fashion, Petruccio establishes a linguistic framework for Kate’s utterances that drains them of all perlocutionary power. As Cappelen and Dever write, “There are necessary social conditions for making an assertion,” and in cases in which “the audience lacks this readiness [to take on board the asserted information], assertion becomes impossible.”13 We can understand Kate’s emotion language as a kind of assertion, in this sense. Whatever she says, however she resists his claims, will be heard by the audience through the frame that she is playacting the shrew, as “bargained” between them; the silencing she experiences is, like the example in Bad Language, “genuinely linguistic” in nature. But it is important to note here that his superior credibility is gender based, rooted in the patriarchal system that does indeed view daughters as fretful “commodity.” Like the lord who ensures that Sly is inducted into a “play” without his knowledge, Petruccio becomes the director of Kate’s unwilling “performance.” But without her emotional community’s (and especially Baptista’s) complicity in this system, Kate’s denials and refusals would not lose power as quickly and thoroughly as they do. It is therefore

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important for the audience—despite the superficial humor of this scene— to step outside of the emotional community presented onstage in order to “hear the violence that converts no into yes.”14 In publicly converting Kate’s “no” into a “yes,” Petruccio forces a kind of social reckoning; in spite of Baptista’s pro forma claim that he must first gain Kate’s love and presumably her consent, the scene in fact demonstrates the impact of a social “history whereby men give themselves permission to hear no as yes, to assume women are willing, whatever women say, a history that is central to the injustice of the law.”15 And as though acknowledging the futility of her situation, Katherine makes no further protestation or denial in this scene.

Canceling Emotives: Becoming Petruccio’s “Owene Thing” This modus operandi is typical of the emotional exercitives that Petruccio deploys as a central part of his “taming.”16 Faced with Petruccio’s refusal to stay at her father’s house for the wedding feast, Kate expresses her anger in a direct emotive: P: O Kate, content thee. Prithee, be not angry. K: I will be angry. What hast thou to do? (3.3.86)

Significantly, Petruccio’s first decisive move to demonstrate the real connection between exercitive utterances and real prohibitions on Kate’s behavior concerns a feast that he prevents her from attending: as we shortly see, the reach of Petruccio’s linguistic power extends to the interior of Kate’s body and specifically to her relationship with food. Here, her emotive statement “I will be angry” demonstrates her initial sense of her own linguistic resourcefulness. Unlike Griselda, she is at first ready and able to announce and label her emotion in an emotive utterance. As William Reddy has shown, rather than simply describing an internal state of affairs, “Emotives are similar to performatives … in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions.”17 In addition to their internal, “self-altering” effects, emotives also often have “relational intent”: “to speak about how one feels is, very often, to make an

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implicit offer or gift, to negotiate, to refuse, to initiate a plan or terminate it, to establish a tie or alter it.”18 Kate’s emotive utterance “I will be angry” precipitates a significant change—or perhaps clarification—in her situation, and surely reflects important relational goals in the uttering itself. The very fact that she so rapidly registers and translates her feeling into an emotive suggests a certain access to discursive power and confidence despite Petruccio’s relentless assault on her will. But she is nonetheless made to feel the actual impermissibility of this exercise of perlocutionary force in her newly married context. She barters her desire to stay against her husband’s love, testing it: “If you love me, stay,” to which he cruelly responds: “I am content you shall entreat me stay, / But yet not stay, entreat me how you can” (3.3.75–76). Kate attempts to construct her own exercitive here, advocating in a forceful linguistic move for the particular outcome she desires, but Petruccio’s mocking turn on her language from “entreat me stay” to “but yet not stay” reveals her lack of authority to do so. Exercitive force is built on actual, social power, which ultimately disregards the other person’s will in the accomplishment of one’s own. It is in this context, in which Petruccio implicitly seems to reject her plea for love, that Kate utters her expression of anger. The auxiliary “will” here does not indicate futurity but rather signifies, in this first-person usage, “an implication of intention, volition, or choice.”19 The emotive is the expression of that will. Kate is verbally digging her heels in and stating that she will feel her anger (and express it), despite Petruccio’s plea, “Prithee, be not angry.” Kate’s invocation of her “will” in this formulation of her emotive recalls the longstanding association of the emotions with the will (in its Augustinian sense): “For what is desire or joy but an act of will in sympathy with those things that we wish, and what is fear or grief but an act of will in disagreement with the things that we do not wish?” (CG, 14.6). In Reddy’s terms, Kate’s emotive seems to have clear relational intent: she is negotiating with Petruccio (“if you love me”) but also countering with a statement of her own strongly felt feeling. Petruccio’s response reveals that his earlier use of courteous language (“Prithee”) is a ruse. In response to the implicit bargaining stance of Kate’s emotive, he reveals that bargaining is not in his playbook: “But for my bonny Kate, she must with me. … I will be master of what is mine own” (3.3.98–100). In other words, you don’t have to negotiate with something you own. Like the Marquis in Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale,” who forces Griselda to recognize that she is no more than his “owene thing,” Petruccio is annexing

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his wife to enlarge his own sphere of selfhood—the “ownness” reminiscent of Stoic oikei¯osis.20 While Griselda recognizes (correctly) that the Marquis has power of life and death over her and her children: “My child and I with hertely obeisaunce / Ben yours al, and ye mowe save or spille / Youre owene thing ” (502–4, italics mine), Kate’s emotive performs a short-lived autonomy, both in its willfulness (“I will”) and its expressive work. The ultimate social source of Petruccio’s linguistic control of Kate is similarly the so-called law of coverture in which married women’s identities were subsumed into their husbands’, or as William Blackstone succinctly puts it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765): “The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover she performs every thing. … And her condition during the marriage is called coverture.”21 For this reason, the husband “cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.”22 The everyday effects of this erasure of the wife’s autonomy emerge in contemporary conduct manuals, so that Robert Cleaver suggests in his Godly Form of Household Government (1598) that “in a well ordered household there must be a communication and consent of counsel and will between the husband and the wife, yet such as the counsel and commandment may rest with the husband.”23 By the same token, the law refused to recognize any right to autonomous decisionmaking on the part of women, once married: “The law will not allow anything done by her during the marriage to be good.”24 In this unanswered moment Petruccio shows Kate that she does not have the space for self-exploration or negotiation with him that the emotive presupposes, because she is now a part of his “own” self—and as Blackstone says, how can one bargain or undertake a meaningful negotiation with oneself? And although the scene makes room for discussion and reaction from Baptista, Gremio, Tranio, and Lucentio, Kate does not utter another word. It is significant that the canceled emotive that heralds the beginning of Kate’s marriage is an assertion of anger rather than some other emotion. Within the medieval and early modern schema, which itself originated with Plato and Aristotle, the passions of the sensitive appetite were divided into two kinds, the concupiscible and the irascible.25 While concupiscible passions registered either desire or avoidance in relation to an object, the irascible passions arose in recognition of an obstacle or difficulty to be overcome. According to Aquinas, anger, as an irascible passion, arises

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from sorrow triggered by a present evil and to a perceived thwarting of one’s aims.26 An element of active striving to overcome a source of sadness is thus integral to anger: “The motion of anger does not arise except because of some sorrow endured and unless there is desire and hope for revenge.”27 As Rosenwein points out, anger is never an end in itself, nor can it be a resting point: “The irascible passions must end in the concupiscible because only the concupiscible can rest.”28 Anger is not a steady state, but aims at something else, such as revenge; once that aim is achieved, anger subsides into joy.29 Partly because it is a sign of striving and discontent, then—a sign that one has independent aims in the world—anger marks Kate’s step outside of the emotional script of femininity. While sorrow may be a recognizable feminine passion, the struggle to overcome the possible response to sorrow, anger, is not. Matthew Kellison writes in 1603 that the Philosopher saide truely, that anger is the whet-stone vnto fortitude: and Basill called it a nerve or tendon of the soule, giving it courage and constancie, and that which is remisse and tender otherwise, hardening it as it were with iron and steele, to make it goe thorough with her businesse. To bee angrie (saith Ierome) is the part of a man [italics mine].30

Helkiah Crooke concedes that some kinds of anger belong to women (he calls these “fretfulnesse or pettishness”), but in this context it is considered a “disease of a weake mind which cannot moderate it selfe but is easily inflamed, such are women, children, and weake and cowardly men [italics mine].”31 A man who is angry demonstrates heroic wrath, but a woman who is angry is “fretful” or “pettish.” Anger, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. As we have seen, the woman’s soul or mind was believed to be precisely “remisse and tender,” lacking the pneumatic (or nervous) strength to harden into true anger or courage—what Crooke calls “wrath,” which “is Ira permanens ” and “belongs to stout heartes.”32 He continues: “If therefore women are Nockthrown or easily mooued of the hindges, that they haue from their cold Temper, and from the impotencie and weaknes of their mind, because they are not able to lay a law vpon themselues.”33 These passages demonstrate clearly how the norms of an emotional community can determine the meaning of particular emotions in relation to particular speakers; anger in a woman is not proper anger, it is a weak “pettishness” arising from her “cold temper” and what Crooke elsewhere calls her “rare, and laxe, and moist” body

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(to be compared with the “thicke and thight” body of a man).34 Levinus Lemnius similarly attributes the alleged fact that “a woman enraged, is beside her selfe, and hath not power over her self, so that she cannot rule her passions, or bridle her disturbed affections” to his understanding of female constitution: “I can find no nearer cause that can be imagined, than the venim and collections of humours that she every month heaps together and purgeth forth by the course of the moon.”35 Women, by this reckoning, “are pevish [sic] creatures most-what, but nothing stout or strong-hearted though their stomachs be good.”36 Taking a slightly different tack, Edward Reynolds’s comment that “anger ever ariseth from the value we set upon ourselves” suggests that women have no business being angry, since their role is to echo their husbands’ speech and opinions rather than valuing their own.37

“I Know You Have a Stomach”: Destabilizing Affects from Within The final stage of Petruccio’s taming occurs at his own house, where we see in microcosm the ground rules of Kate’s emotional community, centered on patriarchal marriage. In this newly isolated context, the focus of his exercitive utterances expands and intensifies (given his newly legal power to dominate Kate as his wife) to include not just what passes out of Kate’s mouth as words but also what passes into it in the form of food. Linguistic control extends to include, indeed merges with, bodily control. This intersection of the verbal with the material/bodily will turn out to be an important indicator of the profound impact of Petruccio’s taming, which will operate on Kate’s internal pneumatic-affective systems. Soon after they arrive at the house, Petruccio resumes his performatively civil treatment of Kate, ostensibly inviting her to eat: “Come, Kate, sit down, I know you have a stomach” (4.1.139). As Jan Purnis points out, in addition to the usual modern meaning of stomach, the term could also refer to “anger or ill-will, pride or stubbornness, and courage or bravery, all of which were characteristics of choler.”38 Reynolds writes accordingly that “hasty, pettish, and fretfull Anger” proceeds “from a Nature Leavened and habituated with Choler, which is presently stirred and provoked.”39 By association, the stomach was sometimes considered more generally a seat of the passions, particularly deep and hidden ones.40 As a gastric juice, choler or yellow bile was associated with the stomach and digestion; it was also believed to make the body hot and dry—features primarily

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of the male body.41 Excess choler, therefore, is the material cause of the “properly” masculine passion of anger or wrath. After quashing her earlier anger emotive, Petruccio continues to invoke, and punish, Kate’s ability to express anger. As Purnis argues, Petruccio ostensibly uses the humoral associations to justify banishing the meat which he has just offered Kate: I tell thee, Kate, ’twas burnt and dried away, And I expressly am forbid to touch it, For it engenders choler, planteth anger, And better ’twere that both of us did fast, Since of ourselves ourselves are choleric, Than feed it with such overroasted flesh. (4.1.151–56)42

Petruccio seems to repeat, albeit in more tangible form, his earlier pattern with covert exercitive utterances. While earlier he counterfactually describes Kate as “passing courteous” and “slow of speech” to serve his own ends, he here describes meat as burnt that, based on Kate’s puzzled reaction (“The meat was well”) probably isn’t. These are not disinterested constative (descriptive) utterances but rather performative utterances that deliberately advocate for a specific outcome by redescribing reality in a coercive way. The effect of Petruccio’s exercitive utterances in this instance is to deny Kate permission to eat under the polite guise of including himself in a prohibition ostensibly aimed at their mutual good: “better ’twere that both of us did fast.” The denial of food, however, is a screen for the deeper goal of the emotional exercitive implied here: to block Kate’s access to her anger. By referring in passing to the fact that the food “engenders choler” and that they themselves “are choleric,” he clarifies that her anger has no legitimate or acceptable outlet. Since he is a particularly forceful (and self-indulgently angry) master of the house, his claim that he himself is “expressly … forbid to touch it” is not itself credible but allows him to smuggle in prohibition without overt aggression. In terms of the standard Austinian exercitive, Petruccio has rendered eating this meat impermissible at the same time as prohibiting any display of “choler” on Kate’s part. In terms of McGowan’s covert, or conversational exercitive, he has made it impermissible for Kate to respond in her speech with anger or resistance. Again, taking away food and taking away linguistic access to emotion seem identified here.

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Despite the lack of overt physical violence evident in other shrew taming tales, Petruccio’s invasion of Kate’s interior experience is aggressive.43 Kate herself seems to acknowledge that Petruccio’s own speech is a form of interior violence when she protests that she is “with brawling fed” (4.3.10) and chides Grumio: “Get thee gone, thou false, deluding slave, / That feed’st me with the very name of meat” (4.3.32–33). Not only this, but the servant Curtis notes that Petruccio also “rails, and swears, and rates” (4.2.165) at Kate in private. In the absence of meat, Kate is as it were fed by the ear with these “brawling” words, a disruptive diet likely to create its own dangers for a “choleric” person. Petruccio’s substitution of his own “brawling” words for actual food is likely to be highly disruptive, as Thomas Elyot’s discussion of fasting suggests: to a cholerike persone, it is ryght daungerous, to vse longe abstynence: for choler, fyndynge nothyng in the stomacke to concocte, it fareth than, as where a lyttell potage or mylke, beynge in a vessell ouer a great fyre, it is burned to the vesselle, and vnsauery fumes and vapours do issue oute therof. Lykewyse in a cholerike stomake, by abstinence, these inconueniences doo happen, humours adust, consumynge of naturall moysture, fumosities and stynkynge vapours, ascendynge vp to the heed, wherof is ingendred, duskynge of the eyes, heed aches, hot and thynne reumes, after euerye lyttell surfette, and many other inconueniences.44

As this passage suggests, diet was understood to have far-reaching effects spreading widely throughout the body and mind.45 By destabilizing Kate’s system of exchange with the world (whether via food or speech), Petruccio interferes with her affective state, potentially creating “adust humours” and other bodily disturbances that will, in turn, affect the mind. In so doing, Petruccio demonstrates the permeability and vulnerability of Kate’s interior sense of self; as Michael Schoenfeldt puts it in his discussion of digestion, “The porousness of the stomach is symptomatic of the overall porousness of the individual.”46 This, in conjunction with the brawling that Petruccio substitutes for food, perhaps explains at a physiological level why Kate seems so bemused: “she, poor soul, / Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak, / And sits as one new risen from a dream” (4.2.165–67). Early modern views of the voice as a penetrative substance that enters the “inbred” air of the hearer’s ear as a material carrier of the speaker’s own spiritual substance establishes Kate’s subjection to Petruccio’s

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“railing” as materially intrusive and violent.47 In his 1650 lecture The Art of Well Speaking , Balthazar Gerbier describes how the “spirituall soule” of the voice uses a “corporeall robe” to enter the body, where it is “conveyed unto our intelectuall parts, and there manifests it selfe, as in a true draught, the very being, thoughts, conceptions, desires, inclinations, and the other Spiritual passions of him that speaketh.”48 On this view, as Gina Bloom writes, “The effectiveness of speech is virtually entirely dependent on the intentions of the speaker.”49 Thomas Wright’s comment about the penetrative power of the voice confirms this view: “Passion … pierceth the eare, and thereby the heart; for a flexible and pliable voice … conveyeth the passion most aptly [italics mine].”50 The ear, Wright suggests, provides immediate access for the infiltrating passions of another person—just as in Hamlet the ghost describes being poisoned by a “leperous distilment” administered “in the porches of [his] ears” (Hamlet, 1.5.63–64). As in Hamlet, the sexual connotations of this enforced aural piercing also seem operative. Helkiah Crooke and others repeatedly confirm the vulnerability of the ear to damaging penetration via what Crooke calls the “hole of hearing,” suggesting a sexual undertone to Petruccio’s persistent aural assault.51 In the context of this interrupted wedding festival—Petruccio forbids the feast and withholds sex—the etymological connection between the stomach and the Greek stoma (mouth) contribute to the underlying sexual implications of Petruccio’s manipulation of food and speech. As Giulia Sissa has shown, in Greek discourse, “the mouth (stoma) through which food is ingested and through which speech emanates corresponds to the ‘mouth’ (stoma) of the uterus.”52 Similarly, the stomach (gaster) was similarly conflated with the womb.53 A similar parallelism between upper and lower “mouths” is of course visible in early modern discourse and is at the root of the conjunction between silence and chastity.54 The analogy indicates a potential metaphoric conflation of food and male seed—as evidenced in the Duchess of Malfi’s highly sexualized consumption of the green “apricock” that catalyzes her labor and discloses her hidden pregnancy.55 Although Petruccio is withholding the pneumatic substance of sex (semen), he is subjecting Kate to a different kind of pneumatic penetration, fashioning her as a listener unable to repel his words, just as she will presumably be unable to repel his sexual advances in a world in which her “no” will always be converted to “yes.” As the metaphoric connections between hearing, eating, and sexuality suggest, the hearer should ideally be able to control what she ingests. In his

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Anatomie of a Christian Man, William Cowper writes that “as the mouth tastes the meat and lets none goe downe to the stomack, unless it be approved; so the eare of the godly tastes words, and lets none go downe to the soule which is not from God.”56 The ability of the ear to “taste” and filter out words, like the ability of the will to assent or not to the impulse of an incoming impression, is central to individual bodily and psychic autonomy. But in strategically overriding Kate’s ability either to filter out the relentless railing, swearing, oaths, and clamor (“And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl / And with the clamour keep her still awake”; 4.2.187–88) or to choose her own food, Petruccio prepares the way for a more complete overriding of her will.

Concocting the Passions: Digestion, Venting, and Transpiration in Words As we saw earlier, the passions belong to the category of the so-called non-naturals, environmental entities like food or air that need to be metabolized, absorbed, managed, and processed, their content either excreted or retained. The physician Everard Maynwaringe couples the passions and digestion in his discussion of the impact of the passions on general health, arguing that vehement desire for anything causes the soul to contract and exhaust itself; as a result, “concoction now is not so good. … The Stomack calls not for a new supply.”57 For Thomas Wright, digestion—in the root sense of separate or purify—is a process that extends to the passions themselves. If the passions are not suitably dispelled, “the heart being possessed by such an humour, cannot digest well the blood and spirits, which ought to be dispersed thorow the whole body, but converteth them into melancholy, the which humour being cold and drie, dryeth the whole body, and maketh it wither away [italics mine].”58 Failure properly to digest and “concoct,” whether in relation to incoming sensory impressions or food, causes blockage and intersecting, systemic harm.59 The codependence of these processes arises from their intersection with the same pneumatic system that facilitates all interaction between parts of the body—the spirits that make up the “love-knot” between mind and body, “which after being dispersed thorow the body, cause a good concoction to be made in al partes, helping them to expel the superfluities; they also cleare the braine, and consequently, the understanding [italics mine].”60 As we saw earlier, one effect of Petruccio’s

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manipulation of Kate’s physical inputs and outputs is confusion and bewilderment. At its most fundamental level, successful concoction in both digestive and passionate contexts indicates transformation along an axis directed toward both greater purification and greater absorption—from food to tissue, from external object to equanimous psychic reaction—by means of the spirits’ pneumatic power. Interruption of this process causes humoral imbalance, confusion, and a variety of bodily ills. And if it is true, as Schoenfeldt remarks, that the early modern stomach is viewed as “the master of the house … upon whose strength all the other digestions depend,” we can perhaps understand Petruccio’s determination to subdue and dominate Kate’s “stomach” as central to his overall mastery of all her bodily systems.61 In humoral medicine, the term “concoction” can denote both the absorptive digestive process that produces chyle to be “made lyke to the substaunce of the body,” and the excretory process, “the ripening of morbific matter, fitting it for elimination from the body.”62 Most broadly, Galen views concoction as a way for nature to elaborate and purify material, whether digestive or psychic.63 When John Donne considers Augustine’s “inordinate” mourning for his mother as arising from a love that is “perchance indigested, uncocted, and retaining yet some crudities,” his language seems to suggest that passion, like food, must be thoroughly cooked (cocted or concocted) to separate out and remove the “crudities,” or morbid by-products.64 Edward Reynolds seems to use the term in just this way in his discussion of grief: It is wise advice which learned Men give, to let Griefes have a time to breath, and not endeavour the stopping of them, while they are in Impetu, and in their first rising. As Phisitians suffer humours to ripen, and gather to some head before they apply medicines unto them. When time hath a little concocted Griefe … It doth then willingly admit of those remedies (italics mine).65

Helkiah Crooke refers to the most attenuated form of concoction qua excretion as “transpiration”; this occurs through the pores of the skin and is a process through which “the excrements of the third concoction which have no other, might this way have egresse or avoidance.” Crooke clarifies that for those whose pores are “narrower or streighter … doe easily incurre diseases thereby,” because “the excrements are retayned.”66 “All bodies,” he writes later, “are Transpirable and Trans-fluxible, that

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is so open to the ayre that it may passe and repasse through them.”67 The air, like the passions, is a nonnatural, belonging to the body but not fully of it; circulating in the body but also needing vent. In the context of the passions, then, concoction seems to suggest both the absorption of the initiating impression, its “review,” but also the elimination, via the verbal transpiration of emotives, of potentially dangerous byproducts of the passion.68 Establishing the centrality of a process analogous to “concoction” in the affective sphere, Reynolds writes that those with “weak minds,” which he likens to “fickle and nauseating stomacks,” cannot properly discriminate among, or “digest,” incoming objects as items for appropriate emotional absorption or rejection.69 He likens what he calls the “secret work of concoction” to a “review of our meat” which distinguishes “that in them which the first Appetite tooke in a lumpe, and together.”70 Emotional “concoction” in the “weak minded,” he seems to imply, is like poor digestion that cannot distinguish between what is good and what is bad for us. Just as the Stoics believed that those with poor pneumatic tension could not withhold assent to incoming impressions and allowed the prepassions to overwhelm them, so Reynolds suggests that a failure of emotional concoction occurs in similar circumstances: in both cases the failure is a failure of filtering, or discrimination among external objects. Petruccio’s disruption of the process of concoction in the “master” organ, the stomach, can thus be understood as analogously disrupting emotional concoction, and especially the ability to grant or withhold assent to incoming impressions. In terms of the affect-emotion spectrum we have examined, this strategy would seem to keep feeling at the affective level, as it were “in a lumpe,” without access to the refining process that would allow feeling to proceed to a more fully conceptualized emotion. A variety of early modern texts, both literary and medical, attest to the need to “vent” or transpire superfluous affective energy—the second, excretory meaning of “concoction.” Aquinas acknowledges a need for venting sorrow in particular, writing that: “When [sorrow] is let out … it is then dispersed, and in that way the inner pain is diminished. And because of this, when people who sorrow show their sorrow outwardly in tears or groans or even words, the sorrow is lessened.”71 The narrator of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers a similar analysis of a passionate hydraulics when he compares the congestion of internal emotional pressure to other kinds of failed concoction:

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An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage; But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, The client breaks, as desperate in his suit. (331–36, italics mine)

Here the emotion in question is love, but other kinds of pent-up emotion also need release through words. Timothy Bright vividly describes the effect of anger’s contrary motions in the heart, by which it gathereth great heate within, which breathing out againe with reuenge, causeth through vehemency, & suddennesse of the motion, that boyling of heat, procured of anger: especially if it be not deliuered by word and deede, whereby liberty is giuen for the passion to breake foorth, which restrained in any sort, breedeth an agony of such feruency, as it may resemble the scalding of a boyling chaldron not vncouered, or an hote furnace closed vp in all vents [italics mine].72

These passages suggest that language itself offers the necessary “vent” for the building energy of emotions as if it were cooking in an internal oven (it is noteworthy that Virgil uses the same imagery in his discussion of Amata’s “feminine” cares [coquebant ]). She too is tightly constrained as to her socially legitimate linguistic vents for these cares. Bright’s passage also suggests a crucial intersection between the physical transpiration or venting that Crooke describes and its analogous form in the passionate context described in these passages; Crooke refers to the “heat of the heart” as that which “requireth no other ventilation but by transpiration, which is by the pores of the habit of the body.”73 The need for passion to break forth in words thus seems directly parallel in these passages to the role of transpiration in cooling the heart. In the selection from Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare refers to the “free vent of words” to ease the cares of love, while Bright speaks of the necessity of delivering “by word and deede” the “boyling of heat” produced by anger. Similarly, in Coriolanus, the mouth “vents” the heart’s anger: His heart’s his mouth: What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent; And, being angry, does forget ever

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He heard the name of death. (3.1.2057–60, italics mine)

While Coriolanus is permitted to express his masculine anger, Kate is increasingly unable to “concoct” her own affective experience into words. In his study of the therapeutic use of words in early modern texts to vent the passion of grief in particular, Michael Schoenfeldt comments on Malcom’s encouragement to Macduff to express his grief: “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak, / Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break (4.3.210–11).74 Commenting on these lines, Schoenfeldt writes: “Grief is imagined in terms of a pressure that builds up in the suffering subject and must be released through words or that subject will be harmed.”75 “Verbal ventilation,” he argues, “assumes the function of physiological purgation and recurs throughout the various scenes of grief that litter the Shakespearean corpus.”76 This notion of physiological purgation is importantly predicated on the mutual imbrication of the affects and voice within the pneumatic (spiritual) system. The pneumatic nature of both passionate “swelling” and vocal “venting” is clear in Phillipe de Mornay’s very similar account of his grief for his son (translated into English in 1609): “My spirit swells within me, and compells mee! Behold, my belly is as the wine that hath no vent. … Therefore I will speake (I thinke it bee best) that I may take some breath, against this abundant excesse of sorrowe.”77 Wine was considered a powerfully pneumatic substance, underscoring the spiritual nature of this economy of swelling and “venting.”78 But de Mornay’s Neostoic convictions force him into a battle with a process of venting that seems modeled on the physical transpiration that Crooke describes; rather than releasing the affective buildup in words he prays to submerge it within: “Lord, seale up my lippes: once more, here binde mine organs of speech; for the flesh rebels and compels me nor see I means to bridle it.”79 Thomas Wright’s comment that those who “slide … too much in their words … may well bee compared to new wine, that by venting bursteth the bottle” hints at the feminization that may attend such venting; he adds that “such commonly are with child with their owne conceits, and either they must be delivered of them, or they must die in child-bed.”80 In a passage that could be a commentary on de Mornay’s text, Reynolds writes: “That grief commonly is the most heavy, which hath fewest vents by which to diffuse it self: which, I take it, will be one occasion of the heaviness of infernall torment; because their Griefe shall not be any whit transient, to work

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commiseration in any spectator, but altogether immanent and reflexive upon it self.”81 In Petruccio’s house, Kate’s grief has few if any vents, but is rather wholly internal and “reflexive upon it self.”82 As she herself will later articulate, this reflexive process poses a very real danger of internal breakdown—of the broken heart she wishes to treat prophylactically with therapeutic words. In her gendered isolation—the lone woman in a house occupied by her husband and his male servants—Kate lacks female intimacy as well as the presumably male idealized friendships praised by Francis Bacon as the source of “the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce [italics mine].”83 The relationality of Bacon’s notion of “discharge” through friendship highlights the importance of a kind of interpersonal fungibility that Kate singularly lacks. As Schoenfeldt points out in relation to this passage, “Those who have no friends ‘to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.’”84 Allison Deutermann’s analysis of Hamlet’s obsessive soliloquies suggests something comparable: that in “venting passionate potentially wounding words into only his own ears” rather than discharging affect in a relational context, he “recycles and reabsorbs his own waste.”85 Kate of course is not even given the space for the venting that soliloquies provide; unlike Petruccio, she has no time alone on stage. As Bacon’s reference to the “ease and discharge” of blocked organs suggests, emotive language has a quasi-medicinal power to remove “morbific matter” by—in a sense—further concocting it: by processing irrepressible, physiologically based affect into more fully integrated emotion and, as it were, transpiring this matter through the mouth (as opposed to the pores). Philippe de Mornay’s insistent reference to the pneumatic structure of both affect and voice emphasizes their mutual imbrication with breath and thus with the aerating function of what Crooke calls transpiration. But as the difference in social context between Bacon’s imagined sufferer and Kate demonstrates, the therapeutic practice of “venting” an emotion in words is not in fact universally accessible and should be considered a highly gendered phenomenon. The very possibility of such emotive “venting” is tied up with the questions of affective injustice evident in the intricate network of exercitive utterances in the play.

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“My Tongue Will Tell the Anger of My Heart”: Venting, Voice, and Heartbreak It is worth pausing to consider in more detail how from an early modern perspective emotives could function to vent the affective build up in the heart. Voice was thought to participate in the circulation of aerated spirit (pneuma) and to act as a vehicle for conveying outward what Aristotle terms “sound characteristic of what has soul in it” and “sound with meaning (phon¯e semantik¯e)” (De Anima, 420b.6; 420b.34). Voice is thus the product of an inclusive process involving air or breath (pneuma), soul, and an act of imagination. For this reason, Aristotle clarifies that not every voiced sound would qualify as true voice: Voice then is the impact of the inbreathed air against the wind-pipe, and the agent that produces the impact is the soul resident in these parts of the body. Not every sound, as we have said, made by animal is voice (even with the tongue we may merely make a sound which is not voice, or without the tongue as in coughing); what produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with meaning (phon¯e semantik¯e). (De Anima, 2.8.420.28–34, italics mine)

Aquinas’s lectures on De Anima ensured the passage of Aristotle’s conception of voice into the medieval period and beyond. Interestingly for our purposes, Aquinas considers the heart has having a central role in animating the voice: “Voice is a striking upon air breathed in through the windpipe; which striking is caused by the soul as animating these parts, but especially the heart [italics mine].”86 This view of the voice as a kind of ensouled materiality seems to undergird theories of voice through the early modern period, as the passage from Gerbier’s lecture quoted earlier clearly shows. Pierre de la Primaudaye’s discussion of voice usefully embeds the voice in a system-ranging pneumatic network, including heart, imagination (via the “phantastic spirits”) and voice: Therfore that which is framed in voyce, pronounced in speach, & brought into vse, is as a riuer sent from the thought with the voyce, as from his fountain. For before the thought can vtter any outward speach by meane of the voice, first the minde must receiue the images of things presented vnto is by the corporall senses. And then hauing receiued them by the imaginatiue vertue that is in it, reason must discourse to know & to consider of

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them well, & to separate or ioyne things according to that agreement or difference, that concord or discord, which they may haue amongst them.87 The internall speach remaineth, not only in the spirit, hart, & thought that ingendred it, being not in any sort diuided, cut off, or separated, but also it filleth all the hearers, by reason of the agrement that is betweene the spirits & mindes of men, & the speach that is bred there, and because it differeth not much from the minde, & from the thought where it first began and was bred.88

Infused with pneuma or spirit that is itself partially built with inbreathed air, the voice emerges as a kind of spiritual via media between the internal and external worlds.89 The continuing understanding of the spiritual (in the sense of pneumatic) nature of voice is confirmed by later writers like Agrippa von Nettesheim in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (translated into English in 1651), “Voyce is sent forth out of the inward cavity of the breast and heart, by the assistance of the spirit.”90 Helkiah Crooke invokes Galen as a source for the view of voice as an intermediary: “Galen expresseth the use of the Voice in these words, that it is the Messenger of the thought of the mind, and therefore worthily is accounted the principall of all the actions of the Soule.”91 As such, the voice could have an impact on the body’s spiritual health and also on the surrounding environment itself. Aristotle himself interestingly acknowledges the possibility that the voice—presumably because of its imbrication in the pneumatic system—contributes to the body’s self-regulation: “Nature employs the breath (pneuma) both as an indispensable means to the regulation of inner temperature of the living body and also as the matter of articulate voice, in the interests of its possessor’s well-being” (De Anima, 2.8.420–20). As a spiritual substance, the voice would be fully entangled with the passionate stir of humors and spirits around the heart. As Bettina Varwig has written, the early modern conception of voice involved “messy amalgamations of bodies and minds” which “eschewed easy capture on the side of either body or soul, instead appearing to insist on a more integrated human body-mind in which soul suffused matter and matter breathed soul.”92 Despite what Adriana Cavarero calls the “devocalization” of speech through the semantic system’s capture of phon¯e, voice remains “rooted … in the organs of respiration and phonation, [and thus] in fact alludes to the vicissitudes of the body where the humors of the

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passions boil.”93 As Cavarero points out, the effort to erase the voice’s corporeality is embedded in a gendered history that associates the “vicissitudes of the body” primarily with femininity, and specifically a threatening feminine discourse of the body.94 At the far end of this spectrum is the siren, whose voice “is a non-semantic voice, the dangerous, fascinating effect of which gestures to a corporeality not yet—or no longer—dominated by reason and, therefore, to the realm of sexual impulses and of enjoyment in general.”95 (A common bilingual pun, “mollis aer” [soft air] for mulier [woman], suggests the near-identification of the female body with a flimsy yet seductive pneumatic quality.)96 This corporeal voice, Cavarero continues, “has the merit of alluding to the internal rhythms of the body, like the heartbeat, or the cadences of breathing.”97 Linked as it is to these indices of the passions, voice seems intricately connected to the affective modalities that may rise up into consciousness but do not live there; operating between the mind and the body, it maintains a labile balance between the material and immaterial elements in its makeup. As the bodily remainder (or “excrement,” pace Mladen Dolar) of the signifier, the voice registers affective disturbance even prior to its commitment to an emotive; indeed, the emotive may in fact bely the complexity of the affects prior to their translation into words.98 The voice is, perhaps, the closest we can get to perceiving the strain between affect and emotion. Helkiah Crooke observes that the voice may easily slide back into a mere sound that “expresseth onelie those things that fall under Sense,” and it is intuitively plausible indeed that song or poetry might occupy a slippery grey area on the continuum between true voice and mere animalistic “noise,” or between fully articulated emotive and embodied affect.99 In its recuperation in sound of the modulations of breath and heartbeat, the voice in song or poetry has the potential to bring potentially buried affects into tense adjacency with the signifier—the voiced claim of the emotive. Petruccio’s taming seems to leverage precisely the “spiritual” interconnection between the passions qua mental events and purely physical ones—to insinuate itself into the silent and invisible sphere of the affects by controlling the organization of “outward things” impressing Kate’s mind and, in turn, her ability to process and voice her responses. The culmination of this psychosomatic taming strategy at Petruccio’s house arrives with the tailor, whose artifacts Kate wishes, but is forbidden, to buy. As Jan Purnis has pointed out, even the clothing item under discussion here (a cap) is absorbed into the discourse of food and eating: Petruccio describes it as “moulded on a porringer,” a “walnut-shell,”

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a “custard-coffin” and a “silken pie.”100 Like the items of food circulating in Petruccio’s discursive construction of Kate’s world, this cap will represent a power struggle taking place not just externally, between Kate and Petruccio, but internally within Kate’s very organs, as she is, or is not allowed to process incoming impressions and articulate emotive responses. The cap seems designed to arouse desire in Kate, to encourage a reaching out (orexis, in Aquinas’s terms) toward an item designated by her judgment as a good (its goodness seems to be signaled by its association with food). But Petruccio deploys an exercitive utterance to render the purchase of the cap impermissible: “When you are gentle you shall have one, too” (4.3.71). Although Petruccio does not explicitly say this, the implication of “when you are gentle [italics mine]” is precisely that she cannot be resistant or angry. When Kate hears Petruccio’s withdrawal of permission to accept the cap, she offers a startling assessment of the internal impact of this specifically emotional exercitive. This speech marks a crucial turning point in Kate’s inward transformation: K: Why sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, And speak I will. I am no child, no babe. Your betters have endured me say my mind, And if you cannot, best you stop your ears. My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart concealing it will break, And rather than it shall I will be free Even to the uttermost as I please in words. P: Why, thou sayst true. It is a paltry cap, A custard-coffin, a bauble, a silken pie. I love thee well in that thou lik’st it not. (4.3.71–83)

Most significantly in these lines, Kate articulates that Petruccio’s refusal to allow her access to emotive language (his deployment of emotional exercitives) will cause the kind of internal breakdown adumbrated in the other texts we considered—where the impact of internal “vehemency” without vent is felt as a dangerous boiling, swelling, and so forth.101 While Menenius Agrippa casually assumes Coriolanus’s right to speak his anger (“What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent”), Kate is struggling to find room for her own similar wish: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart.” Kate’s felt need to “vent” her anger is very similar to Antonio’s exclamation in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge:

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“Come, I must vent my griefs or heart will burst” (2.3.80). But unlike the righteously and manfully wrathful Antonio or Coriolanus, Kate is not master of her own language; she is not allowed the “must” in relation to her access to emotive expression.102 The heart is the source of life— or as Pierre de la Primaudaye puts it, the “shop of all the vitall spirits, without which neither the braine nor the rest of the members can haue life, or performe their duties.”103 As Heather Webb has noted, the heart in medieval and early modern texts is also frequently gendered: its expulsive or ejaculatory function (of spirits and blood) is considered masculine, while its receptive capacity codes it as female. In this sense, the heart has the potential to represent “the ‘masculine’ within.”104 As someone who vigorously wishes to expel spirits (in the form of angry words) from her heart, Kate presents herself as having “hot” and therefore masculine qualities, which are precisely those that Petruccio seeks to erase: “She is not hot” (2.1.1141). The potentially dominant or “masculine” nature of both heart and stomach perhaps suggest a natural pairing, as Elizabeth I’s famous reference to having the “heart and stomach of a king” in the speech to the troops at Tilbury suggests. By the same token, therefore, these organs represent the foremost targets of Petruccio’s taming strategies, which Kate anticipates will lead to a literal breakdown of her heart and the pneumatic system in which it is centered. As Kate’s impassioned reference to her heart’s need to speak “in words” suggests, the voice draws its substance not just from the more obvious source of the lungs, but also from the heart. Aquinas’s reformulation of Aristotle’s exposition of the nature of voice recenters the heart, as doe La Primaudaye’s description of the voice as the “messenger of [the] heart”: Men should be admonished that their voice and their speach is the messenger of their heart: and that for this cause the heart and the mouth, and the voyce and speach which proceede from them, alwayes ought to consent and agree together. For it would be great dissolutenesse, if the heart, which ought to bee the originall and fountaine of the speach, should thinke one thing; and the speach, which is the messenger of the heart, should vtter and declare another. For before the tongue and mouth speake, or speach bee framed in them, it must first bee conceiued and bred in the heart and minde, and then brought foorth and pronounced by the tongue and mouth [italics mine].105

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Properly deployed, the voice would lay open people’s “whole heart, minde, and spirite.” In other words, he continues, “that which is framed in voyce, pronounced in speach, and brought into use, is as a river sent from the thought with the voyce, as from his fountain.”106 The voice serves a double purpose in the spiritual/pneumatic system: to bring forth, as it were, the sound of the soul, via the heart (which is the instrument of the soul); by the same token, as the vehicle for the transmission for pneumatic spirit, the voice also regulates the body’s psychophysical systems, particularly at the affective or passionate level.107 The voice moves, and is moved, “in the interests of the possessor’s well-being.”108 Like Kate, La Primaudaye too envisages a kind of brokenness—a “great dissoluteness”—when the connection between heart and voice, or affect and emotive, is severed. While La Primaudaye seems to envisage a chosen divorce between heart and speech—and thus offers implied moral judgment—Kate’s plight demonstrates a forced dissolution. When Kate expresses her intention to “be free / Even to the uttermost as [she] please[s] in words,” she enacts rather than articulates that wishedfor freedom as she swoops through the enjambment into the new line— its extra syllable, even with elision, nailing home the premise that she will break free of verbal constraint. The word “uttermost” trips up the scansion in this line, creating a trisyllabic amphibrach foot that stands out awkwardly (resentfully?) from the rest of this blank verse speech. Like the meaning of the word “uttermost,” the line’s prosody is straining at the edges. This mid-line amphibrach, with its feminine ending, signals the presence of a materially present, disruptive voice; it brings the words into a spokenness that makes their affective charge more audible. This verbal flight taps into the embodied, rhythmic aspects of the voice even as it dramatizes resistance to the verbal “stooping” demanded by Petruccio (“till she stoop she must not be full-gorged”; 4.2.172). In Cavarero’s terms, this rhythmic voice brings into view the “vicissitudes of the body where the humors of the passions boil” through the interplay of breath and line, gesturing toward an affective poetics that I will explore in more detail in relation to Kate’s final speech and in the following chapter.109 But even in this indignant and defiant speech she acknowledges the reality of her constraint. Her opening line obliquely engages with Petruccio’s emotional exercitive (“When you are gentle”): “I trust I may have leave to speak” (4.3.74, italics mine). The very fact that Kate refers here to the permissibility conditions of her speech, even as she tries to disregard

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them, signals her awareness that she is negotiating with a powerful interlocutor. Petruccio quickly shows her that she does not have access to such freedom. As before, Petruccio’s response seems intended to silence Kate, as he silenced her earlier through the ruse of claiming a prior agreement that she would “perform” the role of shrew in public. On this occasion, he chooses to pretend that she has said something different—something in accordance with his own alleged dislike of the cap: Why, thou sayst true. It is a paltry cap, A custard-coffin, a bauble, a silken pie. I love thee well in that thou lik’st it not. (4.3.81)

Petruccio’s response deliberately undermines Kate’s ability to connect her words to reality; moreover, by acting as though she has said what she has not said, he perverts her speech’s perlocutionary force, annexing it to his own. Through a kind of linguistic oikei¯ osis, he makes her speech speak for him. We should not imagine that the heartbreak Kate conjures as a result of damming up the vocal “river” leading from the heart is entirely figurative. Edward Reynolds pinpoints obstructive grief as a source of actual physical harm to the heart: “In the body there is no other Passion that doth produce stronger, or more lasting inconveniences by pressure of heart, obstruction of spirit, wasting of strength, drynesse of bones, exhausting of Nature. Griefe in the heart … disordereth the whole frame.”110 Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work the notion of heartbreak is also linked less to anger than to grief. Certainly in King Lear, Gloucester’s burst heart seems to be understood as a literal physical calamity that directly causes his death: his flawed heart, Alack, too weak the conflict to support! ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (5.3.195–98)111

That the danger exists at the level of the spirits—those go-betweens carrying affect between body and soul—is also clear in a passage by Timothie Bright:

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The minde transporting the spirits an other way by sodeine conceit, study or passion, yet most certaine it is, if it holde on long, and release not, the nourishment will also faile, the increase of the body diminish, and the flower of beautie fade, and finally death take his fatall hold.112

The disruption of the pneumatic sympathy between soul, heart, and voice suggests a profound dislocation of self—a “dissipation” of needful lines of communication between affective or passionate states and their cognitive integration at the level of the signifying voice that would lead to the articulation of emotives. The insistent deployment of emotional exercitives has already dramatized at the social level the structural inequalities that push Kate into submission. As William Reddy points out, “Politics is a process of determining who must repress as illegitimate, who must foreground as valuable, the feelings that come up for them in given contexts and relationships.”113 But as we have seen, this process of repression is not merely psychosocial; in early modern contexts it is understood as reaching deeply into the body to create material effects on the pneumatic-affective system. The blocking of Kate’s affective system— centered in her heart but also literally “fed” by the stomach—from pneumatic circulation and purging via the voice has produced a kind of dissociation, captured in La Primaudaye’s word “dissipation” (“passing away or wasting of a substance,” according to the OED).114 While Holly Crocker recognizes Petruccio’s taming as a “ruthless program of disorientation,” she reads this disorientation as occurring simply at the level of social roles and identities rather than at the deep, affective level of blood, humors, and spirits.115 Petruccio’s campaign of taming deploys overt demonstrations of power—specifically the emotional exercitives that we have tracked through the play—which nonetheless have concrete, material effects on Kate’s pneumatic-affective system. This dislocation or disorientation created by the unprocessed and unvented affect leaves the field open for Petruccio’s direct manipulation of Kate’s will. Perhaps Kate captures this danger herself in her claim, following the futile exchange about the cap and gown, that Petruccio “mean[s] to make a puppet of [her]” (4.3.103). The word “puppet” here specifically seems to denote “a model of a person or animal that can be manipulated to mimic natural movement.”116 By 1677 the term has come to have the meaning of “automaton.”117 As a result, Petruccio becomes a kind of puppeteer, controlling internal rather than external levers. Indeed, in the scene with Vincentio, Kate’s robotic adoption of

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Petruccio’s arbitrary signifiers (“moon” for “sun,” “young” for “old,” and so on) suggests that his infiltration of this system is complete and manifests itself as a usurpation of her will, identified by Augustine with the passions and since Aquinas as the appetitive part of the intellective soul. It is thus relevant that Petruccio’s intervention in this scene targets Kate’s “capacity as a knower” and thus constitutes an occasion of what Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. Although Kate clearly says, “I know it is the sun that shines so bright” (4.6.5; italics mine), Petruccio disrupts the relationship between signifier and signified—between the word and the world—by arbitrarily disputing her knowledge (“I say it is the moon that shines so bright”). Petruccio offers the clearest declaration so far of his exercitive authority in this sphere—his authority to force Kate to “unknow” the world: “It shall be moon, or star, or what I list / Or ere I journey to your father’s house” (4.6.7–8). Kate’s submission is reflected in the shift into a shared hexameter: P: I say it is the moon. K: I know it is the moon. (4.6.16–17)118

Petruccio’s control of Kate continues to be reflected in her exact replication of his perfect iambic pentameter, with the mid-line caesura after four syllables in each line and exactly the same phrase in the closing six syllables: P: Nay then you lie, it is the blessèd sun. K: Then God be blessed, it is the blessèd sun. (4.6.18–19)

The “will” that Kate so readily expressed earlier in the play has been thoroughly replaced by a willingness to let Petruccio’s will win the day: “What you will have it named, even that it is, / And so it shall be still for Katherine” (4.6.22–23). Here “will” certainly has its older meaning of “want” and desire, so that from Katherine’s point of view Petruccio’s “will” and what actually is (or will be) have collapsed into a single thing: whatever he wants, is. Any ability to want or desire has drained from Katherine’s own will, leaving behind a mere “shall.” Petruccio’s target here, of course, is not Kate’s naming of random objects in the world. His interruption of Kate’s ability to translate a

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visible impression (of the sun) into shareable words has a deeper target, namely her ability to translate her internal impression of an object or occurrence into an emotional response, or emotive. But the link with epistemic injustice seems salient: if one is continually faced with negative feedback in response to emotional expression, it seems likely that one’s own knowledge of what one feels, and thus one’s ability to name it as a particular feeling, may attenuate over time—that the articulate emotion (“I will be angry”) will denature, as Sianne Ngai aptly puts it, into less accessible affect.119 Perhaps another way to put this is that the will’s ability or freedom to determine which objects to pursue (or flee) is compromised by the effects of Petruccio’s persistent exercitives on Kate’s affective-pneumatic system. Edward Reynolds writes in a similar vein that alterations in decision-making occur by “secretly instilling it [Moralitie] into the Will, that it might at last find it selfe reformed, and yet hardly perceive how it came to be so.”120 Kate’s “taming” is framed, as we have seen, by her effort to translate internal passion—specifically anger—into an emotive utterance, efforts that on both occasions provoke Petruccio’s energetic interruption or cancelation. In Stoic terms, Petruccio seems to usurp the function of assent—identified by Augustine with the will— that is, the lightning-fast cognitive judgment about whether an initial feeling will (be allowed to) evolve into a true emotion. The possibility of intrusion into the intimate space of decision-making via the reciprocal relationship between the soul and its instruments is captured when Reynolds invokes the image of a “Rasa Tabula” to describe the erasure that can occur within a weakened mind: For though these Ministeriall parts have not any over-ruling, yet they have a disturbing power, to hurt and hinder the operations of the Soule: Whence wee finde, that sundry diseases of the Body doe often times weaken, yea, sometimes quite extirpate the deepest impression and most fixed habits of the minde. … The Soule of man being not an absolute independent worker, but receiving all her objects by conveyance from these bodily instruments, which Cicero calleth the Messengers to the Soule, if they out of any indisposition shall be weakened, the Soule must continue like a Rasa Tabula, without any acquired or introduced habits [italics mine].121

It is in this sense, perhaps, that Petruccio has fulfilled his claim that Kate will “prove a second Grissel”: by forcibly intruding upon and disrupting the instruments of the soul (the voice, the heart, the spirits), which are

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in continual feedback with the soul, Petruccio has produced a “Rasa Tabula” upon which her “new-built virtue” (in the sense of “obedience”) is inscribed. There is more than a touch of the Stepford wife about the “puppet”-like Kate who emerges onstage at the end of the play. It is in this sense that Kate truly “seems an agent of Petruccio’s will.”122 Holly Crocker argues that Petruccio’s “project of dissociation” is meant to “separate Katharine from her feminine aggression” by allowing her to “exercise her will only when she performs the guise of passive feminine virtue.”123 But Kate’s “dissociation” in this play seems deeper and more radical than this suggests, opening up disjunctions between Katharine’s soul (or mind) and the affects Petruccio has schooled her to suppress; between her overburdened heart and the voice as pneumatic vehicle of thought. Kate’s experience of self becomes increasingly disaggregated under the pressure of Petruccio’s exercitive control—hence Curtis’s marveling statement that she now “knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak / And sits as one new risen from a dream.” The culmination of this disaggregation is the controversial final speech at the end of the play. We have already encountered a hint of what this speech will demonstrate: in Kate’s earlier speech about the controversial cap, her lines’ prosodic irregularity brought us into contact with a voice struggling to be free—in that example, the prosodic resistance was consonant with the semantic content of the speech (“I will be free”). I will suggest that the final speech’s dissociated manipulation of prosody and rhyme similarly brings it into contact with the physical voice, this time emphasizing what Katherine Bootle Attie calls in a different context rhyme’s “apartness from reason.”124 In doing so, it also brings the speech into contact with affects now cut off from the integrated nexus of voice, heart, and thought. If Kate’s heart is not literally broken—she is after all still standing—the pneumatic nexus that allows her will to function as a gatekeeper for her own desires and feelings has been forcibly disengaged.

The Body Speaks: Froward Rhythms and Troubling Rhyme As Adriana Cavarero has pointed out, the poetic text—even when written—is especially attuned to the “rhythmic and musical texture of speech.”125 The principle of sound—the vocality beneath the text— may in fact disrupt “language’s claim to control the entire process of signification.”126 This is of course especially true when the poetry in

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question is written to be spoken by a performer in the theater. Kate’s speech seems to prise loose the phon¯e from the semantik¯e in Aristotle’s formulation of voice, forcing into our notice off-kilter rhythms which, as Cavarero suggests, call attention to “the vocalized rhythm and corporeal drives that anchor the ‘speaker’ to the embodiedness of his or her existence.”127 Cavarero continues: “Unlike thought, which tends to reside in the immaterial otherworld of ideas, speech is always a question of bodies, filled with drives, desire, and blood.”128 Unlike the perfectly regular iambic pentameters that Kate offers under duress earlier in dialogue with Petruccio, the lines in this speech manifest stifled affective turbulence— signs of the disrupted psychophysiological systems connecting voice, heart, and mind. On the surface, of course, the speech ventriloquizes perfect acquiescence to the patriarchal narrative of submission and control foisted on her by Petruccio: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee” (5.2.151–52). But early in the speech the lines begin to depart from standard blank verse. The following lines clearly exemplify the kinds of disruption that begin to build: “A woman moved is like a fountain troubled, / Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty” (5.2.154–55). Both lines feature an additional syllable, creating a feminine ending via a closing amphibrachic foot.129 Feminine endings of this kind have different effects depending on context, but here the word “tróubled” itself seems metrically troubled, chiming awkwardly with the more regular (and iambic) “amiable” in the previous line: “And in no sense is meet or amiable.” The falling rhythm of the feminine ending is doubled in the trochaic foot of the next line, “múddy,” perhaps dramatizing in its heaviness the anger of the hypothetical “woman moved”; followed up by a spondee (“íll-séem/ing”), this opening trochee heralds a rhythm as thick and muddy as the turbulent state it ostensibly critiques. Given Kate’s struggle to articulate her anger throughout the play, it is not surprising that this line—which superficially condemns female anger—seems disturbed from within. Thus, even as the line’s semantic meaning signifies the speaker’s alliance with Petruccio’s taming strategy throughout the play, its physical, vocal energy seems to speak otherwise. In fact, its own angry movement resonates with one of the most striking moments in Shakespeare’s sonnets—“sávage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust”—and carries similarly intense affective power.130 The speech enacts what Cavarero diagnoses as sound’s ability to disorganize “language’s claim to control the entire process of signification.”131

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Line 146 also closes with an amphibrachic foot and another feminine ending, “of béauty.” Although “troubled” and “beauty” obviously do not rhyme, the matching irregular endings draw attention to the words as a kind of couplet, and the word beauty snags with the same word a few lines earlier—this time creating a mid-line amphibrach, or epic caesura—in an otherwise regularly iambic line (“It blóts/ thy béauty/ as frósts/ do bíte/ the méads”). The speech appears to deploy disruptive feminine endings to challenge the speaker’s submission to the message it conveys. We recall Gerbier’s view that the “Corporeall robe” of material voice transfers the true message of the voice, its signified or “Spirituall Soule,” to the mind of the hearer intact, “as in a draught.” But if Kate is here reproducing the “thoughts, conceptions, desires, inclinations” of Petruccio, whose exercitive utterances have been physically impressed on her mind, the “Corporeall robe” of her voice seems simultaneously to be carrying other messages as well—unvoiced affects that tug at the edges of these lines and disturb their obedient rhythm. Similar disruptions occur throughout the speech, as for example: And whén she is fróward, péevish, súllen, sóur, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending rebel. (5.2.152–53)

The first of these lines contains a mid-line feminine ending with additional syllable, or epic caesura: “is fróward.” This irregularity throws additional stress onto the very word—froward—that has been Kate’s epithet in the past. Used only ten times across all the plays, the word occurs seven of those times in this play—all in relation to Kate, or as in this speech, where the word occurs twice, to the “shrewish” woman in general. “Froward” means “ungovernable,” “refractory,” “disposed to counter what is reasonable,”132 and it sums up the judgment of Kate’s emotional community about her behavior. Tranio and Hortensio both offer the word as the central truth about her: “That wench is stark mad or wonderful froward” (1.1.365); “she is intolerable curst, / And shrewd and froward so beyond all measure” (1.2.638–39). The disruption of the rhythm via a feminine ending on the word “froward” contributes to our sense that the speech is shot through with such moments of feminine vocalic disruption. Similarly, the feminine ending on “-ing rébel” spills over the ten-syllable limit, chiming awkwardly and perhaps pointedly with “will,” just as “troubled”

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chimed crossly with the more regular “amiable.” It is precisely Kate’s “frowardness” that Petruccio sets out to tame, as is indicated by his own exercitive denial of the quality: “She’s not froward, but modest as the dove. … For patience she will prove a second Grissel” (2.1.286–87). At the semantic level, Kate’s speech, articulating as it does a critique of the “woman moved,” seems to mark Petruccio’s success in transforming Kate into a “second Grissel.” But at the phonic level, the level of an embodied voice stumbling over extra syllables or initial trochees, the cutoff affects characterized as “froward” seem to be still in evidence even though they remain unspoken, a “corporeall robe” dissociated from its signified. As Cavarero suggests, “The semiotic drives of the phonic thus find some fissures through which to invade language and disturb it with the agitation of its rhythms.”133 The off rhyme on “will” and “rebel” seems to trigger a cascade of increasingly relentless, though inexactly structured, couplet rhymes— sway/obey; hearts/parts; yours/straws; compare/are; boot/foot; please/ease. This somewhat compulsive-seeming and unusually dense rhyming pattern seems connected with the inarticulate intensity that has left traces in rhythmic irregularity, excess, or agitation elsewhere. In her study of Shakespeare’s use of rhyme, Katherine Bootle Attie emphasizes rhyme’s association with orality (including at the level of vulgar tavern rhymes) and a certain kind of spoken power: “Shakespeare regularly associated rhyme with a power that is morally dubious, uncanny, irresistible.”134 She has in mind the witches’ rhymes in Macbeth, and perhaps even more strikingly, the addictive series of rhyming couplets in Hamlet’s Mousetrap. In that context, she notes that the potency of the rhyme “brings the oppressive energy, the maddening repetition” to the play within the play—seeming indeed to compel Claudius self-damningly to continue the rhyme himself.135 We might also recall the near-identical rhyme spoken by the Duchess as she and Queen Elizabeth prepare to confront Richard: If so, then be not tongue-tied. Go with me, And in the breath of bitter words let’s smother My damned son, that thy two sweet sons smothered. (4.4.135)

The near-repetition of “smother” in these lines’ feminine endings certainly enacts a kind of smothering, reinforced by the heaviness of

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the preceding spondaic feet. In the case of Kate’s speech, I suggest that the uncanniness induced by the relentless rhyme signals the presence of turbulent but dissociated affect beneath the surface. In a curious moment in Cymbeline, Posthumus angrily chides a Lord for seeming to make light of the battle he has just described. He asks: “Will you rhyme upon’t / And vent it for a mock’ry?” (5.3.61–62)––as though a rhyme might be the next step for the Lord in his performative trivializing of the battle. In response to the Lord’s “Nay, be not angry, sir,” he finishes the Lord’s line by initiating another rhyme: ’Lack, to what end? Who dares not stand his foe, I’ll be his friend, For if he’ll do as he is made to do, I know he’ll quickly fly my friendship too. You have put me into rhyme. L: Farewell; you’re angry. (5.3.66–71)

The Lord clearly understands Posthumus’s rhyming as expressing anger that is not quite articulated—except perhaps as sarcasm—but that finds its outlet (or vent) in the intensity of rhyming couplets breaking away from their blank verse context. Precisely because Kate’s affective system is so fully dissociated by the demand that she perform Petruccio’s will rather than her own, it is impossible to interpret the intensity of these rhyming couplets as indicating any particular feeling: the integrated relationship between heart and voice, between phon¯e and semantik¯e, has broken down. But we do understand that she has already diagnosed the brokenness of this speech herself and prepared us to interpret it against the grain of its semantic content: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break” (4.3.77–78). Kate’s final speech offers the audience a kind of mute intensity, a dumbshow that bears witness to a “lumpe” of disorganized and disaggregated (undigested?) affects whose access to articulate emotives has been foreclosed. Tracking Petruccio’s use of emotional exercitives throughout the play, we have seen clearly how enmeshed they are in the social structures Shakespeare foregrounds, in which a daughter is a “commodity [that] lay fretting” by a father, and a wife is analogous to her husband’s house, household stuff, horse, ox, his “anything” (4.1.101– 3). The play offers a clinical analysis of the material, physical power

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Petruccio’s exercitives hold within this emotional community, dramatizing through his assault on her stomach, ears, and ultimately her heart, a kind of undoing of the “love-knot” (in Bright’s phrase) that supports the pneumatic system carrying messages from heart to voice, from affects to emotives. But at the same time, in a move that will carry us into the next chapter as we examine the constraints placed on maternal mourning, the play also showcases at its end an affective poetics which powerfully deploys breath, timbre, and spoken line to animate the voice’s intimate connection with the affects, those “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing.”136 As Cavarero puts it, “The semiotic drives of the phonic … find some fissures through which to invade language and disturb it with the agitation of its rhythms.”137 In these ways, the voice conveys the rhythms and modulations of a body whose affective suffering cannot fully be silenced. Like Griselda, whose suffering body suddenly speaks, scandalously, through her reiterated swoon, Kate vocalizes a refrain that cuts across the semantic screen of her speech, echoing, albeit in muffled form, the “feminine” refrain of the nightingale’s song.138

Notes 1. McGowan, “Conversational Exercitives,” 95. McGowan builds on J. L. Austin’s definition of exercitives in How to Do Things with Words, 151. “Exercitives … are the exercising of powers, rights or influence.” An exercitive “is a decision that something is to be so, as distinct from a judgement that it is so; it is advocacy that it should be so, as opposed to an estimate that it is so. … Its consequences may be that others are ‘compelled’ or ‘allowed’ or ‘not allowed to do certain acts.’” How to Do Things with Words, 155. I will be primarily concerned with exercitives that compel or allow or disallow certain emotives in particular contexts. See also McGowan, “Oppressive Speech.” 2. This is McGowan’s term—see “Conversational Exercitives.” She is interested, as I am here, in the ways in which unannounced and noninstitutional authority can exert coercive conversational authority in everyday linguistic contexts. 3. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. 4. See in particular Annabel Patterson, “Framing the Taming,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991 (Newark:

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

University of Delaware Press, 1994), who sees in the Induction (through play on words connected with household stuff and commerce) an organizing interest in the “traffic in women.” On the economics of taming, see also Natasha Korda, “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 109–31; and see also Barry Weller on theatricality and manipulation of identity in the Induction, “Induction and Inference: Theater, Transformation, and the Construction of Identity in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. Thomas M. Greene and David Quint (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992), 297–329. References are to the Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). See, e.g., Robert Cleaver, Godly Form of Household Government (1598): “So that this modesty and government ought to be in at wife, namely, that she should not speak but to her husband or by her husband. And as the voice of him that soundeth a trumpet is not so loud as the sound that it yieldeth, so is the wisdom and word of a woman of greater virtue and efficacy when all that she knoweth and can do is as it if were said and done by her husband.” Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents, ed. Lloyd Davis (New York: Garland, 1998), 202. In their book Bad Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever discuss what constitutes truly illocutionary silencing: “We want … to distinguish between being silenced (prevented from performing the linguistic act one wants to perform) and being ignored (performing one’s linguistic act, but not having it taken up in the way one wanted)” (174). They write persuasively that creating a linguistic framework that undermines utterances—such as creating a “playacting” framework in which speech is heard as lines from a play rather than a true assertion—constitutes genuinely linguistic silencing. Bad Language, 175. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 155. David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979): 339–59. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 54. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “dumps,” 2, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “prove,” I.1.a, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. Cappelen and Dever, Bad Language, 174.

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

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Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 55. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 55. “Owene thing” is a phrase from Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale,” 504. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 105. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 100–101. H. W. Fowler, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, rev. and ed. Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 549. See Chapter 4 above, chap. 4, 106. Blackstone, Commentaries, 442. See Elizabeth Fowler’s excellent discussion of medieval coverture in “Civil Death and the Maiden,” 770. Blackstone, Commentaries, 442. Davis, Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance, 202. From a case debated in Chancery in 1478, qtd. in Barbara Kreps, “The Paradox of Women: The Legal Position of Early Modern Wives and Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore,” English Literary History 69 (Spring 2002): 90. See Chapter 2 above, chap. 2, 25, for more detailed discussion. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 151. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 46.a.1. Qtd. and discussed in Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 151–52. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 153. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 153. Matthew Kellison, A Survey of the New Religion Detecting Manie Grosse Absurdities Which It Implieth (Douay and Rheims, 1603), 640. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 276. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 276. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 276. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 275. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 273– 74; qtd. in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 36. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 276. Reynolds, Treatise, 320. Jan Purnis, “Digestive Tracts: Early Modern Discourses of Digestion” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2010), 4. See also Jan Purnis, “The Stomach and Early Modern Emotion,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2010): 800–818. Reynolds, Treatise, 314. Purnis, “Digestive Tracts,” 4; Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “stomach,” 6b, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/? tl=true. Purnis discusses the features associated with choler in “The Stomach and Early Modern Emotion,” 7.

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42. See Purnis, “Digestive Tracts,” 56. Purnis notes in relation to this scene that Petrucchio disrupts the conventional balance of power in the household by taking over culinary decisions usually in the purview of the wife: “Petrucchio’s assumption of control over home remedies counters the tradition of female control in the domestic arena but resembles male domination in the field of medicine in society generally.” “Digestive Tracts,” 57. 43. Holly Crocker views Petruccio’s linguistic strategy here as one of “rhetorical misrepresentation,” which she reads as inflicting “symbolic violence” on Kate. My reading argues on the contrary that Petruccio’s manipulation of Kate’s affective economy via emotional exercitives exerts a material, bodily violence. See “Affective Resistance,” 149. 44. Thomas Elyot, Castel of Helth (London, 1561), 73. Purnis notes with reference to a different passage in Elyot’s text that “the foods Gremio offers Katharina but then withholds would, in England, have been considered appropriate foods for a choleric stomach.” “Digestive Tracts,” 58. 45. Schoenfeldt remarks: “Diet and digestion were seen to affect not just mental capacity but even the ineffable realms of the soul.” Bodies and Selves, 24. 46. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 21. 47. See Gina Bloom’s excellent discussion of the materiality of the voice in Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), esp. chap. 2. See Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, on inbred air: “This ayre of which Plato among the Phylosophers made first mention, is seated in the eares from the first originall of our generation in the wombe of our mothers. … It is made of the ayry part of the seede and that very pure, to which the purest ayry part of the mothers blood applyeth it selfe, as to a body most like unto it selfe.” Microcosmographia, 608. The air receives what Crooke calls “the stampe or impression of sounds” (583). 48. Bloom quotes and discusses this passage in Voice in Motion, 83. 49. Bloom, Voice in Motion, 84. Allison Deutermann similarly notes in her analysis of listening in Hamlet: “Early modern anatomists described sound as an object or force capable of working profound physiological effects on its listeners. … At each stage [of hearing] sound presses upon the body and re-forms the corporeal material with which it comes into contact. The act of hearing is consequently imagined as a somatic transformation over which the listener has only tenuous control.” Allison K. Deutermann, “‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 231. 50. Wright, Passions, 175. 51. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 603.

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52. Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 53. 53. For a fascinating discussion of this conflation, see Helene A. Coccagna, “Embodying Sympotic Pleasure: A Visual Pun on the Body of an Aul¯etris,” in Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE– 200 CE, ed. Allison Glazebrook and Madeleine M. Henry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 112. 54. See for instance Peter Stallybrass’s classic article “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42. 55. See my reading of this scene from Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: Marion Wells, “Full of Rapture: Maternal Vocality and Melancholy in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi,” in Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, Intersections, vol. 25 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 685–711. 56. William Cowper, Anatomie of a Christian Man (London, 1611), sigs Ff1v–Ff2r; qtd. in Deutermann, “‘Caviare to the General’?,” 238. 57. Maynwaringe, Tutela sanitatis sive Vita Protracta, 60. 58. Wright, Passions, 61–63. Qtd. in Schoenfeldt, “Give Sorrow Words,” 146–47. 59. While Purnis provocatively suggests that digestion in the psychological sphere can be an apt metaphor for “the process for assimilating what is foreign to the self” (“Digestive Tracts,” 45), the analogy seems to signify more precisely the process of internalizing and processing external impressions that can give rise to emotions. 60. Wright, Passions, 60. 61. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 25. 62. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “concoction,” 2b, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. Thomas Elyot writes: “Concoction is an alteration in the stomache of meates and drynkes, according to their qualities, whereby they are made lyke to the substaunce of the body” (U4v); qtd. in Michael Harrawood, “High-Stomached Lords: Imagination, Force, and the Body in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Plays,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2007): 85. See Harrawood’s helpful description of the analogous process of digestion and absorption by the mind: “As with the three steps of concoction [conversion to chyle, then to blood, then assimilation to tissue] mental functions become more abstract and spirits more refined in the rearward passage through the meats [ventricles in the brain], from

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63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

the wits and imagination, to abstract thought and finally to the memory” (88). “For wherever Nature wishes material to be completely elaborated, she arranges for it to spend a long time in the instruments concocting it.” Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Translated and with an introduction by Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 9.4. Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, 4.332. My attention was drawn to this passage by Katrin Ettenhuber’s article “‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation,’” 213. Reynolds, Treatise, 227–28. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 73. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 175. For the notion of a kind of mental concoction as “review,” see the following paragraph, and Reynolds, Treatise, 186. Reynolds, Treatise, 178. Reynolds, Treatise, 186. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 38a.2. Qtd. in Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 155. Bright, Treatise, 88. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 251. Schoenfeldt, “Give Sorrow Words,” 149. Schoenfeldt, “Give Sorrow Words,” 149. Schoenfeldt, “Give Sorrow Words,” 148. Philip de Mornay, Lord of Plessis, His Teares For the Death of his Sonne, Unto his Wife Charlotte Baliste, Englished by John Healey (London, 1609), B5. For an early description of the pneumatic nature of wine, see Aristotle, Problems Vol. II, ed. and trans. Robert Mayhew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), Problem 30.1, on melancholy. Mornay, His Teares, D1. Wright, Passions, 110. Reynolds, Treatise, 55. Reynolds, Treatise, 55. Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 139. Ulinka Rublack discusses this passage as evidence of early modern views of the body and mind as fully interrelated: “Bacon conceived of mind and body not dualistically, but as interrelated. Because feelings swelled the heart, and such swellings, if not relieved, were physically and mentally perilous, openness to exchange was a precondition of human life.” “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 4. Schoenfeldt, “Give Sorrow Words,” 155–56.

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85. Deutermann, “‘Caviare to the General’?,” 255. 86. Thomas Aquinas, Lectio Seventeen on Aristotle’s “De Anima,” trans. Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), 298. David Lawton quotes and comments on this passage in his Voice in Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 24. 87. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academy Fully Discoursed and Finished (London, 1618), 379. 88. La Primaudaye, French Academy, 380. 89. See Bonnie Gorden’s work on the implication of voice in the pneumatic system of body and soul: “The parallel substances of voice, tears, vomit, and sweat turned into one another and flowed in and out of the body through open orifices, purifying, nourishing, and flushing it.” Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20. See also the extensive discussion of the materiality of voice in Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion, esp. chap. 2, “Words Made of Breath.” 90. Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (trans. London, 1651), 3.36. Qtd. in Bloom, Voice in Motion, 81. 91. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 464. 92. Bettina Varwig, “Early Modern Voices,” in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 2. 93. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 62. 94. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 62. 95. Adriana Cavarero, “The Vocal Body: Extract from a Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Body,” Qui Parle 21, no. 1 (2012): 76. 96. See Stephen Booth’s commentary on Shakespeare’s punning “tender heir,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 579. 97. Cavarero, “Vocal Body,” 77. 98. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): “The problem is that this operation [translation of signifier into voice] always produces a remainder which cannot be made a signifier or disappear in meaning; the remainder that doesn’t make sense, a leftover, a castoff-shall we say an excrement of the signifier?” Dolar goes on to note that there are three different modes that are “recalcitrant to the signifier: the accent, the intonation, and the timbre” (20). 99. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 629. 100. Purnis, “Digestive Tracts,” 59. 101. John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge. Five Revenge Tragedies: Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle, Middleton (London: Penguin Books, 2012): “O

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102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

how impatience cramps my crackèd veins / And cruddles thick my blood, with boiling rage!” (1.2.208). Holly Crocker comments that although Kate “can speak until her heart breaks … such displays of agency will only validate the authority Petruchio seems to exert over her.” But in fact, Petruccio sets up permissions conditions for Kate’s speech that specifically prohibit her ability to convert affective feeling into emotive. “Affective Resistance,” 153. La Primaudaye, French Academy, 449. Webb, The Medieval Heart, 109. La Primaudaye, French Academy, 381. La Primaudaye, French Academy, 378. On the heart as instrument of the soul, see for instance Wright, Passions, where he argues that while it is true that “the very seate of all Passions is the hearte,” it is the “soule that informeth the heart” (33). Aristotle, De Anima, 2.8.420–21. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 62. Reynolds, Treatise, 232. See the discussion of “literal heartbreak” in Devon Wallace, “Neuroscience and Galen: Body, Selfhood, and the Materiality of the Emotions on the Early Modern Stage” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2014), 148. Bright, Treatise, 61–62. Reddy, “Against Constructionism,” 335. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “dissipation,” 2, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. Crocker, “Affective Resistance,” 151. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “puppet,” II.3a, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “puppet,” II.3a, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. George T. Wright briefly mentions these lines as an example of metrical variation by way of shared lines in Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 144. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. Reynolds, Treatise, 21. Reynolds, Treatise, 5. Crocker, “Affective Resistance,” 155. Crocker, “Affective Resistance,” 154. Katharine Bootle Attie, “Passion Turned to Prettiness: Rhyme or Reason in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2012): 393. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 132. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 132. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 134.

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128. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 134. 129. For helpful discussion of metrical variety in Shakespeare’s verse, see Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, esp. chap. 11, which focuses on extra syllables. 130. Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 129, line 4. 131. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 132. 132. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “froward,” 1, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. 133. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 133. 134. Attie, “Passion Turned to Prettiness,” 396. 135. Attie, “Passion Turned to Prettiness,” 410–11. 136. Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader, 1–2. 137. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 133. 138. See Chapter 3 above, chap. 4, 122–138. I refer here to Cavarero’s interpretation of Cixous’s concept of “écriture feminine,” which, she argues, is a “practice that—by submitting to the phonic seduction that the androcentric tradition itself links to the feminine—subverts and overturns the metaphysical strategy that has produced the devocalization of logos.” For More than One Voice, 142.

CHAPTER 7

The Tears of Rachel: Lament and Affective Improvisation in Mary Carey’s Life Narrative and Poetry

It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry. —Adrienne Rich

Relatively little is known about Mary Carey, the woman who wrote a prose conversion narrative containing a number of extraordinary elegies for lost children over a period from 1649 to 1657. Scholars agree that she was born in 1609, the heir to Sir John Jackson of Berwick upon Tweed, Northumberland, and she married Pelham Carey, younger son of Sir Henry Carey, in 1630.1 By 1643 Pelham was dead, and Mary had married her second husband, George Payler, a parliamentarian who moved around the country to various garrisons. Her husband’s position, in addition to her reference to the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the introspective nature of her project, confirm Carey’s political and theological affiliation with Puritanism.2 The centerpiece of Carey’s text is a prose dialogue between soul and body, in which the soul sets out to teach the recalcitrant body why she should accept the sufferings that God has imposed on her without murmuring against them. The particular suffering of which the body complains is the loss of a third child, a son. The back and forth in this dialogue leads the soul into a conversion narrative, in which the soul relates how an illness suddenly created the catalyst for a recognition of her spiritually bankrupt condition and an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_7

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inner transformation. The prose dialogue comes to an end with Carey’s name, and the date, 1652. Immediately after this, though, she inserts the information that she has now “buried fower sonnes & a daughter; God hath my all of Children,” making it clear that the child whom she was carrying when the dialogue with the soul began has also died, together with another child, a daughter.3 She then pastes in two poems that were written at the time of the son’s death in 1650—one by her husband and one by herself. Although the dialogue seems to end in an ecstatic acceptance by the body of the soul’s joyful assurances, the text gives the last word, at least spatially, to several much more agonistic poems: the two just mentioned, another poem commemorating the death of a fourth son and fifth child, Perigrene, and then finally, after an intervening prose meditation, the final stunning elegy for an eighth stillborn child (two subsequent children now remaining alive). Although several critics have discussed Carey’s powerful elegies for her children in the context of early modern women’s writing about child loss in particular, very few have considered these elegies in their original manuscript context, in which they are in dialogue with Carey’s spiritual meditations and dialogue.4 Yet the tension established in this framework is essential for understanding the emotional habitus that is the context for Carey’s emotive expression in her poems.5 The manuscript as a whole borrows widely from different generic templates, including the conversion narrative and the mother’s legacy—a popular genre that borrowed the moral urgency of deathbed testimonials.6 In the letter to her husband that frames the dialogue and the piece as a whole, Carey writes that the catalyst for this exploratory dialogue was precisely her fear that “[she] should die on [her] fourth child” (C, 1). In performing this retrospective assessment of her spiritual life, Carey uses her hybrid form to offer a complex and often contradictory map of the pressured trajectories of feeling concerning pregnancy, childbirth, and loss in her emotional community.7 My goal in this chapter is to use my historicized reading of classical and early modern affects to develop an account of the tension between Carey’s ostensible effort to sideline what she calls her “affections”—and especially the “affection” of grief—in her prose narrative, and her poems’ conflicted performance of those affections (C, unpaginated letter, 6). If, as Sianne Ngai has recently proposed, emotions can be understood as “unusually knotted or condensed interpretations of predicaments,” the emotion of grief as expressed by women, and by mothers in particular, seems in

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certain periods and contexts especially knotted.8 Arguing that the broadly Calvinist discourse circulating in Carey’s emotional community works to suppress her articulation of maternal grief in her prose writing, I show how Carey’s poetry provides a vehicle for submerged affect that appears to outstrip her ability or willingness to articulate a particular emotion.9 As the author of a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, Calvin was both well versed in Stoic philosophy and enduringly influenced by its central tenets, providing a clear conduit for a Stoic-inflected discourse into Mary Carey’s emotional community.10 As I have argued throughout this book, instances of what I have called “affective injustice” arise in precisely those moments when a nexus of mutually imbricated sociological, cultural, and linguistic pressures cohere to inhibit access to emotive speech that may be more available to other, more powerful or authoritative speakers in the culture.11 While Miranda Fricker is concerned with instances in which someone is “wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” as a result of what she calls “identity power” (which can include gender, race, sexuality, etc.), I have focused in these chapters on the wrong done to an individual’s capacity not just to feel but to publicly articulate that feeling.12 In Carey’s case, powerful emotional exercitives circulating both in written public documents and much closer to home, in her husband’s companion poetry, operate to construe any allegedly “extreme” grief as ungodly and therefore prohibited. In my particular focus on Carey’s extraordinary poems, I will suggest that embodied “affections” that are pushed to the margins (literally) of her prose work find expression in her poems—even at the cost of contesting the poems’ own explicit semantic meanings— mostly by way of powerful distortions and blockages at the prosodic level. These features of the poems, which I associate with the tradition of performed oral lament (and particularly maternal lament), create an affective poetics through which Carey’s silenced maternal body makes itself felt as a force that has the potential to disrupt deeply ingrained aspects of her emotional habitus.13 As we saw in chapter 4, the notion that there is a specifically feminine style of grief, and perhaps also a specifically maternal style of feminine grief, is familiar from Virgil’s Aeneid, which uses the phrase femineus ululatus to denote the grief-stricken cries of Euryalus’s mother when she learns of his death.14 The term ululatus recurs in Stoic portrayals of unruly, grief-stricken women as the sign of a quintessentially female disruptive passion.15 In Virgil’s text, the subversive function of female

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lament is connected with a displaced rage (furor) that coalesces in unpredictable but intricately connected patterns against the grain of the imperial trajectory of the poem.16 Carey’s poems also bear the traces of a heavily suppressed rage. As James Wilce argues, lament as a genre traditionally indicates an oral performance that is improvised in public rather constructed in private; as such it has the potential to contain powerful, unscripted elements that may depart from traditional emotional norms. Wilce also foregrounds the fundamentally corporeal nature of lament, which uses sobbing, wailing, and embodied gesture as part of its text.17 I will suggest that Carey’s affective poetics brings these strands of the lament tradition together; the poems’ stressed and unnatural punctuation and rhythms work to create an “entextualized” version of the maternal crying voice of lament—one that utters Carey’s version of the rageful or plaintive ululatus, or the nightingale’s song.18

Affect and Affliction: The Body Speaks In the dialogue between her body and soul that makes up the bulk of her prose narrative, Carey clarifies early on what the expectations of her emotional community are regarding grief. The dialogue proper begins when the soul addresses the body, asking, “Why art thou so sore cast downe; hath anythinge befallen the, but what is the lott of gods people whose sufferrings are heere onely?” (C, 1). The body’s impassioned response to her “deare Sister,” the soul, helps to orient the reader throughout the dialogue: Deare Sister, the Lord hath taken from me a sonne; a belov’d sonne; an only sonne; an only Child; the last of 3, and it must needs affect mee; Can a woman forgett hir Sucking Childe, that she should not have Compassion on the son of her womb? … Besides, I am now neare the tyme of my travile; and am verie weake; faint; sickly; fearfull; pain’d; apprehending much sufferings before me; if not death it selfe, the king of terrors. (C, 2–3)

The body here calls decisively for an acknowledgment of affective response in the context of an embodied life: “The Lord hath taken from me a son, a beloved son. … And it needs must affect me [italics mine].” The intensity of Carey’s grief emerges directly from the physical intimacy of pregnancy and nursing; it is an emotional modality directly and

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unapologetically tied to a felt bodily connection to another body, that of the nursing child. But as the speaker of sadness, the body’s power to articulate its sufferings is short-lived; the soul immediately rushes to God’s defense, arguing that the body should not only yield to what it cannot undo, but (a tall order indeed) also welcome it: “First, for the removall of the Childe know, that it is Gods will; to which submite not one word; and doe not only yeild; but approve; God is wise and knowes it best; God is loving and therfore did it” (C, 3). The requirement to adopt what Augustine would call “recta voluntas,” a will aligned with God’s will, is immediately and powerfully apparent in the Soul’s response. Carey battles with what she later calls her “rebellious will” throughout the text (C, 188), often calling in different ways on God’s love to save or redirect her: “The taste of this love cures a Thirst to, and Relish in, all Creature Comforts” (C, unpaginated letter, 7). In one marginal notation she writes simply: “affect mee” (C, 146), which seems ambiguously to ask both that God draw her love toward himself, and that he love her—the affect moving in both directions. Meanwhile, the body’s presentation of itself as “verie weake, faint, sickly, fearfull” recalls Stoic writers’ descriptions of emotional response as leaving the self “broken,” “abject,” and “soft,” and aligning, as those texts do, intense affective experience with a problematic ontological impressibility.19 Interestingly, just at this moment the soul loses “her” objectivity and difference from the body and refers to these afflictions as her own; she continues: “I am sure in faithfullnesse hath the Lord afflictd me” (C, 3, italics mine). As the soul takes on the body’s afflictions, the I/you distinction between body and soul momentarily disappears, threatening to blur the distinction between the rational soul and the suffering maternal body. Carey’s soul here adopts a highly conventional attitude toward the passions expressed by the body. As we saw earlier, given their traditional placement by Aquinas and others in the sensitive soul, the passions occupy a tricky liminal area between body and soul on which much philosophical and theological writing in the seventeenth century converges.20 They are unreliable and often destabilizing reactions to information that is inevitably mediated through bodily sense perception.21 While the period was fairly consistent in postulating what John Sutton calls “a continuum rather than a sharp line between gross matter and pure incorporeal substance,” it is equally clear that within this continuum there is also a hierarchy which was as theologically essential to Protestant reformers like John Calvin as it was to Thomas Aquinas and Augustine.22 The

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Stoics’ uneasy distinction between the irresistible prepassions and passion proper—which by definition is predicated on the soul’s “assent” to the feeling—translates in Augustine and subsequent Christian writers into an anxious focus on the will’s precarious alignment with heavenly rather than mortal matters. Like Augustine, Calvin emphasizes the crucial relationship between what Kyle Fedler calls orthopathy (right feeling) and orthodoxy (right belief).23 While Calvin similarly believes that emotion is an ineradicable part of human nature’s struggle to adjust to external events, he emphasizes repeatedly the need to adjust to God’s will without excessive repining: It must therefore be our study, if we would be disciples of Christ, to imbue our minds with such reverence and obedience to God as may tame and subjugate all affections contrary to his appointment. In this way, whatever be the kind of cross to which we are subjected, we shall in the greatest straits firmly maintain our patience.24

Although Calvin does reject the Stoics’ goal of apatheia on the grounds that emotion is part of the human condition and as such part of Christ’s own experience, his view of emotions as cognitively penetrable, and his insistence that suffering is always a manifestation of God’s will (and therefore not appropriately resisted), indicates the persistent influence of his early engagement with Stoic thought.25 In the framing letter addressed to her husband, Carey articulates some of these embedded values quite succinctly. Praising God, she lists the successive ways in which she relies on God’s interventions to maintain the proper hierarchy of reason over feeling: “God supplies my wants in all kinds; God informes my understanding; submits my will; takes my affections ” (C, unpaginated letter, 5–6, italics mine). Unusually, “submits” appears to function here as a nonreflexive transitive verb, parallel with “supplies” and “informes”— instead of submitting her own will to God, God submits her will, and perhaps only therefore “takes [her] affections.” The meaning of that latter phrase is also somewhat ambiguous: Carey perhaps means that she is redirecting her affection toward God and away from the mortal things of the world, but as with “submits,” the agency is all with God. Later, in a similarly Augustinian mode, she clearly associates the term “affections” with the carnal body and its failures: “Now the frutes of the spirit are love; joy; peace; &c. and they that are Christs have crucified the

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flesh; with the affections; & lusts” (C, 59–60). “But,” she continues— and this turn is characteristic of the tensile texture of Carey’s writing—“I feare another law in my members warring against the law of my mind” (C, 60). Carey associates this “warring” law both with Satan and what she calls her “melancholy Temper” (C, 137), and the effort to keep this temper at bay is palpable, especially in Carey’s often exhortative and selfcorrective marginalia: “Ah love him; love him my soule, my soule; love my deare Lord, and let love the ground of all thy obedience, both doing and suffering” (C, marginal note, 149). In this note and others like it, we hear Carey straining to love God more than the babies who have died, as she attempts to tear herself away from the “haec humana” (human concerns; Conf., 9.31) that Augustine exhorts himself to set aside even as he bitterly grieves his mother’s loss. Like Augustine, she believes she should grieve at her own grief.26 At one point she writes explicitly that her “affections” are “traytors” that the “blessed spirit hath reclaimed” and “sett … to worke, to act their parts another way, to another end, and although much more slowly? Yet safely. God ye Spirit hath now fixed them [my affections] upon worthy, and heavenly Objects, and Subjects that take them up, O that I could say wholly” (C, 189). Once again Carey asserts her commitment to an Augustinian redirection of the will but cannot fully embrace it; no sooner has she asserted her focus on “heavenly Objects” than that other “warring law” asserts itself, forcing a characteristic equivocation: “O that I could say wholly.” It is precisely the suppressed energy of this other “warring” law that Carey’s poetry materializes in its affective rather than semantic content and that will motivate my own turn toward affect theory in my analysis of her poems. Taking my cue from Sianne Ngai’s suggestion that “affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less ‘sociolinguistically fixed,’ but by no means code-free or meaningless,” I will track the ways in which weakly intentional forms of intensity in Carey’s poetry help to materialize the effects of that “warring law,” providing an index of “blocked or thwarted agency” whose interpretive meanings only make sense within her particular cultural context.27 A closer examination of Carey’s emotional community will help to clarify what is at stake in the affective improvisations of her poetry.

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Effeminate Lamentation: Carey’s Emotional Community A sermon by Samuel Fisher in 1655 entitled “A love-token for mourners teaching spiritual dumbness and submission under Gods smarting rod,” gives a taste of attitudes during the period in which Carey writes her poems: “Sometimes Non-submission is expressed by excessive and immoderate mourning under their affliction. … Where there is too much of grief, there is something of discontent. He doth not submit aright to the hand of God, that suffers himself to be overwhelmed with sorrow under God’s hand.”28 Since it is the childbearing body who attempts to voice her grief at the “removal” of her child but is silenced by the soul, the suppression of certain kinds of affective, relational experience emerges as a constitutive feature of the emotional habitus at work within Carey’s context. By the same token, a kind of happy patience emerges as the requisite adjustment in the face of suffering. Calvin’s powerful synthesis of Christian and Stoic thought summarizes a dominant Puritan view: “Our conclusion will always be, The Lord so willed it, therefore let us follow his will. Nay, amid the pungency of grief, among groans and tears this thought will necessarily suggest itself and incline us cheerfully to endure the things for which we are so afflicted” (Institutes, 3.8.10). In the framing letter to her husband with which she prefaces her narrative in her own voice, Carey carefully submits herself to what she perceives as God’s will, remarking: “God hath given us divers sweet babes; and thoughe he hath in wisdom remov’d them from our present sight, yet are they in the bosome of God; and we shall find them one day made perfitt in glorie” (C, unpaginated letter, 10–11). In the margin by the text I quoted earlier (“God is wise and knowes it best; God is loving and therfore did it”), Carey has written “the apprehension of love induceth patience,” as though she is trying to learn the lessons of the soul alongside the body (C, 3). Later in the dialogue the strain is palpable as she again exhorts herself to be patient: “Lett us patiently suffer his will in all things; willingly surrendering; [Carey has written in the margin: ‘ah freely; cheerfully; suffer, surrender’] what he pleaseth to call for” (C, 142).Carey’s painful effort to quell her incipient willfulness recalls Augustine’s struggle to bring his own will into line with God’s will (“recta voluntas”): “I was not wholly willing, nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself, and my very identity was disintegrating” (ego eram qui volebam

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nec plene nolebam. Ideo mecum contendembam et dissipabar; Conf ., 8.10). Carey’s sense of inner conflict is apparent in her continuous selfcorrection, as here in the margins, or even in her visible self-editing. Thus she says at one point, “Now I follow my Christ; whose voice I have heard, with constant [‘perfitt’ is visibly scratched out under ‘constant’] will though verie imperfitt stepps” (C, 54), as though she cannot in all conscience claim that her will is “perfitt,” though it disrupts the parallelism of her phrasing to alter it. In her discussion of the ways in which particularly cruel relations may be disrupted or shifted, Lauren Berlant has singled out “practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and selfabeyance that indicate people’s struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast.”29 As we see here and elsewhere, Carey’s use of marginalia, self-correction, and interruption suggests a similar struggle with the prevailing terms of value in her culture, hinting, I would argue, at underlying affective blockages in her text. In this exhortation to herself to “patiently suffer [God’s] will,” Carey is perhaps heeding the influential words of Calvin, for whom impatience in response to death and suffering is a form of unbelief: Paule doeth not altogither forbidde men mourning, when any of their friends is taken away by death, but he would haue a difference betweene them and the unbeleeuers: because hope ought to bee to them a comfort, and a remedie against vnpatience. … In like sort when wee are sorie that the Church is depriued of rare and excellent men, there is good cause of sorrow: onely we must seek such comfort as may correct excesse [italics mine].30

Many writers in this period adduce Stoic principles to advise tempering passion—and especially grief—with patience borne of reason and good counsel. Edward Reynolds’s discussion of grief in his Treatise of the Passions is exemplary in this regard: “So patience and wisdom in the bearing of one sorrow, doth keep the mind in a stable condition against any other. A man doth never over grieve, that keeps his ears open to counsel, and his reason to judgement above his Passion.”31 Carey’s selfexhorting commentary clearly shows her attempt to adjust herself to this Stoic ideal, and the tension this effort produces in her is evident not only in the obvious division of body and soul, but also in the vigilant selfmonitoring dramatized in her corrections and marginal notations. Her

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term for a careless affective state is “selfesie” (C, 116), a near-neologism that does not appear in this adjectival form in the OED, but which Carey uses to describe a lax condition that she views as highly threatening to her relationship with God. Her readiness to describe her soul in this way perhaps owes something to the pervasive view of women’s bodies and minds as unduly soft and impressible (we might recall Crooke’s reference to the “rare, and laxe, and moist” female body).32 The questions of what it might look like to “over grieve,” or who exactly establishes the parameters of what Thomas Playfere calls in the same spirit the “meane in mourning,” are never squarely addressed, but as Patricia Phillippy has pointed out, the quite general tendency in post-Reformation England is to characterize women’s mourning as “excessive, violent, and immoderate,” the denigrated other of the masculine alternative that is “both Stoic and short-lived.”33 Recent historians have observed that the Reformation witnessed not just the disappearance from churches of iconography featuring holy women, but also what Carlos M. N. Eire has called a broader “masculinization of piety.”34 The removal of women––emblems in the medieval church of “emotionality and loss of control”––reinforces this post-Reformation Protestant emphasis on a gendered version of composure and rationality.35 The Reformation’s denial of purgatory and ban on intercessory practices for the dead—practices that previously offered a public outlet for women’s lamentation—contributes to the sense that the frequent condemnation of “womanish weeping” is politically inflected.36 Not only do Reformation writers condemn Catholicism and its allegedly effeminate practices, they also hark back to classical efforts to curb public and especially female mourning. Pierre Charron’s openly Stoic commentary on grief in his book Of Wisdom (first published in 1601) exemplifies this double move clearly: “Grief utterly destroys, and takes away all that is manly and brave about us, and, in its room, gives us all the softness and infirmities of women. … The old Roman Laws, which were the most noble and masculine … strictly prohibited all such Effeminate Lamentations, and long indulg’d Sorrow.”37 Charron’s language, with its reference to the “softness and infirmities of women” and “effeminate lamentations” is vividly reminiscent of the Stoic discourse of impressible mollitia (softness), whose influence can be traced in philosophical writing through the late seventeenth century. As Phillippy points out, German reformer Otto Werdmuller similarly makes it clear that a certain effort in overcoming sorrow is expected of masculine piety: “Notwithstanding [the

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fact that grief will pass in time] to wayte still till heaviness forget itselfe is a wivish thing: and againe, to bridle it betimes, beseemeth the natural reason and soberness of a man.”38 “Man” in this sentence clearly does not refer to “humankind” but actually to men, whose proper mourning emerges with greater clarity against the background of women’s weak and “wivish” excess, which must be bridled, like unruly women themselves. The frequency with which the metaphor of “bridling” appears in relation to emotions themselves in the classical literature suggests just how closely emotionality and femininity are conjoined at this point. Playfere invokes similar assumptions early on in his 1596 sermon, “The Meane in Mourning”: “Yet it is certain, both that more women wept than men [at Christ’s Passion], and that the women wept more then the men. … Naturally sayth S. Peter, the woman is the weaker vessel, soone moved to weepe, and subject to many, either affectionate passions or els passionate affections.”39 If patience in the face of suffering is expected of both men and women, the early modern understanding of men’s and women’s ability to practice and achieve patience is unsurprisingly less evenhanded. Certain features of early modern assumptions about the emotions and gender construct women as constitutively inclined toward impatience: women are more subject to emotional upheaval because of their colder temperament and less active reasoning faculty. This attitude is epitomized by Helkiah Crooke’s assumption that women are “more easily moved of the hindges, that they have from their cold Temper, and from the impotencie and weaknes of their mind, because they are not able to lay a law upon themselves.”40 In the same section, Crooke also approvingly quotes Hippocrates’s view that “the Nature of a woman is to be of an abiect minde,” a claim that aligns closely with Stoic fears and assumptions about the threat posed to masculine coherence by the mind’s capacity for “feminine” abjection. These assumptions highlight the longevity of classical readings of women’s bodies as cold and wet, more liable to psychic disorganization due to their weaker pneumatic tension, and less able to withstand pressure to “assent” to the impetus of incoming impressions. As we saw in chapter 3, this nexus of beliefs coalesces around the figure of Eve in Augustine’s work, providing successive writers with a ready-made vessel to represent the emotional lability and perversion of the will that led to the fall as fundamentally feminine traits. Carey’s sense that her will is “selfesie” arises from exactly this nexus of inherited beliefs about the gendered mind.

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The influence of Stoic writers—and particularly Seneca—is particularly apparent in early modern commentary on the passion of grief.41 This may in part be explained by Reynolds’s sense that grief is an especially obdurate and disruptive passion: “In the body there is no other Passion [than grief] that doth produce stronger, or more lasting inconveniences by pressure of heart, obstruction of spirit, wasting of strength, dryenesse of bones, exhausting of nature. Griefe in the heart … disordereth the whole frame.”42 Reynolds also reaches for maternal grief as an example of a grief that cannot possibly be assuaged in its first heat, as though it serves as an exemplum of emotionality in its strongest form: “Who would forbid a Mother then to mourne, / When her sons ashes are warme in his urne?”43 Grief, in other words, is of all the emotions particularly liable to overrule the reason and thus especially subject to regulation in a culture that values moderation and rational discourse.44 The grieving mother emerges in this cultural formation as the figure least likely to be able to temper and moderate her emotion. At the same time, she is also the figure whose mutual interdependency with her child poses the greatest threat to the Protestant, and arguably Stoic, masculine ideal of self-regulation and self-coherence. Carey’s grief is complicated not just by these cultural truisms that women are more emotionally labile (“softer”) than men and that excessive passions are by definition bad (and spiritually suspect), but also by the prevailing view that damage to an unborn child, whether in the form of miscarriage, stillbirth, or birth defect, reflects poorly on the mother’s spiritual state.45 As Phyllis Mack and Pamela Hammons have observed, the losses attending on the grieving mother were intensified in the English Protestant context by the cultural instruction to the mother to “interpret the death [of a child] as punishment of her own sinfulness.”46 Thomas Wright representatively conflates two ideas—that women lack control of their passions and that mothers miscarry through a lack of virtue—in his discussion of pregnancy and passion. He begins several sections exploring the topic of inordinate or “unsatiable” passions with the observation that “hell, earth, and a womans wombe, saith Salomon are unsatiable; and with these he might have numbred a number of Passions.”47 With that opener, it is not surprising to discover that having an “unsatiable” womb might make a woman’s passions “unsatiable” as well; and indeed Wright’s imagery leads him associatively to connect the greed of an “epicure who wished his throat as long as a Crane … that his dainty fare might longer feede his gluttonous taste” to the allegedly extreme passions of pregnant

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women.48 The notion that women have “gluttonous taste” draws on the longstanding structural connection between women’s “soft” minds and a sexualized openness to the world’s objects that culminates in Augustine’s identification of Eve with the function of “delectatio,” and later writers’ conflation of Eve directly with the prepassions.49 In a remarkable passage, Wright develops the implications of the Evelike function of “delectatio” more fully: It is wonderful what passionate appetites reign in women when they be with child. I have heard it credibly reported, that there was a woman in Spaine, which longed almost till death, to have a mouth full of flesh out of an extreame fatte mans necke. … I can not but approove a sage Philosophers sentence (who was my maister in Philosophy) that most of these appetites proceeded from women extreamely addicted to follow their owne desires, and of such a froward disposition, as in very deede if they were crossed of their willes, the Passions were so strong, as they undoubtedly wold miscarry of their children; for vehement Passions alter vehemently the temper and constitution of the body, which can not but greatly prejudice the tender infant lying in the womb.50

The strange fantasy inscribed here, intertwining the physical appetites and the vehement passions in the pregnant body, seems to dramatize the principal fear associated with the passions throughout the history we have followed, locating its source firmly in the woman’s fertile body. The fear concerns what is imagined as the violently destructive impact of the world on the vulnerable pneumatic soul; if we consider the “froward” woman here as a version of Eve, she is shown literally biting into the body of her victim, an everyman or Adam figure. But that bite represents the love of worldly things, to which we are all subject—a love that from the Stoics onward is represented as radically threatening to the coherent masculine self, leaving it broken, fragmented, and abject. Influentially, this passage also highlights a fear that original dependence on the maternal body structures a primal and unavoidable vulnerability to the world—the “tender infant” surely prefigures the masculine individual whose tenderness (or mollitia) must be repeatedly disavowed. Wright implicitly lays the blame for miscarriage on the shoulders of the woman who may have precipitated her own pregnancy loss through her inability to manage and dispel her vehement passions. Carey’s internalization of these pervasive views emerges in her own self-castigation, in which the moral and physical

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meanings of “miscarriage” seem intertwined: “And many, yea innumerable times have been the indisposition and evil disposition of my heart to and in prayer. My memory is charged, and overcharged with miscarriages in this kind [margin: ‘even to this day’]” (C, 117). Vehemence, as we saw earlier, is the early modern equivalent of affective intensity; it is the outward manifestation of the internal boiling, seething, and diffusion of the pneumatic system. No virtuous woman, Wright suggests, is subject to such vehement passions, so it goes without saying that the woman who suffers multiple miscarriages is probably by definition too passionate to be altogether virtuous. In this context we do well to remind ourselves that the meaning that we now ordinarily attach to the verb “miscarry”—“to give birth to a fetus before it is viable”—is listed in the OED as meaning 4b; the primary meaning of the transitive sense of the word is “to cause to perish or suffer harm or misfortune.”51 Even the seventeenth-century French midwife Louise Bourgeois cites the passion of anger as the most common cause of miscarriage—an association that would be particularly pernicious for women like Carey, who suffered multiple miscarriages and yet risked dramatizing their own guilt if they expressed anger for these losses.52

Rachel’s Voice: A Bitter Mourning Following the exchange in Carey’s dialogue between the body and soul concerning the proper attitude toward child loss, the soul proceeds to edify the body with its spiritual biography, a confessional narrative of conversion. The culmination of this narrative of conversion begins when the soul consciously turns away from a frivolous life of “carding; dice; dancing, masking; dressing” and so on after a severe illness (C, 19). The change is slow, but eventually the soul feels the grace of God in herself and marks this moment with a textual allusion to Jeremiah in which Carey allegorically takes the place of Ephraim, the tribe of Israel: “God fully satisfied; trully agreed, full of Bowels, monning over me as over Ephraime; Is Ephraim my deare Son; is he a pleasant child; for since I spake against him; I doe earnestly remember him still. … I will surely have mercy upon him, sayth the Lord; Jer; 31.20” (C, 28–29). The passage Carey uses from Jeremiah is taken from an account of the return of the tribes of Israel from the Babylonian captivity and the conversion of the people. The prophet declares: “I have heard Ephraim lamenting thus. … Convert thou me, and I shalbe be converted” (Jer. 31:20, Geneva Bible). Immediately before

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the passage in which Carey lifts verbatim from the Geneva Bible, we find Ephraim’s declaration of conversion as he witnesses God’s mercy toward his wayward people: “Surely after that I converted, I repented, and after that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh: I was ashamed, yea, even confounded, because I did beare the reproche of my youth” (Jer. 31:19). This fits Carey’s soul narrative quite well; she repudiates her youth (a kind of captivity), bears the reproach, and is converted. By adopting this prophetic voice, Carey seems to insert herself into a long tradition of primarily masculine conversion narratives which often involve the repudiation of the body’s needs and desires. This sequence in Jeremiah ends with God’s promise of a new covenant with Israel, which maps back onto Carey’s soul’s account of God coming to her “with outstreach’d armes” in this moment of conversion (C, 30). Nonetheless, a glance at the relevant passage quickly reveals that Carey has also chosen a biblical passage that contains its own tension—a tension strikingly relevant to the dialectical context Carey has created for her narrative. The verses preceding Ephraim’s conversion concern the mercies and favors to be shown to Israel. But no sooner has the prophet finished presenting the Lord’s enunciation of his mercies (“and my people shalbe satisfied with my goodness”; Jer. 31.14) than another, dissenting voice is heard: “Thus saith the Lord. A voice was heard on hie, a mourning and bitter weping. Rachel weping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, because thei were not ” (Jer. 31:15, italics mine). The gloss in the Geneva Bible explains this odd verse as follows: To declare the greatnes of God’s mercies in delivering the Jewes he sheweth them that thei were like the Beniamites or Israelites: that is, utterly destroyed, and caryed away in so much that if Rachel the mother of Beiamin colde have risen againe to seke for her children she shulde have founde none remaining.53

Interestingly, the Vulgate version of these lines uses the term ululatus to denote Rachel’s weeping cries, perhaps alluding to Euryalus’s mother’s “femineus ululatus” in Virgil’s Aeneid: “[V]ox in Rama audita est ploratus et ululatus multus Rachel plorans filios suos et noluit consolari quia non sunt” (Matt. 2:18, Vulgate, italics mine). As Christopher Baswell has argued, Virgil’s work so thoroughly “penetrated the language and imagination of the Church Fathers” that it is not improbable that Jerome had the imagery of mourning mothers from the Aeneid in mind in his

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biblical translation.54 Counter-Reformation texts also sometimes explicitly adopted Euryalus’s mother as a model for the archetypal grieving mother of the Christian tradition, the Virgin Mary; Jacopo Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis (The Virgin Birth, 1526) bases the “furor” of Mary’s reaction quite closely on Euryalus’s mother, including her wail: “tum luctisono ululatu / cuncta replens, singultanti sic incipit ore” (then, filling the world with grief-shrieked wailing, she takes her start from sobbing lips; 1.340– 41).55 A wildly wailing Mary or Rachel is precisely the kind of figure that, as Karant-Nunn and others have observed, Protestant authors were keen to evict from their churches and texts. Whether or not Carey is aware of the Vulgate’s rendering of Rachel’s cries, her contextual allusion to Rachel may establish a link at a purely textual level to these earlier transgressive figures of uncontained and un- “reformed” feminine mourning. Rachel’s experience of childbirth is connected to sorrow throughout her story. After a long period of infertility, she gives birth to two sons, but dies in childbirth with the youngest, whom she names Ben-Oni, “son of my sorrow.” But Rachel’s power to name her child is instantly revoked by Jacob, who renames him Benjamin (“son of my right hand”). When the prophet Jeremiah unexpectedly inserts Rachel into his narrative, he seems to call her up just as she was when she died, expressing the sorrow that was immediately elided by her husband. It is Rachel’s sorrow and impatience in the face of God’s treatment of her and her children for which she seems to be remembered in the early modern period. When Wright considers what he calls the “Impossibility of Passions” in his treatise on the passions, he uses Rachel as an exemplar of excessive passion, suggesting (as Jacob does) that her frustration with God and her husband about her lack of fertility is inappropriate because it lacks the patience expected of women: “Rachel well declared the impossible petitions of her Passions, when so importunely she demanded children of Jacob, or else that she would die: as though it lay in his power to have children at his pleasure.”56 Wright’s evocation of Rachel’s role here highlights the contours of Carey’s speaking position quite vividly. She risks being regarded as a woman whose inability to control her passions leads her to make improper—importunate—demands on her husband and on God. Carey’s internalization of the norms of her emotional community is suggested by her application of the same damning word “importunate” to herself when she uses Satan as an interlocutor to help her critique her own Rachel-like resistance: “What’s that farther, Satan, I wanted the life of my

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children, which I importunately begged?” (C, 172). A characteristically defensive posture emerges in her answer: “I answer ye, when I importunately begged their life, I knew not but god’s will might be to spare as well as to take” (C, 172). The marginal note on the page offers fascinating commentary on her thought process about this “importunate” begging: “I first experienced selfe, then god, first weakness, then mercy.” Carey interprets her vehemence in begging for the lives of her children—something most modern readers would automatically accept as appropriate—as an instance of inappropriate focus on self, or as Augustine puts it, as “a falling away from the work of God to the will’s own works ” (CG, 14.11, italics mine). Carey seems to have internalized the process of shutting off access to her own will, enacting as she does so a kind of self-induced transformation into the apatheic figure of Griselda. Carey’s dialogue opens with her attempt (through the body) to speak of her own “son of sorrow,” as in the biblical story of Rachel; however, her attempt symbolically to name her child is immediately thwarted by the authoritative spiritual narrative of the soul. This allusion to a verse in Jeremiah whose context contains the return of this repressed maternal voice perhaps suggests that Carey’s dissociated grief is working its way back into her text at its margins. Although Rachel’s voice of mourning is not actually included in the prose dialogue, it is in the background for anyone familiar with the text from Jeremiah—and thus presumably for Carey herself. Rachel’s refusal to be comforted for her children “because thei were not” echoes hauntingly in Carey’s own narrative of loss after loss, and contributes an allusive countervoice to the overwhelmingly submissive tone of the spiritual biography. Even as she lists her “assurances” that she is elect, the soul clearly struggles with the absorption of her children’s deaths into this seamless narrative of God’s mercy (C, 45). Tentatively approaching what feels like forbidden territory, she writes: “When I have foresene & apprehended any great suffering before me; as the death of my Children (a hart terrifieing sorrow) … my flesh hath creappe for feare, my spirit hath fainted” (C, 122). In the margin Carey adds a note that intensifies this suffering: “And all my Children were only Children; each Child when it died was all I had alive” (C, 122). Here we seem to hear a more insistent voice, one that refuses to diminish the magnitude of her loss—but this voice is pushed literally into the margins of Carey’s manuscript. Even when a dissenting or more strident voice—we could think of it as the text’s Rachel-voice— is not distinguishable, currents of tension run through Carey’s assertions

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of patient submission. When she writes about the mutual entanglement in her life of affliction and affection (what she loves has died, and thus afflicted her), she writes: To Reforme my affections as thus God hath afflict’d what I have over affect’d, that himselfe might be the only obiect of all my affections; And have the all; or Quintisence of everie affection; viz: I would not only love God; but I would have God; to have all my Love; & all my desires. (C, 85–86)

It is not merely to reform and edify Carey’s soul, then, that God has taken her children; more chillingly, Carey interprets his actions as those of a jealous God who wants all her love to himself. Like the jealous God of John Donne’s “Hymn to Christ on the Author’s Last Going into Germany,” Carey’s God shows his love by “free[ing]” her from loving anyone else: [A]s Thou Art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now; Thou lovest not, till from loving more Thou free My soul.57

Donne’s savage wish to be “free” from loving “more” smacks of irony and resentment as well as devotion. Whether or not Carey knew Donne’s poem (and she may well have), the similarity between her jealous God and Donne’s helps to highlight the subversive potential of her lines, which will bloom more fully in the space of her poetry. The difficulty Carey experiences in continuing to accede to God’s practice of afflicting what she has “over affected” is also suggested by the text’s habits of vigilance, self-monitoring, and self-correcting, which are pervasive, but especially in evidence at this point in Carey’s narrative. A few lines below those just quoted, Carey writes: “In my afflictions I learne much of my selfe; I littell thought ther had lodged so much; infidility, distrust”––and there follows a list of sinful tendencies, ending with “failling of hart” (C, 87) and “faynting of spirit” (C, 88). At this point in her list, Carey suddenly interrupts herself with a self-addressed exhortation: “Ah! alas; alas; thus, is it thus; thus still? alas; alas; what’s in my hart?” (C, 88). What’s in Carey’s heart in the medical sense are her (impatient) passions, and this densely asyndetonic sentence performs a kind of passionate outburst (recalling the affect bursts at the root of the

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ululatus in the Aeneid), beautifully exemplifying the kind of moment in which Carey’s text interrupts itself, seemingly just when the question of her contested will arises. Carey’s passionate “alas; alas” seems to capture the impossibility of controlling or “bridling” what the Stoics would call the prepassion—her heart is snagged with feeling, in spite of her wishes to the contrary. It is in the midst of this seemingly involuntary outburst that affective vehemence, the hallmark of the prepassionate response, seems to burst through even the most syntactically controlled discourse, paving the way for the more radical affective experiments of her poetry.

Now Let Me Die: Poetic Emotives and Lament The first poem that Carey reproduces in her text is not her own but her husband’s, dated 8 December 1650: “Written by my dear husband at the death of our fourth (at that time) only child Robert Payler”: Deare wife, let’s learne to gett that Sacred Skill of free Submission to gods holy will: He like a potter is; and we like clay shall not the potter mould us his owne way: Sometymes it is his pleasure that we stand with prety lovly baby’s in our hand: Then he in wisedom turnes the wheele about and drawes the posture of thos Comforts out Into another forme; either this or that as pleases him; and ‘tis no matter what: If by such changes; God shall bring us in to love Christ Jesus; and to loath our sin. (C, 148–49)

Directly addressed to his wife, George Payler’s poem tackles the problem of child loss through the task of consolation; it is not itself an expression of grief, but rather a series of instructions as to how Mary should respond to their loss. In this sense, Payler’s poem clearly functions as an emotional exercitive, laying out, however gently, the parameters of an acceptable grief response. No particular “forme” of God’s comforts (either “this” or “that” particular child) should be the object of too much affection, since any form chosen by God is good enough to bring the parents closer to Christ. In its conventional urging to acceptance, patience, and above all “Submission to god’s holy will,” this poem channels the pressures present in Carey’s broader emotional community in particularly intimate form.

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The companion poem to this one, written by Mary herself two days later, offers a somewhat different perspective: My Lord hath called for my Sonne my hart breaths forth; thy will be done: My all; that mercy hath made mine frely’s surrendered to be thine: But if I give my all to the lett me not pyne for poverty: Change with me; doe; as I have done give me thy all; Even thy deare sonne. ’Tis Jesus Christ; Lord I would have; he’s thine; mine All; ’tis him I crave: Give him to me; and I’le reply Enoughe my Lord; now lett me dye. (C, 149–50)

Carey’s poem begins with the submission prescribed by her husband; though its iambic tetrameter moves more quickly than her husband’s more conventional pentameter, the opening lines maintain a smooth iambic rhythm, consistent with the breathing invoked in the line: “my hart breaths forth; thy will be done.” Unlike her husband’s poem, however, Carey’s quickly begins to address God directly. Having asserted the primacy of God’s will, in alignment both with her husband’s directive and her own self-instruction in her prose narrative, Carey immediately clarifies how drastic her sacrifice is, turning directly to God to say so: “My all; that mercy hath made mine / frely’s surrendered to be thine.” The fierce caesura after the first foot suggests, contrary to the ostensible semantic meaning of the line, that Carey does not render this child freely or easily. With its sudden and ungrammatical caesura, “My all” stops the breath, in contrast with the earlier line, which expresses both semantically and rhythmically the idea of breathing out the words “thy Will be done.”58 This emphatic, spondaic foot seems to figure Carey’s unarticulated and perhaps unspeakable wish to hold on to her child and disrupts the “free” movement of both line and meaning. It is precisely at the level of the breath that Carey resists the demand that is made of her even while ostensibly acquiescing to it. Indeed, it is through this ragged misalignment of breath with the semantic flow of the line that we feel the body’s effort, its suffering—whether we think of these in terms of the irresistible sting or bite of Stoic prepassion or

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Massumi’s affective intensity.59 The enjambment between “mine” and “frely’s” is equally awkward and in fact creates a jar in the flow of the lines. Grammatical inversion places “frely” first in the line as a trochee— calling attention to the claim that this relinquishing is free, while making the utterance sound tight, awkward, and unfree. The rhythm of the lines works against their semantic meaning, disrupting the reader’s ability to voice the lines smoothly. This feeling of disruption is intensified in the lines that follow, as the spondaic adversative “but” suggests: “But if I give my all to thee / let me not pyne for poverty.” Carey is bargaining with God, rather than simply submitting to his will.60 The culminating demand, “Give him to me,” intensified by the double spondee, is astonishing in its peremptoriness. In the context of a cultural demand that mothers (in particular) moderate their expression of grief, Carey seems to use this poem in part to perform precisely the kind of vehement expression that she carefully suppresses elsewhere in her manuscript. This vehemence is especially apparent in the poem’s charged transformation of “all” through the poem from “My all” to “thy all” to “thine, mine all”— a chiastic structure that perhaps dramatizes the “[ex]change” of God’s child with Carey’s own. But since it does so in the context of continuing, anguished demands (“now let me die”), this merely rhetorical exchange ultimately intensifies the reader’s sense of Carey’s unrelieved “Poverty” at the end of the poem. The sense of excess energy in this poem—unlike in Carey’s husband’s measured couplets—contributes to our sense that unspoken feelings are running through these lines, resisting the choice of “mutually exclusive pathways of action and expression” demanded by the semantic meanings of the poem.61 Andrea Brady has usefully discussed the role of early modern prosody in organizing a poem as kind of organism, whose built-in breathing and pausing may even allow it to act as a “little vent hole for reliefe” in the processing of strong emotion.62 We might recall Philippe de Mornay’s description of his own grief causing swelling in his abdomen that needed relief: “My belly is as the wine that hath no vent.”63 His means of “venting” his grief is to speak: “Therefore I will speake (I thinke it bee best) that I may take some breath, against this abundant excesse of sorrowe [italics mine].”64 The gendered difference between Carey’s and de Mornay’s speaking conditions is notable. De Mornay’s grief-stricken but nonetheless confident assertion: “Therefore I will speake” is a far cry from Carey’s troubled division of her speaking self into a body whose griefs are vigorously repressed by the soul’s insistence on a normative alignment with

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God’s will (up to and including the death of children). Nowhere do we hear Carey assert that she will speak out to vent her “abundant excesse of sorrowe.” But while Carey’s emotional responses are often relegated to the margin of her prose text, this poem initiates a new mode—one that starts to integrate the disorganized and often disowned bodily affects into the same space as overt statements of submission––through the disruption and manipulation of conventional rhythm and meter. If, as Brady has argued, “violations of prosody can express the … griefs which will not submit to social expectation,” Carey’s poem—especially in contrast with her husband’s—calls into focus through its jarring and irregular prosody the affective distress behind the speaker’s ostensible submission.65 More radically, the prosodic irregularities actually allow the affective energy of the poem to work against the semantic meaning of the lines: we feel (though Carey does not say it) that this giving is not free, or easy, even when the poem says it is. The next poem concerns yet another death, that of Carey’s fifth child, Perigrene. It is difficult not to hear some bitterness or irony in the first lines of this poem: I thought my all was given before but mercy ordered me one more: A perigrene; my God me sent him backe again I doe present As a love token; ’mongst my others one daughter, and her 4 deare Brothers. (C, 150–51)

The play on “my all” continues in this poem, written after the death of this child in 1652. In a seemingly typical epitaphic move, Carey names her lost child, Perigrene, in her poem, but this naming ritual is very different from the clearly monumentalizing intentions of, for instance, Ben Jonson, who names his daughter Mary as he figuratively inscribes his lines on her tomb: “Here lies, to each her parents ruth, Mary.”66 Perigrene, as his name implies, inhabits a kind of liminal space between Carey and God. He is a gift going in two directions at once: Perigrene seems to be the grammatical object of both God’s sending (“my God me sent”) and Mary’s presenting (“I doe present”). Although the enjambment encourages us to read “him” as at first belonging to God’s action of sending, we are brought up short with the word “back,” which makes all too much sense when we realize that Carey is enforced to return this gift to the sender.

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The objectification of the child as gift is also enhanced by Carey’s decision not to capitalize the word to indicate its function as proper name in line 3; he is simply “a perigrene.” Carey’s use of the epitaph form also dramatizes the instability of this child’s status as gift. Although the couplets in an epitaph often form syntactically independent units, Carey disrupts that logical and equanimous structure with her disorientingly fluid enjambment.67 There is a sense in which the boundaries between the parts of this poem, and between the heavenly and mortal realms that this traveler child—this Perigrene—traverses, are all too fluid. The second couplet of this poem runs on directly into the third: “[H]im back againe I doe present / as a love token”; the reader’s struggle to figure out who is sending what continues to unfold in the chilling notion that the child is sent as a love token to God—the same God who “hath afflict’d what I have over affect’d, that himselfe might be the only obiect of all my affections.” The jolting caesura after “love token” in the line—“as a love token;’mongst my others”—brings us up short at the pivotal moment of the poem’s thought. Once again, it is difficult to breathe through this caesura and the heavy, spondaic foot after “love token” creates a kind of choking or stuttering in the middle of the line that works against its semantic flow. In the earlier context, Carey seems to accept God’s jealous actions, but here the stuttering effect brings a body into view—one that has trouble speaking out this line of acceptance. The nonacceptance cannot be said (or perhaps even thought), but the sensation of nonacceptance makes itself felt in this poem. If we regard these poems as redescribing in a different mode feelings that cannot be directly expressed or acknowledged within Carey’s cultural and religious contexts, they seem gradually to push those oblique affects toward more fully formulated emotives. Embedded in their devotional context, Carey’s poetry strains to embody more fully the occluded affective material canceled or marginalized in the prose text. The building affective intensity in the first two poems helps to create the emotional quality of lament by creating what Ngai has called in another context a “thick” language based on the erosion of formal syntactic or grammatical distinctions—and both apply here.68 Such a language tends to dramatize the unique occasion of embodied utterance rather than its codified “entextualiz[ation].”69 Some of these poetic features have the effect of holding back the overwhelming flow of strong affect through the poem; the stammering and stuttering effect noted above dramatizes a holding on

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that interrupts what might otherwise be a seamless movement from affect to a selected emotional pathway. What comes into view, as a result, is both the body as effort, as suffering, and a felt sense of linguistic blockage—as though we experience the tension between affect and emotive within the crucible of the poem as a struggle to keep breathing. The results of these effects are particularly evident in the last and longest poem, “Upon the Sight of my abortive Birth, 1657.” This poem, more clearly than the two earlier poems we’ve considered, fulfills an elegiac rather than an epitaphic function, and this poem’s very length, at forty-six rhyming couplets, suggests a difficult, even tortured, coming to terms.70 After seven pregnancies, only two of which resulted in children who lived beyond infancy, Carey experiences an eighth pregnancy that ends in miscarriage. The poem begins in a place of horror and confusion—“What birth is this; a poore despissed creature; / a little Embrio; voyd of life and feature” (C, 195)—and closes with a prayer to God to “quicken” the bereft speaker (C, 201). Spiraling through several couplets recalling previous pregnancies, the speaker returns to the present loss in the fifth couplet, which refers again to “this,” the “poore despissed creature” with no name: “This is no lesse; the same God hath it donne; / submits my hart; thats better than a sonne” (C, 195). The compressed syntax in these two lines helps to create a feeling of pressure in the startling statement that submission of the heart is somehow better than the birth of a living child. The following couplets seem to explicate the nature of this pressure, while simultaneously intensifying the affective tightness of the lines: In giveing; taking; stroking; striking still; his glorie & my good; is; his. my will: In that then; this now; both good God most mild his will’s more deare to me; then any Child. (C, 195–96)

The intensity of the first line’s asyndeton calls attention at once to the disturbing and unpredictable oscillation between gentleness and violence, giving and taking, and Carey’s continuing use of punctuation to violate the flow of the grammatical units causes the sentence structure to all but collapse. Instead of regular punctuation, alliteration and successive internal feminine rhymes reorganize the line, grouping together words according to entirely different logics. And while the first line is

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an entirely regular iambic line, the fierce caesurae disrupt that evenness with a jagged breathlessness even as the feet tear up the words, whose feminine endings sound out like sobs. The following line disintegrates even further, producing explosive spondees which actually speak like singly gulped-out syllables. Like the earlier poems, these couplets let us feel the strain of unarticulated feeling behind the lines, a choking, stuttering quality that indicates powerful resistance, but also an unarticulated and thus mysterious affective potential. Sensing this quality of the lines, Lisa Schnell calls attention to their “sobbing punctuation,” an emotional effect that illustrates the poem’s success in approximating the performative, embodied nature of lament.71 Wilce describes traditional lament as “melodic weeping with words” and points to the continuity of verbal utterance with specific corporeal gestures, including what he calls a “crying voice characterized by pharyngeal constriction and ‘cry breaks.’”72 In its approximation of the “crying voice” of lament, Carey’s poem performs a version of the classical ululatus, giving the silenced, grieving body a powerful voice. Like her fictional predecessor, Euryalus’s mother, she is operating within an emotional community which regulates the expression of maternal grief especially harshly. At the semantic level these lines are not so different from the gist of what the body and soul together agree to say by the end of the prose narrative, particularly as concerns the submission of Carey’s grieving will to God’s opaque one. But as a performative expression of emotion these two couplets work quite differently. The quite bizarre fragmentation of the second half of line 12—“his glorie and my good; is; his. my will”—revisits with very different effect Carey’s exploration of the tension between her will and God’s elsewhere. Here the jolting punctuation and radically elliptical compression create a jarring separation between the semantic meaning of the words—her will is consonant with God’s—and the disrupted rhythm, which requires multiple breaths within the line and seems to give voice to feelings that are other than fully compliant: an emergent willfulness. The speaker’s need to gasp through these lines perhaps acknowledges the riskiness of this unspoken affect; as Sara Ahmed writes, “Willfulness is a diagnosis of the failure to comply with those whose authority is given. The costs of such a diagnosis are high. … Willfulness is thus compromising; it compromises the capacity of a subject to survive, let alone flourish.”73 The authority of Carey’s interlocutor in this poem could not be greater—she is, as the poem later reveals, really talking to God. To counteract the felt risk to the speaker, the poem seems to

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draw on the presence of autonomic activities within the body—breathing, shifts of heartbeat—that are indices of intense affective response and yet are only tangentially implicated in the linguistic narrative of the poem. In his account of what distinguishes affect from emotion, Massumi emphasizes the role of precisely these bodily indices in shifting unconscious affect into consciousness: “Modulations of heartbeat and breathing mark a reflux of consciousness into the autonomic depths, coterminous with a rise of the autonomic into consciousness.”74 Although for Massumi affect and emotion “follow different logics and pertain to different orders,” the connection between them is also implicit in his definition of emotion as “qualified intensity … intensity owned and recognized.”75 Carey’s poem seems to situate itself on that continuum between affect qua intensity, and emotion. Her “thick” language disrupts her feeling’s “narrativizable” semantic units but generates out of those fragments a felt sense of affective energy willfully seeking expression.76 The affective pressure applied in the first half of this poem leads us to the poem’s inflection point at couplet 17. The tension of the foregoing couplets seems to create the conditions in which Carey can ask the central—but hitherto unspoken—question of her narrative. It is the question on which the whole poem, and perhaps the whole manuscript, turns: why has God taken her children? And if heere in God hath fulfill’d his will; his handmaides pleassed; compleatly happy still: I only now desire of my sweet God; the reason why he tooke in hand his rodd. (C, 197)

As Wilce points out, laments are also “conventionally marked by ‘grieving questions,’” and Carey’s quietly devastating “why” pulls away from the many assertions of grateful acceptance throughout the prose text.77 In his treatise on grief, John Flavel remarks: “Were it not better to be searching our hearts and houses, when Gods rod is upon us, and studying how to answer the end of it, by mortifying those corruptions which provoke it?”78 But rather than heed this powerfully regulatory advice, and ask herself what she has done to deserve her suffering, Carey finally turns the question back on God. Ventriloquizing just the moralizing view of miscarriage that we explored earlier, Carey’s God cruelly accuses her of responsibility for her losses: “this is the sinne … Thou often dost present

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me with dead frute; / why should not my returnes; thy presents sute” (C, 197). In other words, Carey’s “dead formlesse babe” (C, 196) is God’s return for her “dead dutys; prayers; praises … affections dead” (C, 198). Although Carey earlier claims that she is “Compleatly happy still” (C, 151), the affective quality of this poem has told a vastly different story. As we have seen, Reddy notes that the emotive is characterized by its performative function in relation to a feeling it both articulates and (in so doing) alters. This poem’s negotiation between the poles of affect and emotion is not static. The early couplets register affective distress that is not fully articulated, but that seems ultimately to create the poetic environment for this pivotal question: why has God visited this suffering on her? The damning answer to this question in turn provokes a kind of symbolic disintegration in the speaker. Rather like Donne’s speaker in “A Nocturnal upon St Lucie’s Day,” who is “re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not,” Carey adopts a radically nihilistic posture: [H]enceforth I will bee, what; Nothinge Lord; but what thou makest mee; I am nought; have nought; can doe nought but sinne. (C, 199)79

The sequence of trochees, throwing emphasis onto the key word “nought” and at the same time disrupting the poem’s governing iambic meter, dramatizes the speaker’s disintegration into nothingness. It is as though she performs in these lines the soul-destroying absoluteness of a grief that cannot find expression in the dialogue with the soul, and is for that reason pushed into the margins of the manuscript. The shifting and even broken semantic boundaries in this poem provide room for what Cavarero describes as the “vocal flux in which someone laughs, cries, screams, and breathes, singing in writing the advent of his or her own disorganization.”80 If the poem finally allows Carey’s stultified “affections” to shift and move into new pathways, the poem also effects change in her relationship with God. Responding to God’s accusation that she is at fault for her miscarriages, Carey writes two couplets that seem deliberately ambiguous in terms of who (God or Carey) is voicing them:

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Lively: o do’t, thy mercyes are most sweet; Chastisments sharpe; & all ye meanes that’s meet: Mend now my Child; & lively frute bring me; so thou advantag’d much by this wilt be. (C, 198)

Initially the phrase “thy mercyes” seems to belong to God, but by couplet 27, when Carey does address God directly again (“My dearest Lord” [C, 198]), it becomes clear that “thy mercyes” refer to the mercies Carey enjoys; similarly, “mend now my Child” addresses Carey and exhorts her to mend, although the more obvious meaning asks God to mend her children and bring her live births (“lively frute”). “Frute” here could mean either spiritual fruit (prayers) or children. In other words, these couplets are productively ambiguous, and the loose grammatical construction of these lines encourages the reader to entertain both possibilities simultaneously. This sudden conflation of ambiguous meanings is not coincidental. If the early couplets of Carey’s poem draw attention to a kind of affective overload, the transition from affect to emotive is also marked by a rebooting of language and meaning. Not only does Carey ventriloquize God in response to her own daring question (“why”), but she now allows her voice to converge with God’s, producing ironically contestatory meanings. Remarkably, this point in the poem also initiates a new kind of semantic intensity. Whereas the preceding twenty-four couplets allude to only a couple of particular biblical passages, from this point on the allusiveness is so dense and pervasive that almost every line of every couplet needs a gloss. And these glosses are, importantly, part of the poem in the sense that they are present in Carey’s manuscript, not added by a later editor. In the spirit of the improvisatory emotive, this cento-like remixing of biblical quotations or allusions allows Carey to create new, powerful meanings for her suffering—transforming her, perhaps for the first time, into the author of those meanings. The interplay between the cento’s patchwork and Carey’s distilling of her crucial double meaning (child and spiritual fruit) is particularly acute in the passage beginning at couplet 35: I am a branch of the vine; purge me therfore; father, more frute to bring; then heertofore: Lett not my hart; (as doth my wombe) miscarie; but precious meanes received, lett it tarie:

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Lord I begg Quikning grace; that grace aford; quicken mee Lord according to thy word. (C, 200)

These couplets allude to a dense mixture of lines in John, the Psalms, and Exodus, but the hypotext is in service to Carey’s transformation of her bodily suffering—her “miscarri[age]”—into something new and vital, her own laboriously produced and now timely “frute.”81 Although Carey is asking God for “Quikning grace,” and is thus ostensibly focused on spiritual renewal, her consistent use of reproductive organs and energies as the metaphorical vehicle for that spiritual renewal has the effect of foregrounding the vehicle rather than the tenor of the metaphor, just as Carey repurposes her biblical hypotext to refer to her very personal experience with child loss. Through its expression of a highly complex affective counterforce, dramatized largely in the poem’s prosodic disruptions, the elegiac couplets of the poem offer a new and animating vessel in which to transform the nothingness of loss, the unformed matter of the “little Embrio,” into a new kind of “frute.” The poem itself seems to function as an alembic in which the painful affects gradually gain emotive form. This transformation seems to hinge on a key word that, as Donna Long has noted, Carey uses no fewer than six times in eight lines: “quicken.”82 Carey draws repeatedly on a central phrase in Psalm 119: “Quicken me according to thy worde. … Quicken me according to thy loving kindness: so I shall keepe the testimonie of thy mouth.” As Long notes, for a Calvinist the word has a quite particular meaning: it refers to what Calvin calls “the secret operation of the spirit” that revives spiritually dead souls and assures the sinner of the operation of grace within her.83 But Carey’s use of the term in the context of a poem about her dead children has the effect of foregrounding precisely the bodily rather than the spiritual meaning of the word. By the same token, the forceful reiteration of the word creates the kind of affective “thickness” of linguistic texture that we noted earlier, as though the cognitive meanings of the word matter less than its repeated, sensuous sound. “Quicken me” becomes a kind of refrain which, in its very insistence, brings with it feelings of urgency and need that are not necessarily fully articulated. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s ritournelle, this is a rhythm that marks out a new terrain— an “active rhythm” rather than a “passively endured rhythm”—and as such a marker of Carey’s emergent willfulness.84 Similarly, while the lines

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may verbalize spiritual submission in one way, as a series of grammatical imperatives placed at rhythmically powerful moments in the line, they also command God to fill her with life after the catastrophic sequence of deaths she has experienced. Whereas the earlier phrase “Mend now my child” was ambiguously placed between Carey and God, “quicken me” is unambiguously Carey’s to utter. The obstetrical meaning of “quickening” also calls attention to female physical power, since the term marked the woman’s own incorrigible physical sense of her unborn child’s presence and growth—not easily regulated or negated by external objective forces.85 This maternal “embodied knowing” trumped patriarchal epistemologies and contributed to a recentering of the body in early modern scientific accounts of pregnancy.86 A similar recentering occurs more generally in the poetry in this manuscript. The affective intensity of the poems brings back into play the disavowed “affections” of the early dialogue. In doing so, this affective energy resurrects Carey’s suffering maternal body—“weake; faint; sickly; fearfull; pain’d”—banished so early on in the dialogue. Taking up the disorganized affective material from the dialogue (its disavowed hints of guilt, anger, grief, and shame), Carey’s poems approximate lament’s traditional engagement with an improvisatory, corporeal performance, building emotional capacity and allowing her to explore, transform, and rearticulate—even as something approaching anger—those aspects of her grief that dwindle into the margins of her prose. The performative function of the poetry, and especially of this last poem, takes her to the very edges of what can be said in her emotional community, nudging her poetic elegy into the realm of traditional lament and the “embodied knowledge” long associated with the dangerous maternal mourner.

Notes 1. I benefited early on in this project from the work of scholars in the Perdita project on Mary Carey’s biography. I have since worked with Carey’s autograph manuscript, now at the Folger Shakespeare Library. 2. See Rachel Adcock, Sara Read, and Anna Ziomek, eds., Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). The authors note the characteristically Puritan qualities of Carey’s writing (see 37–39). I am indebted to this discussion for the reference to the Westminster Catechism.

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3. Mary Carey, Spiritual Dialogues, Meditations, and Poems, in Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, V.a.628, 145. Hereafter abbreviated “C” and cited parenthetically by page number. 4. The main exception is Michelle Dowd’s “Genealogical Counternarratives in the Writings of Mary Carey,” Modern Philology 109, no. 4 (2012): 440–62. 5. Pierre Bourdieu develops the notion of “habitus” as “a durably installed set of dispositions” that “provide individuals with a sense of how to act and respond in the course of their daily lives.” Language and Symbolic Power, 13. Barbara Rosenwein uses the term to develop her notion of the potentially coercive features of emotional communities in Emotional Communities, 25. 6. For a discussion of Carey’s generic models see Dowd, “Genealogical Counternarratives in the Writings of Mary Carey,” 445–46. 7. The term “emotional community” is developed by Rosenwein in Emotional Communities. See my discussion of the concept, chapter 1, 1–2 and in this chapter, 249 and 254–260. 8. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5. 9. See Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect,” 261–86, on the issue of nonconceptuality. 10. As Ford Lewis Battles and André Malan Hugo point out, “Seneca had a very high standing among the Fathers of the Church,” and was widely regarded as being as close to Christianity as it was possible for a pagan philosopher to be. This early acceptance paved the way for Seneca’s importance to later philosophers: “When the learned men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made much of Seneca and of the philosophy he preached, they were merely taking up anew the thread of a very ancient Christian tradition.” Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, intro., trans., and notes by Ford Lewis Battles and André Malan Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 50. 11. See Miranda Fricker on the concept of “epistemic injustice” or “testimonial injustice” in her Epistemic Injustice, Chap. 1, and my discussion in Chapter 1 above, Chapter 1, 2–3. 12. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 20. 13. On Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, see Chapter 1, 2. For a discussion of normative emotions as “overlearned cognitive habits,” see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 54. 14. Virgil, Aeneid, 9.477. See Chapter 4, 122–end, for a detailed discussion of this term and its occurrence in Virgil’s poem. Chapter 4, 122–end. 15. See Chapter 4, 117–119. 16. Christine Perkell, “Reading the Laments of Iliad 24,” in Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, ed. Ann Suter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93.

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17. Wilce, Crying Shame, 23–25. 18. Wilce, Crying Shame, 23. Wilce distinguishes “entextualized” lament, which emphasizes repeatable elements of the performance, from its “contextualized” aspects, which are unique to the particular performance (34). 19. These terms are used by Cicero in Tusculan Disputations, 4.64. See Chapter 2, 34, for discussion. 20. See Chapter 3, 74–86. 21. For a widely influential account of the passions and their placement in the sensitive soul, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a.2ae.22.1. Dixon has an excellent account of Aquinas’s view of the passions; see From Passions to Emotions, 56 and onward. 22. John Sutton, The Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 288. 23. Kyle Fedler, “Calvin’s Burning Heart,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 22 (2012): 135. See also Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 56, for a helpful discussion of what constitutes “proper” emotions. 24. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.8.10, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/cal vin/institutes.v.ix.html. 25. On the Christological argument, compare Augustine’s statement that “the human emotion in him who possessed a real human body and a real human mind was not feigned” (neque enim in quo verum erat hominis corpus et verus hominis animus, falsus erat humanus affectus; CD, 14.9). I am indebted to Kyle Fedler’s clear account of the overlap and differences between Calvin’s view of the emotions and that of the Stoics in “Calvin’s Burning Heart,” esp. 137–39. 26. “Alio dolore dolebam dolorem et duplici tristitia macerabar” (I grieved with a different sort of grief at the fact of my own grief, and I was torn apart by this twofold distress; Conf ., 9.31). 27. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. See Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect,” on the claim that affects are not nonconceptual even when they are nonlinguistic; I claim similarly that affects do not occupy entirely separate spheres from emotives. 28. Samuel Fisher, A love-token for mourners teaching spiritual dumbness and submission under Gods smarting rod (London: T. Underhill, 1655), 65. 29. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 27. 30. John Calvin, The Commentaries of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the Actes of the Apostles (London: 1585), 62. 31. Reynolds, Treatise, 235. 32. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 275.

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33. Thomas Playfere, “The Meane in Mourning” (London, 1596). See Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. Phillippy’s introduction (1–14) lays the groundwork for her discussion of gendered mourning. 34. Carlos M. N. Eire, The War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 315. For a similar argument, see Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feelings: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 35. Karant-Nunn, Reformation, 68. 36. Phillippy (Women, Death and Literature, 129) discusses Stephen Gosson’s attack on tragedy as the source of “womanish weeping and mourning.” See also Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially Chaps. 3–5. 37. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, Three Books, trans. George Stanhope (London: Printed for R. Bonwick and others, 1707), 257–58. Charron explicitly identifies himself as a neo-Stoic in the original work De la Sagesse (1601; trans. 1707). 38. Otto Werdmuller, A Most frutefull , pithye and learned Treatyse, how a Cristen man ought to behave himself in the daunger of death, trans. Miles Coverdale (London: E. Allde for William Blackwell, 1595), 223. Phillippy quotes and discusses Werdmuller’s reference to a “wivish” mourning in her exploration of gendered mourning in post-Reformation England; see Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, 1. 39. Playfere, “The Meane in Mourning,” 2. 40. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 276. 41. On the ready absorption of Stoic teaching into Christian, and especially Calvinist, teaching, see Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 37–43. 42. Reynolds, Treatise, 232. 43. Reynolds, Treatise, 228. 44. Robert Burton concurs with the notion that grief is the most powerful of the passions, writing that “when griefe appeares, all other passions vanish.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989–2000), 1:257. 45. Dowd writes: “The loss of children could be read as a reminder of sinfulness and a call to rely solely on God rather than on earthly things, but it could also be interpreted in more dire terms as a form of divine punishment.” “Genealogical Counternarratives,” 442. 46. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37. See also

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53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

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Pamela Hammons, “Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal SelfEffacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry,” English Literary History 66, no. 1 (1999): 25–49. Wright, Passions, 71. Wright, Passions, 74. Geoffrey Babion, Enarrationes in evangelium Matthaei, PL 162, 1294D. Qtd. in Knuuttila, 179. Wright, Passions, 72–73. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “miscarry, v,” 4b, 1b, accessed September 4, 2023, https://www.oed.com/?tl=true. For discussion of Louise Bourgeois, see Cathy McClive, “The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe,” Society for Social History of Medicine 15, no. 2 (2002): 209–27, esp. 224. The Geneva Bible, A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008). Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 32. Jacopo Sannazaro, Latin Poetry, trans. Michael C. J. Putnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Wright, Passions, 74. John Donne, “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany,” in Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), lines 19–22. Although the use of semicolons in the seventeenth century is relatively new and somewhat inconsistent, they do generally seem to be used to separate items or emphasize transitions and distinctions. See Vivian Salmon, “Seventeenth-Century Punctuation as a Guide to Sentence Structure,” Review of English Studies 13, no. 52 (1962): 347–60, esp. 354. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. Lisa Schnell discusses Carey’s “quid pro quo negotiation” in “Maternal Elegy in Early Modern England,” in The Oxford Handbook of Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 489. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30. Edward Taylor, The Poems, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 472. See Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century, 178. De Mornay, His Teares, B4. See fuller discussion of this text in Chapter 6, 220. Mornay, Teares, B5. Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century, 206. Ben Jonson, “On My First Daughter,” in Ben Jonson: Oxford Poetry Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), lines 1–2.

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67. Joshua Scodel emphasizes this point in his discussion of Ben Jonson; see The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 76. 68. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 249. 69. Wilce, Crying Shame, 34. 70. See Peter Sacks, English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 71. Schnell, “Maternal Elegy,” 489. 72. Wilce, Crying Shame, 36, 38. 73. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 1. 74. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 85. 75. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88. 76. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. Here Massumi refers to emotion as “the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits.”. 77. Wilce, Crying Shame, 29. 78. John Flavel, A token for mourners, or, The advice of Christ to a distressed mother bewailing the death of her dear and only son [...] (London: Printed for Robert Boulter, 1674), 39. 79. John Donne, “A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day,” in Donne: Poetical Works, lines 17–18. 80. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 142. 81. For discussion of the interplay between hypotext and hypertext in the cento form in Christian works, see Karla Pollman, The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 143. Schnell makes a similar point about the emergence of authorial power at this point in Carey’s poem, arguing that her use of biblical sources allows her to “rewrite herself as an apostle.” “Maternal Energy,” 490. 82. See Donna J. Long, “‘It Is a Lovely Bonne I Make to Thee’: Mary Carey’s Abortive Birth as Recuperative Religious Lyric,” in Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 271. 83. Long, “Mary Carey’s Abortive Birth,” 271. 84. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 320. 85. See McClive, “The Hidden Truths of the Belly,” 214–18. 86. Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect,” 269.

CHAPTER 8

Reflections on Everyday Affective Injustice

On September 30, 2018, Elizabeth Warren wrote: “Brett Kavanaugh was allowed to be angry. Christine Blasey Ford wasn’t. Women—and people without power—grow up hearing that being angry makes us unattractive.”1 The previous day, Rebecca Traister wrote in a New York Times op-ed that in describing the traumatic events that had happened to her, Blasey Ford “did not yell, did not betray a hint of the fury she had every reason to feel as she was forced to put her pain on display for the nation. That is how women have been told to behave when they are angry: to not let anyone know, and to joke and to be sweet and rational and vulnerable.” Later in the same article, Traister offered a summation of her point: “What happened inside the room was an exceptionally clear distillation of who has historically been allowed to be angry on their own behalf, and who has not.”2 Meanwhile, in an opinion piece in USA Today a couple of days earlier, lawyer Harry Litman wrote: “In my 30 years as a prosecutor and lawyer, I have never seen a more credible witness than professor Ford.” The reason for this had nothing to do with the credibility of the evidence or Ford’s own memories. “It was,” he writes, “Ford’s demeanor.” More specifically, Litman found Ford’s testimony convincing because she “was clear-eyed and aiming to please in response to questions from all sides.... She was not angry or overwrought [italics mine].”3 These comments bear witness to a remarkable continuity in our gendered construction of emotional communities, from the classical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_8

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period to the present day. It is clear that Litman would have found an angry or “overwrought” Blasey Ford less credible, however justified her anger might be: she was, after all, alleging an attempted rape by a man who became a Supreme Court nominee. That term “overwrought,” too, though it seems neutral, seems gendered in this context, linked by association to notions of hysterical or nervous women. Similarly, one wonders whether a lawyer would be as impressed by a male witness who appeared to be “aiming to please” both sides of the room. By contrast, as Lili Loofbourow reported in a contemporaneous analysis of the hearing in Slate magazine, Kavanaugh’s anger was read by some as “authentic and sincere,” a notable sign not of loss of self-control but of “candor.” Noting the contrast with the constraints on Blasey Ford’s self-presentation, Loofbourow writes that “rage, like tears, can be exploited for sympathy—but only in certain hands.”4 As these pieces show, the performances of both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh in the hearings offer compelling evidence that contemporary publics are scarcely more receptive to female anger today than when Shakespeare wrote a play explicitly tackling the taming of a woman’s anger. For this reason, Blasey Ford did not seem to need anyone to counsel her not to show anger; the power of the emotional community is still such that she appeared to vigorously police her own demeanor, much as we see Mary Carey anxiously policing her record of grief and anger about her overwhelming experience of child loss. As I suggested in Chapter 6, anger was often understood in the earlier periods I consider as bound conceptually to grief, which indeed makes intuitive sense; for a writer like Aquinas, anger arises as an “irascible” response to a present sadness and as an effort to overcome some obstacle presented by that sadness. As an active engagement with the world, whether expressed as an effort toward revenge or some other form of overcoming, anger does not just perform a passive (or “feminine”) endurance of some ill but strives to regain the equilibrium experienced as joy. Anger thus seems to announce an active intention to change or overcome something, and as such it is historically viewed in women as an appropriately “masculine” emotion. While Miranda Fricker’s attention to epistemic injustice makes visible how a speaker’s credibility deficits may be tangled up with socially constructed identity factors including race, gender, or class, I have sought to show how these factors may also create instances of affective injustice, where certain kinds of people have only highly tenuous access to certain kinds of emotives, or indeed no access at all. In a clear instance of the kind of affective injustice I have been

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exploring in this book, the emotional community encircling Ford in the media and elsewhere—including presumably from within her own overlearned emotion scripts—encoded the belief that any show of anger on her part would seriously damage the credibility of her testimony.5 Even the expression of grief alone is still fraught for female speakers, perhaps because it may strike listeners as the first step toward a recognition of a grievance that may lead in time to questioning and anger (as Carey’s poems move from lament to a questioning of the justice of God’s treatment of her). In my introduction I referred to Barbara Rosenwein’s point that when emotional expression is considered “extreme,” “that is itself a perception from within a set of emotional norms that is socially determined.”6 Throughout this book, we have seen female speakers, both fictionalized and autobiographical, whose display of grief behavior is considered extreme within their emotional communities, from the Trojan mothers, and especially Euryalus’s mother in Virgil’s Aeneid, to Mary Carey. The ululatus, or primal scream of grief that emerges within and arguably because of a highly constrained emotional habitus, becomes the signature “refrain” of this particular arc of my analysis. Precisely because it is not possible to articulate this grief as a socially acceptable and legible emotive, those repressed affective energies eventually emerge in erratic, contagious, and often transgressive “affect bursts.” But this pattern, too, should not be considered a thing of the past. In her groundbreaking account in November 2013 of her own traumatic miscarriage in Mongolia, New Yorker writer Ariel Levy writes that when she returned home after her baby’s death, “grief was leaking out of [her] from every orifice.”7 Powerfully recalling the mutually imbricated pneumatic circulation of bodily fluids and voice in the early modern texts we examined, Levy’s self-description constructs a kind of analogy between the blood and milk that leak uncontrollably out of her maternal body and the words that spill out of her: “I could not keep the story of what had happened in Mongolia inside my mouth.” As we have seen, women’s bodies were read, especially in the Stoic tradition, as constitutively soft, labile, and impressible; maternal bodies in particular came to epitomize the inevitable failure of the mortal frame to cohere under pressure from powerful and uncontrolled external impressions, including the death of beloved children. For this reason, there is a tendency in Stoic literature— exemplified by Petrarch’s version of the Griselda story—to externalize that feared susceptibility in an abjected female body in order to exert control over those impressions, and ultimately, over death. But in its

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susceptibility to the prepassions, which represent precisely an ineradicable bodily response to that dangerous and unpredictable external world, the maternal body itself becomes closely identified with the forces of death and chaos, as in Levy’s story. The ululatus, as I argued in Chapter 4, seems to call in those forces in a wild explosion of feeling; to override the cognitively integrated process of assent (or later, “will”) in a vocalization that both offers unmediated access to internal affective turmoil and immediately affects the listeners with similarly powerful contagious affects. In so doing, this kind of vocalization breaks down what Donovan Schaefer calls the “foundational fantasy of the subject’s autonomous selfcontainment,” threatening to overwhelm the listeners with another’s grief or rage, just as we saw at the end of Euryalus’s mother’s story.8 At the end of her essay, Levy describes herself in terms that uncannily reflect this legacy: “Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone.” Levy’s “primal part” seems to function like the affectively driven “animal... marcidum”9 in Seneca’s hybrid human assemblage, dissociated from her rational mind and impersonally arising in the wounding experience of maternity. Casting herself as a “wounded witch” who is “wailing in the forest,” Levy sounds remarkably like the Trojan mothers making “stealthily for the woods and the hollow rocks they anywhere can find” (Aen., 5.677), or like the bacchic mothers shrieking with Amata on the hillside. She is a presentday maenadic figure, her body and voice both frighteningly (to her and others) aligned with dissociated affects that seem to arise wholly without her consent or knowledge and that certainly don’t “belong” exclusively to her. Like the mothers’ furor in the Aeneid, these dissociated affects too proved contagious; commentators on the piece wrote that they struggled to recover from it. Leah McClaren wrote in the Globe and Mail that “it was one of those rare pieces of personal journalism that seemed to effect an instant emotional transference between writer and reader. It didn’t just make you cry—you cried as if the writer’s trauma had, in some small way, happened to you.”10 The power of this piece owed something to its transgressiveness: as many commentators recognized, it broke taboos in our emotional community against sharing grief about miscarriage. Just as Mary Carey struggled to find room in her Calvinist community for grief that would not strike readers or listeners as

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intemperate (or “importunate,” in her words), so Levy encounters what McClaren calls the “cultural shame” surrounding speech about miscarriage—a shame which, just as in the seventeenth century, arises from the enduring cultural tendency to blame mothers (and for mothers to blame themselves, therefore) for the loss of their offspring.11 I close with one more connection between the material I have explored in this book and our current affective moment. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the New York Times set up what they called the “Primal Scream Line.”12 Inviting mothers to “yell, laugh, cry, or vent for a solid minute,” the line collected screams, yells, and culturally impermissible statements from mothers about being sick of their kids, their laundry, and the interminable, claustrophobic labor of the home during a pandemic. It explicitly invites mothers to overcome the prevailing emotional exercitives in a culture that would prohibit such expression. The project thus intentionally provides the kind of “vent” for pent up feeling threatening to boil over that we explored in Chapter 6, as Kate is denied any access to emotives that would relieve the pressure on her heart; the screaming of course also recalls the transgressive ululatus that demarcates a space of transgressive female vocalization in classical literature. As a space for unmediated affect, the site offers relief from an emotional community that demanded nonstop coping and caring skills from exhausted and often grief-stricken mothers. Taking inspiration from this New York Times project, a group of mothers in Boston decided to meet on a field one night in January 2022 to scream in concert. Reporter Alyssa Lukpat wrote that “their voices, which carried years of pain and rage that they could finally release, merged into an anguished chorus.”13 Whether consciously or not, Lukpat’s description of these voices merging together into “an anguished chorus” draws a direct line back from this contemporary moment to the maenadic mothers in Virgil’s Aeneid and behind them to the tragic context of Euripides’s Bacchae. The ululatus arising in Boston in 1922 bears witness to the enduring social constraints still placed on female affective expression, and on the explosive, contagious power of those affects once released.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Warren, “Who’s Allowed to Be Angry?,” Facebook video, September 30, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethWarren/vid eos/whos-allowed-to-be-angry/1916585158637419/.

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2. Rebecca Traister, “Fury Is a Political Weapon. And Women Need to Wield It,” New York Times, September 29, 2018, https://www.nyt imes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/fury-is-a-political-weapon-andwomen-need-to-wield-it.html. 3. Harry Litman, “Christine Blasey Ford Testimony Was Bloodbath for Brett Kavanaugh, Trump and Republicans,” USA Today, September 27, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/27/christ ine-blasey-ford-credible-brett-kavanaugh-future-unclear-column/144506 7002/. 4. Lili Loofbourow, “Why Christine Blasey Ford Isn’t Allowed to Be Mad,” Slate, September 28, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/ 09/brett-kavanaugh-hearing-angry-shouting.html. 5. For more on emotion as “overlearned cognitive habit,” see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 17. 6. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 15. 7. Ariel Levy, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” New Yorker, November 18, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanks giving-in-mongolia. 8. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 65. Schaefer borrows the term “foundational fantasy” from Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 12–15 (“The Foundational Fantasy and the Affects”). 9. Seneca, Ep. 92.10. 10. Leah McClaren, “Miscarriage: Polite Society’s Last Taboo,” Globe and Mail, November 17, 2013, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/hea lth-and-fitness/health/miscarrage-polite-societys-last-taboo/article15446 661/. 11. Levy writes: “I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me.” “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” 12. “Primal Scream Line,” New York Times, December 18, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/18/parenting/primal-scream. html. 13. Alyssa Lukpat, “These Mothers Were Exhausted, So They Met on a Field to Scream,” New York Times, January 23, 2022, https://www.nytimes. com/2022/01/23/us/mom-scream-massachusetts-pandemic.html.

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Index

A Acedia, 70 Acestes, 118 Adam, 60, 253 Adcock, Rachel, 270 Adler, Eve, 108, 139 Aeneas, 14, 59, 74 Aers, David, 190 Affect, 3 Affection(s), 5, 23 Affective injustice, 2, 243 Affective poetics, 15, 92, 221, 243 Affect theory, 40 Agamben, Giorgio, 52 Stanzas , 89 Agave, 101 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, 237 Agrippa, Menenius, 219 Ahmed, Sara, 5, 8, 33, 60, 137, 155, 232 Air, 29 Alexiou, Margaret, 105, 122, 138 Allecto, 107, 108 Amata, 13, 91, 107

Amphibrach, 221, 228 Anchises, 93 Andromache, 120 Anger, 4, 10, 23, 43, 69, 91, 203, 205 Animal, 22 Animal spirits, 81 Antigone, 131 Anti-intentionalism, 7 Apatheia, 13 Appetite, 23 Appetitive, 25 Aquinas, Thomas, 4, 67, 84 Summa Theologiae, 87 Ariadne, 94 Aristeia, 121 Aristotle, 22, 23, 216 De Anima, 23, 52 History of Animals , 22 Nicomachean Ethics , 23 Ars Medica, 75 Ascanius, 14 Assay, 14, 173 Assemblage, 13, 40, 92, 280

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Wells, Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4

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INDEX

Assent, 3, 30 Asyndeton, 264 Attie, Katherine Bootle, 226, 239 Audience, 201 Augustine, Saint, 5, 13, 57, 84 Confessions , 63, 86 De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis , 62, 151 De Trinitate, 66 On Free choice of the Will , 86 Austen, Jane, 11, 158 Austin, J.L., 10, 159, 231 Avicenna, 77 Canon of Medicine, 77, 89

B Babion, Geoffrey, 67, 274 Bacchae, 94 Bacchic, 92 Bacon, Francis, 215, 236 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 193 Baptista, 199 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 15 Bartholomew, 196 Baswell, Christopher, 145, 274 Battles, Ford Lewis, 271 Belief, 30 Bergren, Ann L.T., 124 Berlant, Lauren, 249 Beroë, 93, 95 Bianca, 197 Bicks, Caroline, 90 Bile, 206 Black, Emily Rapp, 21, 57 Blackstone, William, 164, 204, 233 Blood, 22, 77 Bloom, Gina, 209, 234 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 14, 71, 146 Decameron, 146 Boethius, 151 Consolation of Philosophy, 151

Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul, 186 Booth, Stephen, 237 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 189, 271 Brady, Andrea, 261, 274 Brain, 81 Breath, 231 Brennan, Teresa, 8, 84, 90 Bridling, 251 Bright, Timothie, 15 A Treatise of Melancholie, 75 Bright, Timothy, 213 Burger, Glenn D., 3, 151, 188 Burton, Robert, 274 Butler, Judith, 186 Byers, Sarah Catherine, 85, 190 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 174

C Calvin, John, 245, 273 Campbell, Emma, 157, 185 Canacee, 182 Canterbury Tales , 162 Canzoniere, 71 Cappelen, Herman, 232 Carey, Mary, 5, 15, 48, 271 Carlisle, Claire, 7 Carson, Anne, 55 Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew, 109, 129 Cassandra, 131, 138 Catullus, 123 Cavarero, Adriana, 131, 144, 217, 237 Cento, 269 Cestaro, Gary P., 175, 193 Charron, Pierre, 250, 273 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 14, 71 Merchant’s Tale, 157, 179 The Clerk’s Tale, 9, 203 Chickering, Howell, 185, 194 Childbirth, 172, 242, 256

INDEX

Child-loss, 242 Choler, 206 Christ, 61 Chrysippus, 41, 98, 112, 136 Chrysostom, Dio, 50, 138 Chyle, 211 Cicero, 13, 26 De Fato, 112 Tusculan Disputations , 136 Cixous, 239 Cleaver, Robert, 204, 232 Clerk, 159 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 6, 17 Clytemnestra, 138 Coccagna, Helene A., 235 Coeffeteau, Nicolas, 88 Table of Humane Passions , 76 Concoction, 22, 77, 210, 211 Concupiscence, 68 Concupiscible, 25, 204 Constative, 10, 199 Contagion, 99 Conversion, 241, 254 Coriolanus, 214 Coverture, 164, 204 COVID-19, 281 Cowper, William, 210 Credibility deficit, 2 Crocker, Holly A., 3, 49, 223, 226, 234 Crooke, Helkiah, 54, 205, 234, 274 Cry breaks, 265 ˇ Culik-Baird, Hannah, 47, 55

D Damasio, Antonio, 17 Danaids, 131 Dante, 146 De VulgariEloquentia, 146 D’Arcy, Eric, 68 Defloration, 123

303

Deleuze, Gilles, 92, 135 de Mornay, Philippe, 214, 261 Descartes, Rene, 84 Deutermann, Allison, 215 Dever, Josh, 232 Dido, 59 Digestion, 206, 210 Dillon, John M., 52 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 185 Dioneo, 148 Dixon, Thomas, 16, 85 Dolan, Frances, 190 Dolar, Mladen, 237 Donne, John, 57, 70, 88, 211 “A Nocturnal upon St Lucie’s Day”, 267 “Hymn to Christ on the Author’s Last Going into Germany”, 258 Dowd, Michelle, 271 Dressler, Alex, 49, 72, 190 Duchess of Malfi, 209

E Ear, 208 Écriture feminine, 239 Eichman, Peter, 49 Eire, Carlos M.N., 250 Eiulatus, 45 Electra, 131 Elegy, 242 Elements active air, 22 fire, 22 passive earth, 22 water, 22 Elyot, Thomas, 208, 234, 235 Emotional community, 2, 46, 201 Emotional exercitives, 12

304

INDEX

Emotion(s), 1, 6 Emotive(s), 2, 3, 9 Enjambment, 221, 261 Entextualization, 244 Entrainment, 84 Envoy, 185 Epic, 13, 91, 107 Epictetus, 32, 58 Epistemic injustice, 2, 224 Epitaph, 263 Epithum¯etikon, 25 Ettenhuber, Katrin, 66, 70 Eudaimonia, 32 Euripides Bacchae, 94, 101, 113 Phoenician Women, 131 Euryalus, 116, 280 Euryalus’s mother, 13, 91, 109 Eve, 13, 58, 251 Exercitive(s), 11, 150, 195 External objects, 32

F Fabliau, 156 Fall, 66, 73 Falling rhythm, 227 Fama, 118 Fantham, Elaine, 139 Fantuzzi, Marco, 122 Faunus, 108 Fear, 23 Fedler, Kyle, 246, 272 Felman, Shoshana, 19, 148, 187 Feminine ending, 221, 227 Femininity, 5, 21, 218 Ficino, Marsilio, 78 Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, 89 Fisher, Samuel, 248, 273 Flavel, John, 267 Food, 202

Ford, Christine Blasey, 277 Fowler, Don, 92, 142 Fowler, Elizabeth, 190 Fowler, H.W., 233 Frese, Dolores Warwick, 146, 185, 186 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 49 Fricker, Miranda, 2, 224, 243, 278 Fumo, Jamie, 89 Furor, 13, 91

G Galen, 29, 58, 77, 136 De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis , 137 On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 89 Gawain, 158 Gawain and the Green Knight , 174, 189 Gellius, Aulus, 58 Noctes Atticae, 58 Gender, 2 Georgianna, Linda, 189 Georgic 4, 106, 129 Gerbier, Balthazar, 209 Gibbs, Anna, 99, 137 Gill, Christopher, 85 Gloucester King Lear, 222 Goffman, Erving, 48 Góos, 122 Gosson, Stephen, 273 Gowers, Emily, 141 Graver, Margaret, 26, 51 Greenblatt, Stephen, 232 Green Knight, 158 Gregg, Melissa, 6, 54 Grief, 1, 25, 43, 91 Griselda, 9, 71 Grossberg, Lawrence, 18

INDEX

Gross, Daniel M., 51, 85, 147 Grumio, 208 Gualtieri, 148 Guattari, Félix, 92, 135 H Habitus, 2, 183 Halley, Jean, 17 Hamlet , 209 Hammons, Pamela, 252 Hanson, Elaine Tuttle, 194 Hardie, Philip, 141, 142 Harrawood, Michael, 235 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 91, 114, 135 Heart, 44, 77, 215, 216 Hector, 120 Hecuba, 120 Hegel. See Harrison, Robert Pogue H¯egemonikon, 27, 29 Hemmings, Clare, 17 Herakles, 44, 114 Highmore, Ben, 38 Hippocrates, 251 Holst-Warhaft, Gail, 131 Homer The Iliad, 142 Homeric, 120 Hugo, André Malan, 271 Humanism, 57 Humors, 80 Hyle, 22 Hylomorphism, 24 Hypotext, 269 I Iambic, 227 Iarbas, 104 Ilioneus, 108 Imagination, 24, 216 Impressibility, 21

305

Impression, 24, 30 Impulse (horm¯e), 30, 37 Induction, 196 Insania, 26, 93 Integral objects, 32 Intensity, 4, 30, 230 Intentionality, 7, 81 Intercorporeality, 33 Inwood, Brad, 31, 51, 60 Irascible, 25, 204 Iris, 93 Israel, 255

J Jackson, Stanley W., 51, 75, 85, 88 Jacob, 256 James, Susan, 4, 24, 85 Jarcho, Saul, 88 Jeremiah, 254 Jonson, Ben, 262 Joy, 205 Judgment/Judgement, 31, 69 Juno, 93 Jupiter, 104

K Kahn, Charles H., 52, 68, 84, 85 Karant-Nunn, Susan, 256, 273 Kaster, Robert, 53, 167, 191 Kate, 14 Kavanaugh, Brett, 277 Kay, Sarah, 29, 52, 115 Keening, 46 Kellison, Matthew, 205 King, Peter, 67, 87 Klein, Jacob, 137, 190 Knuuttila, Simo, 50, 87 Korda, Natasha, 232 Kristeva, Julia, 175, 193

306

INDEX

L Lament, 11, 243 Lamentation, 25, 94 Language-game, 161 La Primaudaye, Pierre de, 237 Latinus, 108 Laura, 70 Lausus, 116, 128 Lavinia, 107, 108 Le Livre de Griseldis , 151, 163 Lemnius, Levinus, 206 Levy, Ariel, 279 Lewis, David, 199, 232 Leys, Ruth, 7 Lipsius, Justus, 192 Litman, Harry, 277 Logos, 115 Long, A.A., 52 Long, Donna, 270 Loofbourow, Lili, 278 Loraux, Nicole, 131, 135, 143 Lucretius, 144 Lukpat, Alyssa, 281

M Macduff, 214 Mack, Phyllis, 252, 274 Maenad, 11, 92, 113 Maenadism, 120 Malcom, 214 Malebranche, Nicolas, 81 Marriage, 196 Marshall, Peter, 273 Marston, John Antonio’s Revenge, 219 Marvin, William, 192 Mary, Virgin, 172 Massumi, Brian, 16, 95, 152, 275 Maternal, 14 Maternal body, 12 Maternity, 14, 147

Matt, Susan J., 84 Maximus of Tyre, 50, 98 Maynwaringe, Everard, 76, 210, 235 Tutela sanitatis sive Vita Protracta, 76, 88 McAuley, Mairéad, 65, 86 McClaren, Leah, 280 McClive, Cathy, 274, 276 McDowell, John, 9 McGowan, Mary Kate, 11, 195 Meditations, 242 Melancholy, 200 Menses, 22 Mesquita, Batja, 15 Meter, 262 Miscarriage, 253, 254 Mladen Dolar, 218 Mollis, 28 Mollitia, 33, 62 Monism, 27 Morbus, 26 Mornay, Philip, 275 Mors immatura, 122 Moss, Jessica, 24, 50 Mother’s legacy, 242 Mother tongue, 147 Mourning, 30 Mousetrap, 229 Muich, Rebecca, 142 Murnaghan, Sheila, 142

N Nagy, Gregory, 105, 121, 142, 143 Nail, Thomas, 135 Natoli, Bartolo, 130 Nautes, 106 Nettesheim, Agrippa von, 217 Newmark, Catherine, 25, 50 Newton, Allyson, 193 New York Times , 277, 281 Ngai, Sianne, 8, 60, 247, 275

INDEX

Nightingale, 13, 92, 197 Nisus, 118 Nonconceptual, 7 Non-naturals, 75, 210 Normore, Calvin G., 188 Nugent, Georgia, 136 Nursing, 244 Nussbaum, Martha, 5, 49 O O’Higgins, Laurie, 124, 143 Oikei¯ osis , 102, 204 Oikos , 132 Oliensis, Ellen, 94, 136 Ololyga, 113 Orpheus, 106, 125 O’Sullivan, S., 18 Ott, Brian, 17 Ovid, 125 P Pain, 24 Pallas, 116, 128 Panoussi, Vassiliki, 135, 136 Pardoner, 160 Paris, 105 Parson, 192 Partitionism, 27 Passion, 4, 5, 21, 206 Passive, 22 Passivity, 5, 12, 21, 83 Pathem¯ ata, 23 Patience, 53, 161, 251 Patterson, Annabel, 231 Patterson, Lee, 179, 190, 194 Payler, George, 259 Pender, Stephen, 75, 88 Pentheus, 101, 136 Performative utterance, 10, 199 Perkell, Christine, 272 Perlocutionary, 11, 132, 198, 201

Perversa voluntas, 61 Petrarca, Francesco, 88 Petrarch, 5, 13, 69 Canzoniere, 71 Secretum, 70 Petruccio, 14, 195 Phaedrus, 78 Phantasia, 24, 30 Phantasm, 78 Phillippy, Patricia, 250 Philoctetes, 44, 114 Philomela, 124 Phon¯e, 217 Planctus , 64 Plato, 23 division of soul epithum¯etikon, 25 logistikon, 25 thumoeides, 25 Phaedrus , 27 Republic, 25 Timaeus , 23, 40 Playfere, Thomas, 250 Pliny, 143 Pneuma, 4, 13, 22, 29, 77 Pneumatology, 78 Polis , 92 Pollman, Karla, 276 Pope, Alexander, 49 Posthumus Cymbeline, 230 Pregnancy, 172, 209 Prepassion, 3, 12, 21, 38 Primal Scream Line, 281 Private language, 149 Procne, 124 Propassion, 38 Proposition, 30 Prosody, 261 Psyche, 29 Purgation, 214 Purgatory, 250

307

308

INDEX

Purnis, Jan, 206, 233 Purple, 123

Q Quickening, 270

R Rabel, Robert, 112 Rachel, 254 Read, Sara, 271 Reason, 25 Recta voluntas, 61, 245 Reddy, William, 1, 18, 85, 202 Reformation, 250 Refrain, 135 Rete mirabile, 77 Revenge, 92 Reynolds, Edward, 72, 88, 206 Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man, 72 Rhyme, 229 Rich, Adrienne, 241 Ritournelle (refrain), 92, 270 Rollability, 112 Rosenwein, Barbara, 1, 84

S Sacks, Peter, 275 Salmon, Vivian, 275 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 256 Satan, 247 Schaefer, Donovan, 4, 13, 20, 94 Scherer, Klaus, 56 Schnell, Lisa, 265, 275 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 75, 88, 196, 214, 231 Schwebel, Leah, 149, 185 Scodel, Joshua, 275 Scylla, 39 Seaford, Richard, 111, 118, 135

Secretum, 70 Sedgwick, Eve, 191 Sedley, David, 137 Seigworth, Gregory J., 6, 54 Semen, 22, 209 Semiotic, 175 Seneca, 26, 28 De Clementia, 243 De Consolatione Ad Marciam, 90 De Ira, 31 Moral Essays , 49 Sensitive soul, 25, 80, 245 Servius, 49, 109, 133 Sextus Empiricus, 52 Shakespeare, William, 195 Macbeth, 229 Taming of the Shrew, 195 Venus and Adonis , 212 Sharrock, Alison, 109 Shipman, 162 Shogry, Simon, 16 Shrew, 195, 201 Sibyl, 107 Signet-ring, 24 Signore, Sean, 121, 142 Silencing, 232 Siren, 218 Sissa, Giulia, 209 Skulsky, Susan, 141 Sly, 196 Soliloquies, 215 Solomon, J.R., 90 Song, 218 Sophocles Women of Trachis , 46 Sorabji, Richard, 58, 85, 188 Sorrow, 32, 68, 205 Soul, 4, 12, 24 Species , 30 Spinoza, Baruch, 7, 17 Spirit , 13 Spiritus , 4, 29, 77

INDEX

Stag, 116 Stallybrass, Peter, 235 Stearns, Peter N., 84 Stocks, Claire, 123, 142 Stoic, 3, 21 Stomach, 14, 206 Summerson, Andrew J., 189 Sunkatathesis , 3, 30, 68, 150 Sutton, John, 245 Swoon, 122, 148

T Taylor, Edward, 275 Temperament, 24 Temperance, 29 Testimonial injustice, 2 Theocritus, 126 Thrênos, 122 Thumoeides, 25 Tilney, Edmund, 164, 190 Timbre, 231 Tomkins, Silvan, 17 Tragedy, 26, 118, 131, 135 Traister, Rebecca, 277 Translation, 4, 11, 14, 147 Transpiration, 210, 211 Troades, 94 Trojan women, 91 Turnus, 92, 108, 116

U Ulrich, Jeffrey, 94, 135 Ululatus, 10, 47, 55, 92

V Varwig, Bettina, 217, 237 Vavasour, John, 164 Venting, 215 Vergil, 49

309

Vernacular, 14, 146 Virgil Aeneid, 5, 13, 48 Virtues, 23 Vocalization, 43, 91 Voice, 15, 43, 214 Voluntas , 31 Vulgate, 255 W Wailing, 45, 244 Wallace, David, 186 Waller, Barry, 232 Walter, 14 Walters, Jonathan, 191 Warren, Elizabeth, 277 Weaving, 37 Webb, Heather, 77, 220 The Medieval Heart , 89 Weber, Max, 199 Werdmuller, Otto, 250 Westminster Shorter Catechism, 241 Wiesen, David, 85 Wilce, James M., 15, 122, 142, 244, 272 Will, 2, 13, 30, 58 Willfulness, 265 Williams, Craig, 123, 142 Will you, nill you, 199 Wimsatt, James, 172, 192 Witch, 280 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 148, 187, 194 Womb, 209 Wright, Thomas, 23, 73, 88, 209 The Passions of the Minde in Generall , 73 Z Zerilli, Linda, 7, 194, 273 Ziomek, Anna, 271