Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture 9781501737169

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SAINT HYSTERIA 0

NEUROSIS, MYSTICISM, AND GENDER IN EUROPEAN CULTURE

Cristina Mazzoni

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1996 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mazzoni, Cristina, 1965Saint hysteria: neurosis, mysticism, and gender in European culture / Cristina Mazzoni. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-3229-4 (alk. paper) 1. Women mystics—Europe—Psychology. 2. Christian women saints— Europe—Psychology. 3. Psychiatry and religion. 4. Hysteria. 5. Ecstasy. I. Title. BV5083.M325 1996 248.2'2'o82—dc20 96-13417

© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

To My Family

mamma, papa, Pietro, Sabrina, Silvia, Paola, Stefano John, Paul, and Gemma

Contents

Preface

ix

INTRODUCTION

Historicizing Hysteria, Hysterizing History: A Dialogue of Neurosis and Religion 1

The Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria: Women's Mysticism in Medical Writings

2

54

Decadence and Saintliness: Hagiographies or Pathographies?

4

17

Mystical Languages of Illness: Naturalism in France and Italy

3

i

90

Mystical Self-Interpretations: From the Age of Spirituality to the Age of Hysteria

156

viii

0

Contents

CONCLUSION

From Hysterical Anguish to Mystical Ecstasy: Old Symptoms of a New Sainthood 197

Bi bliography

Index

227

213

Preface

As cultural productions such as the film Agnes of God attest, it is still today a cliche to represent mystical experiences as inherently neurotic. Levitation, mystical marriage, visions, and especially stigmata appear to us uncanny, too strange to fit within the bounds of what we embrace as healthy normality. Clearly, however, the identification of mysticism with hysteria was not always so prevalent, nor did it appear overnight. What impelled me to write this book is the question of how this in¬ tertwining took place, and why women were its target. Accordingly, I have examined scientific, literary, and religious texts, concentrating on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to discover how they converge in a fascination with the otherness of the female body while it is in (ecstatic) pleasure or in (neurotic) pain. Through this interdis¬ ciplinary reading, the dialogue between hysteria and its repressed other—mysticism—is discernible at various levels and in diverse discourses. As I discuss in the Introduction, the medical history of hys¬ teria has been continuously linked to the religious history of supernat¬ ural phenomena, and the medical discourse of positivism remains dependent on the religious-feminine element it attempts to repress. Similarly, a continuity may be detected between the literature of nat¬ uralism and that of decadence in their representation of the interde¬ pendence of neurosis and religion, a continuity that breaks down the presumed antinomy between these two literary currents. The religious writings of women mystics too and the discourses they have inspired

x

0

Preface

around them reveal a never-resolved tension between nature and su¬ pernature, body and soul (or psyche), which, not surprisingly, mirrors and complicates the very issues raised by the process of hysterical con¬ version as described by psychoanalysis. Was the saint hysterized, then, or was hysteria canonized instead? "Academic work is one of those fields containing a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it," wrote Simone Weil. In the course of my academic career I have been blessed with many "pearls" who have greatly enriched my life, both intellectually and with their friendship. At the University of California, San Diego, Stephanie Jed and Jon Snyder first helped me find a way in the field of literary and cultural studies. At Yale, Peter Brooks and Paolo Valesio read and sup¬ ported this project from the beginning and guided me through the labyrinth of tum-of-the-century French and Italian culture with sug¬ gestions, references, discussions, and much encouragement. Jane Chance, Michael Holquist, Stephanie Jed, Paul Lachance, Valerie Lagorio, Robert Proctor, Lucia Re, Jennifer Wicke, and the anonymous readers of Cornell University Press have all graciously commented on the manuscript; the editors at Cornell have made it more elegant and legible. I have also been given useful bibliographical references by John Cirignano, Anthony Russell, and John Thompson. Throughout, I have been fortunate to receive the valuable help of librarians, especially at Connecticut College and at the University of Vermont. It is an understatement to say that the book would not have reached this stage had it not been for the continuous support of Bernhard Kendler. Finally, I wish to thank warmly all the people in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Vermont for their academic as well as personal support during my time here, and for their patience with a toddler running and babbling through our halls and offices. In particular, Yvan Bamps, Sue Breeyear, Patrizia Jamieson, Donna Kuizenga, Gretchen Van Slyke, and John Weiger have provided me with much-needed advice on the most diverse topics. To my husband, John Cirignano, I owe more than I can say. Through¬ out these years, he has been the source of encouragement, inspiration, support, faith, love, hope, and much more. Without his wonderful par¬ enting of our first child I never would have been able to finish this book; and without his presence in my life, writing a book would have been a dry and empty exercise. I am grateful to the University Press of Florida for permission to reprint portions of my essay "On the (Un)Representability of Woman's

Preface

#

xi

Pleasure: Angela of Foligno and Jacques Lacan/' which appears in the collection Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. Cristina Mazzoni

Burlington, Vermont

SAINT HYSTERIA

INTRODUCTION

Historicizing Hysteria, Hysterizing History: A Dialogue of Neurosis and Religion

In Joris-Karl Huysmans's La-bas (Down There, 1891), a novelistic ex¬ ploration of the link between Satanism and insanity, one of the char¬ acters denounces contemporary diagnoses of hysteria and vehemently exclaims: 'There is still this unanswerable question: is a woman pos¬ sessed because she is hysterical, or is she hysterical because she is possessed? Only the church can answer, science cannot."1 This enigma, questioning the validity Huysmans previously bestowed upon the dis¬ course of neuropathology in A reborns, is recurrent in the scientific, literary, and religious imagination of Huysmans's time. What is the agency that dwells physically or psychically inside the (usually female) body, robs it of its self-control and of responsibility for its own actions, and agitates it, sometimes to the point of conferring upon it the ability to perform impossible feats that apparently defy the laws of nature? Is this agency the organic uterus or an incorporeal demon t Is it the spirit of God or the intellectual mind or, for later interpreters, the garrulous unconscious?2 The dilemma of the primacy of natural or supernatural explanations pervades the history of that multifarious phenomenon known as hysteria, appropriately defined as the wastebasket into 1 Joris-Karl Huysmans, La-bas (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1978), is22 Monique David-Menard has noted the link in the history of psychoanalysis between the discovery of the unconscious and the discovery of the erotogenic body. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 1.

2

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Saint Hysteria

which all ailments that are not otherwise classifiable are dumped.3 Hysteria is a gendered "disease" (I use quotation marks because hys¬ teria is both more and less than a disease), hovering between body and spirit/mind. It reached the apex of its "popularity" in the late nine¬ teenth century. The doctor in Igino Ugo Tarchetti's novel Fosca (left unfinished at the author's death in 1869) defines hysteria as "a fash¬ ionable disease among women," and Elaine Showalter, in her study of women and madness, describes the period between 1870 and World War I as "the golden age of hysteria."4 Hysteria has received a great deal of attention in recent times, pri¬ marily from feminist or psychoanalytic perspectives. Martha Noel Evans, for example, has written a thought-provoking social history of the disease in modem France (Fits and Starts), and important chapters are devoted to hysteria in Jan Goldstein's Console and Classify, Ruth Harris's Murders and Madness, and Elaine Showalter's Female Mal¬ ady—all of which take a cultural-historical approach. The ancestor of these studies, Ilza Veith's Hysteria, an informative history of hysteria from its origins to the beginning of this century, has now been largely superseded by Hysteria beyond Freud, a collection of long essays by Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter.5 Important psychoanalytic works on hysteria include Gerard Wajeman's Maitre et Vhysterique, Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, and Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement's Newly Born Woman.6 This is a very partial list (more references will be found in the course of this book), simply meant to convey a sense of the breadth of recent contributions to the study of hysteria. Closer to my 3. Charles Lasegue, quoted in Gerard Wajeman, Le maitre et l’hysterique (Paris: Navarin-Seuil, 1982), 126. 4. Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Fosca (Milan: Mondadori, 1981), 49; Elaine Showalter, The Fe¬ male Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, i830-r98o (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 129. 5. Martha Noel Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siecle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Showalter, Female Malady; Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Sander Gilman et al., Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). In their intro¬ duction to Hysteria beyond Freud, Porter and Rousseau rightly criticize Veith's book for not considering hysteria's "forms of representation or its broad social and cultural subtle¬ ties of class, gender, politics, and ideology." "Introduction: The Destinies of Hysteria," xii-xxiv, vii. 6. Wajeman, Le maitre et Vhysterique; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Min¬ nesota Press, 1986).

Introduction

0

3

own interests are sections of Barbara Spackman's Decadent Genealo¬ gies, a book that explores the interaction of the modalities of illness with those of literature and philosophy, and Janet Beizer s Ventrilo¬ quized Bodies, a study of nineteenth-century French medical and literary texts that thematize hysterical discourse.7 Even a list as incom¬ plete as this one lends the field of hysteria the appearance of saturation. In Saint Hysteria my objective is to take the study in a new direction by investigating the dialogue of hysteria with its repressed other, that mystical element with which it holds several ambiguous connections. Flysteria, then, will be explored as part of a larger story that brings together the discourse of and on this popular neurosis with the lan¬ guages of spirituality and of literature. What follows is an analysis of some of the ways in which the metaphors of hysteria have been used and abused in order to explain a different, yet sometimes analogous phenomenon: the mystical experiences of women. Although my historical focus is primarily on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the connection between hysteria and the su¬ pernatural is as old as hysteria itself. The very story of hysteria is a series of displacements of its dominant hermeneutic metaphor or ganic or functional, corporeal or spiritual, natural or supernatural. As Huysmans, again, so aptly said of hysteria, Everything comes to a standstill on the question of this inexplicable malady, which, conse¬ quently, is subject to the most diverse interpretations, none of which could ever be declared exact. For there is a soul in all this, a soul in conflict with the body, a soul overthrown in a nervous folly!"9 In Labas as in his postconversion novels, Huysmans attacks positivistic knowledge and its diagnosis of Christian mysticism, as exemplified by the Salpetriere doctor and hysteria expert Henri Legrand du Saulle: "Many women Saints and Blessed were nothing other than simple hys terics! It is enough to reread the life of Elizabeth of Hungary, in 1207; of Saint Gertrude, of Saint Bridget, of Saint Catherine of Siena, in 1347; of Joan of Arc, of Saint Teresa, of madame de Chantal, in 1752; of the famous Marie Alacoque, and of many others: one will be easily con¬ vinced of this truth."10 The study of the scientific construction and the 7. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baude¬ laire to D’Annunzio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University 8# Porter and Rousseau, for example, write that theirs "is not a book about the inter¬ face of religion and medicine, or of hysteria and possession, subjects that no doubt merit more attention than they have received" ("Introduction," xvi). 9. Huysmans, Ld-bas, 153. , . 10. Henri Legrand du Saulle, Les hysteriques: Etat physique et etat mental. Actes m-

4

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Saint Hysteria

literary deconstruction of this psychiatric "truth" will occupy Saint Hysteria, and some of these names—Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, and above all, Teresa of Avila—will return time and again, for it is these most famous of all Christian women saints (prominently includ¬ ing the only two women doctors of the church, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila) who form a favorite target for the tum-of-thecentury interpretation of mysticism as previously undiagnosed hys¬ teria. It is clear to anyone familiar with the great mystics that such a di¬ agnosis of all mystical expressions of religion as, in Legrand du Saulle's words, "one of the most interesting modalities of the mental state of certain hysterics"11 is an exceedingly facile one, proceeding from an ideology that is not pressed to take into serious account the mystic's accomplishments and her texts. Nevertheless, an exact charting of the complex intersections of hysteria and mysticism, aimed at establishing where one ends and the other begins, would be a futile because impos¬ sible task. Even as we accord a certain autonomy to the spiritual en¬ terprise, the frontier between the two must remain ever undecided and illusory, resistant to any single totalizing explanation. Why and how, we are nonetheless bound to ask, have these two discourses attracted so much attention as essentially analogous phe¬ nomena in literary as well as medical and religious texts? Again, the question can be analyzed, problematized, but not resolved without do¬ ing violence either to the hysteric or to the mystic. For what does it mean to claim that a rejoicing mystic, perhaps in the throes of what to the nonmystic seems an ambiguous jouissance, is a neurotic needing to be hospitalized and treated? By contrast, what is it that allows a madwoman to put on the real or imagined halo of a saint? In Saint Hysteria, I consider the reciprocal effects of medical theories of hys¬ teria, religious practices of mysticism, and the literary construction of femininity in Italy and France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, digressing when necessary into earlier and later periods. During the epoch that is often referred to as "the turn of the century" (a term of which I am fond because it stresses the elasticity

solites, delictueux et criminels (Paris: Bailliere, 1891), 224. The Catholic neurologist An¬ toine Imbert-Gourbeyre uses this statement to prove Legrand du Saulle's ignorance in matters of mysticism, accusing him of not having read these texts, of attributing the wrong dates to these saints, and of describing as ecstatics saints who were not so (Mme de Chantal and Elizabeth of Hungary). Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation, l’extase di¬ vine et les miracles de Lourdes: Reponse aux libres penseurs, 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand: Librairie Catholique; Paris: Bellet, 1894), 2:459-60. 11. Legrand du Saulle, Les hysteriques, 224.

Introduction

0

5

of the line separating—and joining—the nineteenth century and our own), the awareness of the discursive analogies between the epiphany of the supernatural during the mystical experience and the manifesta¬ tions of hysterical symptoms is at its peak. For the pronounced ambiv¬ alence with respect to the erotic, to the body as pleasure seeking and pleasure giving, which defines the language of and about hysteria, has traditionally been seen as colluding with the nuptial metaphors of much (especially feminine) mystical discourse. This collusion is par¬ ticularly clear in the literature of "decadence," with its frequent and unmistakable mixture of religion and sensuality. Without resorting to their conflation, the discourses of mysticism and hysteria, both diffi¬ cult to define and always controversial, can nevertheless be seen as informing and informed by each other, allowing us to learn about each through a study of the ways in which they come together—and apart. A note on the terms is essential at this point. I examine hysteria not only and certainly not primarily as the most "popular" neurosis of the European fm-de-siecle but mainly as a way of posing the problematic of "constructing," even more than "representing," the feminine. For in spite of Jean-Martin Charcot's controversial claim to have scientifically established the existence of a male hysteria (which, by the way, Char¬ cot finds only among the lower classes; he associates it with margin alized groups, be they women or the poor), throughout the nineteenth century the hysteric is unmistakably a woman. A puzzling identity can easily be discerned between the theories of hysteria developed in an¬ tiquity and those expounded by eminent nineteenth-century alienistes: woman, controlled by the uterus, thus has an inherent tendency toward hysteria. But this apparent blind spot of nineteenth-century medicine must conceal another question, the question of woman's desire, which medicine takes over by turning it into a pathology and thus claiming that woman's sexuality is always-already hysterical. Woman is her uterus, is her desire; but her uterus is (or can be) sick, and so is (or can be) her desire. For all these reasons, I examine hysteria as a mimetic modality, a manipulate representational strategy, rather than a univocally referential diagnostic term. Janet Beizer has rightly pointed out that the nineteenth-century concept of hysteria was "metaphorically useful and even necessary to that era's narrative discourse, leading novelists, journalists, and historians to convert its maiming force into narrative power."12

12 Beizer Ventriloquized Bodies, 2. This interpretation is supported by some nine¬ teenth-century doctors who, like Doctor Huchard in 1882, wrote that "mild hysteria is not as Mr. Richet so aptly puts it, a true malady, it is rather one of the expressions, one

6

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Saint Hysteria

The nineteenth-century authority on hysteria Charles Lasegue has claimed that, because hysterical symptoms are too varied and incon¬ stant, 'The definition of hysteria has never been given and never will be. 13 The word mysticism is equally complex and polysemic. It was, according to Jean Pierrot, "one of those most frequently used to denote the characteristics of the new literature" of decadence and "one of the fashionable literary ingredients of the day."14 This mysticism was a rejection of science and rationality, a diffuse religious faith, and a focus on the soul, and it occasionally enters my discussion, but it is not the mysticism that interests me here. In line with the tum-of-the-century writers and doctors I analyze, I am rather narrowly defining mystical discourse here as the Brautmystik, or affective mysticism, that explic¬ itly or implicitly describes the mystical union of Christ and the soul in terms of the marriage or even the sexual encounter between bride and bridegroom.15 This nuptial imagery, which finds much of its in¬ spiration in the interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory of Christianity (Jesus as the bridegroom of the soul), has been identified as a constant category of women's—or, more generally, feminine— mystical experience, as Jean-Noel Vuamet notes: "True mysticism is fundamentally female: femininity of the great women ecstatics, femi¬ nization of Eckhart or Ruysbroeck and, sometimes, feminization of God himself."16 In tum-of-the-century texts it is precisely around the representation of women (or of overtly and traditionally feminized men, such as Saint Sebastian) that the nexus of hysteria and mysticism is most frequently developed.17 If science purports to resolve it and lay it to rest once and for all in its psychiatric archives, the literary texts to varying extents subvert such positivistic certainty and cast a literary doubt on its axioms.

of the modalities of the feminine character." Quoted in Gerard Wajem’an, "Psyche de la femme: Note sur l'hysterie au XIXe siecle," Romantisme 13-14 (1976-77): 61. 13. Lasegue, quoted in Pierre Janet, L’etat mental des hysteriques (Marseilles- Laffitte

1983), 411. 14. Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chi¬ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 82-83. 15. On the topos of mystical marriage, see E. Ann Matter, "11 matrimonio mistico," in Donne e fede: Santita e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Bari: Laterza, 1994), 43-60. 16. Jean-Noel Vuarnet, Extases feminines (Paris: Arthaud, 1980), 7. 17. In En route, Huysmans explains that "Christ gives himself in the flesh, under the appearance of bread; that's mystical marriage, the divine union consummated by way of the lips; he is the Bridegroom of women, whereas we, without meaning to be, are more attracted to the Virgin. But she does not give herself to us like her Son,- she does not reside in the sacrament; possession of her is impossible,- she is our Mother but she is not our Bride, as he is the Bridegroom of virgins. We understand, then, why women are carried away more violently and why they adore better and why they better imagine that they are embraced." Joris-Karl Huysmans, En route (Paris: Christian Pirot, 1985), 269-70.

Introduction

#

7

Because of its inherent malleability, hysteria has been detected in a vast geographical and historical spectrum Gerard Wajeman calls "transhistoricaL,,18 At the same time Elaine Showalter has persuasively ar¬ gued for the importance of history to any theory of hysteria.19 The more specific awareness of the possible relationship of hysteria to the super¬ natural is by no means a nineteenth-century discovery; a version of it can be found in the oldest records we have of hysteria, two Egyptian medical papyri dating from about 1900 and 1500 b.c. In these manu¬ scripts, the medical treatment for uterine dislocation (interpreted as the cause of polymorphic symptoms ranging from paralysis to blindness) consists either of the ingestion/inhalation of foul substances or of a sweet-smelling fumigation of the genitals. These operations, aimed ei¬ ther at repelling the uterus from above or enticing it from below, could be fraught with magicoreligious symbolism. The fumes to be used were sometimes obtained from melting a waxen ibis, the representation of Thoth, the most powerful god of the Egyptian pantheon and a specifi¬ cally male deity. A masculine figure was thus entrusted with bringing the woman's womb back to its supposedly natural place.20 It is in the Hippocratic corpus (multiauthor texts traditionally as¬ signed to the fifth and fourth century b.c., but probably covering a much longer period) that terms connected with what was later known as hysteria first appear. The word "hysteria," as Helen King points out, is never used in these texts (despite the all-too-common assumption); what we do find is the adjective hysterikos, meaning " 'coming from the womb'/'suffering due to the womb.' "21 Furthermore, King explains, the Hippocratic definition of hysteria does not distinguish between or¬ ganic and hysterical symptoms (in spite of Veith's influential assertions to the contrary), and the Hippocratic diagnosis could not today be read as a specific disease label (such a diagnosis, according to King, cannot be identified until the second century b.c.). It could even be said that in Hippocratic gynecology all diseases are hysterical because the uterus is regarded as the source of all women's diseases.22 The uterus was in fact thought by many (by Plato, for instance, in the Timaeus) to be or to be like an animal, endowed with a life of its own. From the very beginning of the history of medicine, then, it was 18. Wajeman, Le maitre, 11. 19. "Hysteria is no longer a question of the wandering womb; it is a question of the wandering story [histoire is the double term Showalter evokes in this essay], and of whether that story belongs to the hysteric, the doctor, the historian, or the critic." Elaine Showalter, "Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender," in Gilman et al., 335. 20. Veith, Hysteria, 1-8; Charles Melman, Nouvelles etudes sur I’hysterie (Paris: Clims, 1984), 53-55. 21. Helen King, "Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates," in Gilman et al, n. 22. Ibid., 12-13.

8

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Saint Hysteria

linguistically and organically connected with women, sexuality, and difference. It is the metaphorical expression of female desire, of a sex¬ uality believed, like the uterus, to be "other" even with respect to the woman's self. According to the Hippocratic corpus, the unsatisfied uterus migrates and in so doing invades other parts of the body, causing a host of symptoms, depending on its destination, including the famous globus hystericus (the choking sensation of a lump or ball in the throat), as well as paralyses and seizures. Galen of Pergamon (129-99 a.d.) believed hysteria was caused by the pathogenic retention of "uter¬ ine sperm," a liquid or vaporous substance that meandered through the body provoking symptoms like those described by Hippocrates. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, then, hysteria was primarily considered an organic disease, a somatic derangement of the continent uterus. It was treatable, according to the Hippocratic corpus, with marriage and pregnancy and, according to Galen, more prosaically, with sexual inter¬ course (or even, in the absence of a partner, with masturbatory orgasm). But although the Hippocratic corpus vigorously denied any supernatu¬ ral causation, an important strand of Greek medicine, namely, the heal¬ ings that took place at the temples of Aesculapius, relied precisely on suggestions of supernatural influence. As can be imagined, it was later believed that this method was effective because the afflictions Aescu¬ lapius cured were of hysterical origin and therefore receptive to ritual¬ istic procedures and suggestions. What was for Graeco-Roman medicine a disease of the female repro¬ ductive apparatus, caused primarily by unwanted sexual abstinence and treatable with sexual activity, became with Christianity a supernatural manifestation of evil, and an externalized and personalized agency, the demon, took the place of the womb in wandering about the female body. Instead of marriage, the new and more final "prescription" was the stake, death by fire of the presumed witch. In the medieval Chris¬ tian world view, the physiological need for sexual pleasure and the imputation of pathological consequences to continence were clearly unacceptable, and hermeneutically, it was a small step from a disease of shameful body parts in a shameful sex to the evils of witchcraft and demoniac possession. From a medical metaphor, hysteria became a moral one. The woman once diagnosed as a hysteric was no longer a sick human being but rather a victim or, even worse, an accomplice of Satan, a witch. As Ilza Veith, the main historiographer of hysteria, puts it, with "the exception of the few who were fortunate enough to come into medical hands, hysterics became victims of the witch craze."23 23. Veith, Hysteria, 56.

Introduction

0

9

The (in)famous Malleus maleflcarum (1487), the textbook for the per¬ secution of witches written by two notorious clerics turned witchhunters, Heinrich Kraemer and James Sprenger, at the request of Pope Innocent VIII, reveals, according to Veith, that "many, if not most, of the witches as well as a great number of their victims described therein were simply hysterics who suffered from partial anesthesia, mutism, blindness, and convulsions, and, above all, from a variety of sexual delusions."24 The identification of witches with hysterics is by now a historical commonplace, but it continues the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, the master diagnostician of the supernatural (whose work I discuss exten¬ sively in the first chapter), in employing the sweeping and self-assured gaze of retrospective medicine,- that is, Veith and others see witches quite unequivocally as undiagnosed hysterics.25 Similarly, the six¬ teenth-century Dutch physician Johannes Weyer (Wier) declared that the "possessed" and those accused of witchcraft were nothing but hys¬ terics, human beings suffering from a bodily disease like all other med¬ ical conditions,- and this was for the time an enlightened if unpopular position.26 Jane Ussher has persuasively argued that the interpretation of witchcraft as unequivocal undiagnosed madness "is too simplistic and does not account for the many different women who were perse¬ cuted and condemned."27 But that is another story, whose complexity is no less difficult to untangle than that of the hysteria-mysticism con¬ nection. relationship between madness and Christianity, the two larger cat¬ egories to which hysteria and mysticism (in the context of my discus¬ sion) problematically belong, is at best complex and ambivalent. At a most elementary level, one may speak of Christianity and of the Judaic tradition preceding it as based on the irrational, insofar as they rest on

The

24. Ibid., 61. , 25. Thomas Szasz, the campaigner against psychiatry, compares the witches inquisi¬ tion to modern psychiatric treatment in The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)- Jacques Bourgaux writes: “Witches and possessed women can nevertheless be confused in their hysterical manifes¬ tations It is obvious to see what determined the degree of the accusation. Every person that one wants to, and can, eliminate is accused of witchcraft." Possessions et simulates: Aux sources de la thedtralite (Paris: Epi, 1973), 15. A different exploration of the connec¬ tion between hysteria and witchcraft can be found in Cixous and Clement, Newly Born 26. G. S. Rousseau, " 'A Strange Pathology': Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 15001800,“ in Gilman et al., 114-1527. Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illnessl (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991)/ 6o-

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Saint Hysteria

the belief in a God and an otherworld whose existence cannot be es¬ tablished through purely rational or physically perceptible means. This first and not so tenuous link with insanity is underlined, furthermore, by a glance at the history of Christianity. Many of its most basic teach¬ ings (the belief in the resurrection of the dead, for example) seemed sheer madness to the classical mind. Early Christians, in their eager¬ ness to differentiate their beliefs from the hegemonic pagan philosophy, accepted and even celebrated this accusation of insanity and hence of dissenting difference. After all, his own mother and relatives had taken Christ for mad and threatened to tie him up, as the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark narrates. The differences between negative forms of madness and the always-desirable divine ecstasy are deceptively subtle, so that it is only with much difficulty that Christians can learn to distinguish between the two. M. A. Screech points out that in the Re¬ naissance and the Middle Ages "any Christian doctor treating what he took to be madness had to take great care to ensure that he was not resisting the Spirit: that he was not, that is, treating as organically or diabolically mad an enraptured lover of the living God."28 Furthermore, Screech writes, "until very recently (if that), at no time since the first century has it been possible to draw a sharp line between several kinds of Christian other-worldliness and diabolical or organic madness."29 Roy Porter agrees: "Medieval and Renaissance minds could regard mad¬ ness as religious, as moral or as medical, as divine or diabolical, as good or bad."30 The manifestations of the saintly presence of God's spirit are thus seen and feared as dangerously similar to the symptoms of madness— as well as to the signs of possession by the devil. The epiphany of the divine may very well share the semiotic model of organic or diabolical disturbances, to the point of indistinguishability even by the best in¬ terpreters. An illustrious example of this ambiguity is the "madness of the cross" experienced by countless Christian mystics throughout his¬ tory. As Michel Foucault remarks about the period following the Re¬ naissance, "When classical Christianity speaks of the madness of the Cross, it is merely to humiliate false reason and add luster to the eter¬ nal light of truth: the madness of God-in-man's-image is simply a wis28. M. A. Screech, Good Madness in Christendom/' in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, 3 vols., ed. W. F. Bynum et al. (London: Tavistock 1985), i:3429. Ibid., 25. 30. Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World through the Eyes of the Insane (New York: Dutton, 1989), 13.

Introduction

$

11

dom not recognized by the men of unreason who live in this world/'31 Christianity introduces a wholly other perception of sanity and insan¬ ity, which implies that the humanly negative connotations of the con¬ cept of madness must give way in certain cases to divinely positive ones: madness can be wisdom, and the fool of God a saint. Clearly, Porter contends, "a faith founded upon the madness of the Cross, which crusaded against worldliness, which lauded the innocence of the infant, which valued the spiritual mysteries of contemplation, asceticism, and the mortification of the flesh, and prized faith over intellect, could not help but see gleams of godliness in the simplicity of the fool or in ecstasies and transports."32 The difference between human and divine could coincide with the line that separates the sane from the mad, the saintly from the symptomatic. Christians are therefore inclined to be¬ ware of too quickly disparaging a condition that balances so precari¬ ously between self-annihilation and eternal salvation. For just as the divine and the insane share a mode of signification, a semiotic channel—that is, a certain physical and verbal behavior that is the mark of their difference—so they may also respond to one and the same des¬ ignation: madness as ck.sta.sis, or literally as the state of otherness reached by being displaced out of one's senses. A similarly precarious balance is at work in the interpretation of extreme forms of religiosity—be they good or evil, demoniac or divine in origin. Much has been written, for example, about the episodes that took place in the French convent of Loudun, which between 1632 and 1640 was the scene of what has been interpreted in turn as a collective demoniac possession and, especially in the late nineteenth century, an epidemic of hysteria (hysteria being characterized by an instinct to imitate").33 A nun, Jeanne des Anges, accused the priest Urbain Gran¬ der of witchcraft. The effects could be observed in the possessed, con¬ vulsive bodies of nuns throughout the convent, and Grandier was executed in 1634* Loudun was by no means an isolated instance; other analogous outbreaks took place in the seventeenth century—until 1670, when Louis XIV forbade the pursuit of any legal action against witchcraft.34 The pattern in these instances is strikingly similar, a priest is accused of sorcery and debauchery, and the proof is found on 31. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), 79. 32. Porter, A Social History, 14. 33. Legrand du Saulle, Les hysteriques, 314. 34. Yves Pelicier, Histoire de la psychiatrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, I97i)/ 53-

12

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Saint Hysteria

the convulsive bodies of the women who surround him. Exorcism is used and its success is taken as proof of the devil's intervention. It is precisely in his book about Loudun that Michel de Certeau underlines the closeness between demoniac possession and witchcraft, on one hand, and divine ecstasy, on the other, for Loudun was a spiritual cen¬ ter at the same time as it was the site of sorcery. As all aspects of the sacred become marginalized, those that are suspect end up being placed next to the orthodox ones: "Mysticism and possession often form the same pockets in a society where language thickens, losing its spiritual porousness and becoming impermeable to the divine. The relationship with a 'beyond' vacillates then between the immediacy of a diabolical intervention and the immediacy of a divine illumination."35 Charcot implicitly recognizes this interpretive proximity of sorcery, possession, and mysticism when he places his analysis of the portrayal of ecstatics at the end of his 1886 book on demoniacs in art. As Huysmans puts it, "From exalted mysticism to exasperated satanism there is but one step. In the beyond, all things touch."36 Both of these interventions, divine and diabolical, have in turn os¬ cillated between a religious and a scientific interpretation. One of the best examples of this hermeneutic hesitation can be found in the case of the convulsionaries of Saint Medard, which shook Paris in the eigh¬ teenth century.37 Their story climaxed with the closing by the skeptical authorities of the cemetery of Saint Medard, where many miraculous healings through convulsions had taken place on the grave of the Jansenist deacon Francois de Paris. These supernatural phenomena (inter¬ preted by the Jansenists as a gift of the Holy Spirit, by the Catholic church as instances of demoniac possession, and by doctors as cases of hysteria] ceased then to be a purely positive cure and began to suffocate the convulsionaries (primarily women), who thus needed more and more the famous secours (performed for the most part by men), that is, the violent stretching of their contracted limbs, at times involving the use of swords and other sharp objects. The convulsionaries acted as martyrs or witnesses, spectacularly playing out scenes of religious his¬ tory on their own bodies by reproducing and thus almost magically 35. Michel de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1980), 13. 36. Huysmans, La-bas, 73. Adriano Prosperi claims that "the love of the women mys¬ tics is like the other side of the eroticism of the witches' magical rites." "Lettere spirituali," in Scaraffia and Zarri, 238. The proximity of women mystics to witches is continuously (albeit reductively) underlined by Marcello Craveri in the introduction and selections of Sante e streghe: Biografie e documenti dal XIV al XVII secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981). 37. See Catherine Laurence Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint Medard: Miracles, convulsions et propheties a Paris au XVIIe siecle (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1985).

Introduction

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13

conjuring up Christ's violent death; crucifixion was not coincidentally their "favorite" posture. The convulsionaries, accusing their contemporary fellow Catholics of moral corruption, reveled in the frequent charges of insanity, much as early Christians had done several centuries before, since they be¬ lieved themselves to be the privileged physical site of the epiphany of the Truth: the hidden God manifested in the agitation of their bodies. They were also, however, frequently accused of indecency, immorality, and diabolical possession. The Catholic church was in its usual bind of having to denounce the false miracles without denying the true ones. Charcot's retrospective interpretation, on the other hand, obeyed a sim¬ pler axiom: hysteria is ubiquitous as well as atemporal, omnipresent both geographically and historically, so that the Saint Medard convul¬ sionaries had to be counted among its many previously unrecognized victims. Furthermore, Charcot stressed the similarities between the secours and the technique of pressure on the hysterogenic zone which he carried out at the Salpetriere hospital in order to stop the hysterical attack. Analogous to the convulsions of Saint Medard, according to Charcot, were the dancing processions of Saint Vitus and Saint Guy, those forms of chorea or mass hysteria or both which developed and spread in Europe during the Renaissance and which demonstrated how dance (identified by Charcot with convulsions) can be at once illness and treatment, organic affect and intervention of the divine, just as the convulsionaries' body movements were both symptom and cure. Nineteenth-century positivistic scientists were quick to interpret such cases as epidemics of hysteria, quite common in a superstitious past but, at least according to Legrand du Saulle, increasingly rare: "The progress of enlightenment, relegating to the background the belief in mysterious phenomena, and education, decreasing the tendency of na¬ ive minds to mysticism, have led to changes in our customs such that the hysteria epidemic has become a pathological curiosity."38 Well, not quite. ... The interruption of the secular by the supernatural was not confined to a comfortably distant past. Between 1857 and 1873, a slightly modified version of the seventeenth-century possession epi¬ demics (epitomized by Loudun) took place in the small Savoy com¬ munity of Morzine, crossing in time and space the Italian kingdom of Sardinia, to which Savoy belonged until i860, and the French Second Empire and Third Republic. This time, two centuries after Loudun, the stage was not a convent but an entire town, which was, like the con¬ vent, geographically isolated and fervently religious. It was still pri38. Legrand du Saulle, Les hysteriques, 315-

i4

#

Saint Hysteria

marily on women's bodies that the possession unfolded. Almost half of the Morzinoises women were affected, to varying degrees, by the "epidemic." This anachronistic case of collective demoniac possession broke in upon nineteenth-century scientific beliefs with untimely questions. In the first chapter of Le maitre et l’hysteiique, which he dedicates entirely to the events of Morzine, Gerard Wajeman claims that "for nineteenth-century positivist knowledge, it can be said that the possession of Morzine, as such, does not exist (or ex-ists too much)." Possession and the possessed in Morzine were immediately and conclusively inscribed within medical rather than religious dis¬ course. The church authorities refused to perform exorcisms, and the doctors interpreted the Morzinoises as "hysterical-demonopaths."39 The bodies of the possessed—battlefield of the conflict between reli¬ gion and science—must be lifted out of superstition, as their traditional religious identity is dissolved into the medical representation given by another, in this case, a doctor from Paris, charged with re-educating the inhabitants of Morzine about the "truth" of their condition. But as Jacqueline Carroy-Thirard points out, even as the Morzine epidemics officially ended, "what is or should be hidden in Savoy is shown in Paris."40 She is referring to the Salpetriere, Charcot's hospital and a theatrical scene that has not ceased to fascinate viewers since its ear¬ liest performances. Legrand du Saulle, doctor at the Salpetriere and expert on hysteria, summarized the swing from witch or saint to patient: "As far as the hysteric is concerned, finally stripped of her borrowed halo, she has lost her rights to the stake or to canonization. She has the honor today of being a sick person, and depends directly on the doctor."41 The re¬ constructed historical itinerary of the nineteenth-century mystic and hysteric took her from the stake and the altar to the hospital. What I have been outlining is an episodic history of the link between hysteria and the supernatural which, following Michel de Certeau's statement about the proximity of demoniac and spiritual phenomena, draws from both extremes—from spectacular "diabolical interventions" and from divine illuminations." For in late nineteenth-century Europe the in¬ terest and even the obsession with hysteria ran parallel to an increased fascination with evil and the devil, with spiritualism in general, and with Christian affective mysticism.42 39. Wajeman, Le maitre, 36. 40. lyse a 41. 42.

Jacqueline Carroy-Thirard, "Possession, extase, hysterie au 19c siecle," Psychanal’universite 5.19 (1980): 505. Legrand du Saulle, quoted in Wajeman, "Psyche," 63. Knowles points out that the late nineteenth-century revival of interest in mystical

Introduction

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15

Mysticism had, of course, both supporters and adversaries. Within the medical profession, the generalized consensus (not without its dis¬ senters) was to interpret the mystic as an undiagnosed hysteric, often pleasurably plagued by nymphomaniacal tendencies. It is with the study of this dominant medical discourse that the first chapter con¬ cerns itself, analyzing works by Charcot, Cesare Lombroso, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. The fashionable medical interpretation of mysticism as hysteria was very much aligned with the beliefs of the secular intelligentsia, includ¬ ing, of course, naturalist writers. The interaction between literary medicalization and psychiatric literariness was at its peak in the late nineteenth century, and it is with the aesthetics of naturalism that the second chapter deals—focusing on Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Madame Gervaisais and Gabriele D'Annunzio's "Vergine Orsola. But the superficial certainties of naturalism were smothered with doubts by the decadent-symbolist literature that immediately followed it, which, instead of diagnosing neurosis from a detached clinical position, reveled in the neurotic's and especially the hysteric's discourse as a way of approaching the dreamy world of the unknown and the uncon¬ scious. The chapter on decadence discusses the work of Antonio Fogazzaro [II santo and Malombra) and Gabriele D'Annunzio [La figlia di Iorio, Le martyre de Saint Sebastien, and La Pisanelle), placing the two masters of Italian decadentismo in the larger context of French decad¬ ence and its reinterpretation of religious discourse. Each of the first three chapters ends with a postscript on a French feminist who has addressed the question of women's mysticism: Simone de Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex interprets mysticism as a form of women's subjection; Julia Kristeva, who uses the example of Christian mystics to illuminate her theory of abjection in Powers of Horror; and Luce Irigaray, who celebrates in "La Mysterique" (a chapter of Speculum of the Other Woman) the interdependence and inseparability of the hys¬ terical and the mystical female voices. In the fourth chapter I shift my focus to the discourse of the mystics themselves, who were very much aware of the criticism of their lives and writings. If the medieval mystic Blessed Angela of Foligno complained about people's suspicion that she

writings was stimulated by two different groups of scholars, the psychologists on one hand who were working from outside the church on morbid and abnormal (or at least on subliminal and prerational) experience, and Catholic thinkers, on the other, most of whom, Knowles remarks, developed an approach similar to that of the psychologists. That is, they investigated mystical texts from the outside, by means of quasi-scientific observations and comparisons. David Knowles, ''What Is Mysticism?" in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods (New York: Image, 1980), 521-28.

16

Saint Hysteria

was demoniacally possessed, the turn-of-the-century mystic Saint Gemma Galgani had to contend with a doctor's diagnosis of hysteria. The postscript to this chapter brings in Freud and Teresa of Avila, ex¬ ponents of psychoanalysis and mysticism. Finally, in the Conclusion to Saint Hysteria I analyze some more recent rereadings and rewritings of women's mystical discourse, focusing on the work of Simone Weil, in the hope of opening up a new constellation within which the woman mystic and her interpretations may move more freely.

CHAPTER

I

The Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria: Women's Mysticism in Medical Writings

A parallel historical trajectory has brought the bodily phenomenon called hysteria and the relationship with the supernatural known as possession (mystical or demoniac) to bear upon each other throughout the centuries, from the times of Egyptian fumigations and Aesculapian cures to the era of the witch craze and ecstasies of various origins—a trajectory always touching or being touched by some interested scien¬ tific discourse. Thus Foucault notes, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality that "nervous illness is certainly not the truth of posses¬ sion, but the medicine of hysteria is not unrelated to the earlier direc¬ tion of 'obsessed' women."1 At the turn of the century, the scientific interpretation of mystical ecstasy as a gender-specific neurotic mani¬ festation reached its peak with the work of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere (described by a critic as "that unlikely place of femininity the city of incurable women"),1 and with the diagnoses of other contemporary scientists, influenced to a varying extent by Charcot s doctrines, which derived in turn from centuries-old intimations. The scientific revolution these doctors advocated is clearly described by Desire-Magloire Boumeville, one of Charcot's disciples at the socalled charcoterie of the Salpetriere, in his pathography of the notorious i Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 1172. Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hysterie: Charcot et 1 Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (Paris: Macula, 1982), 17-

18

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Saint Hysteria

nineteenth-century Belgian stigmatic Louise Lateau: "Asleep during that period of such sad and somber memory, the human mind has slowly awakened, and, in spite of all kinds of obstacles and persecu¬ tions, science has begun to take shape and to acquire its own organic laws. Still less perfect today than they will be in the future, these laws nevertheless suffice to explain all these reputedly miraculous facts."3 Convinced of the perfectibility of science (not yet, he admits, capable of explaining everything), Bourneville was confident that science could certainly explain miracles and thus expose them as false even as it appropriated them by placing them within its interpretive scope. Thus also Charcot claimed to be able to explain all instances of miraculous faith healing through the concept of hysterical suggestibility.4 But just as positivistic psychiatry, with its sharp and apparently selfassured distinction between normalcy and deviance, insists with fierce determination on reinterpreting the Christian mystic as nothing other than an undiagnosed hysteric—encouraged in that interpretation by the intrinsic malleability of hysteria, "that protean malady par excel¬ lence"5—contemporary writers (primarily, the so-called decadents) cast doubt on the dogmatic imperialism of medical discourse, questioned the self-complacent positivism of the medicalizing enterprise, by im¬ plicating at various levels the referential and supposedly univocal dis¬ course of science with the self-conscious equivocations of literature. In this chapter, I analyze some of the most influential constructions of the hysterical mystic's symptoms of sainthood during the European turn of the century. Although the focus is placed on medical writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—namely, the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, Cesare Lombroso, Richard von KrafftEbing, and Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud—I conclude with an ex¬ amination of a more recent essay by Jacques Lacan. This temporal leap is necessary to underline the continuity, loudly denied by Lacan him¬ self, between Lacan's post-Freudian reading of the mystic and Charcot's prepsychoanalytic interpretation. After a brief introduction to hypno¬ sis, theatrically balanced between nature and supemature, medicine and the occult, I discuss the work of Charcot and Lombroso in some depth, because almost the entirety of their careers, and certainly all of the later part, was dedicated to a close examination of the pathology of religion and, more generally, the supernatural. Krafft-Ebing, Breuer 3. Desire-Magloire Bourneville, Science et miracle: Louise Lateau, ou La stigmatisee beige (Paris: Delahaye, 1878), i. 4. Jean-Martin Charcot, "La foi qui guerit," in Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, Les demoniaques dans l’art suivi de “La foi qui guerit” (Paris: Macula, 1984), 111-23. 5. Boumeville, Science et miracle, 39.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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19

and Freud, and Lacan are grouped together in the second section of the chapter partly because their discussion of mysticism is more cursory than Charcot's or Lombroso's, although their objectives are as clearly discernible. Furthermore, with different yet analogous motivations and intentions, they all turn their diagnostic gaze to the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Avila, a controversial figure in nine¬ teenth-century Europe, whom all of them see as the definitive and most legible metonymy of Christian mysticism.

The Hysterical Saints of Charcot and Lombroso In August 1889 the Hotel Dieu in Paris hosted the Premier congres de l'hypnotisme experimental et therapeutique. Among the honorary presidents were Jean-Martin Charcot and Cesare Lombroso (illustrious participants included Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, and William James).6 Charcot's use of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria, annexing this mysterious technique to the field of science, is well known, even no¬ torious. Contemporaries frequently commented on his commanding and intimidating gaze, and the use of hypnosis (for which he was deeply and somewhat embarrassingly indebted to popular suggestive or mag¬ netic healing) gave Charcot the halo of a sacred man by allowing him to reproduce the hysterical attack at will, thus seemingly to perform miracles. This was an instance of the return of that very supernatural which Charcot carefully represses from his work. In 1875, for example, when a hypnotized hysteric was suddenly cured by Charcot during one of his lessons, the rumor of a miracle at the Salpetriere prompted an article in La semaine religieuse almost immediately.7 Freud, who learned the use of hypnosis as a legitimate medical technique from his French colleagues (Charcot in Paris and Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy), noticed this "side effect" of hypnotism on his own work and ego: "There was something positively seductive in working with hypno¬ tism. For the first time there was a sense of having overcome one's helplessness, and it was highly flattering to enjoy the reputation of being a miracle worker."8 The contribution of hypnotism to the early development of psycho6. L6on Chertok, "Court historique des idees sur l'hypnose d'un 89 a l'autre," in La suggestion: Hypnose, influence, tianse, Colloquc de Cerisy 1989/ od. Daniel Bougnoux (Paris: Les empecheurs de penser en rond, 1991), 13—33/ 137. Carroy-Thirard, "Possession, extase, hysterie," 507. 8. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, trans. James Strachey (New York: Nor¬ ton, 1952), 29-30.

20

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Saint Hysteria

analysis (in the context of Freud's study of hysteria) points to the conti¬ nuity between psychoanalysis and the historical-hysterical oscillation between nature and supernature I outlined in the Introduction. A con¬ temporary French psychoanalyst has eloquently described this debt by underlining the proximity between hypnosis and transference: "Trans¬ ference is what we have left of possession, and it is obtained by a series of subtractions. If the devil is eliminated, the convulsionaries are left. If the relics are eliminated, Mesmer's 'magnetized' are left. If the tub is eliminated, we have hypnosis and the 'relationship.' If hypnosis is elim¬ inated, transference is left."9 The road to transference and hence to psy¬ choanalysis, according to Octave Mannoni, winds from supernatural possession through hypnotic phenomena. Hypnotism is an intrinsically double-edged technique, itself possessed by hysterical uncertainty. From the time of Franz Anton Mesmer and the Marquis de Puysegur well into the twentieth century, hypnosis has forked into a therapeutic branch (which holds it to be a manifestation of the human psyche and its abili¬ ties) and a spiritualistic branch (which sees it as a way to approach the supernatural).10 Charcot and Lombroso at first pathologized this spiritu¬ alistic strand of hypnosis, even though late in their careers both explored it in search of the hidden abilities of the human psyche. It is with the seminal work of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) that any discussion of tum-of-the-century hysteria must begin.11 From 1862 until his death, Charcot was a neurologist at the women's hospital the Salpetriere, which was at that time the largest hospital in Paris and the largest psychiatric hospital in the world. It was there that the young Sigmund Freud studied under Charcot's guidance between 1885 and 1886. In an article written shortly before his death, titled "La foi qui guerit" ("Faith-Healing"), Charcot diagnoses Francis of Assisi and Te¬ resa of Avila as "undeniable hysterics," even as he describes their abil¬ ity to cure the hysteria of others.12 It puzzled Charcot that these "hysterical saints" were for some curious reason, the most popular and effective miracle workers in the cure of what he considered hysterical afflictions. Charcot's attention at the end of his life to the uneasy re¬ lationship of medicine and religion crowned his lifelong annexation to the medical field of extreme forms of religiosity. 9. Octave Mannoni, Un commencement qui n’en finit pas: Transfert, interpretation, theorie (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 49-50. 10. Didier Michaux, "I/emergence de la phenomenologie hypnotique au XVIIIe siecle," in Bougnoux, 43-44. 11. Hysteria before Charcot has been extensively and brilliantly discussed by Jann Matlock in Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in NineteenthCentury France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4. 12. Charcot, "La foi qui guerit," 114.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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21

In Les demoniaques dans l’art (Demoniacs in art, 1886), written in collaboration with Paul Richer (a graphic artist and a professor of ar¬ tistic anatomy) and published at the height of Charcot's fame, we wit¬ ness the forced metamorphosis of religious metaphors into scientific ones and the attempted appropriation by psychiatric discourse of an entire iconographical tradition even as its supernatural content is repressed. Similarly, in "La foi qui guerit" (an article prompted, like £mile Zola's Lourdes, and Huysmans's Foules de Lourdes, by the mi¬ raculous healings that followed the Virgin Mary's apparitions to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in 1858), Charcot claims that faith healing "belongs entirely to the scientific order."13 The mediating fac¬ tor in this operation is sexuality and, more specifically, female sexu¬ ality—also a repressed element in Charcot's work. But the repressed, as Freud has taught us, will invariably return. Thus, although Charcot never explicitly discusses the sexual etiology of hysteria, being a strong opponent of the traditional etymology-based link between hysteria and the uterus, Freud records having heard him say that in cases of hysteria, "it's always the genital thing . . . always . . . always . . . always."14 Although Charcot skirts the issue, a special penchant for eroticism is a defining trait in the popular and often even in the medical repre¬ sentation of the nineteenth-century hysteric (a trait to which I will return). This stereotype was reinforced by the role of the Salpetriere as a haven for syphilitic prostitutes. As Yannick Ripa explains in a history of women's madness in nineteenth-century France, "In everyone's mind, the Salpetriere is synonymous with vice and madness." Georges Didi-Huberman is more evocative: "From the hysteric to the prostitute there is only a step, a simple one, that of crossing the walls of the Salpetriere, and of finding herself in the street."15 At a time when wom¬ en's sexuality was defined as nonexistent, the hysteria diagnosis al¬ lowed its otherwise inexplicable presence to be represented. This apparently self-contradictory relation of woman to (a)sexuality is best 13. Ibid., hi. For a contemporary reading of the Lourdes phenomenon, see Emma Fattorini, "In viaggio dalla Madonna/7 in Scaraffia and Zarri, 495—515. 14/ Freud, "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1966-74), 14:14. Breuer will unequivocally write, in Studies on Hysteria: "I do not think that I am exaggerating when I assert that the great majority of severe neuroses in women have their origin in the marriage bed." Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, in Standard Edition 2:246. 15. Yannick Ripa, La ronde des folles: Femme, folie et enfermement au XIXe siecle (1838-1870) (Paris: Aubier, 1986), 17; Didi-Huberman, Invention, 82. Matlock has ana¬ lyzed the relationship between hysteria and prostitution in nineteenth-century France at length in Scenes of Seduction.

22

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Saint Hysteria

explained by Foucault: "In the process of hysterization of women, 'sex' was defined in three ways: as that which belongs in common to men and women,- as that which belongs, par excellence, to men, and hence is lacking in women,- but at the same time, as that which by itself constitutes women's body, ordering it wholly in terms of the functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agitation through the effects of that very function."16 Sex is both absent from the woman's body in terms of pleasure and present within it in its reproductive ability and, pathologically, in its intrinsic hysteria. Sexuality is thus the unspoken subtext of Charcot's oeuvre. In Les demoniaques dans l’art Charcot engages in what he himself calls medecine retrospective, or retrospective medicine, interpreting a series of paintings and etchings dealing with scenes of demoniac possession and ecstasy in terms of the symptomatology of hysteria he had recently formulated. He enumerated four periods of the grande attaque: the epileptoid phase, the contortions and big movements or clownisme, the passionate attitudes, and the terminal period. Charcot's ultimate ob¬ jective in establishing the ubiquity and atemporality of hysteria was a complete medical reinterpretation of history. As Helen King has shown, he pursued that goal even at the cost of manipulating texts such as the Hippocratic corpus,- hysteria, King remarks, was "a parasite in search of a history."17 Nevertheless, Charcot's choice of visual repre¬ sentations as the privileged metonymic object of his interpretation of mysticism as hysteria points to the exclusion of the mystic's writings and to the almost obsessively visual orientation of Charcot's diagnoses. And despite his formal rejection of its hermeneutic value, it is from the religious artistic tradition of representing the unrepresentable that Charcot derives a subject and an appropriate ancestry for his own in¬ terpretive strategies, at once signaling a self-conscious break from pre¬ ceding theories and proving the existence of a history for his own model of hysteria (against critics' frequent accusations that such a model ex¬ isted only at the Salpetriere).18 Thus some of Charcot's students also set out to prove the hysterical nature of extreme forms of religiosity in 16. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1:153. 17. King, "Once upon a Text," 64. 18. "And it is all too easy to show you that such phenomena have indeed occurred outside the walls of the Salpetriere. First, the descriptions of possessed victims from the Middle Ages are full of similar behaviors." Jean-Martin Charcot, Charcot the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons, ed. and trans. Christopher Goetz (New York: Raven Press, 1987), 107. As Gilman points out in his study of the representation of hysteria, "This is the basic assumption of the definition of a positivistic disease entity at the close of the nineteenth century. Disease is only real if it is universal. And it is universal only if it can be seen and the act of seeing reproduced" ("The Image of the Hysteric," in Gilman et al., 379).

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

&

23

theses devoted to the scientific interpretation of religious events, in¬ cluding, of course, the possession at Loudun, the convulsionaries of Saint Medard, and individual cases of stigmata and miraculous cures.19 The intense visibility of hysterical suffering seems to provoke a sort of collusion between its nosology and the artistic iconography of pain traced through the centuries by Charcot's picture catalog. As Freud remarks in his obituary for Charcot, "He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a (visuel/ a man who sees."20 In Les demoniaques dans l’art there seems to be a veritable visual conspiracy between paradigms of science and paradigms of religion mediated by the artistic representation of these supernatural (painful or pleasurable) phenomena. Charcot superim¬ poses the perceptible space of the hysteric on the space of the possessed and the ecstatic as it had been perceived throughout the history of art, and the fit between the scientist's and the artist's visual representations seems almost miraculously perfect. The hysterical attack is made eminently visible in Charcot's for¬ mulation because it unfolds in specific spaces: first of all, in the space of the Salpetriere, where the hysteric shares, not without nosologically confusing consequences, the space of the epileptic; second, in the sharply defined and sharply defining space of the clinical-anatomical method, which turns the patient's body into a map of hysterogenic zones, an imaginary geography of the body ready to be photographed, drawn, and classified—that is, re-produced. This reproduction may take place in a catalog analogous to that of the artistic reproductions on which Les demoniaques dans Vart is based, as well as in the threevolume Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, published by Desire-Magloire Boumeville and Paul Regnard between 1876 and 1880, which includes photographs of women (no men!) with such eloquently ambiguous titles as "Ecstasy" (confused at times with "Eroticism," and compared to the attitude attributed "to visionaries such as Saint Te¬ resa"), "Ecstatic State," "Beatitude," and finally, as the epitome of it all, "Crucifixion."21 The clinical-anatomical method is in fact charac19. Evans, Fits and Starts, 35. 20. Freud, "Charcot," in Standard Edition 3:12. Showalter cites similar comments by other acquaintances of Charcot's in "Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender," 309. 21. Desire-Magloire Boumeville and Paul Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, 3 vols. (Paris: Progres Medical / Delahye et Crosnier, 1876-80), 1:69-71. In 1888 Charcot founded the periodical La nouvelle iconographie de la Salpetriere, which numbered 28 volumes,- Gilman claims that the image of the insane as the hysteric cham¬ pioned by this journal "dominated the visualization of the insane well into the twentieth century." Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 43. But as Didi-Huberman polemically

24

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Saint Hysteria

terized by what Foucault refers to as the "gaze," that shift in medical perception dating from the end of the eighteenth century and marking the beginning of positivist medicine. For Charcot, looking at a work of art finally corresponds to gazing at a patient, and vice versa. This is the case even when what art expresses is the presence of the reputedly ineffable, as in mystical ecstasies. Charcot can reduce this "presence of an absence" to the object of his gaze because, as Foucault notes, the gaze, that is, clinical experience, that "precarious balance" between speech and spectacle, "rests on a formidable postulate: that all that is visible is expressible, and that it is wholly visible because it is wholly

expressible."22 Through the employment of the clinical gaze, the spatiality—the vis¬ ibility and expressibility—of the attack attempts to make up for the absence of an etiological space, left vacant since the displacement of the early medical theory of hysteria as the wandering of the uterus. In a parallel way, Charcot implies in Les demoniaques dans Vart that the visibility of hysteria fills in, for the artist seeking a model, the empty space of the invisible God or demon (xxi). At the end of the book Char¬ cot asserts that artists, be they painters, actors, or sculptors, have no other resource apart from the exact observation of nature (109). In the godless world of neuroses, the natural (though pathological) sympto¬ matology of hysteria is the only epiphany of possession and ecstasy which the portrayer of the supernatural can aspire to witness. Charcot derives many of his experimental models and even some of his terminology from the Christian tradition. The term stigmata, for example, recurrent in the nineteenth-century imagination because of the popularity of contemporary stigmatics such as the Belgian Louise Lateau, is essential to Charcot's diagnosis of hysteria (it also frequently appears in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, and in Lombroso's oeuvre, where it is used for the physical signs of the born criminal).23 This term has a double-edged religious meaning, for though the word generally refers to the wounds of crucifixion displayed by the body of Christ and by many mystics since Saint Francis of Assisi received them claims, "The Iconographie photogiaphique de la Salpetriere shows nothing of the way in which hysterics were manipulated. It only showed, that is, it attempted to prove, that this prodigious body of the hysteric was not manipulated, and that 'it' happened all by itself" [Invention, 173). 22. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975)/ 115. 23. Nancy Harrowitz discusses the use of the term stigmata as a figure for (sexual, but especially racial) difference in the work of Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. See Har¬ rowitz, Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), i33~37-

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

0

25

in 1224, the stigmata diaboli are the signs of intercourse with the devil, areas of insensitivity on the skin, marked by the devil's paw to seal his contract with the witch.24 A massive study of Christian stigmata, still used today as a reference, appeared at the time of Charcot: La stigma¬ tisation, Vextase divine et les miracles de Lourdes: Reponse aux libres penseurs, first published in 1873 and then extensively revised in 1874

(significantly, the book bears the imprimatur of the bishop of Cler¬ mont-Ferrand), by the Catholic neurologist from Clermont-Ferrand An¬ toine Imbert-Gourbeyre. Of the 321 cases of stigmatization described in this book, it is interesting to note, 227 were women and 94 were men (Italy had by far the largest number of cases, 131, followed by France with 70, and Spain with 47).25 But in the nineteenth century the term stigmata also assumed some strictly medical connotations, as it came to designate the permanent clinical signs of certain hidden mor¬ bid states, such as hysteria and the concealed forms of syphilis. It was their stigmata that allowed the diagnosis of these otherwise unrecog¬ nizable conditions. Bourneville brings together the etymological, the medical, and the mystical meanings of the word in a footnote that underlines, through their common etymology, the medical proximity of smallpox and mysticism: "Stigmata: Stigma, from I mark by points. We say the stigmata or the marks of smallpox. 'But in the mys¬ tical sense the word stigmata signifies something more special. It is a word used to describe certain bodily wounds which are signs similar to those of the five wounds of Jesus Christ." 726 Charcot defines stigmata as "pathognomic signs," as signs, that is, which by speaking the disease or the suffering allow for its interpre¬ tation (Demoniaques, 107). In Charcot's symptomatology these signs consist of the simultaneous occurrence of a narrowed visual field (hys¬ terical blindness), of skin sensitivity disorders (reminiscent of the stig¬ mata diaboli), and of motor disturbances (paralysis or convulsions). It is precisely these permanent somatic manifestations, together with pe¬ riodic attacks, which define for Charcot the otherwise generic neurosis as hysterical, just as in religious discourse analogous signs define the body as possessed by the devil or by the spirit.27 Breuer in fact asks: "What could be more genuinely hysterical than the stigmata? They are 24. An analysis of Saint Francis's stigmata in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory can be found in Didi-Huberman, "Un sang d'images/' Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 32 (Fall 1985): 123-53. 25. Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation i.xxi—xli. 26. Bourneville, Science et miracle, 9. 27. "The permanent symptoms of hysteria, hysterical stigmata, as we are accustomed to calling them" (Jean-Martin Charcot, L’hysterie, ed. Etienne Trillat [Toulouse: Privat, 1971], 160).

26

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Saint Hysteria

pathognomic findings which establish the diagnosis; and yet precisely they seem not to be ideogenic."28 What Breuer is saying here about the actual symptoms he met in his private practice could also be read as a secularizing interpretation of the stigmata of saints. Like hysterical symptoms, stigmata are what defines the wounded person as spiritually chosen,* they are the language of the spirit; and yet this "otherworldliness,/ manifests itself by means of a most bodily and earthly sign. The spirit may be strong, but in this case it requires the all-too weak flesh in order to be known. In his use of the term stigmata, as in his interpretation of religious representations, Charcot empties the religious signifier of its supernat¬ ural content, and replaces it with a neurotic one. Thus, he becomes the principal agent in the medicalization of the hysteric and the mystic at the end of the nineteenth century; he becomes "the great hysterizer," as Imbert-Gourbeyre puts it, "having hysterized all of pathology."29 Just as the hysteric's body is the object of the doctor's gaze, her "spirit" goes from being under the priest's moral authority to being under the doctor's. This is the profound and politically laden anticlericalism of Charcot's position, discussed at length by Jan Goldstein in Console and Classify. Ruth Harris also explains, "The elaboration of hysteria was more than a scientific project; it was also a demonstration of the way science would supersede religious explanation and reign triumphant as the ultimate social arbiter under the Third Republic."30 Similarly mys¬ ticism, in art as well as in history, was placed under the jurisdiction of the doctor's interpretive look, which demystified it while providing the new science with a tradition, a history, a proof of its validity through time and thus of its "scientificity." With Charcot, then, phenomena that had previously been regarded (though not always without suspi28. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 244. 29. Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation 2:498, i:vii. 30. Harris, Murders and Madness, 194. Anticlericalism was rampant at the Salpetriere: "In December of that year [1878], a purge of personnel was set in motion at the Salpetriere, with other hospitals in the city following suit in the next decade. Under the ferocious anti-clerical vigilance of D.-M. Bourneville, a former student of Charcot, virtually hun¬ dreds of old soeurs-infirmieres were summarily replaced by trained and licensed nurses. A prefectorial arrete of June 1883 ended all obligatory church attendance at the Salpetriere and reduced the number of ecclesiastical personnel. The old religious names borne by many hospital buildings since their founding were replaced with names of medical and scientific figures. Increasingly, doctors and administrators spoke of religious belief only as a therapeutic technique, an occasional means of emotional support for the sick and the senile. The secularization of charity, begun with the founding of the Hopital General and continued with the establishment of the Assistance publique in 1849, was now brought to completion." M. S. Micale, "The Salpetriere in the Age of Charcot: An Institutional Perspective on Medical History in the Late Nineteenth Century," Journal of Contempo¬ rary History 20 (1985): 711.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

0

27

cion) as manifestations of the supernatural—be it the divine supernat¬ ural, as in the case of mysticism, or the demonic supernatural, as in the case of sorcery or possession by the devil—were systematically re¬ interpreted with a new and powerful hermeneutic tool: the concept of neurosis and, preeminently, of hysteria. Charcot ends his introduction to Les demoniaques dans Vart with the observation that ecstatics (to whom he dedicates the final chapter) deserve in many ways to be compared to the demoniacally possessed (xxii). In different contexts and with different objectives, Huysmans in La-bas and Michel de Certeau in La possession de Loudun would con¬ firm his theory. Ecstasy, diagnosed in Les demoniaques dans Vart as belonging to that period of the grande attaque called the phase of the attitudes passionnelles, was by 1886 an established hysterical symp¬ tom. According to Bourneville, the major symptoms that established Louise Lateau's hysteria were precisely "ecstasies and stigmata," the same features that defined her as a mystic for believers.31 Ecstasy is different from, yet analogous to the wild contortions of the possessed. In the Christian interpretation ecstasy points to a desirable divine pres¬ ence instead of an undesirable diabolical one,- in the interpretation of Charcot and his followers it distinguishes a beautiful and "good" hys¬ terical attitude from the bizarre and "bad" attitude of the "demoniac" hysteric. Didi-Huberman even claims that Bourneville evoked great Christian women mystics in order to "render an account, describe, and justify in history at once the scandal and the beauty of hysterical ec¬ stasy."32 The visual representations of the ecstasy of saints such as Beatrice of Nazareth, Francis of Assisi, and Catherine of Siena became comparable with the poses struck by some of Charcot's patients. One of them, for example, during her attacks of ecstasy, would become com¬ pletely rigid and take up a posture identified as "crucifixion." But this identification of ecstasy with hysteria was not unanimous, and Char¬ cot's Catholic colleague Imbert-Gourbeyre claimed that "grand hyster¬ ics are nothing but agitated women [agitees]. Ecstatics, on the contrary, are immobilized [immobilises]."33 The different genders of the two past participles in this quotation are not arbitrary, for Imbert-Gourbeyre, while accepting that hysteria is a "female malady," saw it as a proof of its distinction from ecstasy that most ecstatic saints were men.34 There can be no such thing, according to Imbert-Gourbeyre, as an ec¬ static hysteric: only rarely does a hysteric take up ecstatic poses, and 31. Bourneville, Science et miracle, 6. 32. Didi-Huberman, Invention, 146. 33. Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation 2:441. 34. Ibid., 2:441, 435-

28

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Saint Hysteria

then only for a few minutes, after which she returns to her "habitual state of lewdness and fury."35 It is clear from these comparisons that through his visual interpre¬ tation Charcot intends to pathologize religiosity even as he genders it as feminine. In his project, nosography springs from iconography. But Charcot's text unwittingly mimics the religious discourse it intends to deconstruct; it displays many of the features of the target of its critique, which come back to haunt its smug positivistic surface. To give one microscopic example of this "return of the repressed," Charcot uses the generic masculine plural in most references to demoniacs and ecstatics (and although they are a minority, male saints such as Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua are included among those "afflicted" by ecstasy], but toward the end of the chapter (and of the book), when it comes to specifying "an ecstatic," Charcot employs the feminine and in this case feminizing article, "une extatique" (109). For in Les demoniaques dans Vart Charcot's overt criticism of the mystical expe¬ rience implies a not-so-covert criticism of the woman's experience. Not only were most of his patients women (despite his denial of any rela¬ tionship between hysteria and its etymology], but also the mysticism he described was the affective bridal mysticism traditionally gendered as female. Through the sweeping diagnostic gaze of his "retrospective medi¬ cine" Charcot quickly dismisses as delusive any supernatural interpre¬ tation of the mystical experience, but this "repressed" element un¬ failingly returns. Its uncanny contagion infects Charcot's theories of positivist medicine with the irrationality and especially the theatrical¬ ity of the female body language of the mystical and hysterical subjects. Charcot's peculiar method of investigating hysteria depends on a stag¬ ing of it, so that his clinic ends up resembling its object of study, be it an artistic text or a hysterical woman. Thus, the theatricality of hys¬ teria is transposed by Charcot onto ecstasy. In his discussion of the iconography of "les extatiques" he claims that the common girls who are his patients are capable, during their religious hallucinations, of poses and expressions so "true" and so "intense" that not even the best actors could rival them (Demoniaques, 109). Harris has found it more than likely that the hysterics at the Salpetriere were talented "actresses," simulators able to reproduce mimetically not only the epileptic fits of those patients with whom they were sharing the wards but also the instructions given them by some of the 35. Ibid., 2:457-58.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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29

most "obliging" followers and collaborators of Charcot.36 The transfor¬ mation of the hysteric's dialogue into a theatrical performance was even more apparent in Charcot's pedagogical demonstrations and in the transcriptions of his encounters with his patients, texts that read like short dramatic dialogues. Charcot's demonstrations at the Salpetriere have indeed been perceived as fully staged dramatic performances, suc¬ cessful above all at drawing a largely nonmedical audience from tout Paris.37 Once again, the repressed rears its unscientific head to contam¬ inate the discourse of the clinic with its own equivocal modalities. Charcot's myth of a complete and totalizing medical reinterpretation of history can be seen as an illusion, according to which, as Wajeman observes, "religious and scientific discourses are mutually exclusive, have supposedly always appeared as such throughout history, and the development of science increasingly tends to dissipate the edges of re¬ ligious mysticism."38 The ideological supports and consequences of this illusion in the context of the nineteenth-century antagonism between the medical and the religious establishments are multifarious. As med¬ icine replaced religion in the care of the souls (the ambiguity of the French word esprit, which refers to both the mind and the spirit, is crucial here), the primary targets for this power shift were women be¬ cause of their more intense commerce with priests and their all-toowell-known "spiritual" weaknesses (of mind and of spirit). And the diagnosis through which this shift could be most conveniently made was hysteria, "that protean malady par excellence."39 Certainly, the tradition of interpreting the supernatural as a pathological face of nat 6. "In this faceless mass [the Salpetriere], patients strained to attract [Charcot's] at¬ tention, and it was those with the most sensual, grotesque, or flamboyant symptoms w o often succeeded" (Harris, Murders and Madness, 161). x7 The audience included, among others, Guy de Maupassant—who mentions Charcot in some of his Contes fantastiques, such as "Magnetisme" and "Un fou?"—and Alphonse Daudet who in 1883 dedicated L’evangeliste—a novel that describes a case of protestan religious conversion as hysteria-to "the eloquent and knowledgeable J.-M. Charcot, doc¬ tor at the Salpetriere." Guy de Maupassant, Contes fantastiques complets, ed. Anne Ric ter (Pans: Marabout, 1987); Alphonse Daudet, L’evangeliste: Roman parisien (Lausanne: Recontre 1966). In his autobiographical Story of San Michele, the Swedish physician

xe

Munthe (1857-1949) bitterly describes Charcot's Tuesday lectures as "stage perform¬ ances," "an absurd farce, a hopeless muddle of truth and cheating," "unscientific and unworthy

. . Tuesday gala performances." Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele (Lon¬

don: John Murray, 1929), 303. Charcot's rival Hippolyte Bernheim leader of the 6cole de Nancy referred to Charcot's disease as "une hysterie de culture" and said it had been "produced by the physician's awesome powers of suggestion on his patients and his selfdeluded willingness to be duped by his own authority and doctrine" (Harris, Murders and

Madness, 178). 38. Wajeman, Le maitre, 140.

39. Bourneville, Science et miracle, 39.

30

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Saint Hysteria

ture, still very much alive in more recent hermeneutic attitudes toward mystics and visionaries, antedates Charcot's work; it was nevertheless Charcot who systematized it with all the rigor and respectability of the positive scientific method. And it is the echo of Charcot we can read between the lines of the medical writings on mysticism as hysteria which appeared about the same time as his work or in the period fol¬ lowing. Lombroso shared Charcot's lifelong fascination with hypnosis and its relation to hysteria, although in his taxonomic frenzy, Lom¬ broso measured and classified more than he gazed and treated. Like Charcot in France, Lombroso was at the center of the scientific com¬ munity in Italy, attracting not only medical students but also artists, writers, and other intellectuals to his clinical lessons. Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), professor of legal medicine and of clinical psychiatry at the University of Turin, was the founder of criminal anthropology, a (rather undisciplined) discipline that attempted to relate criminology to physiognomy, that pseudoscience which assumes an unambiguous solidarity between body and soul. Lombroso constitutes a unique chap¬ ter in the history of modem Italian science, not only for the cultural and institutional productions tied to his name (his museological mania can still be observed in the halls of the Museo di antropologia criminale, which he founded in Turin) but also for his immense popularity abroad. Lombroso's technique of "criminal anthropology" or "anthropologi¬ cal materialism" has been defined by his student and biographer as assuming that "a man's mode of feeling, and therewith the actual con¬ duct of his life, are determined by his physical constitution,- and that this constitution must find expression in his bodily structure."40 The spirit, Lombroso maintained, is clearly legible on the surface as well as in the recesses of the body, and the somatic is inherently semantic. For Lombroso as for Charcot, physiology causes psychology; only Freud will reverse this causality. Whereas Charcot postulates a lesion that he never finds for the hysterical symptoms he spectacularly exposes, how¬ ever, Lombroso finds nothing but deviant and pathological differences in his anthropometrical study of the "other"—be it woman, the genius, the criminal, or that estranged, doubly other being, the woman crimi¬ nal. Furthermore, the "return of the repressed" in Charcot's study of hysteria (namely, religiosity in its relation to female sexuality) finds a Cesare

40. Hans Kurella, Cesare Lombroso: A Modern Man of Science, trans. M. Eden Paul (London: Rebman, 1911), 18.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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31

grander scale in Lombroso's ceuvre: that feminine and sensual brand of religiosity, quickly dismissed in his 1893 book on women, continued to haunt Lombroso until he dedicated an entire book to it in 1909, the very year of his death. The obvious text to turn to for a study of Lombroso's construction of femininity is La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (1893), written in collaboration with his son-in-law Guglielmo Ferrero (though Lombroso, as senior author, bore ultimate responsibil¬ ity). Although the rigor of Lombroso's scientific method, in this as in his other books, has often been questioned, his work assumes a special relevance if it is true, as one critic contends, that "it is enough to open randomly any writing by Lombroso to find a surprising homogeneity with contemporary culture"—hence the popularity of Lombroso and the cultural success of his theories.41 Thus, according to Lombroso, the normal woman is sexually passive, organically monogamous, insensi¬ tive to pain (for example, to the pain of childbirth), compassionate be¬ cause maternal, and of course, destined to motherhood. All these scientific pronouncements neatly coincide with the bourgeois ideal of femininity. The deviant woman, by contrast, possesses masculine ten¬ dencies, such as a lack of maternal sense and a stronger sexual impulse. Lombroso considers prostitution the offense to which woman is "nat¬ urally" predisposed, and he makes the prostitute the prototype of the woman criminal or "the female offender" (the somewhat infelicitous translation of La donna delinquente used by William D. Morrison).42 Lombroso's anthropological materialism allows him to assert, for ex¬ ample, that because woman's skull is more similar to that of children than to that of men her moral sense must be less developed than men's and she must suffer from generalized infantilism. La donna delinquente deals with Christian religiosity and mysticism only cursorily, yet categorically, in one sentence placed in the context of the discussion of hysterics. There are also a few pages on witchcraft, "during the Middle Ages, woman's most serious crime," and on its

41. Ferruccio Giacanelli, "Introduzione," in Giorgio Colombo, La scienza infelice: II museo di antropologia criminale di Cesare Lombroso (Turin: Boringhieri, 1975), 19. Lom¬ broso's work, Giacanelli adds later, is "a veritable gold mine of commonplaces, popular stereotypes, proverbial images" (21). Similarly, Harrowitz notes that in his treatise on women Lombroso "depends more on already-established cultural beliefs than on any other single mode" (Antisemitism, 28). 42. "The idea that prostitution is criminal behavior is, of rowitz rightly notes, "but the fact that Lombroso views it as in his analysis prostitution is the female version of crime and inals, makes it likely that it is really women's sexuality that 32-33)-

course, problematic," Har¬ unequivocally so, and that all women are latent crim¬ is on trial" (Antisemitism,

32

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Saint Hysteria

relation to womanhood and to hysteria.43 For although witchcraft was supposedly only misunderstood hysteria, according to Lombroso, "no other phenomenon of mental pathology ever struck the human imag¬ ination so vividly" [La donna, 207). In interpreting witchcraft and demon possession as unrecognized forms of hysteria, Lombroso under¬ lines the predominance of women among those accused of witchcraft and among hysterics.44 Hysteria, he claims in this very context, "could after all be defined as the exaggeration of femininity" (203 ).45 Of course, he cites the case of the nuns of Loudun, among a plethora of other hysterized women, as evidence to support his materialistic theories (203-6). The supernatural penchant of witches, so dependent on their femi¬ ninity, manifests itself in different ways in different women. If religi¬ osity in even the cruelest of women criminals is neither rare nor weak (448-49), and if prostitutes, like criminals and most degenerate people, are very religious (552-53), it is among hysterical offenders that Lom¬ broso classifies, without any further explanation (apparently none is necessary), "women saints, women ecstatics, and fasting women, such as Koerl and Louise Lateau" (624). Mystics are somewhat strangely nes¬ tled in Lombroso's list between poisoners and epileptics. Within the positivistic world view, the identification of mystical with hysterical phenomena had already been well established by Charcot and needed no further justification. For example, one of the two "hysterical saints" Lombroso mentions, Louise Lateau, is that very nineteenth-century Belgian stigmatic whose regular Friday bleedings from the side and hands (in remembrance of Christ's crucifixion on Good Friday), unfail¬ ingly accompanied by ecstasy, were sanctified by her fellow villagers in Bois d'Haine and hysterized by Charcot and his followers. Charcot's disciple Desire-Magloire Boumeville, who studied Lateau in depth, claimed to find no essential difference between her and his hysterical patients at the Salpetriere. The hysterization of Lateau was even aided by Genevieve, a Salpetriere patient from Loudun who fled to Belgium in order to visit her "sister" Louise Lateau and who adopted Lateau's posture of a saint transfigured by ecstasy. Boumeville took it as defin-

43. Cesare Lombroso, La donna delinquente, la piostituta e la donna normale (Turin: Roux, 1893), 203. 44. "There is no doubt, anyway, that witchcraft and demon-possession were hysteroepileptic phenomena" (ibid., 203). 45. Paul Briquet in 1859 had written similarly: "Woman is made for feeling, and feeling is almost the same as hysteria." Briquet, Traite clinique et therapeutique de l’hysterie (Paris: Bailliere, 1859), 50.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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33

itive proof that religious ecstasy should be pathologized as hysterical symptom.46 Lombroso's other example, Maria de Moerl (whose last name he mis¬ spells as "Koerl"), the nineteenth-century Tyrolese stigmatic who at¬ tracted thousands of pilgrims to her ecstasies, he discusses in a little greater depth, again in conjunction with Lateau, in Vuomo di genio in rapporto alia psichiatria, alia storia ed all’estetica (1894), in the chap¬ ter dedicated to "Political and Religious Lunatics and Mattoids." Moerl, Lombroso explains, experienced convulsions at first, then ec¬ stasy with "religious poses" (a term reminiscent of Charcot's nomen¬ clature at the Salpetriere), and finally stigmata, bleeding wounds on the hands, side, feet, and head. Like Louise Lateau, Maria de Moerl hem¬ orrhaged especially profusely on Thursdays and Fridays (in an extreme and, among the mystics, rather common form of imitatio Christi).47 Moerl also deserves a sentence in the discussion of stigmatics in Lom¬ broso's last and controversial book, Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e

spiritici.48 It is clear in L’uomo di genio that Lombroso intends to link femi¬ ninity with a certain type of religiosity, namely, Christian mysticism, marginalizing both by pathologizing them into hysteria. For although the book is largely devoted to men and not women (very few women being geniuses and those few being marked by masculine traits), the abnormal religiosity of Maria de Moerl and Louise Lateau is identified as specifically and characteristically feminine. As a matter of fact, when Lombroso explains the fusion of mysticism and hysteria—iden¬ tified in La donna delinquente, as we have seen, as an inherently fe¬ male malady—the generalizations that follow the exposition of the cases of Moerl and Lateau all use the feminine plural, rather than the generic masculine usually employed in the book. But Lombroso's analysis of women's religiosity does not stop at the perhaps understandably suspect cases of ecstasy and stigmata. His cri¬ tique assumes much more obvious socially (in addition to psychologi¬ cally) antireligious, antiwoman, and as was the case with Charcot, anticlerical connotations in the discussion that immediately follows the mention of Louise Lateau. Women's religious self-sacrifice, mani¬ festing itself in almsgiving, visits to the sick, and other charitable 46. Carroy-Thirard, "Possession," 506. 47. Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo di genio in rapporto alia psichiatria, alia storia ed all’es¬ tetica (Turin: Bocca, 1894), 491. This work is the retitled sixth edition of Genio e follia (1864). 48. Cesare Lombroso, Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici (Turin: UTET, 1909).

34

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Saint Hysteria

deeds, is pathologized as soon as it involves a not-better-identified ne¬ glect of household and husband: "There are many women who are ex¬ alted by things religious, give alms to the poor, visit the sick, wake the dead, and practice charity continuously and laboriously, while they ne¬ glect their home and their husband; and their good deeds are always vain, showing off or, at least, making noise" [L’uomo, 491). Drawing on the French authority on hysteria Henri Legrand du Saulle, also a doctor at the Salpetriere, Lombroso writes of hysterically religious women, "Sacrifice is for them the opportunity for a necessary expen¬ diture,- therefore they are virtuous out of sickness" (492). Virtue is somehow transformed into illness, and religiosity supposedly becomes dangerous for the woman's own health if it escapes the narrow confines of her predestined sphere of action. If married, she is to be the angel of the household, not of the streets and certainly not of the unattainable and forbidden "place" of ecstasy. The woman who neglects her house¬ hold chores to help the poor is definitively diagnosed as hysterical. A few years after the publication of La donna delinquente and L’uomo di genio, the analysis of hysteria—which, at least since the time of Charcot, had been firmly (if controversially) connected with hypnosis—renewed Lombroso's interest in parapsychology. As he approached his death, after having derided spiritualism for years, Lom¬ broso's attitude toward it grew increasingly sympathetic. He abandoned his previous belief that physiology could explain all the phenomena of the psyche. In 1891, for example, he participated in a seance with the famous Neapolitan medium Eusapia Paladino; this seance, supposedly conducted as a scientific experiment, was followed by several others (some of which were even photographed).49 Because of this interest in spiritualism, which culminated with the publication in the year of his death of Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici, Lombroso's popular notoriety increased at the expense of his scientific reputation. His dis¬ ciple and biographer Hans Kurella downplays his interest: "Lombroso's dealings with the spiritualists . .. are without significance in relation to his more important investigations—those which interest us and will interest posterity."50 In fact, however, Lombroso's interest in spiritu¬ alism was thematically continuous with his fascination with the 49. Kurella describes Eusapia Paladino as "a miracle of adroitness, false bonhomie, wellsimulated candour, naivete, and artistic command of all the symptoms of hysteroepilepsy" (Cesare Lombroso, 169); according to Kurella, Lombroso believed her because, having himself been falsely accused of fraud by the medical establishment for his study of pellagra (an accusation influenced if not dictated by his Jewishness and social marginality), it was "psychologically impossible for him, when he came to study occult phenom¬ ena, to take into consideration the possibility of fraud" (173). 50. Kurella, Cesare Lombroso, 167.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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35

"darker'' side of existence, with human anomalies and crime, which, it has been argued, "in addition to being dictated by immediate political and social pressures, appear to fit into a precise literary climate, into a cultural fashion."51 Antonio Gramsci, for example, connects the inter¬ est in crime among the Italian sociologists of the Left with the themes of romanticism.52 Indeed, the influence of literature (romantic and pos¬ tromantic) can easily be read in the quotations Lombroso scattered throughout his work to buttress his anthropological claims. The inexplicable or occult occurrences Lombroso observed in states of hypnosis and somnambulism, like hysteria and magic, are gendered as feminine. Transposition of the senses, telepathy, premonitions, and prophetic dreams (phenomena discussed in the first chapter of Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici) all take place predominantly among hypnotized or hysterical individuals—by definition, chiefly women [Ri¬ cerche, 7, 17, 27). Lombroso relates these occurrences in turn to various inexplicable religious phenomena usually tied to the extreme religious experiences of the mystics. He describes the revelations received by many Christian mystics while in a state of ecstasy, so abundant in hagiography, as clear cases of "writing mediumship" (Ricerche, 9m). Thus, revelations, although still unexplained by science, are stripped of their religious value even as they are identified with the medium's scientifically observable activity. The soul, Lombroso claims, "contin¬ ues to belong to the world of matter" (Ricerche, viii). Thus also the religious significance of levitation, which Lombroso says is "among the most frequent phenomena that take place among Christian ecstatics" (126) and for the explanation of which he has recourse to long quota¬ tions from Teresa of Avila, is put into question when he warns of its frequent occurrence among the demoniacally possessed (128). As can be expected, women, more often hysterical than men, are also more often mystical. The predominance of women as the bridge be¬ tween hysteria and Christianity, according to Lombroso, is best ob¬ served in the saints' stigmata. Although the first stigmatic in Christian tradition was a man, Francis of Assisi, and there have been other stig¬ matic men, nevertheless, "it would be impossible to enumerate all the women who have been distinguished by the same signs" (Ricerche, 123). Among them were not only saints (already a dubious category in Lombroso's classification) but also "people who were far from saintly" (124). His symptomatic examples are two sexually intemperate women, attesting to the proximity of religious and sexual excess in women and

51. Giacanelli, "Introduzione," 21. 52. Gramsci quoted ibid., 21.

36

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Saint Hysteria

perhaps even to the sexual origin of religion. Even heretics can be stigmatics; he mentions the convulsionaries of Saint Medard (124). By 1909 Lombroso's positivistic faith in physiological explanations had decreased considerably, and he offers only a tentative and paren¬ thetical explanation of stigmata: "After Saint Francis—perhaps because of a spirit of imitation and emulation—new stigmatics arose" [Ricerche, 123). Thus, he mentions a possible reason for the spread of stigmata—imitation—without, however, dealing in any way with the causes of the original case. Still, Lombroso's interpretation of phenom¬ ena such as levitation, stigmata, and incombustibility is implicitly clar¬ ified by his exclusion of sacrality from their explanation—"but stigmata were not a privilege of the sacred" (124)—and by his inclusion of "nymphomaniacs" (any amount of sexual desire in woman being pathological) and heretics among stigmatics. Even mystical love is dealt an indirect blow when Lombroso relates the excessive sexual impulse of a young stigmatic woman, "a girl of loose morals," to her ecstatic experience and her "most lively love" for Christ (124). Finally, the pre¬ dominance of women among stigmatics points to the hysterical nature of stigmata even when hysteria is not explicitly mentioned. Lombroso's texts all display a similarly thin descriptive surface and an avoidance of psychological profundity. In their frenzy to classify the most disparate phenomena, they show no need to explain the method in their madness. For this madness, they presume—all-too-often cor¬ rectly—to be shared by their readers. In this obstinate classification of the other—woman, certainly, but also the criminal, the prostitute, the saint, the genius—turn-of-the-century bourgeois science is also at¬ tempting with all its positivistic might to define itself, the bourgeois identity being rather precarious in postunification Italy. This process is successful if the criminal, the insane, the prostitute, the stigmatic, formerly figures of daily life that questioned the identity of the self through their otherness, disappear from the quotidian scene by being interned: "Rigorously shut in insane asylums and exorcised in psychi¬ atry textbooks, the 'psychopaths' or the 'schizophrenics' will no longer let their voice be heard by a bourgeois society which has finally reached, thanks to its intellectuals, the illusory certainty of its iden¬ tity."53 An analogous discursive appropriation may be postulated for the scientific exorcism of the otherness of mystical discourse, bridled but not quite silenced by the materialistic explanations offered by positiv¬ ism. 53. Ibid., 32.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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37

Krafft-Ebing, Freud and Breuer, Lacan Among Christian mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), because of her prolonged illness and the sensuality permeating her writings, has traditionally been the "privileged" target of the hysteria-mysticism in¬ terpretive tug-of-war. She is the quintessential mystical (and thus, for some, erotically predisposed) woman, mentioned time and again by tum-of-the-century writers. Charcot's diagnosis of her ("undeniable hysteric") is just the best-known instance of this diagnostic rage.54 Imbert-Gourbeyre begins the first appendix in La stigmatisation, Vextase divine et les miracles de Lourdes by quoting Charcot's statement, but he goes on to discount it: "A hysterical Saint Teresa is an old cliche of freethinkers." Imbert-Gourbeyre provides medical arguments against what he considers a spurious retrospective diagnosis.55 His adversary in this hermeneutic duel is not so much Jean-Martin Charcot (although he too is accused of stating without proving), as the Belgian Jesuit Father Hahn, who a decade earlier, after observing the Salpetriere hys¬ terics, had pronounced Saint Teresa organically, although not intellec¬ tually, hysterical—a distinction Imbert-Gourbeyre castigates as an "absurdity" and a "medical heresy."56 Father Hahn's thesis caused a "passionate controversy." His book was put on the Index, and Hahn later recanted, but the church could not prevent future doctors, such as Gilles de la Tourette, from using Hahn's arguments to support the hysteria diagnosis of mystics.57 Imbert-Gourbeyre declares it impossible to diagnose Teresa's ailment without more medical evidence, but he categorically excludes hysteria because such veritable madness as hys¬ teria would have been recognized in her lifetime and, more important, would have prevented Teresa from accomplishing the many feats for which she is known. Imbert-Gourbeyre concludes that "if Teresa was hysterical, one might as well claim that she never existed. 58 The French novelist Huysmans made an analogous criticism of some contemporary judgments of Teresa of Avila in his conversion novel En route (1895): "When one thinks that, despite incredible difficulties, she founded thirty-two monasteries, that she put them under the obedience of a rule that is a model of wisdom, a rule that foresees and corrects the most ignored mistakes of the heart, one is astounded to hear that

54. Charcot, "La foi qui guerit," 114. 55. Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation 2:533.

56. Ibid., 2:533/ 537-38. 57. Ibid., 2:533, 561. 58. Ibid., 2:552.

38

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Saint Hysteria

she is treated by freethinkers as hysterical and insane!" Later, he adds: "To assimilate the blessed lucidity and incomparable genius of Saint Teresa with the extravagances of nymphomaniacs and madwomen, that was so obtuse, so inane, that one could really only laugh about it!—The mystery remained in its entirety."59 However dubious the pathologization of the great Spanish reformer and mystic, the frequent diagnosis of hysteria belies Ernest Hello's optimistic but rather unin¬ formed claim that, although the world scoffs at contemplative saints, "by a bizarre exception, it laughs little, or not at all, at Saint Teresa. Renan declares her admirable. All women with some imagination have a certain sympathy for her. All the artists respect her; every time her name appears, a rather lively praise is around the comer."60 The controversy generated by Teresa of Avila during and after the nineteenth century has tended to focus on Gian Lorenzo Bernini's fa¬ mously ambiguous sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652), upon which many sets of clinical eyes have gazed with retrospective medicalizing (or sexually titillating) intent. In Bernini's baroque mas¬ terpiece Saint Teresa is portrayed in a faint of sorts. A blissful ex¬ pression on her face, she pleasurably awaits penetration by the smiling angel's burning arrow, which he holds in one hand, while with the other he is about to uncover Teresa's breast. The saint's body disappears in the rich drapery of her robe, except for a dangling and almost lifeless foot and hand. One mischievous eighteenthcentury observer wondered what it was precisely that the saint was experiencing in her sculpted ecstasy, claiming, "if this is divine love, I know what it is."61 Adriano Prosperi, on the other hand, takes Ber¬ nini's statue as exemplary of the profound post-Renaissance change in the interpretation of women's mysticism. The signs of sanctity be¬ ing no longer visible, what Bernini sees is "the spectacle of a woman in amorous ecstasy, symbolized by the ancient symbol of the arrow of Eros/the angel."62 The traditional interpretation of Teresa's sainthood as a symptom, so often mediated by Bernini's representation, hovers between nym¬ phomania—characterized, according to Krafft-Ebing, by "excessive sex¬ ual desire"—and hysteria—in which, still according to Krafft-Ebing, 59. Huysmans, En route, 99, 273. 60. Ernest Hello, Les plus belles pages d’Ernest Hello, ed. Pierre Guilloux (Paris: Perrin, 1924), 188. 61. In Howard Hibbard, Bernini (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1965), 24142. 62. Prosperi, "Lettere spirituali," 239. On the role of images in the propagation of the cult of women saints, see Karen-edis Barzman's essay, "Immagini sacre e vita religiosa delle donne," in Scaraffia and Zarri, 419-40.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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"the sexual life is often abnormally excited."63 The two are almost syn¬ onymous diagnoses in the nineteenth-century popular imagination and often, in spite of many a proof to the contrary, even in medical opinion. As Ripa points out, "The same persistence of the most worn-out defi¬ nitions is found in hysteria. The assimilation hysteria-nymphomaniaerotomania allows us to measure the resistance of mentalities in the psychiatrists themselves!"64 For both hysteria and nymphomania are said to trace their etiology to aberrant sexuality and its metonymic organ, the uterus. A synonym for nymphomania is in fact "uterine fury."65 Thus, in his Dictionnaire des idees regues, Gustave Flaubert can give hysteria the flippant and polemical definition "To be confused with nymphomania," targeting at once, through the derision of a com¬ mon nosological confusion, the dogmatism and false authority of both everyday stereotype and medical discourse.66 The Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere contains several images that make the connection of the iconography of religion with that of neurotic sexuality visible on the surface of the hysterized body and provide irrefutable evidence for mysticism as hysteria. The fantasy inherent in the claim of the photograph, as Gilman explains, is the removal of narrative and therefore of "the subjective aspect from the evaluation of the disease," thus leading to "a real representation of the patient."67 If the ultimate nature, sexual or religious, of the fre¬ quently depicted hysterical "ecstasy" is not better specified by the cap¬ tions of the Iconographie, the "amorous prayer" displays a clear iconographical and onomastic fusion of religious and erotic codes. Charcot, as I have said, insistently and symptomatically avoided "the genital thing" in his investigations of neurosis and mysticism, but the German clinician and forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) had no such qualms. In 1886 he published the famous Psychopathia sexualis, a long treatise on sexual pathology based on a large number of case histories of sexually abnormal individuals. It was Psychopathia sexualis that bestowed upon Krafft-Ebing "the honor of be63. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Scarborough, 1978), 322, 329. 64. Ripa, La ronde des folles, 164. 65. Ibid., 200. 66. Gustave Flaubert, Le dictionnaire des idees revues, in Oeuvres completes, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 2:310. This association was at work from the very beginnings of hys¬ teria: "Usteria was also the name for the feast of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and the mysteries associated with that feast'' (Evans, Fits and Starts, 4). Pierre Janet, however, writes that "hysterics in general are no more erotic than normal people" (L'etat mental des hysteriques, 186). 67. Gilman, "Image of the Hysteric," 402.

40

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Saint Hysteria

ing the founder of modern scientific sexual pathology.,/68 This book, originally addressed to the medical world, was enormously popular, going through twelve editions in twenty years while it grew from fewer than 150 pages in 1882 to more than 600 in 1902 and was translated into several languages.69 Psychopathia sexualis contains some veritable gems of woman's medicalization in late nineteenth-century Europe. One of Krafft-Ebing's statements—"Woman, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire" (8)—turns nymphomania into a dubious diagnosis by positing any sexual desire in woman as patho¬ logical. Masochism (a term he coined from the erotic preferences of his near contemporary Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), by contrast, KrafftEbing considers normal: "In woman voluntary subjection to the oppo¬ site sex is a physiological phenomenon. . . . ideas of subjection are, in woman, normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. They form, so to speak, the harmonics which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling" (130). Not surprisingly, Krafft-Ebing finds it "easy to regard masochism in general as a pathological growth of specific fem¬ inine mental elements (130). Masochism, so aberrant and even patho¬ logical in men as to require a new nosological niche, is but a normal expression of woman's very essence, and as such, inherently feminine, even when it affects men. The definition of masochism will be of some importance in Krafft-Ebing's analysis of mysticism, clearly, if surrep¬ titiously, related by the predominance in both of the feminine element. Krafft-Ebing's construction of religiosity is somewhat less overtly linked to femininity than his classification of masochism. On the very first page of Psychopathia sexualis he writes: "Sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics, and no doubt of aestheticism and religion," thus anticipating in some ways Freud's theory of sublimation and Wilhelm Reich's cruder explication of the sexual nature of religious excitation. In a footnote to this first chapter Krafft-Ebing, quoting from Wilhelm Liibke, describes Bernini's Saint Teresa as "sinking in a hysterical faint" (414 n. 8). The hysteria diagnosis of the Spanish mystic evokes her visible sensuality. Krafft-Ebing is unequivocal about the pathology of women's eroticism, whether he is discussing femininity in general or hysteria: "In the hysterical the sexual sphere is often abnormally excited," and "very frequently [hysteria] disposes girls, and even women living in happy marriage, to become nymphomaniacs" (329— 68. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic, 1970), 297. 69. George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady, and the Victorians (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 170.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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30). Sexuality, though it is a positive force upon which the very ad¬ vancement of humankind is based—even the "sublimest virtues/7 Krafft-Ebing maintains, /7may spring from sexual life77 (1)—must be controlled, for it 7/may easily degenerate into the lowest passion and basest vice77 (1). This is the pitfall most often encountered by the mys¬ tics as well as by women, Krafft-Ebing seems to imply, for just as re¬ ligious fervor frequently degenerates into sensuality (witness the lives of saints and the orgies of the ancients), so the disappointed or unap¬ peased sexual instinct often finds a substitute in religion. It is possible, then and even likely that religious pathology springs from some sexual pathology because 7'religion as well as sexual love is mystical and tran¬ scendental77 (5). The common discourse of religion and sex defines both of them as essentially mystical, as desiring an object (be it the propa¬ gation of the species or the attainment of the absolute ideal) that is essentially beyond the self. Krafft-Ebing concludes that "religious and sexual hyperaesthesia at the zenith of development show the same volume of intensity and the same quality of excitement, and may therefore, under given circum¬ stances, interchange. Both will in certain pathological states degenerate into cruelty77 (6). It is at this point that Christian mysticism and mas¬ ochism coincide (whereas sadism characterizes the human sacrifices of the pagans). Krafft-Ebing has recourse, as can be expected, to the con¬ venient ambiguity of mystical discourse. Not only Teresa of Avila, whose alleged hysteria deserves a footnote all to itself, but also other controversial mystics such as Blessed Veronica Giuliani, Saint Cathe¬ rine of Genoa, Saint Anthony of Padua (the only male in this canon), and other less prominent figures provide convincing evidence of selfdestructiveness or eroticism in their words and actions.70 Krafft-Ebing recurs to the cruelty of religion and sex when he claims that religious self-flagellation leads to "sensual, lascivious fantasies" (exemplified in the lives of Maria Maddalena de7 Pazzi and Elizabeth of Genton) and sexual masochism, (22-23). The inherent femininity of masochism and the masochism inherent in femininity converge into the religious ec¬ stasy of women mystics, derived from a sexuality that in women is, as we have seen, always-already pathological. Ecstasy is a dangerous state, the result of exaggerated religious exuberance, "a condition in which consciousness is so preoccupied with feelings of mental pleasure, that distress is stripped of its painful quality77 (6). Krafft-Ebing eliminates

70. ''In no social class do hysteria and perversions flourish to such an extent as they do in the ascetic circles of the church/' Reich analogously claims in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), 149.

42

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Saint Hysteria

the very possibility of authentic pleasure in ecstasy; religious pleasure is but an illusion masking the real pain of self-sacrifice, operating in much the same way as masochism. All pleasurable religious experi¬ ence, then, is at once feminized, sexualized, and hence pathologized by Krafft-Ebing into Saint Teresa of Avila's masochistic "hysterical faint." In the context of medical discourse mysticism had been effectively hysterized by 1895, so much so that some traits of the mystic could even be used to support a new interpretation of hysteria. "After all," Josef Breuer remarks toward the end of his theoretical section in Stud¬ ies on Hysteria (1895), "the patron saint of hysteria, St. Teresa, was a woman of genius with great practical capacity" (232). With this state¬ ment, Breuer makes the saint into the epitome of the hysterical patient, alluding to the extremity of her religious experience and to the (nervous or organic?) illness she suffered. She was physically paralyzed for three years and an invalid for quite some time before and after that. Charcot inscribed her cure through the miraculous intervention of Saint Joseph, her own patron saint, among his examples of faith healing. Teresa of Avila, perhaps the most eloquent exponent of the language of eroticism in Christian love, becomes in Breuer's statement the model and the protectress of those women whose aching wombs prevent them from appropriating the language of their own sexuality. The globus hysteri¬ cus rising and falling in their throat, that potent image of the displaced and wandering uterus, forbids them to speak the painful eros. Breuer's statement, by pointing to the connection of religiosity and neurosis, refers the reader back to the introduction to Studies on Hys¬ teria, in which the authors describe their finding that traumas that have not been sufficiently abreacted "are the basis of hysterical phe¬ nomena (e.g., hysterical deliria in saints and nuns, continent women and well-brought-up children)" (10-11). In this statement, religiosity is associated with femininity and sexuality by means of an ambiguous hypnosis. Although the word "saints," heiligen in the original German, is apparently gender-neutral, the context of the book (which deals only with women's case histories) and of hysteria in general (traditionally, a female malady), as well as the placement of "saints" among nuns, continent women, and children (kinder, which is also an only appar¬ ently gender-neutral signifier, for all the children with problems in Studies on Hysteria are girls), genders the issue of sainthood as hyster¬ ical. It is women's religiosity that tends naturally and socially toward hysteria.71

71. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studien iiber Hysterie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), 13-

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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One of the saints mentioned in the list must be Saint Teresa of Avila, the "patron saint of hysterics." If it seems puzzling that two illustrious members of the Viennese Jewish community should choose a Catholic patron saint for neurosis (and do so without explanation) the most im¬ portant subtexts for the choice are the study of hysteria at the Salpetriere and the nineteenth-century controversy about Saint Teresa. In fact Breuer's association of Teresa of Avila with hysterics is both deeply indebted to and highly critical of Charcot's identification of mysticism with neurosis. Breuer's decision to stress the positive and active aspects of Teresa's personality, rather than her alleged illness and ecstatic experience (which linked her to hysteria in the first place), is clarified by the con¬ text. This passage is in fact something of a panegyric to hysterical women (rare in the texts of that period), an exaltation of the mental endowment of hysterics against the frequent accusations of degeneracy and intellectual deficiency which plagued these patients at that time. J.-P. Falret, for example, a doctor at the Salpetriere, wrote in 1866: "The life of hysterics is nothing but a perpetual lie; they affect an appearance of piousness and devotion and succeed in passing themselves off as saints, while in secret they perform the most shameful actions, while in their home they have the most violent scenes with their husband and children, during which they speak in a vulgar and sometimes ob¬ scene way, giving in to the most disorderly actions."72 The hysteric is, in Falret's as in most other nineteenth-century texts, the caricature of woman, the wearer of a mask of lies, deception, and dissimulation. As Lombroso asserts in La donna delinquente, "It would be superfluous to demonstrate that, in woman, lying is habitual and almost physio¬ logical" (133). Similarly, Imbert-Gourbeyre postulates an essential in¬ compatibility between hysteria and holiness because everyone knows that simple hysterics are "essentially moody, irritable, that they tend toward exaggeration, lying, sensual affections; that they lack judgment, level-headedness, decorum; that they are unfit for any serious work." "Grand hysterics" are even worse, characterized as they are by "the spirit of indictment and quarrel; the love of theft, of lying, of accusa¬ tion; the impotence of their will to curb passions; one even notices there a certain moral perversion."73 The claims of Freud and Breuer have quite a different tone. Freud writes of Frau Emmy von N. that he and Breuer "used to smile when we compared her character with the picture of the hysterical psyche

72. J.-P. Falret, Ltudes cliniques sur les maladies mentales et nerveuses (Paris: Bailliere, 1890), 502. 73. Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation 2:434.

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Saint Hysteria

which can be traced from early times through the writings and opinions of medical men. We had learnt from our observations on Frau Cacilie M. that hysteria of the severest type can exist in conjunction with gifts of the richest and most original kind—a conclusion which is, in any case, made plain beyond a doubt in the biographies of women eminent in history and literature. In the same way Frau Emmy von N. gave us an example of how hysteria is compatible with an unblemished char¬ acter and a well-governed mode of life" (Studies, 1031. Teresa of Avila is included, indirectly, in this Catalog of great hysterical women: just before claiming her as the patron saint of hysterics, Breuer quotes from the introduction, written jointly with Freud: "Among hysterics may be found people of the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character and highest critical power" (13); he adds: "No amount of genuine, solid mental endowment is excluded by hysteria, though actual achieve¬ ments are often made impossible by the illness" (232). Often, the au¬ thor specifies, not always. Despite Imbert-Gourbeyre's claims that "If Saint Teresa was hysterical, one might as well say that she did not exist" (2:552), according to Breuer, Saint Teresa could have been hys¬ terical and still "have existed." In a way, Breuer's statement is an at¬ tempt to have his cake and eat it too: Teresa was a hysteric, Breuer agrees with Charcot and others like him, but unlike Charcot's hyster¬ ics, she was also "a woman of genius with great practical capacity." Stephen Heath has maintained, that "in every sense psychoanalysis answered to the nineteenth-century hysteria it took as its first and de¬ cisive object" and Dianne Hunter declares, "psychoanalysis can be seen as a translation into theory of the language of hysteria."74 The term "talking cure," for example, was coined by Anna O. and the technique of free association was suggested by another hysteric of the Studies on Hysteria, Elisabeth von R. Freud and Breuer must therefore claim a measure of respect for their hysterics. Retrospective medicalization, which, thanks to Charcot, was a well-established technique by the time Breuer and Freud were writing their Studies on Hysteria, could now be used in a way different from Charcot's, and the mystic's discourse could be retrieved so as to support new and even opposite claims about the nature of the quintessential female malady. now let us jump forward eighty years or so, to Lacan's reading of woman's jouissance and mysticism in the central section of Encore,

And

74. Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (New York: Schocken, 1982), 47; Dianne Hunter, "Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 114.

Ecstasy of Saint Hysteria

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45

"God and the Jouissance of T/he Woman." At the end of this section the author refers to women's Christian mysticism with the self-serving intention of explaining the troublesome question of woman's pleasure. Encore is dedicated precisely to the question of "woman," even though Lacan paradoxically affirms in this seminar that nothing can be said about woman. But he does in fact say, and what he says is loud, if not very clear. Like many Christian mystics, Lacan also crosses the rep¬ resentational boundaries his own text recognizes and even estab¬ lishes—the boundaries, that is, of woman's (un)representability. After organizing both masculine and feminine sexuality around the "signi¬ fication of the phallus," Lacan goes on to state that "woman" can only be described as a "barred" subject (in the title as well as in the essay, Lacan writes "1/a femme," which could be translated as "w/oman"), because she is "pas toute," not all and not whole,- what she lacks, and I am obviously making a long story short here, is the phallus. Therefore, Lacan claims, "there is no such thing as The woman since of her essence . . . she is not all."75 She is, one might say, a hole. It is just this lack of wholeness (or, as one might pun, her "holy-ness"| that determines her experience of a jouissance that is other, "supplemen¬ tary" (and not complementary! with respect to the phallic one. This bodily ecstasy is "beyond the phallus" (145) and thus beyond the sym¬ bolic order that goes with the phallus—the order, that is, of language and representation. Lacan remarks that this jouissance does not come to all women,- yet even those who experience it are unable to articulate it, because it does not enter the symbolic realm. Thus, all that woman can say is that she feels it; she knows when it comes, but that is all she knows about it. Woman's sexuality as such cannot be spoken about. It is a pleasure bound to remain other; it is the ultimate limit of Lacan's verbal theories.76 Some feminists have attacked Lacan's statements about femininity and woman's sexual pleasure as reductive and "phallogocentric"; oth¬ ers have claimed them as the basis of their own theorizing. What I would like to discuss is not Lacan's general theory of womanhood (al¬ ready the subject of many an authoritative essay) but rather just a few lines of his text, more precisely, his synecdochic (mis)representation of

75. Jacques Lacan, "God and the Jouissance of T/he Woman," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), 144. 76. As Alice Jardine points out, the unrepresentability of woman's pleasure within La¬ can's texts is "only the first of a series of such limits, which, through metonymy, will all be gendered as feminine." Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Mo¬ dernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 167.

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the mystic through that of the woman, through the implicit positioning of mysticism as, in Jacqueline Rose's words, "one of the available forms of expression where such 'otherness' in sexuality utters its most force¬ ful complaint."77 How does Lacan relate the sexual to the mystical experience, and does he say anything original about mystics? His pas¬ sage describing the ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila as an illustration of woman's jouissance is well known. After advising his audience to read the writings of the Flemish mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp, he goes on to say that, as far as Saint Teresa is concerned, "you have only to go and look at Bernini's statue in Rome to understand immediately that she's coming, there's no doubt about it" ("God and the Jouis¬ sance," 147). Despite its apparent (over)confidence, Lacan's seemingly outrageous assertion is not a particularly original one, as we have seen. The novelty of Lacan's discussion is largely due to different attitudes toward the articulation of women's physical pleasure, freed from the stigma of sin or pathology regularly accorded it in nineteenth-century medical texts. Thus, Lacan's discussion of Teresa as an icon of con¬ vulsive beauty has been perceived as the logical continuation of his early work with other convulsive women, namely, mad criminals such as the Papin sisters.78 The cover of Encore prominently displays a color photograph of Bernini's sensual Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which in turn illustrates an ambiguous passage in Teresa's autobiography. In it, the Spanish mystic describes her ecstatic encounter with an angel of God, who plunges his burning golden spear of divine love into her entrails, making her moan with a very sweet pain that is spiritual and physical at once.79 The enigmatic description of Teresa's wound of love, the acme of mystical union, is successfully reproduced in Bernini's statue by the blissful expression on the saint's face and by the spent look of her dangling foot and hand. By stressing the visual dimension of the mystic's utterance, that is, by affirming the sufficiency of looking at the mystic in order to under¬ stand her message ("You only have to go and look at Bernini's statue," he insists,- "there is no doubt about it"), Lacan is clearly making a reductive and patronizing move. Not only does he rely on a man's graven image of a woman's verbal account, but he also regresses to the positivistic attitude of Charcot and of his school at the Salpetriere, 77. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 76. 78. Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 67; David Macey, Lacan in Con¬ text (London: Verso, 1988), 72. 79- Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1957), 210-n.

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where doctors, wrapped up in their visual contemplation and compul¬ sive photographing, did not bother to listen to the hysteric's and the mystic's words. Although Freud's talking cure had broken this silence, Lacan's iconic hermeneutics returns to it. The mystic's speech, Lacan implies, cannot add to the knowledge that mere visual observation can afford us.80 This regressive visual fallacy occurs despite Lacan's own (symptomatic?) distinction of his interpretation from that of his most illustrious predecessors in psychological readings of mysticism—nota¬ bly, Charcot himself. Lacan criticizes his predecessors' blind spots re¬ garding female sexuality and mystical pleasures by affirming that at the turn of the century Charcot and company were trying "to reduce the mystical to questions of fucking. If you look carefully, that is not what it is all about" ("God and the Jouissance," 147).81 Those "good fellows" of Charcot's entourage, in an effort to make the invisible visible, mistakenly interpreted the mystical joys of reli¬ gious ecstasy in terms of sexual activity, discounting the mystic's mes¬ sage as a self-deluded one, barely veiling her hysteria. For Lacan, by contrast, the mystic's and the woman's jouissance is problematic pre¬ cisely because it does not have a physical correlative, does not involve "questions of fucking." Yet it is primarily in the value attached to the experience that Lacan's analysis seems to differ from Charcot's. He declares his admiration for the mystics, describing them as "highly gifted" and their knowledge as "something serious" ("God and the Jouissance," 146). Mystics are most often women, he recognizes, and if they are men they must place themselves on the side of the not-all, on the side of the barred W/oman.82 Lacan also says that the writings 80. David-Menard even interprets Lacan's fascination with Bernini's statue as due to men's willingness "for women to be not-everything in the phallic function, for then angels, signifiers, would bring them to jouissance, but not they themselves, not men; and they give themselves the spectacle of that jouissance" [Hysteria, 190). Amy Hollywood points out an analogously silencing gesture on the part of some feminist critics: "Both Beauvoir and Irigaray treat Teresa's description and interpretation of this visionary and ecstatic experience, in which her heart is pierced by an angel's spear, as transparent. There is no need, they imply, to analyze or even cite her text" ("Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Mystical," Hypatia 9 [Fall 1994]: 160). 81. It could nevertheless be argued that, in his discussion of women's orgasms and women's mysticism, Lacan alludes to a connection between women's mouths and wom¬ en's vaginas—through the relationship he posits between the "productions" of each organ—namely, words and orgasms. In this he is also the worthy descendant of nineteenthcentury hysteria doctors who, according to Beizer, "repeatedly signal affinities between the female vocal and sex organs" [Veutriloquized Bodies, 44)—an assertion she backs up with a fascinating illustration of the opening of the larynx (Fig. 6) which looks uncannily like a drawing of the female genitalia. 82. Elsewhere, Lacan also points out, after briefly discussing the figure of Christ, that "the unveiling of the most hidden signifier of the Mysteries was reserved to women" ("Guiding Remarks for a Congress of Feminine Sexuality," in Mitchell and Rose, 95).

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of the mystics "are neither idle gossip nor mere verbiage, in fact they are the best thing you can read" (147). Nevertheless mystics can be defined as those people who "sense that there must be a jouissance which goes beyond" (147), a jouissance, let me repeat, that is neither phallic nor complementary to the phallus (i.e., clitoral/vaginal), one that is without physical or symbolic correlative. In its otherness, the pleasure of W/oman is for Lacan the same as the pleasure of the mystic. It is located in the space of God, the space of the ineffable83—a fundamental topos of mystical literature: "It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it" ("God and the Jouissance147). Just like woman's, their jouissance claims to be utterly beyond discourse and knowledge. But this descriptive statement is not without prescrip¬ tive implications. As David Macey points out, "It is apparent that nei¬ ther Dora nor St Teresa knows what she wants or understands the meaning of her questions,* Lacan, it is implied, does."84 Less antagonis¬ tically another critic notes: "This idea that women are essentially excluded from the symbolically (and even from the imaginarily) con¬ stituted universe—an exclusion marked in part by their lack of a cer¬ tain kind of savoir—provides a crucial undercurrent to Lacan's argument in Encore."85 Most explicitly (although without referring to Lacan in particular), Grace Jantzen criticizes the privatization of mysticism: "If mystical experience is seen as gender-related, especially available to women, and at the same time as private and subjective" (as private as sexual jouis¬ sance, for Lacan), "then this can be used to reinforce stereotypes of women as the spiritual nurturers of humanity while keeping both women and spirituality firmly domesticated." Furthermore, Jantzen continues, the feminization of mysticism and its simultaneous defini¬ tion as ineffable is a combination of which we must beware: "The alleged inexpressibility of mystical experience correlates neatly with the silencing of women in the public arena of the secular world: women may be mystics, but mysticism is a private, intense experience not communicable in everyday language and not of political relevance."86 All this leads us to the question of the hysteric's—and the mystic's— "ventriloquized body," to use Janet Beizer's figure, chosen "to evoke

83. Lacan even writes: "It is in so far as her jouissance is radically Other that the woman has a relation to God greater than all that has been stated in ancient speculation according to a path which has manifestly been articulated only as the good of mankind" (Lacan, "A Love Letter [Une lettre d'amour]," in Mitchell and Rose, 153). 84. Macey, Lacan in Context, 193. 85. Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 178. 86. Grace Jantzen, "Feminists, Philosopher, and Mystics," Hypatia 9 (Fall 1994): 191.

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the narrative process whereby woman's speech is repressed in order to be expressed as inarticulate body language, which must then be dubbed by a male narrator."87 Lacan's ventriloquism only expresses the mute¬ ness of a marmoreal spectacle, but how does that silence correlate with all the words in Teresa of Avila's prolific writing? The mystic's rhetoric of ineffability is appropriated by psychoanaly¬ sis in order to support its own claim of the unrepresentability of wom¬ an's jouissance. It is this annexation that makes Lacan's analysis of mysticism a fit conclusion to the study of similarly imperialistic turnof-the-century diagnoses. Among these, Charcot's is certainly the most ambitious: to replace the dominance of religious models of self¬ interpretation with the models offered by medical science. The dis¬ course of mysticism constitutes for Charcot an exemplary and spectacular testing ground for this transition, just as women form its most readily available target; the mystic's medicalization is thus an essential historical cog of that mechanism of knowledge and power described by Foucault as the "hysterization of women's bodies."88 Lombroso also replaces the religious interpretation with a materialistic one, but his classificatory frenzy points to his more immediate concern as a criminal anthropologist: to establish clearly recognizable differences between the self and the other, between reason and unreason, the only seemingly mysterious occult. This objective is achieved through an ob¬ sessive pathologization of the unexplainable; whereas Charcot aims for theatricality, Lombroso wants completeness—hence his monumental treatises, veritable catalogs of Otherness. Krafft-Ebing's objectives in his diagnoses of mysticism are more limited. For him, the woman mys¬ tic's ambiguity, her apparent pleasure in the quest for pain, demon¬ strates the reality of that newly forged identity masochism and its feminizing distance from the ideal of health and masculinity. The sharpness of the health-and-sickness distinction advocated by Lom¬ broso and Krafft-Ebing, however, is somewhat blurred in Studies on Hysteria: the salvageable traits of the mystics—their accomplishments in spite of their illness—also prove the validity of some of the hysteric's claims, necessary for the construction of a new science of the psyche.

Postscript: Symptoms of Femininity (Simone de Beauvoir)

Simone de Beauvoir's book Le deuxieme sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) has been called "the most important feminist book of this century" 87. Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies, 9. 88. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1:104.

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and identified as the place where the "beginnings" of new French fem¬ inisms can be found.89 It is divided into two volumes and four parts, the third of which, titled "Justifications," includes the chapter "La mystique," "The Mystic." In a manner analogous to Jacques Lacan's in "God and the Jouissance of T/he Woman," Beauvoir begins her analysis by asserting that love mysticism is a mostly feminine undertaking and that the men who have "burned with that flame" are rare, whereas "the women who abandon themselves to the joys of the heavenly nup¬ tials are legion."90 A few years later Jacques Lacan and, as we will see, Luce Irigaray will go one step past Beauvoir's numerical discrepancy to insist on the essential femininity of the mystical enterprise. In preLacanian terms, Beauvoir says that more mystics are women because women are accustomed to accepting, kneeling and in a slavelike posi¬ tion, a love that comes from "above." Human and divine love are con¬ fused "not because the latter is a sublimation of the former, but because the first is a reaching out toward a transcendent, an absolute" (670).91 Beauvoir revisits the Freudian explanation of divine love as a sublimation of libidinal drives, and in a feminist key its direction is reversed. It is not that divine love is a rarefied, sublimated version of sexual love; rather, sexual love has for woman the quasi-religious char¬ acter of a love for (divine) transcendence; her common, earthly lover is thus granted, by the sole virtue of his masculinity, the attributes of (a) g/God. It is symptomatic that the very first example in "The Mystic," which is also by far the longest quotation in the chapter, is taken not from a mystical text but rather from a doctor's pathographic reproduction of an erotomaniac's journal. Beauvoir takes this case of mental illness as exemplary of many a devout woman's experience. The confusion of God and man is epitomized, according to Beauvoir, by the figure of the confessor as the "materialization" of God (671-72). In the texts of Jeanne Guyon and Angela of Foligno, Beauvoir discerns the erotoma¬ niac nature of mysticism (be it platonic or sexual). In those of Teresa of Avila and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque she detects a hysterical strain, 89. Toril Moi, "An Intellectual Woman in Postwar France/' in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 984; Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), xiii. 90. Simone de Beauvoir, "The Mystic," in The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 670. 91. Similarly, Jules Michelet writes: "Lover and mystic on this point are completely blended. In both there is an excessive humility, a desire to abase themselves, so much the more to exalt their god—whether it be a beloved woman, or a favorite saint, the effect is the same" (Jules Michelet, La femme [Paris: Flammarion, 1981], 269).

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also of a fundamentally erotic nature, although, like her fellow femi¬ nists (Irigaray, for example), Beauvoir begins to reevaluate in a positive key the specular position and the mimetic economy of hysteria in the antagonistic context of patriarchal society. What degrades the hysteric, she claims, "is not the fact that her body actively expresses her obses¬ sions, but that she is obsessed, that her liberty is under a spell and annulled. The mastery over his body acquired by an Indian fakir does not make him the slave of it; corporeal mimicry can be an element in the elan of a sane, free consciousness" (673). The language of the body, as long as it is determined by a free subjectivity, can be eloquent and dignified. As we shall see, it is along these lines that Irigaray reconsid¬ ers and redefines hysteria, effectively employing some of its strategies (of mimicry and specularization, for example) in order to criticize and to deconstruct the patriarchal discourse against which hysteria has tra¬ ditionally been defined. But in Beauvoir's statement we can clearly read the anti-Christianity that lies at the root of pathologizing explanations of mysticism, for the other's religion—the fakir's, metonymy of an east¬ ern religiosity—is necessarily respected, even as Christianity is put down. (In the language of existentialist political correctness, Christi¬ anity would be the only religion to have committed, endorsed, or tol¬ erated atrocities.) The discussion of hysteria is undoubtedly the most interesting sec¬ tion of Beauvoir's argument, because here she arrives at a sort of understanding of and penetrating sympathy for Teresa of Avila's mys¬ ticism—a sympathy she does not extend to the mystical experience as a whole, however. Beauvoir recognizes the pleasure involved in Te¬ resa's ecstasy in a somewhat reductive reference to the famous statue that obsesses Lacan, but she discards the simple "sexual sublimation" hypothesis through a further criticism of Freud's very notion of subli¬ mation. According to Beauvoir, Teresa's mystical love is inspired by the immediate presence of God as lover and is not a preexisting, tar¬ getless drive that happens to fix itself on God rather than on a man. "She is not the slave of her nerves and her hormones: one must admire, rather, the intensity of a faith that penetrates to the most intimate regions of her flesh" (673-74)- Thus, if the subjective mystical experi¬ ence may be the same for all women mystics, the interest of their message varies greatly. That there is a wide spectrum of success and failure in the communication of mystical writers not many critics or theologians would question. But it is here that Beauvoir's feminist crit¬ icism falters. Is the successful female mystical text the exception, and does it have to be, essentially, nonfeminine in order to contain a sal¬ vageable message in spite of its religiosity in order to communicate?

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In spite of its insights, especially critical of the psychological (to wit, Freudian) reductionism of religious experience, there is a dubious com¬ ponent to Simone de Beauvoir's argument, for in her discussion of women mystics, she wants to have her (materialist) cake and eat it, too. That is to say, she wants to deny the epistemic validity of the mystical experience (because of her explicit atheism and existentialist ethic), while appropriating great figures such as Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena for women's history. This is no easy feat, and it implies some manipulation of the facts. Thus, at the end of her essay Beauvoir claims that, although mystical fervor (like its two counter¬ parts in the "Justifications" section, love and narcissism) can in fact be integrated with an active and independent life, its own peculiar aim is bound to fail, for its purpose is to place woman in relationship with an unreality, "un irreel"—God. Woman is prevented from coming to grips with the world and from escaping her own subjectivity, so that her own freedom remains "mystified." The only means of achieving this feat, Beauvoir preaches, is for woman to project her freedom into human society through positive action alone (678). In preparation for this conclusion, toward the end of her essay Beau¬ voir juxtaposes the contemplative life and the active life. Saint Cath¬ erine's, Saint Teresa's, and Joan of Arc's worldly aims and practical feats sanction their revelations or their mystical experience and its de¬ scriptions, and these revelations in turn encourage them to follow a specifically active path. The contemplative experience is "justified" (to repeat Beauvoir's heading) by action. By contrast, the more "narcissis¬ tic" mystics, such as Jeanne Guyon, set no precise tasks for themselves and end up accomplishing very little besides their fervent prayers and prolix writings, which are, in Beauvoir's judgment, utterly unproduc¬ tive (677-78). The most obvious problem with this hierarchy, of course, is that the Christian and especially the mystical tradition, unlike the bourgeois world view Beauvoir embodies in her contra mysticas argu¬ ment, does not place a higher premium on action and production over contemplation and prayer. On the contrary, the contemplative Mary has chosen for herself "the better part," as Jesus tells the active Martha. Within Beauvoir's highly critical perspective, then, how can women's history appropriate the great women mystics without accepting their fundamental allegiance to the patriarchal order? Beauvoir's answer is somewhat surprising in its antifeminism. The great women mystics, she claims, are exceptions, either asexual or downright masculine. Saint Teresa, for example, "lived out, as a woman, an experience whose meaning goes far beyond the fact of her sex; she must be ranked with Suso and St. John of the Cross. But she is a striking exception. What

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her minor sisters give us is an essentially feminine vision of the world and of salvation,- it is not a transcendence that they seek: it is the redemption of their femininity" (674). And in a footnote Beauvoir adds: "With Catherine of Siena, however, theological preoccupations were very important. She also belongs to the rather masculine type" (674). Femininity needs to be redeemed, while virility may only be com¬ mended. One could at this point also complain about the exclusion from Beauvoir's restricted canon of other great women mystics—An¬ gela of Foligno, for example, whom Beauvoir, after quoting her at length, unjustly places on a low level of intellectual and theological accomplishment. But this is a minor, even microscopic criticism. Where the trouble lies is in the larger procedure Beauvoir uses to re¬ move Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena from the tradition of women's mysticism, for their qualitative difference (the two being the only women doctors of the church) should not radically affect the es¬ sential nature of the mystical experience. Aside from disagreements one may have with Beauvoir's ranking or canon(ization) of women mystics, then, it is the very process she un¬ dertakes which makes her ideological move collude with the patri¬ archal order she is seeking to overthrow. The best mysticism—the intellectual and theological speculations carried out by Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena—is essentially virile; the worst mysticism—the love displayed for a God that does not exist, a God that is for Beauvoir "an unreality"—is peculiarly feminine. By the same token, action is posited as masculine (Joan of Arc used to dress as a man); passivity or misdirected activity is gendered as feminine. In "The Mystic," Beau¬ voir's materialist critique, very much tied to a utilitarian bourgeois ideology, takes precedence over her feminist undertaking, and with a rhetorical "pincer movement" women mystics are not only criticized for being the mouthpieces of a patriarchal religious establishment but also, ironically, for their lack of masculine attributes.

CHAPTER

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2j

Mystical Languages of Illness: Naturalism in France and Italy

"Of all corrupting novels the worst are the mystical books, in which the soul talks with the soul in the dangerous hours of a deceptive twi¬ light. The soul believes she is sanctifying herself, and she becomes softer and softer, more and more delicate, preparing herself for every human weakness."1 The literary link Jules Michelet evokes between mysticism and nervous illness, although it is already at work in some early nineteenth-century texts, reached its peak during the periods of naturalism and decadence. The literature of these two currents takes the pathological as its privileged object, whether to ally itself with the positivistic method or to expose its shortcomings. In either case, cen¬ tral to novelistic discourse is the part played by the human body, a body that no longer belongs to itself but rather is the plaything of social or hereditary forces. In this chapter I read two texts inscribed in the naturalistic canon which take up the techniques of positivism in a problematic fashion— a French novel by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Madame Geivaisais, and an Italian short story by Gabriele D'Annunzio, "La vergine Orsola." Neither Madame Geivaisais nor "La vergine Orsola," however, pro¬ vides a comfortable example of naturalistic poetics, if we define natu¬ ralism as the school founded on the premise that literature could, and i. Michelet, La femme, 163.

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should, precisely imitate the scientific and cyclic patterns of nature."2 Although at one level both of these texts equate religion with feminin¬ ity, allying themselves with positivistic science and defining both as inherently pathological, these devalorized elements nevertheless con¬ stitute the very kernel of the mimetic enterprise of Madame Gervaisais and "La vergine Orsola." Mystical religiosity and the female body, that is to say, do not let themselves be too easily discounted, and by returning in the form of "slips of the pen" or, more generally, as the shaping/informing forces of the narrative at large, they claim a prom¬ inence that the avowed intentions of the text are loathe to accord them. One of the results of this "return of the repressed" is that the bound¬ aries of the code of naturalism are overstepped, so that both Madame Gervaisais and "La vergine Orsola" seem in many ways to move to¬ ward a decadent and symbolist aesthetics. In her essay on the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux, Naomi Schor begins with the question "How does naturalism naturalize woman?" She takes the verb natu¬ ralize to indicate both what Roland Barthes has described as "the pro¬ cess whereby bourgeois ideology converts the cultural into the natural" and "the process whereby realist modes of representation are converted into those of naturalism."3 Four years elapsed between the publication of Germinie Lacerteux and the writing of Madame Gervaisais. About this latter text I would like, then, to reformulate Schor's question in a way that would also implicate "La vergine Orsola" in the answer. How does a declining (and decaying) naturalism decline the religious woman, make her fall (,de-cadere)? (Or in the more eloquent Italian, Come fa un naturalismo decadente a far decadere la donna religiosal) It is a study of the literary workings sought out by this question which occupies the following pages. Naturalism, like realism before it, had little patience for mystical crises. As Jean-Louis Cabanes points out, "If Christian morality doesn't care about morals and proposes a sainthood which is madness to the wise, realist writers literally read the submission to God as a perverse appetite for humiliation, and the madness of the cross as downright unreason."4 A clear example of such a "reading on the part of natu¬ ralism can be found in the characterization of Marthe Mouret in £mile

2. Jefferson Humphries, ''Decadence/' in Hollier, 785. 3. Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)/ 127-2S. 4. Jean-Louis Cabanes, "Desymbolisation, imitation et pathologie de la croyance," in Literature et pathologie, ed. Max Milner (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1989), 145.

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Zola's novel La conquete de Plassans (1874). Although the repre¬ sentation of Marthe is clearly inspired by the protagonist of Madame Gervaisais (like her, Marthe is a tubercular hysteric approaching men¬ opause, prone to sensuous, yet masochistic mystical ecstasies and mor¬ bidly attached to her confessor), Zola's and the Goncourts' methods differ considerably. Marthe's ailment, first of all, is not the only driving force of the narrative (which focuses instead on a more public event, the Abbe Faujas's "conquest" of the town of Plassans). More important, Marthe's mix of mysticism, tuberculosis, and hysteria is described throughout the novel with a clinical and cold detachment character¬ istic of the naturalistic representation of disease, which one would be hard pressed to find in Madame Gervaisais.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais The representation of the place of the feminine as that of the reli¬ gious situates itself at the naturalistic crossroads of the pathological and the novelistic, where the symptom-producing body is both a clin¬ ical (hence epistemic) and a literary (hence discursive) entity. The lit¬ erary bodies created by the Goncourts are rarely healthy, as Frangoise Coulont-Henderson has remarked: "All the main characters in their novels are defective, sick or neurotic,- victims of an ineluctable degen¬ eracy, a slow decomposition, they all seek life in death."5 Students of late nineteenth-century neurosis can find in the Goncourt brothers' novels a veritable gold mine, as they read of Soeur Philomene's crises de nerfs, Germinie Lacerteux's hysterical attacks, hallucinations, and nymphomania, Renee Mauperin's lethargy and psychosomatic heart disease, Elisa's dementia and infantilism, and so on. In their most famous novel, Germinie Lacerteux, there is a direct reference to the Salpetriere, with which the two brothers were well familiar: "A dis¬ turbance affected her gait, a folly her hands. At times, she carried be¬ hind her the shadow of a woman of the Salpetriere."6 The literary reference to the hospital is overdetermined and self-explanatory, syn¬ onymous with insanity and with lust—because of the hysteric's noto¬ riously excessive sensuality and because of the Salpetriere past as a haven for syphilitic prostitutes.7 5. Frangoise Coulont-Henderson, “Sang, mort et morbidite dans Madeline Gervaisais d'Edmond et Jules de Goncourt," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 14 (Spring-Summer 1986), 295. 6. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux (Paris: Quantin, 1886), 143. 7. On the hysteria-prostitution connection, see Matlock, Scenes of Seduction'.

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The Goncourts' novels read like case studies in which careful atten¬ tion is given to the protagonist's biography (most often a woman's) and to the delineation of predisposing factors such as childhood experiences and heredity. The avant-la-lettre Freudian explanations the Goncourts adduced for their heroines' ailments have already been the object of critical attention.8 The psychological mechanism to which I propose to refer—both thematically and structurally—in my reading of Madame Gervaisais is repression, which is also at work in some of the Gon¬ courts' other novels. Thematically, the protagonist's sickness is related to her inability to express herself, either bodily or verbally, and this suppression/oppression inevitably leads to sickness and suffering, to a nervous crisis of some sort. It has been pointed out that what the Goncourts claim is that the repressed always ends up exploding, that all repression is dangerous, and that the individual's needs and aspira¬ tions must be satisfied."9 As in their other novels, repression is thermatized in Madame Gervaisais (both in the protagonist and in her maid), and it is troped as a specifically female mechanism. Shortly be¬ fore her conversion, Mme Gervaisais remembers "all the secret and unknown oppressed sufferings of a female nature," explicitly associat¬ ing the repression of pain with her womanly nature.10 But repression also functions in another important way, namely, in the text's "uncon¬ scious" (I am invoking an analogy between the workings of literary rhetoric and the mechanisms of the psyche) through the return of the religious even when and where the authors consciously try to eliminate it.11 This all-pervasiveness of Catholic discourse contributes to the dif¬ ficulty of inscribing Madame Gervaisais within the aesthetics of nat¬ uralism, subtly but continuously pushing it toward symbolism and decadence. Madame Gervaisais (1869) was the last work of fiction produced by the collaborative literary efforts of Edmond de Goncourt (1822—1896) and his brother Jules (1830-1870). Just a year after it was published Jules's death put an end to a prolific period of joint research and writing. With a distinctly naturalistic design stressing the dependence on phys¬ iology of all emotional and psychological productions, the narrative 8. Laura Martin Jarman, "The Goncourt Brothers: Modernists in Abnormal Psychol¬ ogy " University of New Mexico Bulletin, complete issue 342 (April 1939): 38-42. 9. Danielle Thaler, "Deux freres en quete de peuple: Les Goncourt," NineteenthCentury French Studies (Fall-Winter 1985-86): 107. 10. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier 1909), 85; all parenthetical page numbers will refer to this edition. 11 1 am here indebted to Peter Brooks's work on the analogies between textual and psychological mechanism; see Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985).

58

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lingers on the movements of the protagonist's more and more tuber¬ cular and climacteric body, her more and more Catholic soul, and her more and more hysterical and, to borrow Foucault's term, "hysterized" psyche, as a quasi-scientific observation of her physical and psychical undoing.12 Mental and physiological illness, hysteria and tuberculosis— both represented in the nineteenth century as specifically feminine diseases and, in this text, conveniently related to the beginnings of menopause—come to assume one and the same pathology, expressed in terms of a dubious religious conversion, a "pathology of belief," as Cabanes has termed it. The representation of the sick Mme Gervaisais's conversion anticipates Nietszche's statement that "one is not converted to Christianity—one must be sufficiently sick for it."13 A certain tension develops in the text between the positive attempt of naturalism to understand, to reduce to matter, and the alterity (be it psychological or spiritual) lying on the other side, beyond the reach of science. Yet this very otherness, although it is eliminated from the text s explicit scope, is the obsessive inspiration of the novel, that which stimulates it into existence. Because of the emphasis on the analysis of the protagonist, the nar¬ rative is reduced to a minimum. Mme Gervaisais, an unbelieving, "ner¬ vous, tubercular thirty-seven-year-old Parisian widow, arrives in Rome accompanied by her only son, a frail and mentally retarded child, and by a neurotic, yet faithful maid. At first, the French lady visits the ruins and studies the classical history of Rome, but soon the celebra¬ tions of Holy Week start drawing her to a darker side of the Eternal City, that Italian version of Catholicism which, during her first en¬ counters with it, Mme Gervaisais so ardently despises. She begins to lose her contempt, however, particularly after her son's apparently mi¬ raculous recovery following his mother's visit to a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. During a summer stay at Castel Gandolfo, Mme Ger¬ vaisais meets Countess Lomanossow, a Russian noblewoman with mystical tendencies who is about to take Catholic vows, and who pre¬ sents her with a devotional book inscribed with the name of a Roman Jesuit confessor. Back in Rome, Mme Gervaisais looks up the confessor, assiduously visits the Jesuit headquarters, studies Catholic texts, and begins confessing and practicing Catholicism regularly. But soon the Jesuit confessor seems too lax to satisfy her intense desire for peni¬ tence, and she seeks out a Trinitarian known for his severity. The latter

12. Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1:104. 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R J FIollingdale (London: Penguin, 1988), 168.

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quickly urges Mme Gervaisais to give up all her worldly attachments, including her material well-being and especially her maternal love. This sacrifice is for some time rewarded by abundant mystical visions and ecstasies, but soon Mme Gervaisais is left in spiritual darkness. Suddenly, her brother arrives in Rome, realizes the gravity of his sister's situation and the dangers it poses to her physical and mental health and makes Mme Gervaisais prepare to leave the city. Devoid of all her strength and incapable of any reaction, she gives in to her brother's orders without hesitation, but her last wish is to have an audience with the pope as the crowning moment of her four-year stay in Rome. Once she is in the papal antechamber, as the doors open to let her inside the pope's room, Mme Gervaisais collapses and dies. The complexity and the ambiguity of the representation of feminine Catholicism is stressed from the beginning of the text, with the set-off reproduction of Mme Gervaisais's visiting card. The choice of the wom¬ an's name as the title (a Goncourtian strategy that enhances the resemblance of the text to a pathography or a case study) and the sub¬ sequent mise en abime of Mme Gervaisais's name underscore its origin in the tempestuous and doomed love affair between the marquis de la Gervaisais and Louise Adelaide de Bourbon-Conde (i757—1824)- After their separation, Mile de Conde entered a convent, had mystical ex¬ periences, and wrote a Vie (published in 1843) that was much-consulted by the Goncourt brothers. The intertext of Mile de Conde's Vie exposes how Madame Gervaisais weaves together different genres of writing, either explicitly or through a pattern of allusions. Women's Catholic writings (vastly, if superficially, read by the Goncourts), together with psychiatric treatises such as Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours's Psy¬ chology morbide (1859) and Ulysse Trelat's Folie lucide (1861), inform the style and the content of the novel.14 The Goncourts' stance is of¬ ficially anticlerical and antimystical without doubt. (They write in their Journal "Some of the things that most compromise God, after religion, are mystical books. Came out of reading all of these mystics as out of an insane asylum and a hospital for souls. )15 Nevertheless, tRg religious sub- or intertext is unquestionably an essential part of the very structure of their last novel, and like hysteria, it manifests itself in protean forms as a "return of the repressed. Here are two paratextual examples of this return. In a postface of 1892, while protesting the historicity of the events depicted in Madame

14. For an analysis of the Goncourts' research for the novel, see Robert Ricatte, La creation romanesque chez les Goncourt, 1851-1870 (Paris: Collin, 1953)/ 380-88. 15. Goncourt, Journal 2:160 (3-2'1 September 1S57).

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Saint Hysteria

Gervaisais, Edmond refers to it as "our mystical novel."16 And about Jules, Edmond says that, during the writing of Madame Gervaisais, "the illness that was killing him gave him, in certain fragments, I would think, something like the religious drunkenness of a rapture."17 The convergence of malady and writing cannot be evoked in these cases without invoking mystical terms,* a certain amount of identification with the mystical seems inevitable, and Jules de Goncourt could easily be imagined saying, a la Flaubert, "Mme Gervaisais, c'est moi!" The character was inspired by the Goncourt brothers' haunting aunt, Nephtalie de Courmont, the "Mme ★★★" to whose memory the book is ded¬ icated. The aunt is a mother figure, a displaced part of the self. Through her thematization, the Goncourts' own presence within Madame Ger¬ vaisais, the identification of their self-proclaimedly sensitive nerves with Mme Gervaisais's increasingly sensitive ones, is emphasized, and the distance they (i.e., naturalism) take from hysteria, as from mysti¬ cism, is undermined. Their identificatory representation of Mme Ger¬ vaisais is light-years away from Zola's clinically detached representation of Marthe Mouret in La conquete de Plassans, despite the identical diagnosis of the two characters. As was the case with Charcot, the hysteria/mysticism nexus that is the object of novelistic analysis and critique unexpectedly leaks out of its assigned place to infect the text. At a microscopic level, just as the word esprit and its derivatives are necessary to describe the protagonist, the religious vo¬ cabulary is essential to the development of the text. For example, the woods crossed by Mme Gervaisais are "severe and religious," enveloped by "a sacred fog" (187). The way in which Catholic writings function within the economy of a self-proclaimedly anti-Catholic novel is complex and double edged. How must the Catholic text be rewritten in order to be turned into its own parody, or at least into its own critique, or even in order to be made to talk about something other than Catholicism, be it tubercu¬ losis, hysteria, or poetic creation?18 On one hand, Madame Gervaisais is a pastiche of religious genres, from homilies and spiritual journals 16. Quoted in Marc Fumaroli, Preface to Madame Gervaisais, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 21. 17. Quoted in Ricatte, La creation, 387. 18. Susan Sontag claims that "the romantic view is that illness exacerbates conscious¬ ness. Once that illness was TB; now it is insanity that is thought to bring consciousness to a state of paroxysmic enlightenment" (Sontag, Illness as Metaphor [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977], 35-36). From this standpoint, Madame Gervaisais stands at a privileged medical-historical borderline, shortly before the discovery of the TB bacillus and just as psychiatry was emerging as a profession. Furthermore, according to the medical view dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hysteria was among the causes of pulmonary tuberculosis. Selman Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 29.

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to confessors' accusations and descriptions of mystical raptures. Yet the tradition of revising the representation of the Catholic experience as a form of pathology allows the pastiche to become a critique, in a way analogous to that of Charcot, who recuperated the iconography of religious history and tradition for the ambivalent benefit of a complete nosology of hysteria (a move allegorized in reverse by the fall of Mme Gervaisais, who, instead of going from a priest to a doctor, regresses and forgoes her doctor for a priest).19 Madame Gervaisais, then, relies for its aesthetics precisely on what it ethically sets out to criticize as pathological: religion, disease, and religion as disease. Some nineteenth-century religious texts actually seem to ask for this kind of appropriation. A young Italian saint, Gemma Galgani of Lucca (1878—1903)/ a mystic and stigmatic to whom I return in the fourth chapter, makes the bond between the spiritual encounter and insanity explicit by regularly using the expression "andar via la testa" (literally, "going away of the head") to describe her own ecstatic experiences, aware that the contact with the divine has a maddening quality and that her experience belongs to the mystical tra¬ dition of the "madness of the cross." Literalizing the mystic s meta¬ phor, the Goncourts refer to Mme Gervaisais's ecstasy as "the chronic state of the exhausted woman" (260), employing the word ecstasy, but modifying it with the adjective chronic, as a medical rather than a religious term. A certain complicity develops in the novel between the organic and the supernatural. The body's weaknesses qua body—the incipient tu¬ berculosis and the effects of menopause—make it a privileged site for extracorporeal manifestations. This is after all a part of the apparent rhetoric of the text, which claims that a certain type of physical ill¬ ness—tuberculosis—contributes to the development of a certain type of religion—mysticism: Illness, the slow illness that was extinguishing, almost sweetly, the life of Mme Gervaisais, was peculiarly helping the mysticism, the ecstasy, the aspiration of this body, which was becoming a spirit, toward the supernatural of spirituality. The thinning of tuberculosis, the diminishment and the con19 In this regression, Mme Gervaisais reverses every point of Jan Goldstein s obser¬ vation that "the popularization of the hysteria diagnosis and other related nervous dis¬ orders helped to sever the close traditional bond between women and priests . . . and to replace it with a dependency on the medical profession. ... But another way to make women 'belong to science' was to habituate them to thinking of their bouts of emotional distress as medical conditions falling within the purview of the physician rather than as moral failing or spiritual crises requiring the guidance of the priest" (Console and Classify, 373-74)-

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sumption of the muscles, the beginning and gradual death of the flesh under the cavernous ravages of the malady, the growing dema¬ terialization of the physical being, were increasingly drawing her toward the holy follies and the hallucinated delights of religious love. (263)

The less corporeal the body, the more //spiritualized,/ and thus open to the supernatural it becomes. Tuberculosis is a disease that literally makes the body less of a body, by consuming it, by making it thinner and diminishing it, by digging caves within it, by "dematerializing it," as the text itself so expressively puts it. The body thus becomes less of a body and more of a "spirit." Still, the word "spirit" needs to be put within quotation marks in this naturalistic context, because a con¬ sequence of this analogy is that the spirit becomes an extension of the body, becomes contingent on the movements and the changes that oc¬ cur at the somatic level. This is a reductionism that is again akin to Charcot's in Les demoniaques dans Vart. The spirit is a category that, paradoxical as it may seem, can and indeed should be known through its bodily manifestations alone. The interdependence of mind and body manifests itself most compellingly in the realm of sexuality. The hysteron (by which I mean the uterus as an imagined, rather than a physiological organ) is the site of physical reproduction as well as the production of pleasure and pain (and the connection between excessive or underdeveloped sexuality and neurosis is established throughout the Goncourts' oeuvre). In the case of Mme Gervaisais, it is menopause (etymologically connected with the moon and its cycles)—that is, the physical process by which her reproductive function slows and eventually stops—which encourages strikingly "feminine" behavior: "The softening of the first approaches of faith delivered her to the seduction of those spiritual sensations whose effect is so potent on the organism of a woman at the age during which she descends her life" (165-66). Mme Gervaisais's feminine sur¬ roundings (Catholic religion and its spiritual/physical sensations) bring out her own femininity (in the form of an irrational, nonreflective ad¬ oration), by literally "seducing" it out of her, at the expense of that virile force instilled by her relationship with her father before her mar¬ riage. At this point the protagonist's body is turned into a sort of "re¬ venge of the feminine" against "the masculine and firm reflections of her youth" (121). The text becomes obsessively concerned with show¬ ing how the physiological cycles (or their interruption) regulate the psyche, so that the character is subordinated to the (mal(functioning of her reproductive apparatus. As Cabanes puts it, "Madame Gervaisais is

Mystical Languages of Illness

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the prisoner of her body, while she believed she was freeing herself of it through asceticism and the practice of ecstasy/'20 The dualistic representation of disease in Madame Gervaisais com¬ bines the dominant negative representations with some paradoxically positive ones. The consequences of the protagonist's deleterious phys¬ ical processes, which the text handles with some distaste, seem at cru¬ cial points to contribute to the physical attractiveness of the heroine. In his Journal, Edmond de Goncourt aestheticizes tuberculosis by not¬ ing that certain chest maladies are "disturbingly photogenic."21 By at¬ taching her to her body (= sensation) and detaching her from her intellect (= reason), illness and religion make Mme Gervaisais more of a woman. From the beginning, her beauty is described in the sometimes frightening terms of the nineteenth-century cult of female invalidism, that fascination with beauty as a product of immobilizing disease; she has "a beauty whose character and style was superior to the human beauty of woman . . . her finely contoured features, whose youthful thinness had been preserved even at thirty-seven by illness, a pale skin ... a sex-less and almost seraphic leanness, the austere profile of a psy¬ chic creature, added to that beyond-life semblance, which conferred upon her entire being the appearance of an otherworld figure" (40-41). Ironically enough, her disease, that is, the predominance of her path¬ ological and infected constitution, gives to Mme Gervaisais's body the illusion of being incorporeal, asexual, superhuman (i.e., dead), instead of showing her dependence on the flesh. Her face is "that of a spirit" (40). This cult of invalidism goes so far that, later in the novel, Mme Gervaisais is necrophiliacally described as if she were dead, as thin under her white robe as a ghost (254). To a varying extent, the cult of invalidism implies necrophilia. If the idea is that a sick woman is more feminine, then the logical last step in feminization is the sick woman's death.22 Much has already been written on the aesthetization of femi-

20. Cabanes, "Desymbolisation," 139. 21. Goncourt, Journal is:i42 (2^ July 1888). 22. Dijkstra speaks of "how literal an equation late nineteenth-century males made between virtuous passivity, sacrificial ecstasy, and erotic death as indicative of feminine fulfillment/ " as well as of "a necrophiliac preoccupation with the erotic potential of a woman when in a state of virtually guaranteed passivity (Bram Oijkstra, Idols of Perver¬ sity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 54-58). One can compare this description of Mme Gervaisais with Zola's description of Marthe Mouret during her mystical phase: "A wholly new woman was growing up within Marthe. She had been refined by the nervous life she was leadingMarthe, thinner, with pinkish cheeks and superb, blazing and black eyes, had then for a few days a unique beauty. ... It seemed as if her forgotten youth was burning within her, at forty, with the splendor of a flame" (Emile Zola, La conquete de Plassans [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1972], 271)-

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nine death. In Over Her Dead Body, for example, Elisabeth Bronfen reads the representations of the death of beautiful women—the site of alterity and therefore of distance from the self—as "symptoms that visualize even as they conceal what is too dangerous to articulate openly but too fascinating to repress successfully."23 Along the lines of romanticism and especially of melodrama, death becomes the culmi¬ nation of the novelist's fascination with the pathological and the fem¬ inine,- death is the beautiful and the "writable" par excellence. As Gian Paolo Biasin explains, "The scientific attitude toward death as a source of vital knowledge is paralleled in romantic literature by an analogous evaluation of death as a factor of individuality."24 The death of the tomboyish protagonist of Renee Mauperin is especially useful in un¬ veiling the workings of this aesthetic model. The "coquetry of death" makes Renee feel "more of a woman" by tempering her "masculine and violent soul" and thus allowing "all the signs of her sex to ree¬ merge in her." Renee's feminization entails the loss of "her sharp sense of judgment" as well as "her bold use of language."25 In an analogous way, Mme Gervaisais's greatest beauty is manifested during her ecstasies—resembling orgasm and thus evoking the petite mort. During ecstasy, her beauty becomes "unspeakable," and her thin and immobile figure appears as if "at the edges of heaven" (261). The naturalist's fascination with the aesthetic value of the pathological brings this "scientific" discourse, again, dangerously close to an exal¬ tation of the religious. The obvious fascination gives to a novel that aspires to be a pathography the style and the tone of a panegyric, of a believer's account of a saintly ecstasy. The aestheticization of disease is only one aspect of its representa¬ tion. More frequently, Mme Gervaisais's illness, never detached from religion as both its cause and its effect, leads to decay rather than to beauty. This tendency is dramatized in the text through the affinities between the protagonist and Rome, troped as a metonymy for the ex¬ treme and pathological forms of southern Catholicism (this is the oply novel of the Goncourts not to be set in Paris) and (hence?) as an intrin¬ sically female location. The privileged site of Catholicism, Rome is also the place of the hysteron and the irrational. Like the hysteron, Rome is hot and humid and thus a pertinent "hothouse" for Mme Gervaisais's tuberculosis and climacterium. "Finally Rome is that comer of the 23. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), xi. 24. Gian Paolo Biasin, Literary Diseases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 6. 25. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Renee Mauperin (Geneva: Slatkine, 1986), 288.

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world where, according to the energetic phrase of a bishop, Piety fer¬ ments like Nature in the Tropics" (178). Furthermore, theatrical modes are ubiquitous in the setting of the novel, making the hysterical pres¬ ence (always theatrical in the late nineteenth century) more intensely felt. Rome is an "amphitheater" (56) whose very sky is "theatrical" (109). Naturally, the histrionic nature of the city is revealed most con¬ spicuously in its religious manifestations. In a letter to her brother, describing a religious procession, Mme Gervaisais wonders "if it was necessary in this country—and maybe everywhere—so much materi¬ ality, so much spectacle, so much base reality, so many efforts of manly muscles, in order to create what is called religion!" (51). The epiphany of the spirit during the Catholic procession ostensibly takes place thanks to the intermediary of the body and its base reality, its mate¬ riality, its manly muscles! An even more obvious accusation of theatricality is directed against priests during Mass,- for example, a Jesuit preacher is described as "an actor, a mime, commediante, tiagediantewhose sermon "gave its public all the emotions and all the illusions of a speech and a theater play" (170). The theater emulated by religion offers the escapism of feigned emotions and unfounded illusions. The critique of Catholic fab¬ rication, simulation, is, not coincidentally, the same accusation hurled at nineteenth-century hysterics. The affinity of religion and hysteria surfaces again in the text's materialistic critique, for if the pain does not arise from a tangible organic lesion (as in the case of the hysterical symptom), and if the host does not turn into tangibly physical flesh (as in the process of consecration), may one believe the truthfulness of the hysteric and of the Catholic, of symptom and of transubstantiation?26 Theatricality, combined with Rome's dangerously exotic and almost Oriental charm, exemplifies the misogynistic topos of the alluring, yet deceptive appearance of female beauty, hiding that physical degeneracy which is the prime aesthetic target of the naturalistic text (thus, at the end of the novel, Mme Gervaisais is described as "the woman that Rome had made" [299]). The same fascination is at the center of the positivist anthropometry in La donna delincpiente, la pxostituta e la donna noinaale, in which Lombroso speaks at length of the deception inherent in the female body, especially the prostitute's, who must hide her degenerate essence (which normally translates itself into an unat¬ tractive appearance) if she is to practice a profession that so depends 26. As Jules de Goncourt writes in the 1859 Journal while studying neurosis in psy¬ chiatry books, "Few cases of folly display such a characteristically morbid hallucination as to believe in God in a piece of bread; and yet this folly is endemic: it is called religion" (quoted in Ricatte, La creation, 383).

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on her beauty. Lombroso claims that prostitutes possess a "beaute du diable," the dangerous attractiveness of the devil. In so doing, however, he reveals another point of contact between positivistic/naturalistic discourse and that of Catholicism (or, more precisely, that strand of Catholic discourse, bordering on Manicheism, which so angered posi¬ tivism): its fascination with and disgust of the fleshly (but more on disgust later). Through a parallel set up between the two from the very beginning, Mme Gervaisais mimics more and more accurately the movements of Rome's giant female body, manifested primarily in its religiosity. The pathological essence of Catholicism makes the city a live, although also a decaying, body. Thus the infamous Roman summer wind, the sirocco, is her dizzying and contagious effluvium, an illness-bearing breath that makes the protagonist exclaim: "Ah! it's the siroccol That's what I felt since this morning. ... A sense of release, a kind of general malaise" (58).27 The sirocco is a perversion of the Holy Spirit into a vector of disease (of tuberculosis and syphilis), and as a consequence, the most potent smells of contagion in Rome emanate from her churches—a strange kind of genital organs from which religion, troped as syphilitic contagion, spreads out: "Religion in Rome is a wide em¬ brace, an immense holy contagion" (177). This desecrating description perverts the caritas at the center of the Christian message into a path¬ ological sexuality.28 Like a virulent sexually transmitted disease, Ro¬ man religion is disseminated through an immense embrace, a public kiss mixing sexuality, religion, and illness. The evangelical word (in the naturalistic reading, an injunction to pain) quite literally becomes flesh by infecting and (in)forming the body as sign. This contagion resembles that which affected the Saint Medard convulsionaries, whose bodies "figured" the visibility of pain. Thanks to the mimetic capacity of hysteria, Mme Gervaisais is able to incorporate the spectacle of illness/religion that she witnesses. Even her tubercu¬ losis could be read as an "upward displacement" (to use the psycho¬ analytic vocabulary of hysteria) of Rome's syphilis from the genital organs to the lungs. Catholicism is thus doubly related to the protag¬ onist: its madness is reflected in her hysteria, and its contagiousness

27. In an entry dating from their trip to Rome, the Goncourts write: "People and things, everything here is a bit like the smell of the Roman street, where one does not really know what one is smelling: whether it's shit or orange blossoms!" [Journal 8:17 [25 April 1867]). 28. For a study of syphilis in nineteenth-century French literature, see Patrick Wald Lasowski, Syphilis: Essai sur la litterature frangaise du XIXe siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

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in her tuberculosis (syphilis and tuberculosis, Patrick Wald Lasowski claims, "recognize each other, all-powerful, and take each other by the hand," since "tuberculosis declares itself in the place of the other— unnamable").19 As the Goncourts themselves so unambiguously put it in their Journal, "Religion is a part of woman's sex."30 As such, it at¬ tacks Mme Gervaisais where she is at her weakest, her ill (because tubercular and climacteric) constitution. It is symptomatic that when her brother comes to Rome and encourages her to lead a normal life, Mme Gervaisais's biological nature de femme, which flourished under the harsh moral and physical penitence imposed by her religion (or her confessor), cannot bear it. It is this natural affinity between woman and pain which Krafft-Ebing would proclaim a few years later, and it binds Mme Gervaisais to her "Master," Christ.31 Like her, Jesus is "nervous" (Gervaisais, 99), and he is even singled out in the Journal as the origin of neurosis itself: "By bringing into the world the feeling for suffering, Jesus Christ has increased enormously the ability to suffer. His death was the death of physical and moral pagan health. Neurosis comes from Golgotha."32 As the "mythographer" of pain, Jesus is the figure who increased it by giving it a meaning; he is "a terrible Emperor of suffer¬ ing" (Gervaisais, 259). And, suffering being the prototype of the (fem¬ inine) heightened sensitivity that is typical of nervous illness and especially of hysteria, his Passion is turned into a neurosis, into a hys¬ terical spectacle of pain. Christ is the incarnation of Mme Gervaisais's etiology; but as such, he is also one of the cornerstones of naturalistic mimesis. The cult of female invalidism in Madame Gervaisais suggests that the protagonist is spiritually and sexually pure, that she has abandoned her masculinizing tendencies, and that she belongs to a privileged class in no need to work-in short, that she is superior to "base" corporeal needs. One of the most resonant implications of this cult in the novel, which is related to the hysteria and repression present throughout the text, is the disgust elicited by the body-as-flesh. But sexual flesh and religious flesh are treated quite differently. Let us begin with the for¬ mer: Freud's controversial theory that the hysteric is one "in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponder-

29. Ibid., 114, H730. Goncourt, Journal 2:94 (11 April 1857). 31 An excellent discussion of masochism in Madame Gervaisais can be found in Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-theCentury France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)/ chap. 6: "Mystical Pathography: A Case of Maso-Fetishism in the Goncourts' Madame Gervaisais," 124-46. 32. Goncourt, Journal 8:109 (15 May 1868).

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antly or exclusively unpleasurable" is exemplified in the attempt, on the part of a handsome Italian tenor, at a romantic seduction of Mme Gervaisais.33 It is in this scene—similar to the attempted seduction of Dora by Herr K. in Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hys¬ teria—that Mme Gervaisais's "repressed sexuality" shows up most conspicuously.34 In the encounter with the tenor, even more than in Freud's text, one cannot know from the narrator's account whether the man's advances are actually an inappropriately insistent attempt at se¬ duction or just a flirtation magnified by the woman's hysterical per¬ ception: "She had something like the hallucination of a declaration of love, of an offense approaching her" [Gervaisais, 214). In either case, her reaction leads to a loud expression of disgust and to the almost pathological onset of monomania, another popular disease in the nine¬ teenth century: "She used to flee, almost ashamed, from the men who stared at her, pointing them out, indicating them to the people she was with; for it had almost become a monomania with her" (214-15).35 This disgust for the sexual replaces the disgust for religion. At first, Mme Gervaisais is horrified by the idolatry of Catholicism and its re¬ liance on the body of Christ as the tangible covenant between God and humanity. For such an embodiment raises a number of questions, if not around the chastity of the love of Christ, then at least around the imperviousness of the discourse held by such a love to the all-too sim¬ ilar discourses expressing explicitly sexual or sensuous love,* a confu¬ sion of terms and of tone often becomes inevitable. Mme Gervaisais reflects on this danger in the memorable description of a scene of ad¬ oration witnessed during her first Holy Week in Rome, when the germs of her conversion, to use the text's own metaphor, begin to sprout. These events unleash "the repressed"—"her restrained, closed up, and confined nature" ("sa nature comprimee, refermee, resserree" [98)). Thus the text identifies, avant la lettre, a Freudian traumatic event that provokes the hysterical attacks in the protagonist. Again, it is a question of love, of bodies, and of disgust: 33. Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier, 1963), 44. Krafft-Ebing anticipates Freud's controversial statement when he writes that "in hysterical insanity the abnormally intense sexual impulse may express itself in delusions of jealousy, unfounded accusations against men for immoral acts, hal¬ lucinations of coitus, etc." (Psychopathia, 512). 34. With a remark appropriate to the Goncourts' last protagonist, Sontag writes that "the TB-prone character that haunted imaginations in the nineteenth century was an amalgam of two different fantasies: someone both passionate and repressed" (Illness as Metaphor, 39). 35. Goldstein notes that monomania was named by J.-E.-D. Esquirol around 1810, and that by the 1820 s " 'monomania' had already percolated down to the nonmedical French intelligentsia and been incorporated into their language" (Console and Classify, 153).

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Good Friday had left behind a certain memory of the anger and the disgust which she still felt towards material worship. It was in a church in Piazza Colonna: between two candles, beside a silver dish set on the floor for alms, on an old bedside rug, there was a black wooden cross, and on this cross was a nervous, muscular, skinny Christ, morbidly colored and with the anatomy of a murdered man with painted-on blood; and all around him adoring men and women on all fours were choosing the shivering and ticklish parts of the divine body so as to walk their love on them. (99-100) In this passage Christ, like the heroine, is described as "nervous," "morbid," and covered with a blood reminiscent of the symptoms of Mme Gervaisais's tuberculosis.36 What fascinates and repels the pro¬ tagonist is the religious "discourse" that surrounds Christ, the modes of adoration and expression of Christian love chosen by the faithful; the epiphany of their faith is no different from the expression of erotic attachment, which manifests itself in the same way: through the phys¬ ical and sensuous contact of human and divine, of flesh and symbol. The emphasis on fleshly pleasure, even in abjection, becomes all the more obvious in the adorers' choice of certain body parts (though in its identification with its protagonist the text leads us to forget that this is the ill Mme Gervaisais's own twisted vision): those that are ticklish and quivering and most sensitive to tactile stimulation. If hysterical disgust is really caused by a withdrawal of erotic in¬ vestment from the organic (and this is the characteristic mark of the hysteric's repression), so that the value of the body is reduced to that of a corpse, one can see how the text itself (and not only the protago¬ nist) recoils in disgust when a corpse, in this case Christ's, and sensual experience risk being confused. Mme Gervaisais's first disgusted reac¬ tion to the Catholic body (before her conversion) consisted in turning away from the flesh of Jesus and from its ambiguous adoration by the faithful, turning away from the "manly muscles" upon and thanks to which Catholicism, as she observed, is founded. She averted her face (her eyes, her mouth, and her nose) from religion as if from an object of horror, with a movement of disgust, a common trait of hysterics, which is the opposite and the correlative of the movement of hysterical conversion. If conversion implies a hypereroticization or a sexualization and a symbolization of the organic, disgust desexualizes the real, the somatic, by refusing to read any erotic element in it. Disgust is the mark of repression of the sexual, the irruption of the organic body that 36. An analysis of the blood imagery in Madame Gervaisais can be found in CoulontHenderson, "Sang, mort et morbidite."

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is unsignifiable because "real" in Lacan's sense (as opposed to imagi¬ nary or symbolic).37 This theory is eloquently expressed in the Goncourts' Renee Mauperin, whose protagonist, leaving a church where she had been praying to the miraculous statue of a black Madonna, ex¬ claims: "—Ah! . . . we really should have been made of something else. Why did the good Lord make us all out of meat? It's horrible!"38 The unsexualized, unsymbolized body is described as an utterly unappeal¬ ing hunk of meat—"de la viande" in the original French—and Renee's refusal of sexuality is interpreted by the text as the cause of her death: neither Renee nor Mme Gervaisais can repress her sexual needs and get away with it. What is at first disgusting for Mme Gervaisais is a religion with erotic overtones,* after she has embraced it, it is a man's erotic insin¬ uations that provoke that same movement of revulsion. But while the text thematizes and diagnoses disgust for the overtly sexual in a de¬ tached and almost clinical manner, as a form of monomania and, hence, a strictly pathological manifestation, the repugnance inspired by religious love implicates the novel itself in a vociferous expression of disgust, to the point that the text comes to assume some of the hysterical traits that it diagnoses in its protagonist. If Madame Gervai¬ sais overcomes her fascinated disgust with Catholicism, the text never does,* it is captivated by and yet forever drawing away from the horri¬ fying descriptions of the protagonist's self-abjection, for the abject, as Kristeva defines it, is "an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned."39 The descriptions of the protagonist's self-abjection are thoroughly mor¬ bid, employed to indicate the limits of rationality and of naturalism, "what I permanently thrust aside in order to live."40 But if Mme Gervaisais's disgust is the mark of repression (troped by the text as a feminine mechanism), of what is the text's disgust the mark? The insistence of the text on the thematization of disgust must have aesthetic implications for the economy of the novel if, as Ned Lukacher asserts, "The hysterized discourse that is psychoanalysis teaches us that 'all aesthetical satisfaction . . . excites disgust/ and that it is precisely what makes it exciting. Perhaps the hysterization of dis¬ course is synonymous with the becoming disgusting of aesthetics."41 This hypothesis has a double resonance in the context of a naturalistic 37. Serge Andre, Que veut une femmel (Paris: Navarin, 1986), 101. 38. Goncourt, Renee Mauperin, 277. 39. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 40. Ibid., 3. 41. Ned Lukacher, 'The Epistemology of Disgust," Foreword to David-Menard, xxi.

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text, whose aesthetics is located precisely in the place of the disgusting, the pathological, that from which one averts one's nose—to wit, woman as always-already sick. In Naomi Schor's words, "Naturalized woman is by definition an aesthetic monstrosity."42 If hysteria is to discourse what the disgusting is to aesthetics, then an exploration of the hysterical element within the naturalistic text, a text so obsessed with the disgusting, is bound to shed some light on how this very text works, on what its repressed is. And if naturalistic discourse depends to some extent on the hysterical, the network of dependences in Ma¬ dame Gervaisais gets more complicated; for although this text ada¬ mantly professes an antireligious stance, it nevertheless continuously undoes itself by using (and ab-using) religious discourse. Antireligion is to religion, the novel repeats from beginning to end, as male is to female and, most important, as sanity/health is to madness/sickness. But if antireligion, for its self-representation, cannot dispense with the religious, what role does that leave to sanity in literary creation?

Gabriele D'Annunzio,

La vergine Or sola"

Madame Gervaisais is a novel at the edges of naturalism and on its way to symbolism and decadence; it has indeed been remarked that the apotheosis of Madame Gervaisais is Huysmans's A reborns, a connec¬ tion readily perceptible in many of the novel's purple descriptions, for example, the fascination with the various marbles of the Roman churches (72).43 The explicit and collusive intersection of medical and literary discourse championed by naturalism is destabilized in the Goncourts' last novel by the implicit assumption of the codes of mysticism in the form of a "return of the repressed." A similar mechanism is at work in Gabriele D'Annunzio's early naturalistic writings, a mecha¬ nism that is the seed of the valorization of pathology he will carry out a few years later in his more overtly decadent-symbolist texts. The critique of Christianity as sickness such as the one developed by Nietszche in The Anti-Christ (1888) is explicitly embraced yet implic¬ itly critiqued in "La vergine Orsola." As Valesio puts it, "D'Annunzio and Nietszche explain, (con)fuse, and struggle with one another in turn."44 But the religious element in "La vergine Orsola" appears to be much more than the return of the repressed which it was in Madame Gervaisais. If in the Goncourts' last novel religion was, as it were, an 42. Schor, Breaking the Chain, 130. 43. Fumaroli, Preface, 63. 44. Paolo Valesio, Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark Flame, trans. Marilyn Migiel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 46-

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excuse to write about a pathology, the contrary is the case in D'An¬ nunzio's short story. Here, the pathologizing surface is a signifier that continuously refers the reader to a religious or sacred subtext. The fiction of Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) is an eloquent ar¬ ticulation of the complexities inherent in the literary representation of women at the European turn of the century. The models of feminine mimesis present in his work owe much to the paradigms afforded by the discourse of hysteria, with its rich repertory of images so inspiring to naturalism and decadence alike. But another relevant model, insep¬ arable from the neurotic, is that of the language and metaphors of ex¬ treme forms of religiosity, usually portrayed as the prerogative of women. "La vergine Orsola" provides a fully developed example of the inseparability of these two discursive models. On the one hand, D'Annunzio's work can be seen as a self-conscious expression of the iconography of misogyny so popular at his time. His feminine charac¬ ters span the gamut of physical and moral degeneracy,- they are domi¬ nated by a diseased reproductive system, mad, prostitutes, sadists, and so on. On the other hand, his representation of women is always com¬ plex rather than reductive, curiously probing rather than superficial, and it is therefore central to the aesthetics of the European turn of the century. The first two of the Novelle della Pescara, more specifically, deal with the mimetic problems of representing the female body as the place of the "religious" and femininity as a "symptom of sainthood." Thus, the intertwined discourses of mysticism and hysteria necessarily become in these stories an indispensable subtext. Le novelle della Pescara (1902), a collection of short stories set in Abruzzo and consisting of the more or less revised versions of texts previously published in the collections 11 libro delle vergini (1884) and San Pantaleone (1886), constitutes a distinctive chapter in the history of D'Annunzio's copious literary production. Usually described, some¬ what loosely, as examples of verismo, these short stories nevertheless already subtly display some of the features that soon were to safely establish D'Annunzio's writings at the pinnacle of the Italian and Eu¬ ropean decadence; thus, they constitute an essential reference for read¬ ing some of his later texts. The ties between Italian verismo and French naturalism are numerous and too well known to be reiterated here, and yet the different sociopolitical situations of the two neighboring coun¬ tries produced some basic deviations as well. Veristic prose, for ex¬ ample, typically unfolds in remote provincial settings. Thus, whereas the Goncourts set their novels among the exploited of the industrial¬ ized French capital [Madame Gervaisais is the only one of their novels not to be set in Paris), Giovanni Verga, the undisputed master of Italian

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verismo, places his most famous narrations in the economically back¬ ward Sicily, his home region. Like Verga, D'Annunzio happened to come from one of the more primitive regions of Italy, Abruzzo, isolated by the Apennines from the surrounding territories. In addition to considerable economic disadvan¬ tages (in contrast to the progressive industrialization of the peninsula, agriculture and sheepherding provided sustenance in Abruzzo), this ge¬ ographical position brought about severe cultural isolation—the main factor in the preservation of ancient Abruzzese rites and customs. In contrast to Verga's interest in the economic and social predicament of his people (not to be confused with a formal political agenda on the part of the conservative Sicilian novelist), it is precisely this exotic cultural aspect that D'Annunzio chose to emphasize in his early nar¬ rative work. Abruzzo for Gabriele D'Annunzio, like Rome for the Goncourt broth¬ ers, became the quasi-Oriental geography of the primitive, the abso¬ lute Other with respect to the high culture of Rome to which the young dandy strove to accede. It is a fantastic location, suspended outside measurable time and space, as was to become particularly clear in La figlia di lorio, to which the author explicitly refused to give any specific historical placement by setting it "in the land of Abruzzi, many years ago." It is also alluded to in the hagiographic-sounding titles of "La vergine Orsola" and "La vergine Anna." Abruzzo is represented as a land whose people live under the implacable, millenarian laws of a syncretic religion, an amalgam of superstition, paganism, and Christi¬ anity. The predominance of a sacred element is the abject that at once fascinates and repels in many of these stories, including La figlia di lorio. The sacer, in its etymologically dual significance, is the ambig¬ uous place of transgression, that which cannot be touched without soil¬ ing or being soiled.45 It is the privileged space for the manifestation of the exceptional, the abnormal—hence D'Annunzio's preoccupation with sex, violence, folly, disease, and death. Once the sphere of the sacred is entered, the inescapable horror of these processes makes the violation of the untouchable clearly—and didactically—visible on the human body. But this intimate commerce with the sacred (using the word in its widest sense) is what detaches Le novelle della Pescara from strictly veristic mimetic concerns. D'Annunzio's early experi¬ ments with the literary treatment of the supernatural, although they proceed with a mildly naturalistic quasi scientism and an even milder attempted objectivity, are nevertheless excessive with respect to the 45. Roger Caillois, L’homme et le sacre (Paris: Leroux, 1939)/ 40.

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naturalistic agenda. The particular "slice of life" he chooses to depict is not quite cut out of the intended mimesis of verismo. It breaks the measures imposed by realistic representational poetics by looking too hard, becoming too involved, infiltrating too deep into the forbidden, for the sacred is forbidden to the characters but also, in a way, to the naturalistic writer. It is thus that the texts of Le novelle della Pescara transgress or go beyond the self-imposed veristic code of limitations, and the subject of religion will be approached with sufficient freedom by Gabriele D'Annunzio only after he abandons this restrictive code with La figlia di Iorio. The first two stories in Le novelle della Pescara, both longer than most of the others, are also linked by symmetrical titles: "La vergine Orsola," the story of virginity lost through religion, and "La vergine Anna," the inverse story of a virginity preserved through that same religion. In both stories virginity is the metonymy for a lack of sexual intercourse that is posited as the root of the virgins' psychological in¬ stability—following medical warnings from Hippocrates to Lombroso. "La vergine Anna" (previously published as "Annali di Anna" in San Pantaleone, 1886) describes a curious instance of mystical folly. Al¬ ready advanced in years, Anna is an idiotic epileptic. Most likely, she is a hysteric, for her first attack of "mal caduco," epilepsy (described at least since Hippocrates's time as "the sacred disease" and by Nietszche as the state "most highly desired and designated by the highest names" in Christianity),46 takes place, significantly, when she sees the corpse of her pregnant mother. Anna later enters a convent as a lay sister, and there, her mutism and catalepsy, hysterical symptoms par excellence, are taken for mystical ecstasies by the other nuns. The nuns also mistake her idiocy for a proof of martyrdom, her pathological glossolalia for a gift of the Holy Spirit, and her disease for sure sainthood. The deception of woman as a producer of meaning turns the convent (a feminine topography not unlike Charcot's Salpetriere) into a privi¬ leged location for the full manifestation of female pathology. This as¬ sociation is reinforced by the tradition of "epidemics" of demoniac possession which have overtaken convents throughout history. In the convent Anna's attacks increase in number and intensity (the reader wonders whether the nuns are also for Anna the traumatic signifiers of dead wombs, whose resemblance to Anna's mother exacerbates her suf¬ fering). Anna's symptoms worsen even as a precise, transcendent mean¬ ing is attributed to them: they are holy, literal symptoms of sainthood. 46. Nietzsche, Twilight, 131. Gabriele D'Annunzio, "La vergine Anna," in Le novelle della Pescara (Milan: Treves, 1912), 94.

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As soon as Anna enters the convent, bearing the frightening halo of her difference, “a sort of sacred horror began to spread, as if through the presence of some occult power, as if through the imminence of some supernatural event/747 The religious component in these stories is never free of an ominous dimension, drawn from its morbid and pathological nature, certainly, but in contrast to the Goncourts7 overt and self-confident, even arrogant antireligiousness, D'Annunzio's texts are often in awe before the epiphany of the sacred, never ceasing to take it seriously. The text seems more aware of an inescapable contam¬ ination by the sacred of the literary, more self-conscious that the nat¬ uralist writer's disavowal of religious faith is not sufficient for the achievement of a scientific or even just a plausible objectivity. But the most sustained use of religious metaphors and analogies in Le novelle della Pescara takes place in the first story, "La vergine Orsola," previously published in II libro delle vergini (1884), with the title "Le vergini." The chaste protagonist is a sick woman who, together with her sister Camilla, has dedicated her virginity to Christ, described as the heavenly Bridegroom, and to Jesus' marriage bed.48 As she slowly recovers from an almost fatal illness, Orsola becomes progressively more aware of her own beauty and sexual curiosity; she begins flirting with an officer, Marcello, with whom she exchanges amorous letters through the help of a procurer named Lindoro. The latter, however, turns out to be a brutal man who takes advantage of his vicarious in¬ timacy with Orsola to rape her. When she discovers that she is pregnant (a state that in the case of unmarried women she associates with death, [69]), Orsola goes to a mountain healer to have an abortion. Immedi¬ ately she starts hemorrhaging from the mysterious abortifacient potion and bleeds to death upon her return to Pescara, while a blind old man is beating her with a stick, having mistaken her for a dog (the original description of the protagonist's death in the 1884 version of the story was so gruesome that D'Annunzio toned it down somewhat in the 1902 revision). The pain Orsola experiences has destroyed her linguistic abil¬ ities, and her regression to groans and cries metamorphoses her into a speechless animal. If "La vergine Anna" is aimed at subverting the tradition of mystical ecstasy by diagnosing it as nothing but a symptom of hysteria (and an organic one at that), "La vergine Orsola" develops a more complex rep¬ resentation of religion. Although in general I agree with Barbara Spackman's assertion that in Le novelle della Pescara "D'Annunzio employs

47. D'Annunzio, "La vergine Anna," 155. 48. Gabriele D'Annunzio, "La vergine Orsola," in Le Novelle della Pescara, 15.

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a rhetoric of sickness [akin to Nietszche's in The Anti-Christ, Spackman rightly notes] in order to critique Christianity,"49 still the am¬ bivalence of "La vergine Orsola" requires that this statement be complemented by its opposite. Christianity, it seems to me, is used in this story to critique the naturalistic-positivistic rhetoric of sickness (in anticipation of the similar, yet more obvious critique that D'An¬ nunzio will display in his decadent texts). For "La vergine Orsola" is not only the story of a hysteric, as was the case with "La vergine Anna," but also a "hysterical" text. It is as if the text itself had caught the disease, begun to exhibit its symp¬ toms.50 A stylistic example of this hysterization of the story is a certain narrative exaggeration or incontinence, as in the description of Orsola's death. More generally, in the text as in the figure of its protagonist, language precipitates from the realm of the signifier onto that of the body, concealing or reducing the essential heterogeneity of words and organism. Orsola's body in this way becomes the theater for the text's own hysterical performance, its articulation of the relationship among sexuality, disease, and religion.51 The articulation of hysteria in this story, then, is achieved not so much through a diagnostic representa¬ tion of the protagonist (as was the case with "La vergine Anna") as through textual strategies borrowed from the models of hysteria. This effect is obtained, to give another example, through a language-tumedbody, which, although it is aimed at describing a diseased feminine desire, nevertheless hovers with a self-conscious (and perhaps even a self-complacent) uncertainty between the experience of pleasure and that of pain (a trait characteristic of the hysteric's experience), and to¬ gether with its protagonist, the text itself balances on the undecidable frontier between religious ecstasy and hysterical conversion. While the virginal Camilla's chaste search for penitence leads her to the delights of nightly mystical ecstasies (as Nietzsche negatively .puts it, "The re¬ quirement of chastity increases the vehemence and inward intensity of the religious instinct—it renders the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful"),52 the exact opposite is the fate of her sister Orsola,

49. Spackman, Decadent Genealogies, 115. 50. Peter Brooks establishes an analogous parallel in modern narratives in general, which "appear to produce a semioticization of the body which is matched by a somati¬ zation of story: a claim that the body must be a source and a locus of meanings, and that stories cannot be told without making the body a prime vehicle of narrative significations" (Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], xii). 51. I am alluding here to the definition of the hysterical symptom given by DavidMenard, Hysteria, 114. 52. Nietzsche, Twilight, 133.

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whose quest for sexual satisfaction eventuates in a degraded and painful death. The scenario of the short story becomes one with the scenario! s) of the protagonist's body. The various physical and psychic pains and pleasures Orsola undergoes—often simultaneously—remain nameless, incomprehensible, intangible (and therefore inviolate| events until they can find a meaning in their encounter with certain discourses (the dis¬ courses of hysterical nymphomania and mystical eroticism], and with certain social/symbolic practices and their transgression (above all, feminine chastity, procured abortion, and rape]. But as Orsola passes from her former mysticism to her new erotic and hysterized persona, or from the saintly to the symptomatic, her violations entail a religious profanation in atonement for which the textual responsibility is to de¬ stroy the protagonist. Her death is represented as a sacrifice: "The vi¬ olated bride of the Lord," lies in a puddle of "blood of sin" at the feet of an old man who is described as "the horrendous monster," a figure of Moloch who unwittingly beats her as she dies (85). Orsola's death as well as her initial malady, typhus, are described in great detail, with an obviously naturalistic touch that turns disease into a cognitive instrument—of the feminine, of the primitive, of the reli¬ gious—and places the marginal at the center of narration. But even as it makes abundant use of a naturalistic aesthetics, "La vergine Orsola" displays a religious intertext that declares the positivistic paradigms insufficient for the poetic representation of the sacred. The text is clearly fascinated by the way in which Orsola's illness is both physical and spiritual, an illness that can be read as a perversion of the mystical topos, common among women mystics, of the illness that brings about conversion or visions (the best known of these being Saint Teresa of Avila's). As is usually the case in D'Annunzio's work, the illness of the body is mirrored by an illness of the mind (or perhaps of the soul), for the mechanism of conversion (psychological, literary, religious) breaks down these dualistic principles. As a hysterized text, La vergine Or¬ sola"—intended as both the protagonist of the short story and the short story itself—shows how "the hysterical body thinks. 53 So, when Or¬ sola's physical strength returns, her unconscious and erotic self emerges triumphantly as the now-unchallenged alternative to her pre¬ ceding chastity, and this emergence is significantly aided by Orsola's frequent use of a mirror, described by her pious sister as "the devil's instrument" (29). The fertile Orsola is described almost as giving birth to her new self out of the remnants of her typhus: "Out of the conva53. David-Menard, Hysteria, 12.

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lescent's intense desire to live and feel alive, out of all this, slowly, almost as if in a second birth, a better creature was rising" (13-14). In her fecundity, Orsola is true to her semantically laden name, Orsola dell'Arca (in the earlier version of the story her name was simply Giuliana). An area is a box, a coffer (among other things, a facile Freud¬ ian symbol of femininity), and it resonates with allusions to the Ark of the Covenant and Noah's Ark.54 Likewise, Orsola is defined by what she physically contains, her uterus hysterized or pregnant—first with her new self, later with the procurer's offspring. As in many late nine¬ teenth-century texts, including Madame Gervaisais, the religion de¬ picted is cruel. It is clearly so in the description of the virgins' pedagogical methods, which instill in their pupils frightening images of ambiguous saints and an agonizing, revenge-seeking Nazarene (1516). Religion destroys all "natural" family ties and provides a powerful instrument for the repression of "natural" instincts. The two sisters' blood ties are replaced by the religious bond, so that they become co¬ religionists rather than sisters (21-22). Therefore, religion is exploited by the naturalistic representation of the pathological in order to define and to name the morbid manifestations of the heroine, although in "La vergine Orsola" (unlike Madame Gervaisais) the sexual element is more self-conscious and unveiled, finally manifesting itself unequivo¬ cally in the protagonist's pregnant womb. From the very beginning of the text, disease is dependent for its rep¬ resentation on religious discourse, its dependence a complement to Nietzsche's statement that "Christianity needs sickness."55 The nar¬ rative starts around Orsola's deathbed, where she is being administered the last rites. Her decaying body is minutely described, surrounded by sacred icons resembling pagan images (the Virgin of Loreto, a Black Madonna, looks like "a barbaric idol" [3]) and tended by a Mary Mag¬ dalene or Thais figure (so dear to the decadent imagination, and central to the representational poetics of La figlia di I oho), Rosa Catena, the penitent whore,* it is she who is responsible for reawakening Orsola's sexual self-consciousness by making a suggestive remark about her de¬ sirability (26). Throughout this first chapter, the description of Orsola's physical symptoms is interspersed at regular intervals with Latin quo¬ tations from the liturgy of the last rites, which rhythmically and evoc¬ atively stress and aestheticize the otherwise repugnant representation 54. Although it is somewhat archaic, the term area appears in D'Annunzio's work to describe an everyday object, as for example in La figlia di Iorio, where it significantly refers to the nuptial coffers. D'Annunzio, La figlia di Iorio (Milan: Mondadori, 1980), 39, 40, 72, 78, 159. 55. Nietzsche, Twilight, 167.

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of the protagonist's pathology. Through the scanning activity of liturgy and through her appropriation by God, Orsola's suffering becomes a passio and she is naturally identified with Jesus. She is "the Lord's anointed" (7), literally "the Christ." (She is like Christ a teacher, and her pupils are referred to as her disciples.) Conversely, Christ, in the shape of the Eucharist, is "the virginal host" (5), like Orsola, the object of a sacrifice, the text's expiatory victim. As the language of the last rites follows her in her physical malady, so also the larger cycle of the liturgical year accompanies and even encourages Orsola's sexual awakening and violation—as well as the narrative development. During the Christmas novena she starts to feel obsessively and metaphorically hungry,- on the Sunday of Lazarus she first sees her officer, Marcello,- during the celebrations of Palm Sunday they touch for the first time; during Holy Week she falls in love with Marcello and is raped by Lindoro,- she discovers that she is pregnant on Pentecost, and it is on the day of the Corpus Domini that she drinks the abortifacient potion and dies. The cycles of sexuality are not simply mirrored by the liturgical calendar; they are downright steeped in it, as the sensuality of the Christian Passion celebration—the purple cloths on the crucifixes, the high, white grass around the sepulchers, the po¬ tent smell of flowers and resin—protects and encourages Orsola's own passion (8-22). Thanks to the fusion of veristic and symbolist elements, Orsola takes on the complex function of a character rich in archetypal ele¬ ments. As a signifier, she is quintessentially feminine (because her sexuality is reawakened by her malady, and it is therefore sick) and re¬ ligious (because she has consecrated herself to a "chaste" marriage with Jesus), manifesting herself multifariously as "the Lord's anointed," a Christ figure (7), Christ's bride (untouched first, then vi¬ olated [30, 85]), a martyr ([12, 15] anticipating D'Annunzio's Martyre de Saint Sebastien), the Virgin (23, 33), and when she is pregnant, as Saint Elizabeth (66). There is a direct causal link between the profa¬ nation of Orsola's body—the rape and the drinking of the abortifacient potion—and her death. The physical violation of the sacred and un¬ touchable body (Orsola is a bride of Christ) engenders disastrous con¬ sequences that, in the patriarchal society that is the context of this story, a "regular" rape would not, and the lethal abortion is the re¬ venge of the occult powers that thus reestablish their authority.56 56. Pertinent discussion of the representation of rape in literary texts can be found in Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, Rape and Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). At this point, I won't get into the disturbing phrase that describes Orsola's reaction to her rape as "a great pleasure mixed with pain" (59).

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(This enforcement of justice, however, is quite distant from a moral¬ izing or bleeding-heart pro- or antiabortion rhetoric: it is not in the name of the woman or of the fetus, but rather because of the violation that textual justice must be carried out.) D'Annunzio's representation of sacrality implies at all times an erotic as well as a violent element. Orsola's sister, Camilla, consecrated like Orsola to Jesus, murmurs and sighs in bed during her frequent and "enthusiastic" mystical dreams, looking like "the corpse of a martyr, into which the spirit of God descended" (60-61). And at the same time that Camilla is having mystical intercourse with her God, who de¬ scends into her, dentro, in the form of the spirit, the guilt-ridden Or¬ sola, lying in the same bed, has similar commerce with the demon of her sin: "She fell under the incubus/nightmare of her sin, crossing her arms over her breasts so as to defend herself from the demons" (62). Orsola's incubo is both the nightmare of her punishment (rape as ret¬ ribution for her quest for erotic pleasure at the expense of her love of God) and the incubus so popular in fin-de-siecle literature, which by lying with the consecrated woman cuckolds Jesus, who is thus "the divine betrayed Bridegroom" (62). The incubus is announced by Orso¬ la's "diabolical temptation" (33) and preceded in Orsola's bed, on Or¬ sola's body, by a masculine specter engendered by her fantasies: "She . . . threw herself on the bed almost fainting, deathly pale, under the ghost of a man" (35). Through the proximity of the two virgins' rela¬ tions with their respective "lovers" (or invading agencies), the text thematizes the continuity between mysticism and demonic possession which figures so prominently in the history of the relationship between hysteria and the supernatural. The semioticization of the body in hys¬ teria, Orsola's illness being related to supematuralness, corresponds in this passage to the somatization of religion, Camilla's mysticism un¬ folding itself on her virginal and eroticized body. The incubus that penetrates Orsola, like the devil of witch-hunts and the spirit of mysticism, is the invading agency that "hysterizes" her body in much the same way as the uterus of hysteria and the re¬ pressed of psychoanalysis, despite inevitable changes in terminology and definition. This penetration is so powerful as to reshape Orsola's entire aesthetic perception of religion. She is ambushed by desire even in the most godly places. On Palm Sunday, "in the mystical dusk, in that great mass of Christian men and women, little erotic sparks were set off and spread out" (37). The Christian rites involve for Orsola a sexually exciting physical proximity. Religious art itself is not im¬ mune to this carnal contamination, becoming another go-between for Orsola's amorous encounter and laying its "traps" everywhere and

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anytime, so that "the Saints on the walls, the Madonnas, the naked crucified Christs, the small and misshapen wax figurines, all the things around her, took on in her eyes impure appearances. From all things impurity emanated and breathed on her body, stiflingly" (34— 35).

The eminent representability of Christianity (that which makes Christ's birth and death, the most "bodily prominent" moments, such privileged iconographic motifs in Christian art) turns itself against its own ideals of chastity, as the sensuousness of its art is all too easily metamorphosed by the imagination to compromise the purity of its virgins. For although Orsola is fearfully conscious of her sacrilege, nonetheless, "she then sank into a kind of dream where the livid figure of the dead Jesus and the crash of scourgings and the quivering of her aroused flesh and the heavy smell of the flowers and the breath of that blond man all mingled together in an ambiguous sensation of pain and pleasure" (40). The figure of the dead Christ, such an essential element of the aesthetic as well as of the metaphysical dimension of the Chris¬ tian ritual, is the solid link in the naturalistic and, especially, in the decadent or symbolist chain of eroticism, art, and disease—or suffering, Passio Christi, and hysterica passio—which in this passage takes the dubious form of a sexual betrayal of the dead Bridegroom which hovers ambiguously between sadism and masochism. The hysterical uncer¬ tainty between pleasure and pain, operative both in the discursive ob¬ ject of the naturalistic critique—the feminine, the religious—and in naturalistic discourse itself, surfaces once again in the naturalistic cri¬ tique of religious experience, to acknowledge not just the operations of the pathological, but also the emergence of occult, subterranean pow¬ ers, the mysterious ancient rites of the "land of Abruzzi." Orsola's sacrilegious betrayal of her Bridegroom of many years is ma¬ terialized in her epistolary production, revealing what peculiarly deconstructive form of hermeneutics informs her writing. In this passage, just at the center of the story, is an acute thematization of the rela¬ tionship between mystical and erotic discourse, complicated by the hysteria of the latter. The letters Orsola composes for Marcello are an explicit deallegorization of psalms such as the Song of Songs (that un¬ abashedly erotic text of the Judeo-Christian tradition which has been a major inspiration for love mysticism), as well as of other mystical love books: "The entire thesaurus of a devout woman's psalmistic apos¬ trophes . . . poured onto the paper-That great sediment of mystical lyricism accumulated through the reading of prayer books over so many years of faithfulness to the Heavenly Bridegroom, now, stirred by earthly love, rose up confusedly and assumed new flavors of profanity"

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(41-42). The rest of the passage describes in some detail the literary metamorphosis that accompanies the virgin's transformation of her mystical love into an earthly one, of her prayers into sensual sighs, of the offerings of her soul into offerings of her body, converting the mys¬ tical tradition of deciphering every sexual metaphor as an intervention of the divine through the only apparently sexualized/eroticized body: "Her tearful implorations to Jesus changed into hopeful sighs for the pleasures of non-ethereal embraces" (42). Orsola's metaphors are an upside-down mirror of those employed by women mystics who, as Car¬ oline Walker Bynum explains, "derived their basic symbols (including sexual ones) from such ordinary biological and social experiences as giving birth, lactating, suffering, and preparing and distributing food"— and, I must add, from sexual intercourse.57 The opposite is true for Orsola, who derives her basic symbols, including erotic ones, from re¬ ligious language. At the thematic level, the sacred text is "profaned" by Orsola, it is corrupted by an abuse of its own suggestive metaphors; the figural or allegorical and rigorously asexual interpretation of the psalms is turned back into the literal, is untroped by Orsola during her "self-forgetful," "maniac" composition (41), so as to be used to capti¬ vate and seduce her beloved. Spiritual and metaphorical eroticism can be rewritten with a surprising facility into a pandering text, a galeotto, so that her transformation explicitly allegorizes the historical move from mysticism to eroticism described by Michel de Certeau: "Since the thirteenth century ... a gradual religious demythification seems to be accompanied by a progressive mythification of love. The One has changed its site. It is no longer God but the other and, in a masculine literature, woman. In place of the divine word (which also had a phys¬ ical nature and value), the loved body (which is no less spiritual and symbolic, in erotic practice) is substituted."58 The physicality of the divine word is obvious in its effects on Cam¬ illa's jouissant flesh, and the symbolic nature of Marcello's body be¬ comes explicit in Orsola's letters. But if we attempt to identify an 57. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 6. Many other critics have explored these sources. D'Annunzio delves into the sensuality inherent in mystical discourse in Le vergini delle rocce, originally published in 1895 (Milan: Mondadori, 1986), in which the protagonist speaks, for example, of Saint Claire as being lit up by her love for Saint Francis (133), and he claims to love Saint Catherine for her bumingly passionate personality ("she is like a rose of fire," on whose book grass flames up "as if on the brink of a furnace" [118]), for her pleasurable ecstatic relationship with God and the Eucharist, and for the sharpness of her senses, which makes her delicate nostrils "pal¬ pitate and dilate" (141). 58. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen¬ turies, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4.

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unequivocally negative criticism of mystical discourse in D'Annun¬ zio's text, we will be disillusioned. The short story does not allow its reader to forget that the protagonist is a hysteric prone to somatiza¬ tion, to perversely turning words into flesh. Her dealings with writing are physical to the point of corporealization. Thus we leam that the purplish ink of Marcello's love letters imprints itself on Orsola's breast. Not just any body part, these are erotic as well as maternal breasts, significantly close to the heart and, like woman herself, lit¬ erally "impressionable"—"like a gentle tattoo of love, from which she derived pleasure" (41). This tattoo on Orsola's breast is in every sense a linguistic signifier that calls attention to the "woman-astext" nature of the protagonist even as it eroticizes and, in so doing, hysterizes a body previously forbidden because belonging to the cor¬ pus mysticum.59 The tattoolike signs are a self-reflective form of hys¬ terical conversion whereby the body speaks the language of love and illness and the text speaks the body (David-Menard points out that Freud referred to hysterical conversion as "a transformation, a trans¬ position, and more clearly still a transcription").60 But this amorous stigmatization, which reduces the formerly sacred virgin to a soiled and not altogether willing lover of the potent, fertile incubus, is also a diabolical stigmatization, the physical sign of a pact with the devil. For we are told that Marcello's letters, which induce in Orsola "faint¬ ing fits of tenderness" and "shivers of ill-contained pleasure" (so that, in the tradition of Barthes's "text of pleasure," they are an anagram of the erotic body), are also full of "eternal fire" (137).61 Fire is a priv¬ ileged symbol of passionate love, but the adjective "eternal" perverts this symbolism of pleasure by giving it supernatural connotations that are far from celestial. Eternal fire is the fire of hell, of the place of sin and punishment to which Orsola is damning herself. The agency invading her body is no longer the Spirit, or even typhus or hysteria, but a demon, an incubus that by inscribing her with his word legibly claims her as his own. From this point on, Orsola's des¬ tiny is sealed. 59. Peter Brooks notes that ''signing or marking the body signifies its passage into writing, its becoming a literary body, and generally also a narrative body, in that the inscription of the sign depends on and produces a story' (Body Work, 3). I am also re¬ minded in this passage of the phenomenon of "dermographism so fascinating to nine¬ teenth-century hysteria specialists, and analyzed by Beizer in Ventriloquized Bodies, 2029: when a doctor traced letters on the skin of certain hysterics, the letters would appear raised and red. 60. David-Menard, Hysteria, 64. 61. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 17-

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Postscript: Symptoms of Horror (Julia Kristeva) In "Stabat Mater" Julia Kristeva claims that through the figure of the Virgin Mary Christianity reabsorbs femininity in "the Maternal," that "the most intense revelation of God, which occurs in mysticism, is given only to a person who assumes himself as 'maternal/ "62 Kristeva goes on: "Freedom with respect to the maternal territory then becomes the pedestal upon which love of God is erected. As a consequence, mystics, those 'happy Schrebers' (Sollers) throw a bizarre light on the psychotic sore of modernity: it appears as the incapability of contem¬ porary codes to tame the maternal, that is, primary narcissism."63 In their "bizarre" yet "enlightening" assumption of the maternal, of the quintessentially feminine, Christian mystics have succeeded where modernity, according to Kristeva, now fails, in taming the pre- or per¬ haps even antisymbolic residue of the maternal body, the semiotic drive that is the object of primary repression and which linguistic com¬ munication cannot recover.64 Although Julia Kristeva's collection Histoires d’amour (Tales of Love, 1983), in which the essay "Stabat Mater" can be found, consti¬ tutes her most direct contribution to the study of mysticism, it is in Pouvoirs de Phorreur (Powers of Horror, 1980), subtitled An Essay on Abjection, that the problem of pleasure and pain in its relation to femininity and mysticism is more fully developed.65 Neither subject 62. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater/7 in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 235. In “Stabat Mater," according to Diane Jonte-Pace, Kristeva posits that in Christianity "woman and religion are structurally, thematically, and logically linked. She reveals a maternal substratum to the paternal Christian dis¬ course, and hints at an association of motherhood, religion, and death" (Jonte-Pace, “Sit¬ uating Kristeva Differently: Psychoanalytic Readings of Woman and Religion/7 in Body/ Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Woman, and Psychoanalysis, ed. David Crownfield [Al¬ bany: State University of New York Press, 1992], 9). 63. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater/7 235. * 64. Kristeva has developed the notion of the “semiotic/7 in contrast to Lacan's symbolic order of language, in order to refer to the contributions of sexual drives to signification (contributions that predate the distinction between subject and object and therefore defy social and symbolic regulation). According to Kristeva, it is in the privileged domains of madness, holiness, and poetry that the semiotic (repressed and tied to the maternal space and hence to “the feminine") breaks through and ruptures the (paternal and phallic) sym¬ bolic order of language, thus exploding within the text itself as the traces, disruptions, silences of an excessive and of course transgressive jouissance. 65. According to Toril Moi, “The central project of Histoires d’amour is to present a psychoanalytical discourse as a discourse of love (as opposed to desire), one that situates itself in the space previously filled by religion77 (Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 238). In Tales of Love, several chapters deal with mys¬ tical experience. “A Holy Madness: She and He" (83-100) is a psychoanalytic reflection

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nor object, the abject as it is defined by Kristeva, accompanies every religious construction. Indeed, the different ways of structuring the abject determine the different types of the sacred. As taint and pol¬ lution characterize paganism and exclusion and taboo dominate monotheism, so sin, the result of the internalization and permanence of the abject, is central to Christianity. The history of religion, ac¬ cording to Kristeva, consists in the different modalities of purification of the abject, the impure. At the same time, abjection, or horror, is what attests to the weakness of the symbolic order with respect to the threatening and dispersive nature of the semiotic drives, which it is impossible for the symbolic to obliterate or even to exclude. The abject is "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not re¬ spect borders, positions, rules" (Powers, 4); "the abject... a jetti¬ soned object, is radically excluded and draws me towards the place where meaning collapses" (2). Examples of the undecidability of the abject can take such diverse shapes as the skin on the surface of boiled milk, which is both inside and outside the milk, and the corpse, which is both human and not human at once, and thus the culmination of the abject. Psychoanalytically, abjection is the revul¬ sion, or the horror, experienced by the subject when it is confronted with the failure of the subject/object division to express the subject's bodily boundaries and corporeality adequately. And the abject, being the "object" of primary repression, is the mother's body—hence a connection with "Stabat Mater" and Diane Jonte-Pace s assertion that, in Kristeva's work, "the meaning of woman and the meaning of religion are interlocking pieces of a single structural unit."66 For al¬ though it is the rejection of unclean and socially unacceptable cor¬ poreal modes which allows the constitution of the speaking subject, allows its entrance, that is, into the symbolic, the unclean and the improper can never be excluded in any final way. Thus, their disrup¬ tive recurrence must be continuously harnessed if the subject is to preserve its identity within the symbolic order of language. ^A/ith the awareness of the presence of these semiotic drives, the subject expe¬ riences abjection, a fear of dissolution and regression to the unceron the Song of Songs which sees in it an allegory of the constitution of the subject; "Ego affectus est. Bernard of Clairvaux: Affect, Desire, Love" (151-69) deals with Saint Bernard s ambiguous and ambivalent conception of love, or affect, as a passionate tension, a holy violence" toward the Other (the ideal, God), striving to overcome the necessary and in¬ evitable resistance of the flesh; "A Pure Silence: The Perfection of Jeanne Guyon" (197317) tells the story of the controversial quietist Madame Guyon (1648-1717), of the jouissance she experienced while emptying her self in the transport toward the ideal, and of the pleasure she felt in the writing of it. 66. Jonte-Pace, "Situating Kristeva," 12.

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tainty and shapelessness out of which the subject was first constituted—hence the relation of the abject to the death drive, to its own undoing. The disgust entailed by the experience of abjection leads to the im¬ possible desire, on the part of the subject, to transcend the boundaries of the body and its cycles (abjection manifests itself primarily in rela¬ tion to food, waste, and sexual difference), for the materiality of the body is perceived as essentially impure and defiling. If poetry, together with literature and the arts, sublimates abjection, the entrance into the symbolic represses it, and religion, with a characteristically different move, displaces it. Indeed religion finds a certain jouissance (the word Kristeva uses to describe the effects of the transgressive practices of madness, religious ecstasy, and art) under the guise of religious ecstasy in the sensations caused by abjection, that is, by the eruption and over¬ flow of the semiotic over the boundaries of the symbolic: "Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness Elizabeth of Hungary who Though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing herself' " (Powers, 5, quoting Saint Francis of Sales). Kristeva describes Christian mysti¬ cism as one of the most important modalities of the abject. Because it is founded on exclusion rather than on desire, the existence marked by the abject distinguishes itself from neurosis as well as psychosis, and its psychic dynamic goes so far as to question the validity of the notion of the unconscious by casting doubt on the permeable and uncertain distinctions between the Self and the Other, the Subject and the Object, the Inside and the Outside, and therefore on the very distinction be¬ tween Conscious and Unconscious. The abject is thus for Kristeva the distinctive mark of "borderline" discourses and behaviors: "Since they make the conscious/unconscious distinction irrelevant, borderline sub¬ jects and their speech constitute propitious ground for. a sublimating discourse ('aesthetic' or 'mystical,' etc.), rather than a scientific or a rationalistic one" (Powers, 7). With the adjective "sublimatory" Kris¬ teva describes a discursivity that is alien to the "rationalistic" one and not the dynamic of sublimation with which Freud explains away reli¬ gious behavior and which Beauvoir also criticizes. Through an analysis based on the (maternal) semiotic organization, Kristeva goes beyond the paradigms of neurosis that have characterized many a psychological interpretation of the mystical experience: "In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime" (Powers, n). Unlike Beauvoir's mystics, Kristeva's are not the willing victims of the patri-

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archal order, rather, like artists and the insane, they are figures of dis¬ sent, for their discursive model is fundamentally “other." The jubilant self-abjection of the mystical subject can be demon¬ strated in uncountable examples that constitute some of the more sen¬ sational episodes of many a mystic's life. Francis of Assisi's kiss to the leper, Angela of Foligno's drinking of the water used to wash a leper's sore (these two alluded to by Kristeva herself), Catherine of Siena's drinking of a cup of pus—the significance of these actions has baffled most, converted some, and turned away many others from the work and words of the mystics. What these actions signify, however, has remained ambiguous and difficult to justify even from an orthodox be¬ liever's perspective. Kristeva has talked of jouissance, as anyone fa¬ miliar with French criticism might expect, for in abjection the object (of the subject's desire) falls into the "real" (which, with the symbolic and the imaginary, is one of Lacan's three orders regulating human life), which can be reached only through jouissance, the real being otherwise inaccessible because it stands alone as "one," neither symbolic (triadic) nor imaginary (dyadic): "It follows that jouissance alone causes the ab¬ ject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion" [Powers, 9). Kristeva explains the prerequisite of abjection and one of the foun¬ dations of mysticism in a way that, although far from theological or¬ thodoxy, does not exclude the possibility of God's reality (as Beauvoir's argument does) but rather posits the (at least) psychic existence of God as a possible way around Lacan's "phallogocentric" "name of the fa¬ ther": "I experience abjection only if an Other settled in place and stead of what will be 'me.' Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be. A possession previous to my advent: a being-there of the symbolic that a father might or might not embody. Significance is indeed inherent in the human body" [Powers, 10). This statement can be interpreted as a characterization of the mystic's re¬ lation to her God, an alternative to the (phallic) father's anchoring point of the symbolic. The Other during mystical union cannot be reduced to either an (imaginary) phantasm "with whom I identify" or to a (sym¬ bolic) law I "incorporate"; rather, it is granted an independent reality that "precedes and possesses me." Its result is not repressive but sub¬ lime, tied to the semiotic modalities of the human body, here gendered as feminine. For just as the abject is closely related to the feminine through its dependence on the semiotic and on the maternal body, so also the Christian notion of the abject and that of femininity are

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brought together in the idea of the sinfulness of the flesh. What Kristeva strings together as "the femininity-desire-food-abjection series" is central to the Christian notion of (original) sin (Powers, 126). This series is also tied to Kristeva's other important assertion con¬ cerning the place of the body in Christianity, for if, on one hand, the permanent presence of sin within human beings renders them inher¬ ently abject, forever divided into flesh and spirit, on the other hand, through the corporealization of the W/word, through its Incarnation, corporeality itself is elevated, spiritualized. That is, even though Chris¬ tianity pushes the spiritual to its limits, still it is on Christ's body that its culmination rests, and thus an "osmosis nevertheless takes place between the spiritual and the substantial, the corporeal and the signifying" (Powers, 120). This feat, discussed from a historian's perspective by Caroline Walker Bynum, can be achieved because the Christian con¬ ception of the flesh, as Kristeva underlines, is heterogeneous, signifying according to two major modalities: the flesh is a material body, with all its avid drives, but the flesh is also a malleable body, a spiritual body immersed in the divine word.67 While the physical body is per¬ verse (because it transgresses the law), the spiritual body is "subli¬ mated," yet also inseparable from the physical: "One of the insights of Christianity, and not the least one, is to have gathered in a single move perversion and beauty as the lining and cloth of one and the same economy" (Powers, 125). This gathering together of flesh and spirit or "perversion and beauty" is most visible in the life and writings of affective mystics, Teresa of Avila being the best-known example thanks to Bernini's ambiguous sculpture of her ecstasy. This question is of course tied to the larger one concerning the relationship between body and language, between the corporeal and the symbolic (a knot that constitutes the psycho¬ analyst's principal interest in the mystical experience), and their proximity entails an ever-impending, albeit potential, transgression. Kristeva uses the story of Adam's fall to point out that between per¬ fection (that is, knowledge and, more specifically, sexual knowledge) and sin there is only one step: "Perhaps official theology does not take that step, but the mystic grants himself the fathomless depravity of doing so. That is so true that only after having sinned does the mystic topple over into holiness, and this holiness never ceases to appear to him as fringed by sin" [Powers, 126).

67. For a comparison between Kristeva's and Bynum's work, see Martha J. Reineke, " /This Is My Body': Reflections on Abjection, Anorexia, and Medieval Women Mystics/'' Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58.2 (1990): 245-65.

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In abjection, the opposition of flesh and spirit, of body and language, is finally overcome: "The mystic's familiarity with abjection is a fount of infinite jouissance" (Powers, 127). This statement must be counter¬ balanced by the close relationship Kristeva underscores between lan¬ guage and pain, which can be observed in the development of the word martireo 'I witness': "Speech addressed to the other, not sinful speech but the speech of faith, is pain: this is what locates the act of true communication, the act of avowal, within the register of persecution and victimization" (129). Of course, Kristeva remarks, we could claim that a masochist economy underlies the mystic's jouissance in abjec¬ tion (as Beauvoir repeatedly does), but if we are to claim that, she notes, we must also underline that "the Christian mystic, far from using it to the benefit of a symbolic or institutional power, displaces it indefi¬ nitely (as happens with dreams, for instance) within a discourse where the subject is resorbed (is that grace?) into communication with the Other and with others" (127). The illustrious examples adduced here are Saint Francis (and more specifically his kiss on the mouth of the lepers), and the Blessed Angela of Foligno. In the case of the mystic's self-abjection, then, the body goes from being the source of all evil to being "the requisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh and the law" (127-28). The mystic wins a privileged status within the discourses of Christianity, "for only on the fringes of mysticism, or in rare moments of Christian life, can the most subtle transgression of law, that is to say, the enunciation of sin in the presence of the One, reverberate not as a denunciation but as the glorious counterweight to the inquisitorial fate of confession" (131). From their place of subver¬ sive difference, mystics can afford to say the unsayable (which, as the etymology of the word mystic implies, is their special quest), and what may seem to the uninitiated the obstacle of ineffability becomes in their voices an unrivaled instrument of discursive freedom.

CHAPTER

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3

Decadence and Saintliness: Hagiographies or Pathographies?

Max Nordau (1849-1923), the Hungarian-born journalist and medical intellectual, gave the title "Mysticism" to the second book of his no¬ torious and symptomatic polemic Degeneration (1892). Nordau's mys¬ ticism, however, is not the Brautmystik that so fascinated Jean-Martin Charcot and the other doctors and writers discussed thus far,- rather it is that vague entity so popular in literary circles, "a state of mind in which the subject imagines that he perceives or divines unknown and inexplicable relations amongst phenomena, discerns in things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols, by which a dark power seeks to unveil or, at least, to indicate all sorts of marvels which he endeavors to guess, though generally in vain."1 Mysticism is for Nordau a symp¬ tom of fin-de-siecle degeneration (explicitly, therefore, associated with hysteria and femininity), observed most frequently in epilepsy and hys¬ terical delirium (the two being often confused in tum-of-the-century medical practice and popular imagination). Nordau also mentions in passing that Saint Teresa's and Saint Ignatius's ecstasy, or "the bliss accompanying their ecstatic visions," is associated with sexual feeling because both ecstasy and sex are characterized by "the sharp pain which accompanies nerve action in over-excited brain cells."2 Nordau's complex neuropathological explanations in Degeneration, laden with 1. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: Appleton, 1895), 45. 2. Ibid., 64.

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jargon and references to medical texts (he studied for some time with Charcot himself), lend an air of scientific plausibility to a discussion that is glaringly exaggerated if not downright untenable. Although many readers acclaimed his ideas, according to Jean Pierrot, they "merely sent most of the French writers concerned into gales of laugh¬ ter."3 Significantly dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, from whom Nordau de¬ rived many of his theories, Degeneration exaggerates Lombroso's ideas to the point of caricature, indiscriminately dismissing as degenerate— that is, as feminine and hysterical—just about all fin-de-siecle art— from the Pre-Raphaelites ("hysterical fanatic[s]"), to the symbolists (marked by "degeneracy and imbecility"), from the decadents to the naturalists ("morbid," "vulgar and even criminal").4 As literary and cul¬ tural analysis Degeneration leaves much to be desired because of its pathologizing gone awry. Still, it contributes positively to the destabi¬ lization of the unsatisfactory clinical self-definition displayed by nat¬ uralistic texts. If literary history builds a wall, albeit a porous one, between the literary currents of naturalism and decadence, Nordau in¬ terestingly lumps both under the same label, "hysteria": "All these new tendencies, realism or naturalism, 'decadentism,' neo-mysticism, and their sub-varieties, are manifestations of degeneration and hysteria, and identical with the mental stigmata which the observation of clinicists have unquestionably established as belonging to these."5 So much for the naturalist writers' self-definition as scientists and anatomists. And I would claim that the hysteria Nordau all-too quickly diagnoses in finde-siecle authors can actually be read—as a semiotic and perhaps un¬ conscious modality rather than as a psychobiographically established neurosis—between the lines of those texts that ostensibly take the hysteric as a subject from which they self-confidently purport to dis¬ tance themselves.

Antonio Fogazzaro,

11

santo and Malombra

Nordau's identification of mysticism with hysteria is problematized in many a decadent text. D'Annunzio's unconventional hagiography of Saint Sebastian as a spectacle of his martyrdom, for example, belongs to a veritable turn-of-the-century genre. Most notably, Antonio Fo¬ gazzaro (1842-1911) in Italy and Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) in 3. Pierrot, Decadent Imagination, 5 5- On Nordau's popularity, see Drinka, Birth of Neurosis, 257. 4. Nordau, Degeneration, 69, 101, 67. 5. Ibid., 43.

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France both undertook different "lives of saints." Fogazzaro's is a fic¬ tional figure (Piero/Benedetto Maironi in 11 Santo), and Huysmans's is a historical one, although not officially canonized (Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam). Other literary hagiographies of this period include Maurice Maeterlinck's Marie Magdeleine (1913) and Anatole France's Thais (1890). Although Huysmans's opulent decadence is stylistically and thematically closer to D'Annunzio's than that of his more sober Italian colleague, it is nevertheless Fogazzaro's work that needs to be explored in connection with D'Annunzio's. The varied spectrum of Italian deca¬ dent literary production demands the balancing perspective of Fogaz¬ zaro's work next to D'Annunzio's more extreme representation of femininity and the sacred. Fogazzaro's novels, spanning thirty years (from Malomhra, 1881, to Leila, 1910), were immensely popular in his lifetime. Although they are usually seen as explicit examples of Italian decadentismo, these texts can only with difficulty and tact be linked to D'Annunzio's ver¬ sion of decadence. Indeed, Paolo Rossi, a cultural historian, maintains that Fogazzaro's treatment of science in his fiction, essays, and lec¬ tures, cannot be inscribed within the cultural zone of decadent Europe. If the decadent perspective is connected to the idea of a fundamental failure of history, as well as to a radical mistrust of the work and prog¬ ress of humanity, for Fogazzaro, on the contrary, the conflicts and the tensions of the present—be they religious, philosophical, or scientific— constitute the sign of an deeper underlying unity.6 Fogazzaro did not lose faith in the panacea of positive science because he never believed that science alone could solve the problem of human salvation. Yet science, Fogazzaro concluded through an optimistic application of Dar¬ win's evolutionism to the moral progress of humanity, was not only a cognitive instrument but also a moral force tending toward the unifi¬ cation of history and capable of constructing human values. In addition to this exalted idea of what science at its best could be (if not exactly a belief in what contemporary materialistic science ac¬ tually was), Fogazzaro's faith in the potentialities of the present points to another trait that sets him apart from D'Annunzio and many of his other fin-de-siecle contemporaries, namely, the fundamentally con¬ structive role he assigns to religion in his work—and more specifically, to Catholicism in its most progressive guise. Fogazzaro's ardent, yet far from unproblematic Catholicism indelibly marks all his works, form6. Paolo Rossi, "1890-1900: Alcuni letterati italiani e la loro immagine della scienza," in Letteratura e scienza nella storia della cultuia italiana: Atti del IX Congresso A.I.S.L.L.I.: Palermo Messina Catania, 21-25 aprile 1976, ed. Vittore Branca et al. (Pa¬ lermo: Manfredi, 1978), 260.

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ing an unchanging background to the repeated staging of the conflicts of flesh and spirit, of the desire for immanent happiness and transcen¬ dent salvation, while his texts always display an awareness of the shift¬ ing and elusive roles that rationality and passion—and also reason and madness—must take in this ongoing and endless battle. A study of Antonio Fogazzaro's relations with religion and his dia¬ logue with science leads first of all to his "hagiographic" novel, 11 santo (1905), and then to his first novel, Malombia (1881), two books that also entertain intertextual relations with literary and scientific texts such as Huysmans's, Maupassant's, and Tarchetti's, but also Lombroso's and Freud's. With these intertexts in mind, the reader of Fogazzaro can begin to perceive with more clarity the complex role that the mod¬ els of madness and those of religion offer for the literary representation of the body as it escapes its own self-control—for better (in the case of the illness and sainthood of Piero Maironi, called in 11 santo "Bene¬ detto") or worse (in the case of Marina di Malombra's spiritualistic and death-dealing monomania). 11 santo and Malombia need to be read to¬ gether, inasmuch as they are the two works of Fogazzaro which deal most self-consciously with (more or less successful) experiences of tran¬ scendence; in both cases, however, the experience is marked by the traces of a psychopathology (either accepted by the text, in the case of Malombia, or disputed by it, in 11 santo). It is this trait above all else that places the two novels in the context of the late nineteenth-century imagination of the workings of hysteria as it relates to the supernatural. The relationship of Fogazzaro's texts with positivism and especially with the new science of psychiatry was notoriously ambivalent. He was an active believer in evolutionism, although he did not accept Darwin's materialistic implications, as well as in the new doctrines of the Cath¬ olic modernist movement, which attempted to apply some of the the¬ oretical renewals taking place in the field of science to the dogmas of the Catholic faith. An eloquent example of Fogazzaro's ambivalence is a speech made by Don Innocenzo (the parish priest and probably the most sympathetic figure in Malombia), who describes positivists as having only one leg and therefore as doomed to fail in their attempt to conquer and rule the world.7 Positivism is accused of one-sidedness, of ignoring, that is, the spiritual dimension as the "other leg" on which the human being's stability depends. During Fogazzaro's time, Italian professional psychiatry consisted of a group of physicians gathering around the Societa italiana di freniatria (formed in 1873), an association that was strongly committed both to the positivist experimental meth7. Antonio Fogazzaro, Malombia (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), 39°-

94

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°ds and to the conception of mental illness as a strictly organic phe¬ nomenon. Through this double commitment, the program of the society aimed at gaining scientific credibility for the new profession and at unifying it around positivism as the "creed" of modem science.8 As can be expected, this strictly organicist approach to the human psy¬ che aroused many controversies. Fogazzaro's fascinating essay "Per una nuova scienza" (For a new science), for example, clearly demonstrates its author's conversance with the most modem theories of psychology, inasmuch as it illustrates and criticizes several case histories and their theories by positivist scientists such as Charcot, Janet, Bemheim, Ambroise-Auguste Liebeault, and others. As the mere mention of these names makes clear, the phenomena under consideration in Fogazzaro's essay as exemplary of the workings of positivist science are taken from the field of psychology and, more specifically, from the study of hys¬ teria and hypnosis.9 Some of these ambiguous and sometimes extraordinary psychological phenomena make various appearances in Fogazzaro's fiction. For ex¬ ample, Piero Maironi's wife, in Piccolo mondo moderno, is an interned lunatic, who nevertheless brings Piero back to his faith and away from his adulterous love for Jeanne Dessalle through her own spectacle of suffering and faith; she also displays paranormal abilities by predicting the exact moment of her own death. In the same novel Jeanne Dessalle, in her more or less systematic refusal of and disgust for erotic relations, reminds us of Freud's (and others') controversial theories regarding the pathological disgust for sex in hysteria. Even Piero Maironi himself— in some ways, a feminine or at least a "feminized" character because of his tendency to mysticism and his pronounced nervousness—is de¬ scribed, both by a priest and by the director of his wife's asylum, as a possible neurasthenic; neurasthenia was a neurosis so similar to hys¬ teria in its wide-ranging symptomatology that the two were often in¬ distinguishable.10 And like his wife, he also displays paranormal ability when he makes his way through the unknown and dark Vatican hall¬ ways until, unaided, he finds the pope's chambers. The diagnosis of neurasthenia, to which I shall return, takes place at the end of Piccolo mondo moderno. In 11 santo, published four years later, Piero Maironi's

8. Annamaria Tagliavini, "Aspects of the History of Psychiatry in Italy in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Bynum et al., 2:179, 186. 9. Antonio Fogazzaro, "Per una nuova scienza," in Discorsi (Milan: Cogliati, 1905), 141-84. 10. George Miller Beard (1839-1883) characterized many neurotic symptoms under this heading in 1869 in New York (Goldstein, Console and Classify, 335), and neurasthenia "became all the rage in America" (Drinka, Birth of Neurosis, 84).

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physical and psychical "disturbances" will be accorded an unques¬ tionably divine origin, thus turning Piero/Benedetto into an antiD'Annunzian kind of superuomo, a leader whose powers derive from divine rather than merely human heroism. The gloomy spiritualistic tendencies of Marina di Malombra, by contrast, are finally diagnosed by her doctor as monomania (Malombra, 413), another "popular" nine¬ teenth-century form of madness, which, according to Lombroso, was a characteristic manifestation of hysteria. Lombroso's symptomatology of "monomaniacal delirium" is in fact an accurate description of Mari¬ na's behavior. There is a sharp contrast between Marina di Malombra's morbid spir¬ ituality, which sees Christianity as a keen adversary, and the religious experience of Benedetto, "the saint." Published in 1905, 11 santo is the third novel in the tetralogy that includes Fogazzaro's masterpiece, Pic¬ colo mondo antico (1895), its sequel, Piccolo mondo moderno (1901), and after "the saint's" death, Fogazzaro's last novel, Leila (1910). The story of II santo begins at the end of the preceding novel, Piccolo mondo moderno, and the intertextual relations of Piero Maironi's story with that of Marina di Malombra unfold in the interstices between these two books. In the last chapter of Piccolo mondo moderno, Piero Maironi visits his dying wife in the insane asylum where she has been confined for some time. Although he is a sensual man involved in a liaison with a married woman, Jeanne Dessalle, just after this visit to his mad, yet deeply religious wife, he has a mystical vision regarding his future mission in the church, a vision that takes place in a small church near the asylum. Piero writes this vision down, hands it over to a priest friend of his, and like Malombra at the end of her story, vanishes without leaving a trace. It is at this point that the action of II santo begins. Piero has been living an anonymous life of penitence as a gardener in a Benedictine monastery in Subiaco, under the assumed name of Benedetto; his friends include Father Clemente, an intellectual and ascetic monk, and Giovanni Selva, a theologian at the head of the Catholic progressive movement. Jeanne tracks Piero down and manages to meet him, only to realize that his mystical experience was not a passing crisis; his religious love is a stronger bond than his love for her, and all she can obtain from him is the promise that he will call her to him before he dies. Benedetto begins preaching and performing miracles in the area around Rome, but some antagonistic priests ruin his good reputation and he must leave the countryside, heading for Rome itself. Here he leads a saintly life, attends reform meetings, and obtains an audience with the pope; but in spite of the pope's trust in him and in his ideas

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of peaceful reform, Benedetto is ostracized by a clergy fearful of losing its privileges. Gravely ill from physical privations and penitence, he dies in the house of a generous, though unbelieving man of science. While he is on his deathbed, Jeanne, who had been vainly searching for religious faith, passionately kisses the crucifix he holds out to her. Piero's and Jeanne's are the two most dramatic moments of conver¬ sion in Fogazzaro's work, moments that are paradigmatic of the bond between divine and earthly love. The scene of Jeanne's final conversion, in which she kisses the crucifix "with a passionate kiss," stages the tum-of-the-century confusion among sensual passion, religious fervor, and disease or death.11 Just as Jeanne comes to believe in Christ on the deathbed of the man she loves, so Piero's own mystical vision some time earlier had been provoked by his meeting with his dying wife in the insane asylum. At the point of death, his wife temporarily regains her mental faculties, to find out her husband's disbelief and to incite him to faith. Both in the conversion he provokes and in his own, how¬ ever, it is Piero/Benedetto who is at the center of the narrative and of the spiritual and scientific investigation carried out within the text, in spite of the obvious attention accorded Elisa, the insane wife, and Jeanne, the sensual and perhaps also hysterical lover, in a literary ex¬ ploration of the connection between spirit and body. A further and more general sign of this connection is that the women in Fogazzaro's fiction, although usually initially skeptical toward reli¬ gion (a notable exception is the pious Edith in Malombra), convert not so much because of a personal spiritual crisis, as is usually the case for Fogazzaro's masculine characters, but rather out of their romantic pas¬ sion for a religious man. This is the case of Jeanne, of Leila in the eponymous novel, and even, at an embryonic and heterodox stage, of Marina, who gives up her materialistic and skeptical attitude dur¬ ing her encounter with Corrado's spiritualistic beliefs. Hence, other grounds are laid for the postulation of an intimate relationship between religious and earthly love, between sensuality and the love of God—a veritable topos in the medical, religious, and literary discourses of that time. Just as religion is frequently diagnosed as a form of madness, so also passionate love has an element of insanity to it. This connection of love and madness is reinforced with particular insistence in Mal¬ ombra, through repeated references to the nerves (so popular during the European fin de siecle), through correlations between insanity and plea¬ sure (focusing on the maddening feelings inspired in all by the seduc¬ tive figure of Marina), and through Corrado's own falling in love with ii. Antonio Fogazzaro, II santo (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 333.

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Marina, when he refers to a physiology of love by claiming that his feelings are not only spiritual but actually correspond to a physical movement of his blood and nerves (Malombia, 278). Corrado's apparent "somatization" of his feelings leads Steinegge to declare, after the young man's death, that men of letters "feel love now here, now there, like a nervous ailment which is never serious" (4^9). The intellectualization of love turns it into a disease of dubious nervous origin, a psychosomatic or a hysterical symptom that, as such, is never taken seriously. It is an effect of literature rather than an organic or even a spiritual (dys (function. Moreover, love in this passage is a nervous ill¬ ness constantly in the process of displacing itself ("now here, now there"), thus dramatizing the displacement characteristic of the neu¬ rotic symptom akin to a linguistic signifier. If religious conversion is often the outcome of a love relationship, love in turn can also be a peculiar form of somatic conversion, a hysterical symptom formation. The need for religion to deal with the relation to science is revealed in the fact that both Piero's and Jeanne's conversions take place in an environment dominated by science: the insane asylum and the house of Professor Mayda. In the first scene, Don Giuseppe Flores, the priest friend of the protagonist, and the director of the asylum discuss what is happening to Piero. The director, described as a sort of avant la lettie psychoanalytic literary critic for his psychologizing interpretations of Hamlet,12 tells Don Giuseppe after Elisa's death that he is afraid Piero will soon come to take his wife's place in the madhouse, adding: "I am not saying that he is a neurasthenic, but, well, let s leave scientific terms aside: he is definitely a nervous man" [Piccolo mondo, 94). His proto-Freudianism is further manifested in his theory that Piero's ex¬ cessive religiosity (revealed, according to the director, by his fervor, his intolerance of "free" language, and his refusal to visit the women's ward) is due to his unfitness for celibacy, which has been imposed on him by the internment of his wife. He is relieved when he later hears of Piero's relationship with Jeanne, imagining it to be a healthy outlet for his sexual drive. According to the director of the asylum, then, re¬ ligion is for Piero Maironi a sort of sexual displacement. His opinion mirrors that of many psychologists at that time, and it had already appeared earlier on in the novel, when Piero tries to get Jeanne out of his mind by intensifying his ascetic practices (Piccolo mondo, 94).13 12. The asylum director speaks of "that most peculiar Hamlet, who simulates madness and does not even realize that he is not just a neurasthenic but a real moron (Antonio Fogazzaro, Piccolo mondo moderno [Milan: Mondadori, 1984]/ 346)13 Corrado Silla in Malombia also "sublimates" the sensual urges Marina inspires, through an assiduous study of Greek and religious philosophy (Fogazzaro, Malombia, 276).

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The director explains to Don Giuseppe his generalized skepticism toward the very possibility of a healthy religion in modern times: "The janitor has seen him behave in the oddest of ways: moaning, looking at the Crucifix with a hallucinated expression. You're going to tell me that even saints used to do such things. I respect saints, I don't even want to discuss Saint Teresa; but do you believe that there are still saints around? I doubt it! Now there is hysteria and there is religious mania. In my opinion, what happened this morning were acts of reli¬ gious mania" (Piccolo mondo, 371-72). This description of Piero's experiences—"hallucinations" and "moaning"—falls within the representational terms of that love mysticism which traditionally aroused skepticism even within the religious population and whose ambiguous language lends itself so easily to both erotic and patholog¬ ical interpretations. The director's supposed respect for the saints (even for the difficult Saint Teresa, by his own avowal) is coupled with his disbelief in the very possibility of a modem saint. His statement will be counterargued by the very title of the following novel. 11 santo thus becomes a sort of rewriting of the real presence of religious phenomena in modern times, a reinscription of these potentially controversial cases within the canon of sainthood (which includes Saint Teresa, despite her appropriation as a model of dubious religious experience), rather than within the modem taxonomy of neuroses. Nevertheless, even in 11 santo the medical opinion makes its presence felt, and one doctor is quick to diagnose Piero's experience as a case of "contagious mystical psychopathology" [Santo, 169). Don Giuseppe has no ready response for the asylum director. Unlike visible mystical ecstasies, the divine mystery does not lend itself to the glib and facile readings of positivist discourse. An enlightened priest, Don Giuseppe is not unaware of the iconoclastic but also potentially correct scientific gaze when it is directed to extreme religious phenom¬ ena, and he manifests this awareness well before the director's speech on this subject. He himself warns Piero, at the time of his conversion, of the dangers inherent in some extreme forms of religiosity, asserting that "a certain human presumption often finds a way of interfering with the pious movements of our soul, and leads us to mistake for facts with supernatural origins facts that derive instead from abnormal con¬ ditions of our spirit and of our body, also operated by God—because God, of course, operates in everything, with peculiar methods, with unfathomable purposes—but facts that are not aimed at letting us know God's will" [Santo, 361). As is often the case in Fogazzaro's nov¬ els, we have at the center of the protagonist's personal development the figure (at times, doctorlike) of an educated and sensible priest who

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does not at any time discount the activity of God through the human body and mind, but who is also very careful not to mistake it for the confusing operations of madness and human physiology. For Don Giu¬ seppe, the human body is always the site of the activity of God (and this belief is obviously in contrast to the director's materialistic speech), but this divine intervention presupposes in turn a correct in¬ terpretation on the part of the human receptacle. God operates in every¬ thing, including "the abnormal conditions of our spirit and our body," but even if the body and the mind are always open to the operations of the divine, nonetheless, neurosis is not the vehicle through which we may know God's will, and one must therefore leam to distinguish it from the action of the spirit. Nevertheless, this sort of confusion can and does take place. In the first chapter of 11 santo, an alternative to the sainthood of Benedetto is presented through a parodic mise en abime—one, that is, in which religion is actually a displaced sexuality that contrasts with Benedetto's "genuine" sainthood. The setting itself introduces the tradition of love mysticism. We are in Bruges, a city associated with mysticism on the first page (49), where the building of the Beguinage, the center of the medieval lay sisterhoods of the Beguines, and thus of much Brautmystik, is always in view. Carlino, Jeanne Dessalle's brother, is writing a novel about an old priest who falls in love with a young woman. It is "a peculiar case of spiritual contagion," "a drama of madness" (55), in which "a mystical influence of sex leads the old man to seek a harmony of souls with the girl" (56), until they achieve "the vague revelation of a sexuality between their souls" (57). The story contains some of the elements that characterized the relationship between Piero and Jeanne in the preceding novel—the contrast and confusion within the psyche and the body between mystical and carnal impulses, their simultaneous manifestation under the guise of love, the sexual overtones of a sup¬ posedly spiritual relationship between two souls. At the same time, this exaggerated version is an obvious parody next to which Benedetto's true mysticism can only be exalted. An analogously parodic mise en abime of the relationship among religion, eroticism, and disease, also the work of Jeanne's mischievous brother, takes place in Piccolo mondo moderno, in which Carlino speaks of a project for a novel in which a mystical Polish man buys an abbey in order to gather there "some hysterical women so as to found, through meditation and prayer, a new religion" [Piccolo mondo moderno, 133)But the exaltation of Benedetto's mystical graces does not ignore that he is making use of models usually reserved, especially during this period, for the representation of women, especially sick women. Thus,

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in Piccolo mondo moderno the mad wife is also a second self. She is Piero's cousin, a blood relative, and she is the insane other with whom Piero at different points in his life risks identifying himself. At the beginning of II santo, Jeanne herself (who does not know of Piero's vision and therefore judges him harshly for having abandoned her after his wife's death) questions Benedetto's manliness, his virility, inter¬ preting his mobile behavior as strikingly feminine: "He had proved himself incapable of love, incapable of action, feminine in the mobility of his mood. Yes, he had been feminine until the very last moment; feminine, unable to perform a virile criticism of his own mystical hys¬ teria" (59). By feminizing him (a striking interpretation on the part of his adulterous lover), Jeanne makes Benedetto more like herself, and in her lack of religious faith, she interprets his spiritual crises as bouts of emotional or nervous distress, as a pathological case of "mystical hys¬ teria." Already in Piccolo mondo moderno Piero is identified with Jeanne in their common, quasi-pathological disgust for sex. It is after his traumatic first sexual experience that Piero decides to marry his intact cousin, in order to escape the torments of the flesh: "The reac¬ tion of shame and nausea was most violent. Thus, marrying a girl as pure and serious as my cousin seemed to me a haven of peace" (92). Like Jeanne, who says, "I only desire affection, the rest fills me with disgust, and "I know that the sheer idea of extreme sensuality inspires in me an extreme repugnance" (126, 163), Piero, in spite or because of his sensual nature, feels disgust at the lowliness of bodily needs and pleasures. He seeks a form of love that can satisfy him but also tran¬ scend the body, and this satisfaction he will find only in mysticism. But the disgust for sex, coupled with the inherently sensual nature of each character (particularly Piero), is a hysterical trait. The text, in its sanctifying intent, is far from pursuing such an association, but the dialogue with science inevitably hints at it.14 In a speech to his modernist circle in Rome, Benedetto himself un¬ dertakes this animated debate with science, using strikingly modem terminology, so that, like the mystic and unlike the hysteric, he per¬ forms a self-diagnosis, an autohermeneutic act that displaces him from the hysterical position of object (of the clinical gaze, of positivistic sci¬ ence, of the naturalistic writer) into that of mystical subject, capable of articulating both pleasure and pain without the help of an inter¬ preter, whether doctor, psychoanalyst, or priest. Benedetto draws a

14. David-Menard explains that "the hysteric's approach to sexual difference takes on the aspect of a refusal. There is something about the body of the other that the hysteric cannot 'take/ cannot swallow, inhale, or touch" [Hysteria, 71).

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careful parallel between the complex hierarchy of the church and the multilayered hierarchy within each individual: "This hierarchy of steady and self-controlled ideas is not the whole of man. . . . Under these thoughts there is another region of the soul, there is the Uncon¬ scious, where hidden faculties perform a hidden task, where the mys¬ tical contacts with God take place" [Santo, 223). Benedetto's modernist agenda in this speech involves pointing out the importance of the laity as that part of the church which works secretly, outside or rather "un¬ der" the officially recognized and traditional powers (but one must re¬ member that 11 santo was condemned by the Congregation of the Index in 1906 because of its modernist proposals, and the doctrines of mod¬ ernism as a whole were rejected by Pius X in 1907 with the syllabus Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi).15 It is not surprising that it is just in an "occult" psychic territory, namely, the unconscious, that Benedetto places the action of mysticism both as an individual "microcosmic" experience and as a cognitive instrument, as that mode of contact with the divine which throughout history has been viewed with some suspicion and has therefore been placed at the very margin of the Catholic church.16 In contemporary terms, one could say, with¬ out doing too much anachronistic injustice to this speech, that mys¬ ticism is postulated as the unconscious of Catholicism. But in opposition to this marginalization or this "repression, Benedetto de¬ scribes the mystical experience as the only one through which the church can hope to renew itself, because this "unconscious . . . contin¬ uously draws from Truth through the external experience of reality and through the internal experience of the Divine, and therefore it tends to correct the superior ideas, the dominant ideas (223)- Again, the divine penetrates the mystic (but also the church), by working on the open and easily accessible "inside," the interno. So appropriate is psycholog¬ ical theory that even the Catholic novel itself, for all its professed an15. Roberto Tessari, Pascoli, D’Annunzio, Fogazzaro e il Decadentismo italiano: Irrazionalismo e crisi dell’ideologia borghese tra ‘800 e ‘900 (Turin: Paravia, 1976), 114. 16. Von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten (1868) had been published in nine editions by 1882, including translations in several European languages; the term uncon¬ scious (Unbewusstsein) was first used in a meaning close to the one now current by Ernst Platner in 1776, and it had been made popular by Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling between 1780 and 1820/as Lancelot L. White explains: “The idea of unconscious mental processes was in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around r8oo, and became effective around 1900Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Basic, i960), 63. Whyte also points out, with an uncanny relevance to II santo, that "today faith, if it bears any relation to the natural world, implies faith in the unconscious. If there is a God it must speak there; if there is a healing power, it must operate there; if there is a principle of ordering in the organic realm, its most powerful manifestation must be found there" (10).

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timaterialism, does not hesitate to name this region of contact ''the unconscious," in accordance and in dialogue with the latest scientific terminology. An active and informed dialogue with science is noticeable both in Malombra and in II santo, but in Malombra the diagnosis of disease (hysterical monomania) is a key to the explanation of the seemingly supernatural events. In II santo the contrary hermeneutic movement takes place, and the protagonist's apparent illness, diagnosed by a psy¬ chiatrist toward the end of Piccolo mondo moderno, is later explained in the text by a religious experience that, for various reasons, may in¬ volve but in no way relies on the experience of illness (examples of this illness as a heightened state of being are Benedetto's obsessive high fever throughout the end of 11 santo and especially his panegyric of suffering as a desirable continuation of Christ's redemptive action [316]). The Catholicism in these texts thus aids in establishing a qual¬ itative difference between the more or less orthodox religious experi¬ ence of Piero Maironi (finally, a healthy and constructive one), and the spiritualistic and occult tendencies of Marina di Malombra (which lead to her madness and murder). The descent of the spirit into Benedetto's body, although it is a fe¬ cund operation, bears a striking resemblance to the infiltration of men¬ tal illness into the protagonist of Malombra. II santo tells the tale of a man whose mystical experiences succeed in reconciling, through a struggle ending in transcendence, the dualism of flesh and spirit, to the point that his death is, paradoxically, a happy ending. Malombra, by contrast, is a somber story, despite the protagonist's final survival, of a romantic madness with possible erotic causes, an organic monomaniacal delirium that takes on some of the appearances of possession by a spirit. In Malombra, the identification repeatedly established by pos¬ itivism and naturalism among religion, psychopathology, and romantic passion becomes explicit and, in a sense, reversed, through the repre¬ sentation of madness itself as a heterodox form of religious discourse (as opposed to the usual nineteenth-century description of religion as a form of madness)—through the contact, that is, of the mentally un¬ stable protagonist with the world of the dead. The elusiveness of the literary representation of disease in Fogazzaro's work (in plain contrast to the positivistic or naturalistic accounts of it) comes to express am¬ biguously, yet eloquently some of the religious questions that haunted the late nineteenth-century imagination. In staging the contrast be¬ tween reason and unreason in the human psyche, the novel at the same time represents the eternal fight of good and evil (at times identified with Christianity and occultism) over the possession of a soul and a body.

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Published for the first time in 1881, Malombra was Antonio Fogaz¬ zaro's first novel, regarded by some as his masterpiece and by others as poorly constructed and rather confusing.17 As the title indicates it is the dominance of the protagonist which lends the otherwise potentially disjointed plot a definite unity. The tale of Marina di Malombra is of an obviously different kind from that of the other characters. Unlike the simple and often either comical or melodramatic tales of other characters' behavior and adventures, Marina's story at its core is a selfconscious, critical rewriting of the conte fantastique, which flourished in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. In Italy, it is the literary production of the scapigliati, with whom Fogazzaro had an assiduous commerce during his stay in Milan (1865-1868), which provides the most relevant comparisons, especially with Igino Ugo Tarchetti's strange and fascinating stories. The scapigliati's conception and literary use of science are closer to Fogazzaro's than the veristic model. Influenced by both romantic and positivistic views of illness, the work of the scapigliati makes use, for example, of a pseudoscien¬ tific association of genius and alienation, positing a quasi-magical ver¬ sion of science quite unlike the veristic one, which instead tried to align itself with the materialistic creed of positivism. The particular fantastic subgenre of Marina's tale combines the rep¬ resentation of madness with the manifestation of the supernatural. By attributing irrational phenomena to psychopathology, this genre in turn conferred upon madness a supernatural dimension (the most famous examples of this genre are Maupassant's Contes fantastiques and some of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales), thus reversing scientific attempts, such as the psychiatrist's in Piccolo mondo moderno, to define the supernat¬ ural experience as an instance of insanity. Fogazzaro's often unorthodox but certainly compelling Catholicism contributes a critical dimension to the fantastic literature of his predecessors, a spiritual perspective that, while criticizing the materialistic positivism of contemporary psychology (a typical critique of the fantastic genre), also attempts to provide a transcendent alternative to the fantastic uncertainty.18 It is this dimension, too, that makes Malombra a critique of the genre rather than an authentic fantastic tale, for the fantastic effect of un¬ certainty between the real and the imaginary (or the illusory), estab-

17. See Antonio Piromalli, Fogazzaro (Palermo: Palumbo, 1959), 63. 18. One can turn to Agnello Baldi's article for a series of quotations from Fogazzaro's essays and lectures demonstrating his conversance with all the latest innovations in the field of psychology; these include his informed reaction to the inclusion of hypnotism, telepathy, apparitions, etc., in the program of the Society of Physiological Psychology (chaired by Charcot, and to which Lombroso also belonged). Baldi, "Darwinismo e parapsicologia in Fogazzaro," Critica letteraria 3 (1965): 568-82.

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lished by Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal work on the fantastic as the defining trait of the genre, is largely lost through a heightened aware¬ ness of its processes.19 The problem of where to place the phenomena of abnormal psychology in the spectrum of human experiences of oth¬ erness will be fully resolved in Fogazzaro's work only a few years later, by its displacement onto the mystical plane in 11 santo. Malombra begins with a visit to the castle of the wealthy Count d'Ormengo by Corrado Silla, an unsuccessful young writer,- the count wants Corrado's help in writing a treatise of "positive politics." At the castle, Silla befriends Steinegge, the count's secretary, and falls madly in love with the count's orphaned niece, the unsociable and beautiful Marina di Malombra. As it turns out, the two had been corresponding, each under an assumed name, about Corrado's fantastic story "A Dream," in which the writer, a deeply religious man, affirms his belief in reincarnation. In a secret compartment of her desk Marina had found a note from the count's father's first wife, Cecilia, convincing her that she is the reincarnation of her dead "ancestress" (the text is not clear as to whether Cecilia in fact had any progeny, but Marina certainly perceives herself as Cecilia's direct descendant). Guilty of an adulterous love for an officer, Cecilia had been locked up in her room until her death by her husband, Count d'Ormengo's father, and was considered by the townspeople to be insane. Marina, at this point, decides to take her vengeance on Cecilia's oppressor's son, her uncle. She at first be¬ lieves that Corrado is the count's illegitimate son and that he is after her dowry, and in spite of her own love for him, she insults him by publicly casting doubt on his real name and paternity, thus forcing him to leave the castle. She accepts instead the marriage proposal of a des¬ picable fortune hunter, Count Nepo; during Nepo's visit to the castle, Steinegge is reunited with his long-lost daughter Edith and moves with her to Milan, where they see Silla regularly. Corrado now loves the pious and chaste Edith, who is in all ways the opposite of Marina,- Edith loves him back, yet refuses him in the hope that if she remains with her father she can convert him to Catholicism. In the meantime, at the castle Marina bluntly accuses her uncle of Cecilia's murder, thus pro¬ voking in him a fatal apoplexy. She sends a telegram to Corrado, who

19. According to Todorov, the reader must choose between two possible solutions: "Either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown. . . . The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty." Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25.

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rushes to the castle where Marina tries to convince him that he is Renato, Cecilia's adulterous lover, and announces their love affair to all those present around the count's deathbed. Silla decides to marry Marina in spite of her insanity, which is by now quite obvious, but fearing that he no longer loves her, she kills him with a pistol shot. She then disappears on her boat while Edith remains behind regretting her rejection of Silla and assuming responsibility for his death. As early as the first few paragraphs the reader is introduced to the mysterious atmosphere of a fantastic tale and the different mode of interpretation of reality in force in this genre. Corrado is "a fantastic traveler"; his train is a live, snakelike monster enclosed in "darkness," "shadow," "silence," and "the absurd." Two chapters later, shortly be¬ fore the count gives Corrado a ghostly note from his dead mother, twi¬ light is evoked as the time when "shadows take on bodies, bodies dissolve into shadow" (Malombra, 63). The confusion of body and shadow, presaged in this passage by a kind of pathetic fallacy that links the movements of human psychology with the forces of the occult, will soon haunt Corrado in the form of a written message from the beyond, the physical trace of an otherwise immaterial spirit, a memory turned into a ghost, seemingly coming from the world of the spirits (69). The shades (ombia meaning both shade and shadow] represent in the novel that ambiguous zone where the spirit comes into contact with the flesh (in Piccolo mondo moderno the term ombia is even used to refer to mental illness), a zone that in 11 santo will be boldly termed the un¬ conscious,- this is just where the battle between flesh and spirit must be fought (Corrado's periodic escapades with prostitutes, described as the pleasure of "the city shades," persuade the narrator of the violent incompatibility of spirit and senses [275]). Furthermore, as shades take on bodies and bodies dissolve into shades, in addition to the contrast between body and soul, between sensual pleasures and religious asce¬ ticism, this description involves a formula characteristic of the ghost story, announced here by the appearance of nature as it infiltrates the human spirit under the shape of a corporealized remembrance—the ghost of the dead mother which takes over the body of her son and by so doing makes him fade (the title of this chapter is "Ghosts of the Past") and whose action prefigures that of the dead grandmother, who will in turn overtake Marina. The ambiguity of the word ombia mirrors that of its namesake pro¬ tagonist, Marina di Malombra, literally, the "evil shade," the mala om¬ bia,; in its frequent apparitions throughout the novel, this word points to the more or less hidden presence of Marina and her name, by which she is penetrated as by the ombia of the ancestress. The emphasis on

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names and genealogies, on the story of onomastic transmission, begins in this novel with the difficulty presented by the count's own name, which the coachman describes as unsuitable or irrelevant, in contrast to the nobleman's pride in his ancient name (36, 47). Marina's name, on the other hand, far from being irrelevant (an entire valley is named Val Malombra [212]), causes extreme reactions. One of the towns¬ women, for example, says bluntly that if she were a man she would not marry a woman with such a name: "She has a real witch's name, you know. Malombra!" (73).20 It is her name that excludes Marina from romantic and reproductive love, since it qualifies her first and foremost as a witch of dubious descent, an offspring of shades, even a shade herself, a combination "of shadow, light, and electricity" (189). Mari¬ na's paradoxical nature makes her darkness and light at once, an anti¬ thetical knot complete with a dose of that mesmerizing electricity which was fashionable and presumed to be scientific at that time.21 The emphasis on names is an overarching metaphor for the transmis¬ sion of specific qualities through the generations, and as such it points to the presence in the novel of a dialogue with evolutionism and thus with positivistic science. In 11 santo there is a similar emphasis on the power of names to determine one's life: Piero Maironi changes his name to Benedetto when he abandons Jeanne, and since his vision in¬ cludes his death in the Benedictine habit, he moves to Subiaco in order to live in Saint Benedict's own convent. It can hardly be a coincidence that, when forced to leave Subiaco, he goes to preach to a nearby town, the paronomastic Jenne. Marina's name—signifying her witchlike nature and transmitted, un¬ like a patronymic, from mother to daughter, or rather, from "grand¬ mother" to "granddaughter"—is a curse that invades or "hysterizes" her entire persona. The townspeople suspect that she is the count's lover and not his niece, tied to him by sex rather than by blood. Mari¬ na's repetition of her dead ancestress is also noticed by the townspeople (who rebaptize her "la Matta," "the Madwoman"), even before she her¬ self discovers it and assumes the name Cecilia. Since she often walks 20. "In some regions of Southern Italy, the malombra is an evil ghost, a specter (mala ombra, a non-human figure that brings calamities): in a figural sense, a ghostly figure" (Ubaldo Serbo, "La luna e l'ombra come strutture simboliche nell'opera di Antonio Fogazzaro," Antonio Fogazzaro, ed. Attilio Agnoletto, Enzo Noe Girardi, and Carlo Marcora [Milan: Angeli, 1984], 205). 21. Electricity is associated with Marina elsewhere in the novel, too: her hand possesses a "nameless electricity" (96), and she inspires in others the desire to be physically close to her "so as to feel better the electricity of her presence" (203). Most unambiguously, during a conversation with Marina the doctor is described as "magnetized by the big eyes that were fixed on him" (327-28).

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in the woods (looking for demons, it is believed) and since she never goes to mass, the people believe her to be "another excommunicated woman, like the Madwoman of the Palace" (92). She is another Cecilia, another madwoman, another object of excommunication, and if mad¬ ness is here linked to a lack of orthodox religiosity because of its causal connection with demon possession and witchcraft, the development and manifestations of Marina's hysterical monomania are nevertheless tightly linked to a religious or a numinous dimension. As will be re¬ vealed most clearly at the very end, she literally belongs to another world. As early as Marina's arrival at the castle the count finds her behavior "mysterious and suspect," "bizarre," "an unexplainable enigma," and his servant Giovanna finds it "a work of sorcery" (85), for the belief that madness was the work of the devil was still wide¬ spread in rural areas in late nineteenth-century Italy.22 Unable to fit into any pattern, Marina is read as "wholly other." Even before she becomes convinced of the reality of her reincarnated existence, Marina is given Cecilia's name by Cecilia herself, who per¬ emptorily rebaptizes her: "Change your name! Let me come back as Cecilia. Let him love Cecilia" (102). It is at this point—before, that is, what the text itself will diagnose as her "reincarnatory monomania"— that Marina takes the name Cecilia, that is, "the blind one," as a pseu¬ donym. But when Corrado recognizes her as his correspondent, kisses her, and calls her Cecilia, Marina, still unaware that Corrado is the Lorenzo with whom she has been exchanging letters, believes he has recognized her as the reincarnation of her ancestress. For Marina, Cor¬ rado becomes the reincarnation of Renato, Cecilia's lover. Hence the fatal quid pro quo that unchains the peripeteia of the action. Once Corrado returns to the castle and embraces her, Marina is convinced that he is Renato and asks him for confirmation of their common mem¬ ories,- Corrado, not understanding and drunk with passion, answers without thinking (357), thus unwittingly confirming her delusion. But when, satisfied with his positive reaction, she tells him, "Thank God," the force of the name, here a divine one and taken in vain to boot, reemerges victoriously: "This time the terrible name squeezed his guts like a cold blow" (358). The name of God, cold as a ghost, the letter that "killeth," is here pronounced prayerfully by the usually blasphe¬ mous mouth of Marina, as in the parody of a religious conversion, and it becomes in her mouth a wounding instrument that prefigures the pistol shot to come. The shooting of Corrado, tied to Marina's frequent amusement of shooting at the statues in the garden, classifies her with 22.

Tagliavini, "Aspects," 180.

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Lombroso's assertion that women who commit crimes of passion "have also some masculine traits of disposition,- such, for instance, as the love of firearms."23 In its multiple displacements through legitimate genealogies as well as through spurious assumptions, the name in Malombra is an emblem of possession and dispossession, investing its bearer with the specific qualities that belong to it—hence its link to reincarnation, to posses¬ sion by the spirit, and to the modes of hysteria. In his introduction to a study of Italian first names, Edoardo Sanguineti claims that the his¬ tory of names is made of "incarnations and reincarnations between people and figures because, to say it in an epigram, the novel of cultural anthroponymy is an endless tale of onomastic metempsychoses, and the history of human beings is a history of boundless homonymies."24 By their very need to repeat themselves from one human being to an¬ other, names are transmigratory as well as uncanny, and the story of names in Malombra becomes the fantastic story of a metempsychosis, since the elusive signifier of the name unceasingly slips from one spirit to another in order to (in(form them—from the Malombras to Marina, from Cecilia to her "descendant." The count's name, d'Ormengo, is a self-conscious and proud symbol of ancient nobility; Malombra, on the other hand, evokes the evil feminine shadow by which Marina is pen¬ etrated, and the name of the protagonist acquires an increased signifi¬ cance by becoming the title and the name of the book itself.25 Finally, and most important, the name Cecilia, far from being an empty label—like first names in general, signs without a specific sig¬ nified—is the recurrent symbol of an uncanny repetition marked by blind passion. Cecilia's madness repeats itself through Marina's, and the name Malombra points to Marina as a shadow of Cecilia. She is both an incarnation of her shade, of her ghost or spirit, and a shadow¬ like reflection of her ancestress, her doppelganger. One. could relate the main elements of Fogazzaro's story to some of the conclusions of Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919), particularly its emphasis on Wiederholungszwang, compulsive, involuntary repetition of the re¬ pressed and familiar. For the count, this repetition of a woman and her name turns into a fatally traumatic "return of the repressed," resulting

23. Lombroso, La donna delinquents, 245. 24. Edoardo Sanguineti, "L'omonimia culturale," introduction to Nomi e cultura: Riflessi della cultura italiana dell’Ottocento e del Novecento nei nomi personali, by Emidio De Felice (Venezia: Sarin/Marsilio, 1987), xviii. 25. A similar effect occurs a few years later with the novel Leila, in which the prota¬ gonist's name, Lelia, and its variation, Leila—a material trace of her dead boyfriend who had so renamed her—also stand at the center of the story and on the cover of the book.

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in what the text, with its openness toward the medical terminology of its time, diagnoses as an attack of apoplexy (321). Just at the moment when his niece accusingly confronts him with the account of her an¬ cestress's death (a story about which the count was always silent), the count has a fatal stroke, and Marina twice proudly admits to Corrado that she wounded her uncle to death (362, 365). Marina presents a peculiar case of possession in which it is impos¬ sible to state exactly who is possessed and by whom, for she is pos¬ sessed at once by Cecilia's spirit and by her blinding madness. At one point she even claims "possession" by God; she tells Corrado that she had to go and accuse her uncle because God told her to do so (363). Fogazzaro's ambivalence about both science and established religion expresses itself in the hesitation of his text between scientific and su¬ pernatural explanations. This hesitation is apparently resolved, in the end, in favor of a medical diagnosis; yet it is not clear what its impli¬ cations are. Certainly, a form of possession is at work here, or better yet a dispossession, a form of self-alienation of Marina's subjectivity, but the postulation of hysterical monomania is hardly a satisfactory explanation even within the economy of the novel. The relationship with a dimension beyond the rational is at stake, and this dimension, be it the universe of the spirits (demonic or divine) or the universe of madness (organic or functional), employs ambiguous forms of expres¬ sion which make it, above all else, the Other of the materialistic world view of positivist science and therefore equally inexplicable by reason alone. Thus, after his attack of apoplexy, the count is not sure exactly who Marina is, for he is not surprised to see her at once as both his niece and "another person" (333). Her madness naturally transforms Marina into an other. Through different narrative emphases, Malombra and 11 santo problematize the close relationship of literature and science, just as the contemporary emergence of psychiatry as a science and of the fantastic tale as a genre, some have argued, is no coincidence. In its long history, madness has been perceived as an epiphany of the supernatural, of the beyond, with which it shares an impenetrability to reason. In nine¬ teenth-century European literature, this was the position of writers such as Guy de Maupassant (1850—1893)/ who assiduously frequented the Salpetriere with a literary-tumed-clinical interest and whose fan¬ tastic tales abound in allusions to Charcot s and Bernheim s contem¬ porary experiments with hypnosis and magnetism (Fogazzaro also mentions Charcot, most notably in his essay "Per una nuova scienza"). In spite of some dubious aspects of Charcot's medical practice (those same aspects, primarily centered on the use of hypnotism, that made

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his work so appealing to the general public), his enterprise was selfdefined as positivistic, as grounded, that is, in the recently developed experimental method. In representing the mad according to paradigms borrowed from the iconography of the supernatural, some of the writers dealing with the fantastic (including Fogazzaro in Malombra) were trac¬ ing a movement opposite to the positivistic path followed by Charcot in texts such as Les demoniaques dans Vart. Charcot's mission was to provide his renovated (if not altogether new) science the advantage of a history and a tradition, and he accomplished this goal by systemati¬ cally reinterpreting past representations of supernatural manifestations as if the actual models for the artists had been neuropathologically affected subjects. Through his deployment of "retrospective medicine" over the entire spectrum of extreme forms of religious experience, Charcot gave a comprehensive history to hysteria as he knew it—or, perhaps, as he invented it, as Georges Didi-Huberman has convincingly argued in Invention de l’hysterie. The rhetoric of the fantastic tale, although frequently colluding with some of the contemporary scientific and especially psychiatric theories, systematically reclaims for the in¬ explicable a territory that had been even more systematically invaded by "scientific imperialism"—a disruptive effect achieved largely through the text's hesitation between a natural and a supernatural self¬ explanation. The materialization of the spirit, effected in the late nineteenth cen¬ tury most notably by scientific positivism and naturalistic literature, was accompanied by a spiritualization of matter, by the insistent rep¬ resentation, that is, of a supernatural dimension in the literary depic¬ tion of the inexplicable phenomena of insanity. The depiction of Marina's progressive monomania after she finds her ancestress's note, mirror, glove, and lock of hair, for example, is indebted to the tradi¬ tional representation of possession and madness as infiltrations of a foreign body into the possessed (such as, for instance, the iconography of the "stone of madness" during the Renaissance).26 Marina's intelli¬ gence and will, says the text, fight against "the ghost escaped from the open cabinet in front of her charming figure with the evil purpose of infiltrating into her blood, of clinging to her bones, of sucking her life and her soul so as to take their place" (105). The shade of the ancestress becomes the agent of possession about to besiege Marina and to spread the contagion of its madness over her, despite Marina's own initial and skeptical realization that Cecilia was in fact mad, that she wrote while delirious, and that her own excessively involved response, according to 26. See Gilman, Disease, 19-21.

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Marina herself, was "sheer" madness (io6). The ghost, nevertheless, slowly creeps in through the objects contaminated by Cecilia's touch and through the "transmigration" of her name and/as her neuropathic heredity, operating a confusion of borders reminiscent of the working of abjection. The body's boundaries become permeable. Marina is de¬ scribed throughout the novel as suffering from increasingly frequent, although, at least initially, not serious, nervous disorders, and at the end of the novel a doctor maintains that Marina must have had an initial neuropathic predisposition if she so readily received such fantasmi—such phantoms, phantasms, or ghosts (414). The name is the uncanny metonymy of heredity, its fantasmatic version arising from the presumably scientific association of woman with degenerate pa¬ thology. Marina's illness begins with the reinterpretation of unexplainable past experiences, such as episodes of deja vu and hallucinations, in the light of her recent discovery of another possible hermeneutics; her psy¬ che, she figures, can be interpreted through the displacements of a ghost. It is no coincidence that the first somatic effect of her discovery is a violent cerebral fever and delirium, for fever is the body's warring reaction to the infiltration of a foreign pathogenic agent. And at the end, Marina shows the doctor some mosquito bites on her arm, which she describes as if they were deep wounds, and asks him if a soul can exit through those apertures (414). If a spirit can enter her psyche through her body, as she has experienced, surely then a spirit—hers or another's—can also exit through fissures on that same (abject-ed) body. Marina's wounds become in this passage a perverted sort of stigmata, the marks of her disease, since her body, before these "wounds," was perfectly unmarked: "She enjoyed excellent health, and no part of her body had a flaw or a scar" (192). This assertion overtly contradicts Lombroso's premise in La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale that crime and certainly the ability to commit murder may be read in every mark on the surface of the woman's body that deviates from the standards of normalcy. These imaginary wounds become the bodily traces of Marina's spiritual/mental difference. In its fusion of the medical and supernatural elements of analogous invading agencies, the portrayal of Marina's pathology in Malombra corresponds not only to other fantastic stories—such as Maupassant's "Conte de Noel" and Tarchetti's "Spirito in un lampone"—but also to some contemporary scientific explanations for inexplicable phenom¬ ena, with which Fogazzaro, as is evident from his essay "Per una nuova scienza," was intimately familiar. He deals in this text with the re¬ placement, or rather the rebaptizing, by contemporary psychology of

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the medieval demons and spirits with a new terminology that leaves much of their essence intact: "These newcomers frighteningly resem¬ ble the monstrous medieval ghosts which possessed places in ancient times. They let themselves be called mental suggestion, telepathy, dou¬ bling, or psychic force, clairvoyance, spiritualism, materialization, apparitions of the dead, of ghosts, of living beings." As Fogazzaro ob¬ serves, these phenomena are welcome in the field of modern psychol¬ ogy as long as they abide by certain rules, as long as they "scrupulously respect the laws and regulations of the experimental method" (150). But this attempt to integrate the supernatural into positivism, Fogaz¬ zaro claims, does not succeed. In many ways analogous to Fogazzaro's claims in "Per una nuova scienza" is Freud's theory concerning the parallels between his own new science and the medieval and ancient theories of demonic posses¬ sion. Both Fogazzaro and Freud criticize positivism and distance them¬ selves from it. Freud wants to establish a difference from the methods and discoveries of the "exact sciences" of the nineteenth century (which "somatized" disease), but he also creates a tradition (albeit a fragmentary one) for the new science of psychoanalysis,- although this is an appropriation in some ways parallel to Charcot's "retrospective medicine," nevertheless Freud's hermeneutics, by reading what is hid¬ den rather than reproducing what is exposed, aspires to an exaltation of the virtues and not only to a devaluation of the sins of the herme¬ neutics of the past. As Gerard Wajeman notes of Freud's essay on de¬ monic possession, "Psychoanalysis and primitive Times are held together in a relationship to truth. . . . according to Freud, the Middle Ages have chosen, in a certain manner, the way of the Freudian un¬ conscious."27 In several different texts, spanning the greater part of his career, Freud claims that his theory about the split consciousness (which, in Studies on Hysteria, is at the basis of his concept of neurosis and which is also the ancestor of the concept of the unconscious) was anticipated by the medieval theories of possession by the devil. In both cases, the patient's loss of control over her actions is determined by the presence of an other within her, a presence in turn provoked by a loss of control over her bodily boundaries (abjection). This Other is what antiquity called the uterus (the wandering hysteron as the agent of hysteria for Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and beyond), the religious Middle Ages, as Freud himself points out, called the devil (the fertile incubus who made nightly visits to the witches), and Freud called first the split conscious27. Wajeman, Le maitre, 95.

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ness (as in the Studies on Hysteria) and later the unconscious. Sum¬ marizing a theory that Freud expounded in his obituary for Charcot (1893) as well as in his essay "A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century" (1923), Breuer writes in Studies on Hys¬ teria (1895): "The split-off mind is the devil with which the unsophis¬ ticated observation of early superstitious times believed that these patients were possessed. It is true that a spirit [Geist] alien to the pa¬ tient's waking consciousness holds sway in him; but the spirit is not in fact an alien one, but a part of his own" (Studies, 250).28 Almost thirty years after his first book-length publication, Freud still claimed that the medieval evil spirits correspond to repressed evil wishes and that the only difference between the medieval theory and his own is that "we have abandoned the projection of them into the outer world, attributing their origin instead to the inner life of the pa¬ tient in whom they manifest themselves."29 With the aid of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Other becomes the self, but with the advent of structuralism and especially its impact on psychoanalytic theories and notably with the work of Jacques Lacan, the unconscious will be termed "the discourse of the Other," and the Freudian dichotomy of inside and outside—the very dichotomy on which his distinction be¬ tween the medieval theories of demon possession and his own is based—will be deconstructed (abjected?) and exposed as no longer tenable. The invading agency once more becomes external, the "Other," and the connection between medieval theories and those of psychoanalysis is exposed more forcefully. It is in a personal letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, written in Jan¬ uary 1897, that Freud's correlation of the medieval devil and the mod¬ ern unconscious explicitly includes the sexual etiology he invariably found in cases of hysteria and of neurosis in general: "Do you remem¬ ber that I always said that the medieval theory of possession held by the ecclesiastical courts was identical with our theory of a foreign body and the splitting of consciousness? But why did the devil who took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them sexually and in a loathsome manner?"30 The relationship between the devil and the body it chose to possess was invariably sexual, as the ancient theories of the 28. Freud and Breuer, Studien iiber Hysterie, 203. 29. Freud, "A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century/' in Studies in Parapsychology, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier, 1963), 92. 30 Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (1887-1904), ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 224. Dominick LaCapra discusses the relationship among history, psychoanalysis, and religion (quoting from this same letter by Freud to Fliess), in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), chap. 6.

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uterine etiology of hysteria also implied; moreover, this body was most often feminine or feminized, and therefore open, holed, hol(e)y. With the advent of psychoanalytic interpretation, the invading agency con¬ tinued to invade the feminine or a feminized site for perverse and hys¬ terogenic erotic purposes, and Freud's case histories are populated with hysterical females or feminine (hysterized?) males. One is led to won¬ der whether originally the unconscious, as an invading agency is, like the devil its ancestor, an essentially masculine force. Marina's convulsive delirium, vividly described in the novel, also has an obviously sexual/romantic etiology, since her ancestress's madness and imprisonment were tied to a sexual indiscretion. Even during her convulsions she is constantly talking to her "lover" (373). But unlike the contemporary scientific discourse with which the naturalistic writ¬ ers aligned themselves, Fogazzaro's text chooses not to set up a hier¬ archy of hermeneutic validity ranking hysterical monomania and reincarnation—the two poles between which the definition of the invading agency oscillates in this novel. Marina is diagnosed as mad by the doctor; yet she is not interned or treated but rather sets off as if on a journey to regain her reason. Another major uncertainty, on which the definition of Marina's experience depends is whether Marina's an¬ cestress was truly mad (as the townspeople all seem to believe) or was locked up solely because of her husband's sexual jealousy,- perhaps both of these alternatives are true. Is Marina's madness due to her neuro¬ pathic heredity, or is she possessed by Cecilia's spirit? In any event, the story of Cecilia, as an instance of the romantic topos of the "mad¬ woman in the attic," is a story within the story which, even more than a mise en abime, constitutes the not-so-hidden mechanism that stim¬ ulates Marina's psyche into a vengefully destructive action (the peri¬ peteia of the novel). The spirit or the madness of her ancestress imbues her to the point of turning her into an image of itself—mad or pos¬ sessed—and whether the cause is neuropathic heredity or supernatural means is left undecided. This undecidability is reminiscent of stories such as Maupassant's "Conte de Noel" (1882), in which the woman protagonist, just after eating a mysterious egg, has a long and violent convulsive attack. She is perceived alternately as mad (by a doctor) and as possessed (by a priest) and is finally cured by a hypnotic trance (or perhaps, as the text concedes, by a religious contemplation), induced by the sight of a con¬ secrated host on Christmas Eve.31 Treatment, which in Malombra is curtailed by Marina's disappearance on her boat, consists of a visible 31. Maupassant, "Conte de Noel," in Contes fantastiques complets, 137-43.

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and effective combination of religious and psychological elements. The text leaves the reader in doubt as to which one of the "therapies" has effected the "cure/7 so that both the positivistic and the spiritualistic reader can come out (dis?) satisfied. What ties this short story to Malombia is a typical aspect of fantastic tales of this period, namely, oscillation between two different and op¬ posite explanations for a case of invasion of one subject by another (one must hesitate to say "one body" because the soul and the spirit are nowhere transcended in these texts, as they are in their scientific or naturalistic counterparts). The hesitation typical of the fantastic genre has been discussed at length, notably by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fan¬ tastic. What still needs to be underlined, however, is the specific in¬ vading function that characterizes the representation of hysteria as well as mysticism, which is operative in many fantastic tales as well—priv¬ ileging the depiction of masculine invasions of the feminine self. Another fantastic short story that, geographically and otherwise, is close to Malombia, is Tarchetti's "Spirito in un lampone" (1869).32 As the most prominent exponent of the Italian scapigliatura, Tarchetti had a considerable influence on Fogazzaro's artistic development, especially with respect to the literary treatment of psychological and psychiatric notions. It has been said that in Italy it was only with the scapigliatura that a literature with a clear psychopathological foundation was bom.33 The representation of pathology in Tarchetti's work stands between romantic idealizations of disease and its naturalistic and decadent treat¬ ment (as a natural and therefore diagnosable phenomenon for natural¬ ism, as a pre-Freudian, modem and voguish neurosis for decadence), anticipating some of the developments of this relatively new (at least in its clinical form) literary theme. Furthermore, much of Tarchetti's work combines physiological and psychological diagnoses, usually sep¬ arated elsewhere, thus anticipating and hovering between naturalistic and decadent representations of pathology. "Uno spirito in un lampone" is the story of a young baron who, af¬ ter eating some wild raspberries during a hunting expedition, experi¬ ences a perplexing double personality. In addition to being himself, he is also Clara, a young servant who had mysteriously disappeared from his castle some time earlier. This dual persona, resembling Freud and Breuer's theory on the hypnotic state of the neurotic split personality, becomes evident not only to the baron himself but also to those 32. Igino Ugo Tarchetti, "Uno spirito in un lampone," in Narratori dell Ottocento e del primo Novecento, ed. Aldo. Borlenghi, 3 vols. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1963), 1:802-12. 33. Elio Gioanola, "Scrittura del Pathos: Pathos della scrittura nelPespenenza scapigliata," Otto-Novecento 5-6 (1980), 22-23.

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around him, since he feels and visibly acts at times as a man, at other times as a young woman. Once he arrives at the castle, Clara, alias the baron, is recognized by and in turn recognizes and accuses her mur¬ derer, one of the baron's foresters, who, out of jealousy, had killed Clara and buried her. From her chest sprang the patch of raspberries whose fruit the baron had eaten. Finally, at the end of the story, the baron takes an emetic and frees himself of Clara's spirit by vomiting the raspberries. Through a physical penetration of the baron's body, the spirit of the dead woman also takes possession of his incorporeal personality, and by making use of his body and mind she succeeds in avenging her own violent death. The structural similarities with the story of Cecilia and Marina are conspicuous. The spirit of a dead woman invades a living subject in order to find revenge for a crime of jealous passion commit¬ ted against herself. The merging of genders in Tarchetti's story makes the scenario even more bizarre. The doubled or split personality turns itself into a message from the beyond, a text interpretable only with some difficulty even by the subjects themselves. Both the baron and Marina, before realizing what is "truly" happening to them, are affected by a fever and, together with those around them, they wonder whether they themselves are mad: Marina says, "It is an act of folly" (Malombra, 106), and the baron similarly repeats, "I have gone mad, I have gone mad" ("Uno spirito," 807), expressing feelings of disgust or abjec¬ tion against his uncontrollably porous self. In both cases, the text to be interpreted is a woman's name. In "Uno spirito in un lampone," the baron himself remains mysteriously un¬ named throughout the text. He is "the young baron of B." (much to the narrator's dismay, who apologizes, "I regret that a formal promise forbids me to reveal his name" [802]), and Clara herself (a name that carries as heavy a symbolic load as Malombra and Cecilia, although an opposite and a clarifying one) is named only toward the end of the story by the forester and then by the entire crowd as soon as everyone rec¬ ognizes Clara, "hidden" inside a male body. The recognition is simul¬ taneous with the naming, and these occur just as Clara, alias the baron, in turn recognizes her killer in the speaker, who faints and later gives a full confession of his crime. In Fogazzaro's and Tarchetti's texts, the significance of the name is heightened much beyond that of a symbolic set of linguistic connota¬ tions. Malombra is an evil shade,- Cecilia is symbolically blind, that is, unaware in her madness of her own surroundings,- Clara is she who brings light by illuminating with her spirit the path of justice. Cer¬ tainly, these allusions are functional in advancing the story. But even

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more relevant to the economy of each of these texts is the subversive action of the woman's name, its uncanny power to disrupt, through the mad or the spiritualistic repetition of the same, the otherwise straight genealogical lines, and to make evident the inability of time to wash away the faults of the fathers,- on the contrary, heredity must neces¬ sarily repeat itself indefinitely. Clara's spirit manages to feminize or to "hysterize" the body whose space she comes to possess, as if she herself were the penetrating malady, the "foreign body," which needs to be expelled at the end in order to return to the status quo (and vomiting is as bodily an expulsion as a literary text can offer!). In spite of many ironic moments in the narration (the explanation of metempsychosis as a bad case of indigestion, for example, has been read as a demysti¬ fication of a fantastic topos),34 Tarchetti's story remains within the con¬ fines of the fantastic genre, hesitating between the illusory and the supernatural as possible explanations for the mysterious happenings. Contrary to the rampant positivistic beliefs but also contrary to any all-encompassing spiritualism, the text refuses to make a totalizing choice that would confine it to a spiritualistic or materialistic stance and opts instead for an ironic indeterminacy. A similar indeterminacy controls Malombra, in which the romanti¬ cism inherent in the spiritual and matrilineal bestowal of a name by a "grandmother" on a "granddaughter" masks the tragic transmission of a neuropathic heredity: the appellation Marina inherits from her an¬ cestress is not only her first name, Cecilia, but also her chief attribute, "la Matta," "the Madwoman." Thus, in her confrontation with Silla while in the throes of her violent delirium, she exclaims: " 'So you believe that lam?...'... The unspoken yet guessed word resonated more strongly. ' . . . you believe that I am mad!' " (360—61). The expli¬ catory power of madness, a word that acquires strength by not being pronounced, overcomes that of reincarnation, especially once it spreads its contagion over Corrado in a sort of folie a deux ("Silla in turn felt attacked by madness" [363]), and also with the discussions of madness by both doctors and priests in the final pages. Thus, the delicate balance of the fantastic genre, which by definition must leave the reader in doubt as to the nature of the events in the text, is tipped at the end of the novel toward the privileging of Marina's madness as the only viable explanation of her behavior. Yet this choice is in turn undermined by the solution the text affords to the case of madness it presents, and scientific closure (to be achieved, for example, through treatment or at 34. Marinella Columni Camerino, "La narrativa di Tarchetti tra ragione e follia," in Branca et al., 732-41.

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least internment) is abandoned in favor of a return to metaphors of embarkation and of aquatic searches for the lost sanity, metaphors that are reminiscent in many ways of the stultifera navis of the Renais¬ sance.35 Despite the obvious differences between II santo, which describes the mystical experiences of an unrecognized saint, and Malombra, which explores the borderline region of sanity and spiritualism, there are points of contact in their indebtedness to and criticism of the in¬ tertext of contemporary psychology. These similarities are revealed pri¬ marily through the parallel self-hermeneutic strategies of the two novels. Like some scientific texts of the time, Malombra and 11 santo describe how a subject comes to be emptied of itself and replaced by another agency. In the earlier and less ambitious novel, this agency presents itself in the guise of the fragile spirit of a dead woman, and its intrusion is more or less dismissed as a case of madness, although the hesitation with which this interpretation is applied highlights the similarities between the effects of madness and those of spirit posses¬ sion. In the later and somewhat visionary novel, the spirit whose pen¬ etrating and shaping movements the text tries to capture is God's own, although some of its scientifically inclined witnesses persist in (mis)reading its activities as pathological manifestations, and mystical ecstasy finally replaces the bodily conversions of madness and its pos¬ session. The exploration of science and belief carried out in Malombra, although distant in many ways from Benedetto's mystical experience, is nevertheless an essential stepping-stone toward Fogazzaro's novelistic investigation of the effects of science and the spirit on the human body. To conclude, one may take a comprehensive and final look at Antonio Fogazzaro's perspective on the experience of the supernatural in his novels by comparing it to John Hoyles's assertion about mystical experience in an essay that explores different modem attitudes toward it: As thesis, there is the still dominant (but increasingly ignored) notion that orthodox mysticism can be identified and protected from its heretical potentialities. As antithesis, there is the notion that mys¬ ticism has no legs to stand on and on analysis resolves itself into a sublimated function of sex-economy. And as synthesis, there is the notion of an alternative tradition and with it an alternative interpre¬ tation whereby a materialist (but not mechanical) theory avoids re35. See Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 3-37. The stultifera navis was a ship used to carry away the mad.

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ductionism and gives a local habitation, both psycho-sexual and socio-economic, to the practices and experiences of mysticism.36 The thesis is exemplified by the work of some major traditional schol¬ ars of mysticism, such as Evelyn Underhill; the antithesis finds its bestknown exponent in Wilhelm Reich and his mechanical and reductive theory of "sex-economy"; and the synthesis, with which Hoyles aligns his own criticism of the mystics, is constituted by the "dynamic mo¬ nism" of the "mystical Marxist" Ernst Bloch. This contemporary rearrangement of the issues, which takes into ac¬ count Freudian, Reichian, and Marxist critiques of the mystical expe¬ rience, is actually a meaningful tool in a reading of Fogazzaro's work. The representation of the mystical experience in his novels, aware as it is of the close relationship and the interaction of mind and body in communication with the divine, is a strikingly modern one, and it is in blatant contrast to both the skeptical and the pathologizing in¬ terpretations of positivism and naturalism, which find a twentiethcentury follower in Wilhelm Reich, and to the decadent exaltation of malady and neurosis as privileged, albeit destructive, states of being. Fogazzaro achieves this "modernity" largely through conversance with contemporary scientific discoveries (especially in the field of experi¬ mental psychology), coupled with an intense religious faith that was constantly attempting to work around sometimes adverse dogma. What Hoyles terms the thesis and the antithesis are not avoided; rather, they are introduced and, to some extent, counterargued in 11 santo, and a synthesis is developed which reconciles the scientific viewpoint with the religious. As Fogazzaro asserts toward the end of "Per una nuova scienza": "It is worthwhile to be called dreamers and collectors of dreams, to face ridicule in order to establish on experimental bases a spiritualistic psychology such as the most powerful thinkers of the past have drawn from the depths of their mind and the greatest poets from the depths of their heart" (183-84). II Santo, as I mentioned, is but one example of the turn-of-thecentury re visitation of a characteristically medieval genre, hagiography. Most frequently, the principal purpose for revisiting this genre was to redeem saintliness from positivist accusations of hysteria. Huysmans took up this project after the cycle of novels on Durtal's conversion [La-bas, En route, La cathedrale, and L’oblat), with Sainte Lydwine de 36. John Hoyles, "Beyond the Sex-Economy of Mysticism: Some Observations on the Communism of the Imagination with Reference to Winstanley and Traherne," in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: Department of Literature, University of Essex, 1981), 238-39.

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Schiedam, published, not without some difficulties, in 1901.37 Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam is an infinitely more "decadent" hagiography than II santo, which strikes the modern reader as comparatively tame or "reasonable." The two nonetheless share several elements. Sainte Lydwine tells the story of a fourteenth-century Flemish mystic (never canonized), who, during the thirty-nine years of her life, experienced every conceivable illness, including stigmata and the medieval feu sacre (identified as the "forerunner of syphilis").38 Huysmans's acute taste for the morbid, as can be imagined, thoroughly exploits the purulent aesthetics of her expiatory suffering. Through the encounter it stages between the human body and the divine Word that inscribes it and gives it a meaning, the spectacle of the suffering sanctified body, flaunted in the case of Lydwine and, as we will see, Sebastian, more subdued in the case of Benedetto, becomes a privileged point of cross¬ over between the language of science and that of religion. Huysmans writes in his hagiography: "If Pain is not the exact synonym of Love, it is in any case its instrument and its sign. ... he who loves his God must wish to suffer for him."39 In similar terms, Piero Maironi thinks: "It had been a blessing for his soul... to accept from Love all the pain which it had destined for him without telling him its mysterious rea¬ son" [Santo, 316). Particularly in the case of Lydwine, whose ailments are depicted at length as in a pathographic account, the description of holy suffering employs the clinical gaze, developed by positivistic medicine, with the subversive intent of making the presence of the divine (rather than neurosis) more vividly visible. Huysmans's hagiographic glibness, in the attempt to render the action of the divine wholly visible through a clinical balance of speech and spectacle, reaches the point of the dis¬ gusting, the point of hysteria: the saintly soul is inscribed in a rotting body. Huysmans's method is not idiosyncratic. Catholic writers fre¬ quently used the very tools developed by their adversaries, notably by the clinical gaze, to display the visibility of the divine and therefore, it was hoped, the difference separating hysteria from mysticism. By a lin¬ guistic representation of the body's holy suffering they intended to cap¬ ture the suffering of the soul. Through this expression, however, the depiction of holiness came to resemble more and more, and in an in37. Already in En route, Durtal wants to write Lydwine's hagiography, but he is dis¬ couraged by the hagiographical failures of Gustave Flaubert and Ernest Hello, Flaubert's for lack of faith and Hello's for lack of art (Huysmans, En route, 41). 38. Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in NineteenthCentury France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 250. 39. Huysmans, Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (Paris: Maren Sell, 1989), 200.

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creasingly conspicuous way, the intensely visible displays of suffering of the Salpetriere, from which it was the purpose of the Catholic texts to distinguish themselves.

Gabriele D'Annunzio, La figlia di Iorio, Le martyre de Saint Sebastien, and La Pisanelle I have brought up Huysmans's Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam to un¬ derline the international nature of the hagiographic enterprise and es¬ pecially its diversity. For within this genre we can place the narratives of both historical figures such as Huysmans's Lydwine and D'Annun¬ zio's Sebastian, and fictional ones such as Fogazzaro's Piero Maironi and, to a lesser extent, D'Annunzio's Mila, Iorio's daughter. It is to D'Annunzio's oeuvre, beginning with La figlia di Iorio, that I now re¬ turn, for even as it proclaimed a naturalistic aesthetics, "La vergine Orsola" displayed a religious intertext that declared the positivistic par¬ adigms insufficient for the poetic representation of the sacred, even though the sacred may be expressed with the materializing terminology of an ambiguous "female malady." These ethical and aesthetic issues, never separable in the discourse of fin-de-siecle decadence, are recur¬ rent in D'Annunzio's work; they appear again a few years later, in com¬ parable yet contrasting terms, in La figlia di Iorio (1904)/ undoubtedly one of D'Annunzio's masterpieces and the only one of his plays to have enjoyed continued popularity on the stage even in recent years. The ambiguous religious discourse permeating "La vergine Orsola" took se¬ riously the possibility of disease as its own explanation, the hysteria of the protagonist being hardly distinguishable from the hysterization of the text itself. The activity of the numinous in La figlia di Iorio, how¬ ever, is a self-conscious tragic force independent of the narrative force of physical illness, though certainly not of its representational poetics. In the later work, the "hysterization" of the text gives the female pro¬ tagonist a fertile rather than a diseased uterus, and her symbolic par¬ turition through her death at the end of the play, quite unlike a gassy hysterical pregnancy or a bloody abortion, produces a valid, charitable alternative, a veritable redemption, to the cruel mores of her Abruzzese deuteragonists. Given D'Annunzio's usually negative portrayal of femininity, a text such as La figlia di Iorio—where the eponymous protagonist, despite

40 The intimate bond of ethics and aesthetics in the context of D'Annunzio's work has been argued persuasively by Paolo Valesio throughout Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark

Flame.

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the fact that she is a prostitute and a witch, is a positive and redeeming figure, even a saintly one—assumes increased importance. Nonethe¬ less, the poetic models on which the representation of Iorio's daughter is based have much in common with those of the other D'Annunzian feminine figures; even in her more positive and holy configuration, Mila does not spring out of nothingness. Rather, she is obviously in many ways the sister of Basiliola, of Pisanelle, and most definitely of Saint Sebastian (himself a self-consciously feminine figure).41 What binds Sebastian and Mila together is a religious and loosely Christian vocation that confers upon their death a clear eschatological or numi¬ nous dimension, however minor, which is absent or barely perceptible in most of D'Annunzio's work. Although this form of religiosity is far from an unequivocal expression of Catholic orthodoxy (it is thoroughly saturated with and fascinated by pagan elements), nevertheless it al¬ lows the tragic and ethical tensions of the play to be inscribed within a religious intertext, the use of which goes beyond the common deca¬ dent exploitation of ritualistic aesthetics and aestheticized rituals. This feat is achieved with greater success in La figlia di Iorio than in the more controversial Martyre de Saint Sebastien, where the ambiguous opulence of the setting and the language may leave one in doubt as to the aims of the representation of religion. Religiosity in La figlia di Iorio is inextricably bound up with the essentializing femininity of the figure of Mila (because she is a woman and a prostitute and a witch, she is thrice eroticized), as well as with the setting of the play, D'Annunzio's home region, Abruzzo. The choice of Abruzzo allows or imposes a dense subtext of binary conflicts between Christian law and atavistic law, faith and superstition, miracle and magic, freedom and necessity, spirit and flesh, and so on. Above all, the sacred that lies at the core of this Abruzzese tragedy is repre¬ sented as primitive, and therefore, as Rene Girard notes, it is insepa¬ rable from violence: violence lies at its very core.42 Because of this chosen geography, which implies the exoticism of a culture utterly other than that of the high society to which D'Annunzio aspired, the play leads back, as its principal and most intimate intertext, to D'An¬ nunzio's early writings such as Le novelle della Pescara. Thanks to the Abruzzese background, the inseparability of sexuality, violence, and 41. It has been aptly remarked that Mila and Saint Sebastian are the only D'Annunzian protagonists who do not die at the moment of their death, but rather turn death into "a transition toward a recognized and recognizable heaven." Odoardo Bertani, "L'elemento religioso nel teatro di D'Annunzio," Quaderni del Vittoriale 24 (1980): 80. 42. Rene Girard, La violence et le sacre (Paris: Grasset, 1972), 36, 52.

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the sacred, theorized by Girard and covertly or tentatively represented in "La vergine Orsola," is openly thematized in La figlia di Iorio. This alterity of Abruzzo—D'Annunzio's motherland but also the rep¬ resentation of the very Other of high culture—is underlined by the mysteriousness of the play's historical setting, different from the more or less contemporary Novelle. The scene is rather specifically set in "The Land of Abruzzi," but the time is vague, "many years ago" (38). Both spatially and temporally, then, the play is located in a mythical space that the reader's culture may not reach, where the standard laws of European civilization are simply not in force. The cultural otherness of a historically distant Abruzzo is further heightened by the choice of a woman as the protagonist of the action. The dark continent of fem¬ ininity—particularly feminine sexuality, which is central to the char¬ acterization of both Orsola and Mila, respectively defined as a virgin and as a prostitute above all other attributes—is thus superimposed upon that of the mysterious Abruzzese rites and customs. Furthermore, Mila is described as a stranger both to the valley and to the mountains, the only two available locations in the text. She does not belong to a specific geography, but is always "other," a purely exotic creature. It is because she is an outsider that Mila will be the ideal sacrificial victim when the time comes. As Girard points out, the victims of human sacrifice must be marginal to the society that sacrifices them in order to avoid the possibility of revenge for their death.43 Woman and Abruzzo are both incomprehensible, located in an unknown "else¬ where" and therefore unseizable in many of their dimensions by the textual mimesis,- the story must trope itself as the self-conscious re¬ flection of a reflection, spoken in the dreamy language of a reality un¬ certain of its own existence. For this purpose, the textual category of religious writing, which provides the reader with the materializing ex¬ pressions of a place utterly other than one's own, offers itself as a priv¬ ileged epistemological instrument. The language of the play, in addition to being laden with a plethora of evocatively archaic and rare words, frequently alludes to a complex religious intertext. These characteristics, together with the frequent repetition of certain words and phrases by the characters, confer on the entire work an incantatory, almost a liturgical quality. Thus, for ex¬ ample, Aligi speaks repeatedly and in the exact same terms of his ob¬ session with a dream of Christ—an obsession his mother takes up at the end of the play as she identifies in her madness with her con43. Ibid., 27-29.

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demned son and repeats his very same words—and with a sevenhundred-year sleep. But above all, his obsession is with an ever-present mute angel, Yangelo muto, who prevents him from throwing Mila out and whom Aligi mentions every time he comes onstage. These obsessions or perhaps possessions (undecidably spiritual or de¬ monic) do not pass unnoticed by Aligns interlocutors, who, beginning with his own mother, fear him mad. Candia prefigures the denouement of the play, for it is she who will be judged mad at the end just for borrowing Aligns initial words. Most important, she speculates at the beginning of the action that Aligi's seeming madness may come from his bride, who may have poured him black wine on an empty stomach (49). Later, his other "bride," Mila, will falsely accuse herself of having bewitched Aligi, of having made him mad. She will make this final sacrifice in order to save him from the just accusations of parricide, for he has indeed killed Lazaro di Roio, his own father, as he knows and as his people are all-too ready to disbelieve. The misogynistic gesture of the mother—pointing the finger at the woman-as-bride, the womanas-object-of-desire, judged to be the origin of folly—is turned by the protagonist into a sublime action before which the text bows its head, as it were. And instead of Vienda the bride, it is Candia the mother herself who will give Aligi the drugged wine in the cup of comfort, la tazza del consolo," to diminish the pain of the gruesome torture he is to undergo. (He was to have his hand chopped off and then to be tied into a sack with a ferocious mastiff and thrown into the river.) The confusion of madness with divine inspiration infects the characters at various points in the text. Aligi's heightened state of receptivity in the first act is seen as madness. In the second act he himself fears that Mila is mad (assuming she has eaten some poisonous wild honey) when she announces to him her imminent departure (94)* ln f&ct, it is her selfabnegating intention to let him return to his people. Mila's last action "saves" her and also saves the status quo of the tribe, for tribal unity is the principal objective of the sacrificial act. Mila is the expiatory scapegoat who pays for the sins of a barbaric society, she is the pharmakon that, by being expelled, prevents further violence and thus allows social life to continue.44 But the "superfem44. Girard points out that in some tribes it is not the guilty one who is sacrificed but someone close to him/her, so as to avoid a perfect reciprocity that might look too much like revenge or counterviolence to the gods (ibid., 45)—just what happens in La figlia di Iorio. Ussher adduces similar explanations for the European witch craze: "As explanation for misery or infection could not be found in traditional religious discourse, which was changing and uncertain, another source was sought. And women became the scapegoats. As witches, women were a convenient source of evil, for their absence of morality was 'known' " (Women’s Madness, 45).

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mina" of this play is not only a strong but also a sympathetic character who ends up saving rather than damning her lover (unlike most other femmes fatales of D'Annunzio's theater).45 The awareness of the re¬ deeming value of human sacrifice is voiced in the play only by Omella, Aligi's youngest sister and a chorus or priest figure of sorts, incarnating that Christian charity so patently obliterated in the rest of the char¬ acters by the powerful remnants of a more primitive religion. The relationship between Mila and Omella is the most complex and selfaware in the play, and just as it is Ornella who saves Mila from the crowd of reapers at the beginning of the action, so it is she who at the very end recognizes Mila's self-accusation as the sacrifice it is. Ornella blesses her in a kind of last rites, a sacerdotal gesture that identifies her symptoms as those of sainthood, not witchcraft, and promises her a place in heaven: "Mila, Mila, my sister in Christ, I kiss your feet as they walk away! Heaven is for you!" (173)* This redemption is at once Mila's personalized reproduction of the Passion on Calvary, an imitatio Chiisti, and a rewriting of Charcot's interpretation of witches as hysterics. Mila s sacrifice restores meaning to hysteric and mystic and in so doing dehysterizes both. This over¬ determined sacrifice is coupled with the use of religious language throughout the play to produce a peculiar form of "Christian" message, the spirit of which—if not the letter—is in glaring contrast to the cruel atavistic laws of the rest of the characters. This decadent, yet anticlinical version of Christianity is D'Annunzio's own (and his religious heterodoxy can hardly be questioned), introducing elements of neopa¬ ganism, Abmzzese primitive religiosity, and a gnosticism derived from the apocryphal gospels into the more canonical tradition of Catholic texts. The syncretic essence of the religion of the play is made clear from the very first set of stage directions, which describe the setting of the first act as a room containing a bunch of red buckwheat against witchcraft, the image of our Lady, and a waxen cross, also against witchcraft (39). The same room contains an effigy of the Virgin Mary (here ambiguously named Nostra Donna, a generic and not specifically Christian object of veneration) and a weed protecting against evil. But the cross made of wax, blessed on the feast of the Ascension (49), is the first and best sign of the Abruzzese integration of the old religion with the new. Christ's cross is the new form shaping the old matter, the wax used to ward off the evil effects of witchcraft. A Christian

4S Superfemmina is a somewhat unpleasant term coined in 1912 by Alfredo Gargiulo (Gabriele D’Annunzio: Studio critico [Naples: Perrella, 1912]), and frequently used by D'Annunzio's critics.

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symbol is used here for an undoubtedly pagan function, blending the languages of the old and the new in one pithy signifier. The syncretism of the play's religiosity is manifested not only spa¬ tially but also in the temporal setting of the first act, which is very much in tune with one of the most popular myths of the European finde-siecle. It is the Eve of Saint John, June 24 (the Baptist's birth occur¬ ring six months before that of Jesus), a date made particularly significant in the late nineteenth century by the many studies of reli¬ gious folklore and, more important for the literary world, by the fash¬ ionable inconographic motif of John the Baptist s beheading and Salome's dance. The motif, reintroduced in 1843 in Heinrich Heine's poem Atta Troll, reached its apex later in the century with Flaubert's "Herodias," Stephane Mallarme's "Herodiade," Jules Laforgue's "Sal¬ ome," Huysmans's A reborns (in the lengthy and passionate ecphrasis of two paintings of Salome by Gustave Moreau), and Oscar Wilde s play Salome.46 The feast of Saint John, coinciding with the summer solstice (the second act, with a similar emphasis on the solar rhythms, takes place during the autumnal equinox), was the superficially christianized version of an older rite celebrating the return of the sun after the winter and, in southern Europe, the wheat harvest. Thus Omella sings that, since the following day is the feast of Saint John, she wants to go up the hill "to see the severed head inside the sun as it appears, to see all the blood boiling in the golden platter" (42-43). Similarly, Aligi says that on the Eve of Saint John he was waiting for the sun when he saw the bleeding head of Saint John inside its blazing disc (100). Saint John's bleeding severed head (reminiscent of Gustave Moreau's paintings of the same gore-dripping image) is identified with the shape of the sun, the redness of his boiling blood with solar light and heat, and his sac¬ rificial beheading is easily associated with the simultaneous ritual of harvesting the wheat. Both are examples, along the lines of an extreme imitatio Christi, of a life-giving though violent death.47 It is through the symbolic violence of the harvest that Aligi is asso¬ ciated with the Baptist, since the first time he went harvesting he cut his vein and blood flowed. Because of this incompetence in the fields, a mark of his difference and inferiority, his father makes him a shep¬ herd, and this difference will later stress the contrast between Aligi and the crowd of angry reapers who want to capture Mila. The erotic am46. The bibliography on Salome is abundant; a good place to start is Helen Grace Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Minard, 1960), which examines all the major turn-of-the-century Salome texts. 47. On the complex symbolism of the Eve of Saint John, see Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 199-207.

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biguity of the Salome subtext appears in the chorus of the reapers, ready to rape, slay, and burn Iorio's daughter, figured as both Salome and John the Baptist at once. This sensuality tinged with violence also appears in Omella's song, in which she desires to dress in green for Saint John because "Santo Giovanni" wounded her on the green (49). The singer is eager to dress up for the injured and injuring Saint John even though—or maybe just because—he is about to come and wound her. The figures of John the Baptist and Salome, of executioner and victim, are forever intertwined in the use that La figlia di Iorio makes of this subtext. They will return in all their splendor in D'Annunzio's French plays. Mila herself, however, is the narrative and tragic space where this religious and linguistic synthesis is most comprehensively and con¬ spicuously articulated. At her first appearance on stage, she is chased by the reapers armed with their sickles. Like Christ, she is the symbolic grain that must die to give life (literally to Aligi and symbolically to his entire tribe). Mila is throughout the play an eminently mysterious figure, the end product of a conflation of different historical and literary figures; she is the eloquent accumulation of traces from popular and literary representations of womanhood, both sacred and profane. It is clear, above all else, that Mila is a kind of Mary Magdalene figure, the penitent whore (like Rosa Catena in "La vergine Orsola"). She is the prostitute who loves much and whom, therefore, much will be forgiven (Luke 7:47). But she is above all the Mary Magdalene who appears in the apocryphal Gospel of Mary, a teacher of the Apostles and an initiate of Christ's mysteries.48 Fier readily available sexuality, which goes be¬ yond merely physical manifestations (she and Aligi lead a perfectly chaste life together while in the mountains), is the very cause of both her sin and her sainthood. In this, she is very much a figure of her time, an avatar of the holy harlot whose many incarnations charmed the finde-siecle and who will return in all her glory in D'Annunzio's play La Pisanelle. The dualism inherent in the figure of Mila can be inscribed quite literally in the ambivalent tradition, only apparently self¬ contradictory, which alternately represents woman as a sacrificial vir¬ gin to be glorified and a predatory whore to be censured and destroyed. La figlia di Iorio, however, is especially interesting because it refuses to choose between the two, maintaining through this suspension of judgment a potent tragic tension. The lustful and angry reapers call Mila "harlot of the bushes and the 48. James Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977)# 471-74-

128

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Saint Hysteria

woods, whore of the haystacks and the pigsties/' as well as "the rotten sheep, the scabby dirty sheep," and they say that she threatens to in¬ fect" Aligi's "sheepfold" or even to "give to his wife her contagion" (68-69). The sheep metaphor is evidently a perversion of the Good Shepherd imagery, successfully exploited in the play thanks to Aligi's own occupation as a shepherd. Thus, during their confrontation, Lazaro refers to Mila as the ewe he wants to capture and to Aligi as the shep¬ herd he will judge (129). Even as he accuses Mila of being a whore, however, Lazaro protests too much, responding to Aligi's implorations by asking him, "Of what saint were you just speaking?" (130), when Aligi has not made any mention of sainthood: he has only said that it would be a sin to touch Mila. His father then points out to Aligi that Mila carries the seven deadly sins under her eyelids and around her neck (130). In spite of his insulting intentions, Lazaro unwittingly calls Mila a saint (an appellation she will earn by choosing martyrdom) through an uncalled-for denial, a Freudian slip of the tongue, and through a symbolic association with the prototype of all repentant pros¬ titutes, Mary Magdalene. But Mila's use of a Franciscan subtext—she calls herself and is called "the creature of Christ" (59, 63) also iden¬ tifies her as a saint. Aligi more unequivocally calls her "poverella di Gesu" and himself "povero di Cristo" (84, 85), Saint Francis's own ep¬ ithet, "Christ's pauper." Against the danger of the prostitute—a figure of feminine evil which, after all, still belongs to this world—the besieged male can to some extent protect himself. The danger of the witch is more serious. Mila is also feared as a witch, daughter of Iorio, the antonomastic sorcerer (68), the bearer of horror religiosus capable of inflicting others with disease, death, and madness (she refers to those she has sickened, killed, and driven mad [164]). It is precisely this name that the text chooses as its emblem, the name that places the protagonist in the genealogical line of witches, while it subverts such a definition. Mila is burned as a witch, but she is, if anything, a saint (sharing the fate of Joan of Arc). And it is by cleverly exploiting this genealogical reputa¬ tion of sorcery that Mila succeeds, during the last scene, in making the crowd believe her lie over Aligi's truth, and even in convincing Aligi himself of her guilt and his own innocence. All she need do is remind him that she is the daughter of a wizard and therefore knows and per¬ forms every possible spell (164). But Mila's death has very little in common with the classical sce¬ nario of the burning of witches, be they hysterics or not, and it is the diagnosis of witches as hysterics that her martyrdom implicitly ques¬ tions. Also, unlike the quintessential witch, Mila wills her own death,

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like Christ, she immolates herself to save Aligi and, indirectly, his en¬ tire tribe. Just as Christ and many saints literally embraced a painful cross (or, like the turn-of-the-century Italian mystic and stigmatic Saint Gemma Galgani, were affected by or chose the way of the folie de la cioix), so also Mila goes to the stake of her own accord, crying, "The flame is beautiful! The flame is beautiful!" (173)- With these words, she proclaims the aesthetic value of her death (martyrdom, be it God's or the saints', being an important symbol and inspiration of Christian ethics and aesthetics) and embraces it in a fashion at once Christian and highly decadent. On one hand, Mila may certainly be said to undergo a traditional purgation by fire. Cosma the saint had earlier asserted that the dreams that come from God are purified by fire before being told (96), and Mila is in a sense Aligi's dream, sprung from his seven-hundred-year sleep and purged by fire when he awak¬ ens from his love for her through her confession. On the other hand, of course, she dies in the tradition of true witches: burned at the stake. Only through this complete, yet subversive identification can she turn the witch's diagnosis upside down. But death by fire is also a decadent topos. Aligi is the first one to say "The flame is beautiful!" (172-)/ im¬ plying that fire is too beautiful a death for the evil Mila (whom he now considers guilty) and at the same time constituting an erotic tri¬ angle among himself, Mila, and the flame; the image of fire underlines the aesthetic possibilities inherent in staging of the "superfemmina's" death. The analogies of the protagonist with Christ are consistently and almost blasphemously carried out through the play, bursting forward in her downright imitation, during a dialogue with Aligi, of Christ's own characteristic expression of authority, "in verita," "verily": "In verita, in verita ti parlo" ("Verily, verily I say to you," [93D-49 h is es¬ pecially (though not exclusively) in this passage that Mila's speech be¬ trays a puzzling sense of intimacy with God, an obscurely obtained knowledge of God's will (gnosis). This can be seen from her very first speech, when she repeatedly warns everyone that God will not forgive them if they do not save her (60)—an injunction that she reiterates as with the power of an incantation to Aligi's mother a few pages later. By the use of this language and the intertext of the apocrypha, Mila is portrayed as a privileged bearer of knowledge, the gnosis that some apocryphal gospel stories (such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel 49. One must keep in mind here Valesio's perceptive remark on the close (and chal¬ lenging) relation between decadent writing and evangelical discourse. A full exploration of the way the language of great symbolist literature transforms the languages of the Gos¬ pels in an ever-challenging fashion has yet to be done" (Gabriele D’Annunzio, 50).

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Saint Hysteria

of Philip attribute to Mary Magdalene.50 It is this gnosis that creates a unique bond between Christ and the Magdalene, who share in the mys¬ tery of God's revelations. And it is also this gnosis that sets Mila utterly apart from the other tragic characters in the complex game of religious identifications they all play. If Mila finds her ancestry in representational traditions of both Christ and Mary Magdalene, so also Candia identifies at the beginning of the play with Christ's language, when she ritually breaks the bread over Aligi and Vienda, his future bride (50). Yet at the scene of Aligi's im¬ pending death, she shifts positions and becomes the Virgin Mary, the Mater Dolorosa witnessing Christ's death on the cross: "I have lost the heart of a sweet son; it has been thirty-three days, and I cannot find him! Have you seen him, have you met him?—I have left him on Mount Calvary; I have left him on the faraway mountain; I have left him with tears and blood" (150). As Candia goes insane she loses her sense of a unified self and her consciousness wanders from one figure to another, from Aligi's mother to Aligi to Mary to an outside observer of the scene (148-53). Omella immediately perceives her mother's de¬ lirium as a loss of sanity: "She has lost her sense, can't you see?" (149), she tells her sisters, one of whom, Splendore, suspects a case of de¬ moniac possession: "Mother, who speaks in you? Whom do you hear speaking inside you, inside your womb?" (151)* This is a striking pas¬ sage, for it is an unusual homage to Christianity on the part of a non¬ religious text to attribute a clear perception of physical and spiritual phenomena (madness, in this case) precisely to the one entirely Chris¬ tian figure in the play, while superstition (in the form of belief in spirit possession) is assigned to the still predominantly pagan beliefs of the other characters. In the last act, another resonant religious identification is that of Aligi's bride, Vienda, with the bride of Christ; Aligi hands Vienda over to his successor by telling her that she is to become Christ s bride in heaven (159). As in "La vergine Orsola," Jesus Christ is the privileged Bridegroom of the soul, and Vienda's existence comes to resemble Saint Gemma Galgani's as the crucified bride of Christ. Vienda's trousseau consists of "mourning clothes, combs of spines, necklaces of thorn, sheets woven with sorrows" (159).51 The dubious linguistic pleasure 50. See Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, 131-51/ 471-7451. "When I am your blood bridegroom—Jesus told me—I will want you, but I will want you to be crucified" (Gemma Galgani, Gesu solo, ed. Gabriele Pollice [Rome: Citta Nuova, 1978], 191). Her angel tells her: "Remember that the precious jewels that adorn the bride of a crucified king can be nothing other than the thorns and the cross" (Gemma

0

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inherent in the list of torture instruments is only slightly tempered by the joy of Vienda's sanctification and imminent marriage to Jesus; her portrayal as a saint is in fact qualified as a call to martyrdom, as a violent vocation, placing her among the "golden martyrs" (160). Unlike most of D'Annunzio's theater, La figlia di Iorio sets forth a spiritual dimension that goes beyond the hysterized surface of the deca¬ dent text. The liturgical quotations and paraphrases are not merely an aesthetic accessory but rather an essential component of the dramatic development, even if they are not proposed with an evangelizing intent. Thus, if La figlia di Iorio is set quite apart from decadent literary pro¬ duction, still it employs paradigms of feminine representation and re¬ ligious disbelief which must be read together with the intertexts of fin-de-siecle mimesis. In turn, this mimesis is a complex amalgam of hysterical depths and surfaces steeped in a misogyny and an antireli¬ giosity that La figlia di Iorio endorses at one level—a superficial one, I would maintain—yet also challenges on a more profound one. The challenge comes from the reinscription of Mila as Christ and the re¬ demption she effects through her voluntary sacrifice. In the end, Ornella's sacerdotal gesture seals the efficaciousness of Mila's death. Yet even as it proclaims its Christian message of charity, La figlia di Iorio makes use of poetic models whose ideological backdrop can hardly leave the Christian message intact, as for example in the case of the perversion of the language of the Gospels. This unresolved tension gives the play a self-consciously Christian dimension that is only am¬ biguously represented in the rest of D'Annunzio's theater, where the action more self-complacently embraces the aesthetics of decadence and its problematic ethics. Among D'Annunzio's decadent-symbolist literary production, the two plays originally written in French, Le martyre de Saint Sebastien (1911) and La Pisanelle, ou Le jeu de la rose et de la mort (1913] stand out for their opulent fin-de-siecle flavor, even though they were written more than a decade into the twentieth century.52 Le martyre de Saint Sebastien caused a great scandal among the religious authorities, both because Ida Rubinstein—woman, Russian, and Jewish—was to have

Galgani, Estasi, diario, autobiografia, scritti vari [Rome: Postulazione dei PP. Passionisti,

I943I 241)-

.

m

52. Gabriele D'Annunzio, Le martyre de Saint Sebastien: Mystere, in Tragedie, sogm e misteri, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 2:381-590; D'Annunzio, La Pisanelle, ou Le jeu de la rose et de la mort, in Tragedie, sogni e misteri 2:591-841. The third French play by D'Annunzio, La chevrefeuille, is a slightly modified version of a play first written in Italian, II ferro.

132

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the title role and because of the languidly erotic tone pervading its representation of Christianity. The recommendation of the bishop of Paris to all good Catholics not to attend the play was soon to be fol¬ lowed by a condemnation by the Index of all D'Annunzio's novels, short stories, and theatrical works. Le Martyre was clearly not per¬ ceived as orthodox, or as entertaining, for that matter: the public found it too long, too slow, and too difficult to understand (D Annunzio s French was a complex amalgam of archaisms and precious words, and Ida Rubinstein's foreign pronunciation was notoriously atrocious). But the use of French implicates D'Annunzio's decadentismo with that of France—the same linguistic and poetic choice made by Oscar Wilde a few years earlier with his writing of the controversial Salome in French (1893; Ida Rubinstein also played Salome in the 1912 Paris produc¬ tion).53 The relation of this play to D'Annunzio's Martyre, as well as his Pisanelle, outlines the complex modes in which the literary lan¬ guage of decadence rewrites the language of Christianity around the display of a suffering and feminine or feminized body (hysterical, that is, or hysterized). The genres of hagiography and biblical narrative are read selectively and imitated creatively, providing important aesthetic models in the literature of the European decadence. The action of Le martyre is developed in one prologue and five "man¬ sions," compared by the author to five stained-glass windows (389). This description underlines the static and visual nature of the text and its debt to diverse iconographic sources, so that the play is often more like a series of tableaux vivants than like a theatrical performance. The first mansion tells of the martyrdom of the twins Marc and Marcellien, whose spectacle of unshakable faith inspires Sebastian himself, the chief of the imperial Roman archers, to declare his allegiance to Chris¬ tianity; the perfect and the emperor, enamored of Sebastian s beauty, in vain try to dissuade him, offering him their own personal adoration and great material riches. At the end of the first scene, Sebastian is made to dance on hot coals (the "Primum Sancti Sebastiani Supplicium Incruentum"). The second mansion (the "Sanctae Sindonis Inventio ), describes Sebastian's encounter with the mysterious girl sick with fe¬ vers, a "sacred harlot" who carries on her breast Christ's Holy Shroud. 53. Nancy Pressly, Salome: La belle dame sans meici (San Antonio: San Antonio Mu¬ seum of Art, 1983), 32. Anthony Pym claims about the representation of Salome that "there can be no doubt that from 1869 to 1892, the period in which the theme won popularity, all major versions were in some way associated with Paris. It was then entirely fitting that Oscar Wilde should write his 1893 version in French and that Salome's sub¬ sequent travels should generally follow the dissemination of French influences on the fin de siecle period." Pym, "The Importance of Salome: Approaches to a Fin-de-Siecle Theme," French Forum 14 (1989): 3*3-

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In the third mansion, the saint is almost suffocated to death by a mur¬ derous shower of flowers and gold (in the "Secundum Sancti Sebastiani Supplicium Incruentum,/). And finally, in the fourth mansion, Sebas¬ tian is killed by the arrows of his own archers (and this is the "Extre¬ mum Sancti Sebastiani Supplicium Cruentum"). In the brief last mansion, the saint appears in all his heavenly glory, among singing choirs of martyrs, virgins, apostles, and angels.54 Clearly this is D'Annunzio's very own rewriting of the story of Saint Sebastian, inspired by sources ranging from Renaissance art (D'Annun¬ zio claims in the dedication to have been inspired by Antonio del Pol¬ laiuolo's painting of the saint), to medieval mystery plays (the text is described in the title page as a "Mystere"), to fin-de-siecle iconography of androgyny.55 Saint Sebastian, traditionally represented as a beautiful youth, was a favorite saint of aesthetes and decadents,* Oscar Wilde, to pick a notorious example, chose the name Sebastian during his exile in France. A parallel could be drawn between the exiled British aesthete and the "exiled" Italian dandy, both of whom had the audacity to com¬ pose in French, the language of decadence par excellence, Christian "mystery" plays, the erotic tone of which could not pass unnoticed by the religious authorities (Salome was banned from the English stage because of its use of biblical characters). If in Salome sexual and gender ambiguity is alluded to (for example, by Wilde's photograph posing as Salome)56 rather than explicitly thematized, Sebastian's enigmatic gen¬ der is flaunted, reminding the reader of Aubrey Beardsley's grotesque illustrations for Wilde's play. Sebastian is an object rather than a sub¬ ject of desire, he is figured as feminine by drawing on his status as a homosexual icon. In a different D'Annunzian context, Valesio claims that "The reversal of sexes is primarily a hermeneutic approach."57 This statement suggests that the representation of Sebastian as a "gen¬ der-bender" signifies more than a decadent/degenerate challenge to or¬ thodoxy (D'Annunzio flippantly claimed that he wrote Le martyre under the inspiration of Ida Rubinstein's beautiful legs).58 The herme54. In 1911 Le martyre de Saint Sebastien was set to music by Claude Debussy for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. 5 5. Notably, many elements are taken from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Bibliotheque nationale (the words of the messenger at the beginning, for example, are a clear imitation of the manuscript prologue); see Leonard Mills, ed., Le mystere de Saint Sebas¬ tien (Geneva: Droz, 1965). In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann remarks that "Sebastian, always iconographically attractive, is the favorite saint among homosexuals." Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1988), 7m. 56. Reproduced in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, facing 42957. Valesio, Gabriele D’Annunzio, 53. 58. Philippe Jullian, D’Annunzio, trans. Stephen Hardman (New York: Viking, 1973), 224-25.

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neutic use of hysteria is inseparable from that of gender exchange in Le martyre as in all texts that present a hysterized male. In her study of hysteria in man, Monica Torres contends that, if the hysterical woman prefers to be rather than to have the phallus (for she knows that she does not have it), by displaying it on her body (for example, through the conversion symptom), then the parade of virility itself is feminine: "To display male attributes as a woman displays her own body has the effect of feminizing man—nothing more, nothing less"59 The image of the androgyne, a popular iconographic motif at the end of the nineteenth century, represents, among other things, physical as well as moral ambiguity (as a hysteric, yet at the same time also a male, he is suspended between being and having the phallus), homoerotic desire, artistic self-absorption, and, most frightening for the desiring subject, the threat of sexual self-sufficiency and independence.60 Fur¬ thermore, sexual ambiguity is yet another marker of Sebastian's hys¬ teria. "A hysterical symptom is the expression of both a masculine and a feminine unconscious sexual phantasy," writes Freud in his 1908 es¬ say "Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality," while stressing the bisexual nature of hysterical symptoms and male neurot¬ ics' "bisexual predisposition."61 I refer to these texts not in order to diagnose a character but rather to underline some of the ways in which the decadent texts rewrite medical codes. For the theme of gender exchange is also a sustained allusion to gnostic scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, in which we read: "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male and the female female . . . then will you enter [the kingdom]."62 With a spiritual movement analogous to the psychological movement of abjection, boundaries are overstepped and opposites reconciled. Intertextual discussions of the problematic deter¬ mination of gender are not rare in turn-of-the-century texts. In his novel En route, for example, Huysmans underlines the fluidity of the line dividing masculinity and femininity among Catholic saints: Even in religion, there are some souls that seem to have mistaken their sex.

59. Monica Torres, "La questione dell'isteria nell'uomo," in Armando Verdiglione et al., In materia di amore: Studi sul discorso isterico (Milan: Spirali, 1980), no. 60. See A. J. L. Busst, "The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century," in Romantic Mythologies, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), i~9561. Freud, "Fiysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality," in Fragment of an Analysis, 151. 62. Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, 121, emphasis mine.

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Saint Francis of Assisi, who was all love, had rather the feminine soul of a nun and Saint Teresa, who was the most attentive of psychologists, had the virile soul of a monk. It would be more exact to call them woman-saint [sainte] Francis and man-saint [saint] Teresa."63 In an analogous fashion, Saint Sebastian is represented as the masculine (or one might say the feminine) counterpart of Saint Joan of Arc, whose cult was being revived around this time (she was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920). Just as Jules Michelet, Paul Claudel, and George Bernard Shaw were all intent on showing, as a strange proof of her sanctity, Joan's conspicuous lack of feminine qualities, the figure of Sebastian underwent an opposite manipulation. His meek passivity was troped as a characteristically feminine form of martyrdom. Both saints are held responsible for a disrupting confusion of their respective gender codes, and it is precisely this confusion that stands at the basis of their sanctification, and of their martyrdom. A correlation between the two saints (a sort of androgynes and gynanders, to use fin-de-siecle terminology), is pointed out in D'Annunzio's preface to the text, where Joan of Arc is evoked in her function as a chief of archers, and is thus associated with Sebastian's own activity.64 In fact, in his "Hymne a l'androgyne," "Sar" Josephin Peladan (1858-1918) describes the andro¬ gyne as the "very holy sex, the only one to have gone up to heaven," and as "sex of Joan of Arc and sex of the miracle! Praise to you."65 Ironically, Joan according to tradition does not menstruate, but Se¬ bastian does. Visible and blatantly symbolic black blood is said to flow from his groin onto his pale thigh [Martyre, 554). This detail seems stranger to us than it would have appeared to those familiar with turnof-the-century psychiatry. The first appendix to Desire-Magloire Bourneville's monograph on Louise Lateau, titled "Observation on a man menstruating from a finger," deals with hysterical periodic bleeding in men and is aimed at showing that stigmata are nothing but a displaced menstruation, capable of making its appearance both in women and, albeit more rarely, in men.66 Joan of Arc, on the other hand, according

63. Huysmans, En route, 251. 64. D'Annunzio states in the preface that, while he was writing about Saint Sebastian, he had in mind the small company of Italian archers Joan had in Compiegne (384). It is somewhat surprising to read in the history of the iconography of Saint Sebastian that he was represented until the Middle Ages and in some cases even later as an old man, usually bearded and with white hair; it was only during the Renaissance that he began to be portrayed as a beautiful young ephebe. See Pietro Cannata, "Sebastiano," in Bibliotheca sanctorum, 13 vols. (Rome: Citta Nuova, 1965), 7:789-801. 65. Josephin Peladan, L’androgyne: La decadence latine, ethopee (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979)/ 7-

66. Bourneville, Science et miracle, 79-82.

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to Jules Michelet and his historical sources, "grew up, became strong and beautiful, but she never experienced the physical miseries of woman. She was spared them, to the profit of her religious thought and inspiration."67 The relationship between hysteria and menstruation, one of the obsessive questions at the Salpetriere (some parallels were drawn, for example, between the periodicity of menstruation and the periodicity of hysterical attacks), is as enigmatic as the uterine dimen¬ sion of hysteria and as (its?) stigmata; it is metonymically connected to both uterus and bleeding wounds.68 But in either case, the potency of thought and of religious inspiration necessitates the disappearance of paralyzing, blood-sucking menstruation, and in other accounts of Joan of Arc's exploits, such as Shaw's, even Joan's supposed beauty is obliterated in favor of the success of her saintly military—and virilemission.69 In addition to the allusion to and the implied comparison with Joan of Arc, Saint Sebastian's androgyny is introduced through that of his two predecessors in martyrdom, the twin brothers Marc and Marcellien; Marcellien, in particular, his mother calls his sisters' sweet sister (Martyr e, 414). Christianity is imbued with femininity, and it is only women or feminine men who convert to it. The bodily nature of the feminine is apt to be transposed onto the corporeality of the Christian rites, and Sebastian acquires Christianity even as his femininity be¬ comes increasingly painful and exasperated. He is "male, with a beau¬ tiful face, like a Fury's" (431)- A hermaphrodite made up of masculine and feminine body parts, Sebastian has masculine organs but a myth¬ ologically feminine face. So also the Roman emperor, enamored of the saint like every other man in the play, describes him as the "ephebe" (543, 548), praises his "ambiguous body" (560), and greets him by no¬ ticing that he veils himself with a chlamys "like the virgin girl who is violated, or the one who is about to be slaughtered" (537)- Sebastian s ambiguous, ephebic looks combine with his feminine behavior (like a 67. Jules Michelet, Jeanne d’Arc et autres textes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 49. 68. In a chapter dedicated to nineteenth-century medical texts on hysteria, Beizer un¬ derlines that "the specific preoccupation with menstrual disorders hides a more run amental anxiety about menstruation as disorder, or the essential disorder of the female condition" (Ventriloquized Bodies, 40). , , 69. In 1924 George Bernard Shaw elaborated on Joan's looks: "All the men who alluded to the matter declared most emphatically that she was unattractive sexually to a degree that seemed to them miraculous, considering that she was in the bloom of youth, and neither ugly, awkward, deformed, nor unpleasant in her person." George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (New York: Penguin, 1987), 11. Paul Claudel published Jeanne d’Arc au bucher (the libretto for an oratorio) in 1935, and in this text Jeanne is accused of being a witch— cruel—heretical—schismatic—homicide—lapsed—impostor—hysterical—prostitute^ Paul Claudel, Jeanne d’Arc au bucher, in Theatre, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, i956)/ 2:1218.

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virgin, he protects himself with a hymenlike veil] for a total girlish appearance. The emperor's simile is but an example of how the myth of the an¬ drogyne in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often appears in conjunction with that of the virgin. Both are sexually selfenclosed beings, and therefore quite threatening as objects of desire because of the impenetrability of their continence or their sexual selfsufficiency. Sebastian's indifference to the sumptuous offerings of the authorities places him in the company of such stubborn figures as the archetypal virgin Joan of Arc and, even more, Salome, the lascivious and cruel virgin of the European decadence, who, like Sebastian, refuses the fantastic offers of the monarch who desires her, being willing to accept only blood as the reward for her arousing beauty. Genders get confused through the feminization of Christianity (of which Sebastian is its privileged synecdoche] and through its encounter with the overt homoeroticism of a decadent and sickly imperial Rome.70 The aestheticism of the characters leads them to define divin¬ ity and, by extension, sainthood, in terms of physical beauty, which is the very quality upon which Sebastian's holiness and Christ's divinity are founded in the play. Sebastian is "beautiful the way a god is beau¬ tiful" (556). But beauty is only one of the traits bringing Sebastian and Jesus together. Like Iorio's daughter, Sebastian also carries out his imitatio Christi to its logical and fatal conclusion, and like Mila, he also incorporates Christ's language into his own, using the same character¬ istic expression: "Verily [en verite] I say to you" (576). Furthermore, Sebastian imitates Jesus' function as a healer (in the play, Jesus is called the Galilean healer by the emperor [546]] by performing medical mir¬ acles that are rendered all the more necessary by the diseased condition in which decadent Rome finds itself. (Sebastian has been hailed through the centuries as a powerful thaumaturge, and his help has been and still is invoked to protect Christians against the plague.] But more than as the healer of ills, Sebastian imitates Christ in his sacrificial function as a bearer of ills; this suffering, Sebastian's symp¬ tom of sainthood, is identified by the text at times with masochistic (or ascetic) self-imposed pain, at times with physical disease, and at times even with madness and neurosis. In D'Annunzio's representation of martyrdom, the models of hysteria derived from pathology harmo¬ nize with those of the saintly imitatio Christi, and they operate, for 70. Spackman points out the connections between degeneration and "degeneration" during the late nineteenth century: 'Tar from being terms of opprobrium, eviration and feminization of the (male) protagonist are constitutive elements of this rhetoric [of sick¬ ness] and of the decadent aesthetic" (Decadent Genealogies, 33).

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example, in Sebastian's unconventional acquisition of stigmata. At the beginning of the action, and before the saint's conversion, blood starts flowing out of Sebastian's left hand for no apparent physical reason as an unidentified voice from the crowd exclaims prophetically that a halo has appeared around Sebastian's head and that he is in the midst of a celestial rapture. The wound is received during a recognizably "heav¬ enly" state of ecstasy, of spiritual possession, and blood becomes an omen and a symptom of Sebastian's impending fate, both of his saint¬ hood and of his bloody death. This sacred blood acquires from the start an aestheticized as well as a divinizing value: "The flower of your vein is more beautiful than Adonis's anemone" (407)- Throughout the play Sebastian will be identified with a decadent symbolism of flowers, as well as with the myth of Adonis. Even Sebastian's name for God is the paronomastic Adonai (454).71 Stigmata are the somatic marks of saintly (or devilish) possession, as well as the pathognomic signs of disease; in either case, they are emi¬ nently specular in their self-conscious visibility, and they have been frequently put on the spot (or on the stage) by hagiographers, inquisi¬ tors, and neurologists. So also with Sebastian's wounds, whose histor¬ ical primacy comes to compete with those of Saint Francis: he is described as carrying the first stigmata, the stigmata of Christ's suffer¬ ing, which makes his hand stronger, a stigmata that bums, opens, bleeds (444, 454, 577). It is the saint himself who shows this bleeding mark of a divine preferential choice, demonstrating that the spirit re¬ quires the supple compliance of the flesh in order to make itself known. And the wounded hand is actually made mightier by the action of the strong spirit over the weak flesh. As neurosis, or mental illness (an illness, that is, of the esprit) shows itself through the somatic stigmata, so also the mystical spirit must be manifested through the mystical body. Sainthood needs its symptoms. (It is worth noting that, although the first and most famous stigmatic, Saint Francis, was a man, the phenomenon has traditionally been associated with femininity. A prominent list of stigmatics compiled in the late nineteenth century, for example, showed a seven-to-one proportion of women to men.)72 The legend of Adonis's death and rebirth during springtime has traditionally been associated with the Easter celebrations of the dead and risen Christ. In Le martyr e, more¬ over, Aphrodite holding her lover's body in her arms is compared to the Christian scene of the Pieta, which depicts the Virgin Mary with her dead son in her lap (509). Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology (New York: Longman, 1971), 11823; James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: 71.

Macmillan, 1949), chaps. 29-33. 72. Ian Wilson, The Bleeding Mind: An Investigation into the Mysterious Phenomenon of Stigmata (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 10. Beauvoir, alluding to menstru-

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Through his corporealized and thus dramatized display of suffering, Sebastian is the theatrical incarnation of Adonis and Christ at the mo¬ ment of their violent deaths and thus a first-rate imitatio Christi73 His limbs are "hysterized," made malleable and impressionable, so that their configuration can trace the physical movements of his predeces¬ sors and models, as in a tableau vivant (all too often interpreted by D'Annunzian critics as an obvious tableau clinique instead, a la Char¬ cot). When he first receives the stigma on his left hand, the chorus of Gentiles accuses Sebastian of simulating Christ's crucifixion by bleed¬ ing, of faking it, like a hysteric (whose disease some considered a de¬ ceit), of acting out in bad faith a suffering, a passio, so as to obtain a self-divinizing effect on the crowd: "—He intoxicates them with the sight of his blood. . . . —He has pierced his left hand as a trick" (42829). The accusation of trickery in cases of stigmata is common, as if the body had a natural penchant for lying (even the Catholic church is usually skeptical of stigmata: of the aforementioned nineteenthcentury list of 321 stigmatics, only 62 have been beatified or canonized, and always for reasons other than their bleeding wounds).74 Thus Iardane, one of the seven sorceresses in the second mansion, asks the saint the reason for his crucified posture, "like the slaves on the cross" (47273)—and, I might add, like the hysterics at the Salpetriere. The pagan observer, like the clinician, is puzzled and made powerless by this self¬ destructive position (how can one treat a lying body?), and the sorceress in fact continues to remind him that he could be a god instead of dying (473). Sebastian's behavior is a mystery and his will to be a human sacrifice in a drawn-out imitatio Christi remains misunderstood in a pagan context, where Christian suffering is perceived as a symptom of madness. But Sebastian makes it absolutely unequivocal that his death is only a reenactment of Christ's. The stage directions indicate that "like the Crucified," Sebastian is to stretch out his arms and to join his feet (565). Thanks to the transubstantiating power of the stage, the iconographical symbol can become flesh, and the collusion between the paradigms of art and those of religiosity (and of neurosis) presents itself ation, claims that women are especially attracted to Christ's blood as the dreamed-of means of access to glory through love ("The Mystic/' 677). 73. As Bynum remarks about women's stigmata, these "were not an effort to destroy the body, not a punishment of physicality, not primarily an effort to shear away a source of lust, not even primarily an identification with the martyrs (although this was a subsid¬ iary theme). Illness and asceticism were rather imitatio Christi, an effort to plumb the depths of Christ's humanity at the moment of his most insistent and terrifying human¬ ness—the moment of his dying." Caroline Walker Bynum, "Women Mystics and Eucha¬ ristic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century," Women’s Studies n (1984): 189-90. 74. Wilson, Bleeding Mind, 10.

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as a legible spectacle, as the corporealized scenario of an otherwise unfathomable mystery. Is it a sharing of gnosis or a hysterical imitation that makes the saint cry out, just before his second "supplicium incruentum," "I and the Christ, we are One. I outstretch my arms. We are One, by the Nails, the Spear, and the Sponge" (565)? Feminizing Christianity entails coding it as irrational, as always nec¬ essarily possessed by an external invading agency. Sebastian's sex ap¬ peal is one such agency, which by troping him as an object of desire turns him into an expendable female. Another penetrating agency is insanity, the expression of which is indistinguishable from that of re¬ ligious fervor. The pagans in the play regard the Christian sacrifice as a display of madness (the "female malady") and Sebastian as a fou de Dieu"—or perhaps as a "folle," a man disguised as a woman, almost a drag queen. In the first mansion the twins, like Sebastian, are believed to be possessed by madness (significantly, the less crazy one is the less feminine one), for which their mother blames God. Sebastian s faithful archers declare that he is "made sacred by Mania" (45°)/ uniting in the same "diagnosis" Sebastian's sacredness and his madness—the two be¬ ing indistinguishable in making him untouchable. What the crowd per¬ ceives as the craze invading the saint, namely, the monotheistic belief in a God who forbids him to sacrifice to the divinized and divinizing Roman emperor, is also what accords Sebastian his ecstatic raptures. The "female malady" of Christian madness has its pagan and mas¬ culine counterpart in the physical disease harrowing the Roman body politic. The prefect is malade, afflicted by podagra (a form of gout af¬ fecting the feet and toes), which immobilizes him. He has his slaves fondle his feet to soothe the pain, as the crowd repeatedly shouts in disgust. The Gentiles, mocking him for hesitating to kill the Chris¬ tians, shout to him to ask Sebastian/Christ (the Healer) to heal him, daring him to be healed by Christ's (his rival's) miraculous intervention (400). But the fullest and most eloquent expression of malady in the play, harmoniously combining physical and mental disease, fever and folly, is embodied in the mysterious figure of the feverish girl who appears in the course of the third mansion. She is called in turn Magdalawit, Mariamme, a diseased woman, a descendant of Herod (is she perhaps related to Salome?) and of the Syrian king Athronge, the anointer of Christ, a prostitute, a crazy woman, a possessed woman, an inspired woman, the bearer of gnosis, the holder of the Holy Shroud, Mary Magdalene at the sepulcher, a saint. The passage unfolds in an oneiric atmosphere, in which the feverish girl's incurable illness (she even claims that she does not want to be healed [512]) is coupled with Sebastian's own folie de la croix to produce a conflated and ambiguous representation of several Christian mysteries at once.

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But is the girl a prostitute (Sebastian notices suspiciously that she is wearing makeup and nail polish [514]), or a saint, as the text calls her in the last four pages of the mansion, substituting "la sainte" for "la fille malade de fievres" as the introductory heading to her words? Her ambiguity mirrors Sebastian's. She is an avatar of the symbolist sacred harlot that will be incarnated in the eponymous protagonist of D'An¬ nunzio's Pisanelle. The decadent display of intense femininity, which runs the risk of sacrilege in the case of the canonized Saint Sebastian, is manifested in its full garb through the historically unidentified fe¬ verish girl. Her fever may be termed hysterical, for it allows her to express in equivocal historical terms that which is at the core of the decadent representation of femininity, that is, the irrational and mys¬ terious dark continent of the hysteron. The feverish girl is related to Iorio's daughter because of their privileged access to the mysterious knowledge of God's wisdom, or gnosis, as well as through their double and seemingly contradictory configuration as prostitute and saint at once. This "Mary Magdalene complex" of the feverish girl forms a di¬ rect path to D'Annunzio's other French play, La Pisanelle, ou Le jeu de la rose et de la mort (previously titled La Pisanelle, ou La mort parfumee). Together with the flower symbolism of Saint Sebastian, it is not fully legible by itself but calls for an intertextual reading of the two French plays in their decadent context. Like La figlia di Iorio, La Pisanelle is also the tragic story of a dan¬ gerous, yet desirable woman, a "sacred harlot." The play is set in me¬ dieval Cyprus, defined as the island of Venus and at the same time "friendly to Jesus" and "loved by Christ" (596). This geography, like that of Le martyre, sets up a territorial struggle between Christianity and paganism, and Pisanelle will inevitably hover between sainthood and lechery. When Pisanelle arrives in Cyprus as a captive, the heir to the throne, Sire Huguet, takes her for the holy woman the island has been expecting and falls in love with her. In order to protect her from the lustful crowd of mariners (reminiscent of Mila's crowd of reapers), Sire Huguet, the new Aligi, takes Pisanelle to a convent, where the nuns begin to adore her and to regard her as a saint. She is soon joined at the convent, however, by a group of boisterous prostitutes who im¬ mediately recognize her as an old colleague from Pisa. Sire Huguet persists in his desire to marry her, and the jealous queen, his mother, more concerned about the threat to her own power than about the preservation of a pure genealogy, orders the drunken, dancing Pisanelle to be killed by her slaves, who suffocate her under a shower of roses. La Pisanelle ostentatiously reveals a complex network of influences or genealogies which was also articulated, less obtrusively, in Le martyre, and which makes the interpretation of one play depend to some

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extent on a simultaneous reading of the other.75 The episode of the sacred dance in Le martyre, for example, derives a magnified signifi¬ cance from Pisanelle's final dance, the culmination of her story (both texts were written with Ida Rubinstein's performance as a dancer in mind). These scenes find their chief decadent intertext in Salome's in¬ famous dance of the seven veils, and cut flowers, severed from the world of nature and placed within the space of the dramatic artifice, are prominently displayed as poetic rather than natural creations. Bunches of lilies, and especially their potent scent, accompany the saint's martyrdom, and Pisanelle is surrounded and finally killed by a shower of roses. The theme of suffocation by erotically charged flowers is a popular late nineteenth-century topos that D'Annunzio had already used, in a milder form, in La citta morta (1898).76 In the two French plays, however, floral imagery, so important to nineteenth-century French poetry, becomes a veritable obsession, as these murderous flow¬ ers of decadence—or of Baudelairean evil and disease [le mal)—take on a morbid significance quite different from that of the earlier romantic floral sensibility.77 The first mansion of Sebastian's story is aptly named "La cour des lys," and the stage directions call for large bunches of lilies with their stems "tied in bundles around the tallest one as the lictors' rods around the ax" (394). The phallic symbolism here could hardly be more obvi¬ ous. The play on the word verge ("rod," but also "penis") posits the lictorian rods as the masculine sign of power, and through the simile the lilies of purity are linked to these phallic rods. But lilies are also the favorite flowers of aestheticism and decadence, sported in many photographs by Oscar Wilde and followers, and endlessly represented in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Because of their shape and their connota¬ tions of perfect chastity, exploited by Christian art (lilies are part of the standard iconography of the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, and other chaste saints), lilies come to stand for Sebastian himself, masculine in his military capacity as chief of archers, virginal in his incorruptibility by the lustful offers of the prefect and the emperor, yet feminine in his 75. The concept of genealogy in intertextual readings has been discussed by Paolo Valesio in Ascoltaie il silenzio: La retorica come teoria (Bologna: 11 Mulino, 1986). 76. Gabriele D'Annunzio, La citta morta (Milan: Mondadori, 1975), 58, 75/ 119- The most famous example of suffocation by flowers is Albine's suicide in Zola's 1875 La faute de l’abbe Mouret (Paris: Bernouard, 1927). 77. "Floral tropology was clearly a determinative factor in the development of poetry during this period [from romanticism to symbolism], as the flower became the one indis¬ pensable emblem of poetic continuity and change, the main agent of 'intertextuality' in a poetic tradition progressively more aware of its own unity and self-transformation." Philip Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Claredon, 1986), 243.

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great physical attractiveness to men. But the representation of the lilies of Catholicism is not impervious to the influence of the flowers of decadence. One can trace a striking affinity, for example, between Jean Lorrain's symbolist poem "La mort des lys"—which associates a bunch of withering lilies with mixed images of death, sexuality, violence, martyrdom, and ecstasy—and the function of lilies in D'Annunzio's play.78 Thus, in his final epiphany, the choir of martyrs in heaven hails Sebastian as "the Lily of the cohort. His stem is the strongest one" (589), effectively combining his military, chaste, and aesthetic attri¬ butes and making him at once both feminine and phallic (the saint's "stem," after all, was earlier connected with the wordplay on the French verge [394]). But well before Sebastian's final floral transfiguration, precisely at the end of the first mansion, the text presents the riddle of Saint Se¬ bastian's ambiguous dance.79 As he steps on an expanse of red-hot coals (and in the text's display of aestheticism the reader can only with dif¬ ficulty keep in mind that this is supposed to be a torture), a mute woman miraculously regains her speech and the lilies that surround the saint are transfigured into an epiphany of divinity, shining with "a supernatural whiteness, as if their bundles were clasping a celestial spirit" (460). The celestial spirit may be seen through the fleshy flow¬ ers, as the saint and the lilies are observed performing the same func¬ tion of offering up a body through which the spirit may manifest itself, and they are recognized by the crowd as being together responsible for the occurrence of the miracle (the mute woman's speech is restored just as the spirit becomes visible). Although it is immersed in an obviously decadent atmosphere, this exploitation of flowers by the spirit is by no means a novelty in reli¬ gious representations of the supernatural. Pisanelle's death on Pente¬ cost is a perversion of the theophanic function of flowers, exploited for centuries by Christian iconography, in which a shower of roses (for example, in paintings of Saint Therese of Lisieux, but as well in Mae-

78. Jean Lorrain, "La mort des lys," in La poesie symboliste: Anthologie, ed. Bernard Delvaille (Paris: Seghers, 1971), 156-57. The ambiguous decadent lilies appear frequently in Lorrain's symbolist poetry; in addition to "La mort des lys," see, for example, "Comme un lointain etang" and "Narcissus," La poesie symboliste, 160-61. 79. On the significance of dancing in the context of religious rituals, see E. Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. E. Classen (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952); and J. G. Davies, Liturgical Dance: An Historical, The¬ ological, and Practical Handbook (London: SCM, 1984). Backman in particular points out that in the early Christian church, when martyrs appeared to those who venerated them, they were dancing, and dances were in turn performed in their honor (Religious Dances, 33-39)-

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terlinck's tum-of-the-century fictional hagiography Sceur Beatrice) symbolizes divine intervention in the saint's existence. Rose petals were in fact used for the celebration of Pentecost, the "Pasqua di rose" or "Paques rosees," when the falling red petals illustrated the descent of the Holy Spirit's tongues of fire on the Apostles fifty days after Easter (a tradition still kept alive today in the Roman Pantheon). It is no co¬ incidence that the dramatic action of La Pisanelle follows the cycles of Catholic liturgy and takes place entirely between Palm Sunday and Pentecost.80 As was the case with Le martyre, the text of La Pisanelle is framed by flowers, but this time, they are roses. The first set of stage directions for the prologue calls for open and fleshy pink roses to be strewn on tables set—ambiguously—in the shape of a cross (593). The stage is thus prepared for the imminent entrance of Pisanelle, later described as the "rose of Tuscany" (811). And roses are also abundant in the final act, the first part of which takes place in the queen's rose garden, where she will later bid her servants to go with their sickles and cut the murderous roses. Pisanelle the rose dances among roses,- similarly, in his religious en¬ thusiasm, Sebastian perceives the burning coals on which he dances to be lilies: "I dance on the ardor of the lilies. Glory to Christ the king! I step on the whiteness of the lilies. Glory to Christ the king! I press the sweetness of the lilies. Glory to Christ the king!" (462). It is as if he were dancing on mirrors and could see, in the utter and doubled self¬ absorption of the virgin and the androgyne, only a multiplied reflection of himself rather than the painful reality of the burning coals. Through this aestheticizing and narcissistic confusion, his dance acquires the hallucinated character of the maenads' (also favorite personages of late nineteenth-century iconography). He is joined to them by the feminin¬ ity he displays and by the "manie sacree" that possesses him (45°)/ from which the maenads derive their very name. In Les demoniaques dans Part, Charcot points out the pathological link between hysteria and dancing—without omitting to mention the eroticism of dance—in his discussion of the medieval and Renaissance dance epidemics (known as the dance of Saint Guy or of Saint Vitus).81 80. For a symbolist/decadent use of roses, see Remy de Gourmont, "Litanies de la rose . "Painted face, like a love girl, rose with a prostituted heart. . . give us the scent of your illusory virginity" (Gourmont, "Litanies de la rose," in Histoires magiques et autres recits [Paris: Union Generale dlditions, 1982], 373-74)- Another Italian poetic use of roses and lilies akin to D'Annunzio's in its polarization of lilies and roses (but obviously different because of its humor) can be found in Aldo Palazzeschi's poem "I fiori": "My dear, is it my fault if the lily is a pederast, if the rose is a whore?" (Palazzeschi, "I fiori," in Poesia erotica italiana del Novecento, ed. Carlo Villa [Rome: Newton Compton, 1981), 48). 81. Charcot claims that in Breughel's representation of a dancing procession hysteria

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Through the medical model of the convulsive hysteric and the classical model of the frenzied maenad, dancing can be troped as a distinctively feminine activity, a way for women to discharge their excessive ner¬ vous energy, literally to let loose "the animal" within them (the uterus as defined in antiquity]. In this interpretation, Charcot is reviving the theory of the controversial Renaissance physician (or quack] Paracelsus, who called hysteria chorea lasciva, or "lustful dance." It is tempting at this point to conjecture that the popularity of the figure of Salome at the end of the nineteenth century is closely related not only to the popularity of dancers such as Jane Avril and Loie Fuller, but also and especially to the contemporary prominence of feminine paradigms of hysterical seizures. In Wilde's play, most notably, Salome the dancer is identified time and again with the moon, which Herod calls "a hys¬ terical woman who goes looking for lovers everywhere," and in A re¬ borns Salome is identified as "the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria," thanks to a fusion of lust and fe¬ male madness.82 So also in Sebastian, a hysterical maenad, madly sen¬ sual like Wilde's and lustfully divine like Huysmans's, delirium is indistinguishable from ecstasy (Martyre, 463]. The stage directions complicate rather than clarify the nature of Se¬ bastian's dance by noting the contradictory feelings and actions his movements express: "In an ineffable ambiguity, delirium alternates with ecstasy, ardor with joy, the warring saltation83 with the nuptial jubilation," so that, in the end, "there is nothing left but delirium and ecstasy" (463). The alternating expression of madness and fouissance and of the saint's self-portrait as a warrior and a bridegroom turns Se¬ bastian's dance into a mix of mystical ecstasy and hysterical delirium, into the ineffable expression of the body in pleasure and the body in pain (what the saint is dancing on, after all, are red-hot coals, perceived in his hallucination as fresh-cut white lilies). The sanctified body becomes during the dance the vehicle for the and hystero-epilepsy clearly play "a predominant role": "Certain episodes . . . display to the point of evidence that lewdness was not always banished from these assemblies—far from it"; Charcot and Richer, Les demoniaques dans Tart, 34, 38. See also Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: "The culprit behind woman's uncontrollable urge to dance was her nervous organization, her tendency to hysteria" (243). On the relation between hysteria and danc¬ ing, see Cixous and Clement's discussion of southern Italian tarantella in The Newly Born Woman, 22-26. 82. Oscar Wilde, Salome: Drame en un acte, in The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 1908-1922, 15 vols., ed. Robert Ross (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), 2:35; Huysmans, A reborns (Paris: Gallimard, 1977)/ 14983. Backman points out that the Latin word saltatio (turned into French in Le martyre) was a technical term in the early Christian church, referring to "a dance with more or less violent jumping," as opposed to chorea, a round dance (Religious Dances, 13).

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extemalization of the soul or the spirit. The dancing body, be it delir¬ ious or ecstatic, is the means to overcome the ineffability of the spir¬ itual life, and the warrior's saltation alternates ambiguously with the bridegroom's jubilation. Love is one with war and, more specifically, in the case of Sebastian, with the art of archery. The sexual connota¬ tions of the martyrdom by arrows are already set up in this scene, where it is impossible to determine where pain ends and pleasure be¬ gins, where the dance is a choreic attack, a poeticized form of the path¬ ological Saint Vitus dance, and where it is instead the joyous mystery of a theophany, where it is symptom and where it is sainthood. What brings religion and pathology together, again, is the sexuality read in mystical ecstasy (for example, by Max Nordau) and in hysterical at¬ tacks ("the hysterical fit is the equivalent of coitus," writes Freud).84 Pisanelle's dance displays an analogous ambiguity. Although it is not the manifestation of a saintly body, her dance has nevertheless a sacred or a magical character. Before beginning to dance, Pisanelle tells a story that explains to the queen the nature of her dance; hers is a repetition of "the low Dance of the sparrow-hawk," through which a bird that has been killed, cooked, and eaten, returns to life from its own remains (829). Like the Christian mystery reproduced by Sebastian, this is also an archetypal tale of death and resurrection, though that of an animal. By living out her perversion of the Christian text, however, Pisanelle will also pervert this last tale, for the self-absorbed dancing rose is suf¬ focated by a mass of other roses, and with no hint of a possible resur¬ rection. Like that of the roses, the ambiguously feminine quality of the lilies is manifested in their excessive scent, a suffocating odor di femmina. "_And this smell of lilies! And this smell of lilies!—Break the stems, then! Cut the bunches!" (Maityre, 409), is the Gentiles' cry, a muchrepeated sentiment that explodes later with, "—We are suffocating. We are suffocating as in a furnace. And the stench of the lilies! (430). The intense aroma of the lilies, a veritable stench, is suffocating, like the desire provoked by the saint's beauty, thus suggesting to the emperor a clean, nonbloody way of killing the saint, which is carried out, un¬ successfully, at the end of the third mansion. This attempted martyr¬ dom is actually a blend of the death of Oscar Wilde's Salome (who was crushed under the shields of Herod's guards) and the "rosy one of Pisanelle (inspired by Albine's suicide in Zola's novel La faute de l’abbe Mouret): suffocation by the lustful and jealous monarch's ser¬ vants and guards under the weight of highly symbolic objects. Just as 84. Freud, "General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks," in Fragment of an Analysis, 157-

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desirability was the cause of Sebastian's sanctification, so desirability is the cause of his martyrdom. The femininity of Sebastian's martyr¬ dom is underlined by the stage directions that immediately follow: "The Saint is buried under necklaces like the virgin of Ephesus,- he suffocates under crowns/wreaths [couronnes] like the virgin of Naxos" (567), and Sebastian's impending death is represented like that of a vir¬ ginal girl. The emperor's motivations for killing the saint are also due to an interrupted circulation of desire and thus correspond to those of Herod and of the queen of Cyprus. The victims are highly desirable, yet untouchable and must be eliminated for having exerted their sexual power over the desiring subjects; moreover, they are guilty of desiring a forbidden, "sacred" man—John the Baptist, Sire Huguet, and Jesus Christ himself. The flowers in D'Annunzio's French plays symbolize an unlawful circulation of desire, which leads the protagonists to their death, and they also make subtle use of a famous sentence from a notoriously ambiguous religious intertext, the Song of Songs. The King James ver¬ sion begins the second chapter of this song with "I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys" (the Vulgate has the more generic "Ego flos campi et lilium convallium"), thus juxtaposing the preemi¬ nent icon of chastity to the most popular floral representation of love.85 The same juxtaposition emerges from a comparative reading of the two French plays: Sebastian is the lily, the chaste one who, like Christ, will return to life after his violent death, whereas Pisanelle, the prostitute who may be saved because she loved much, is the rose, the loved lover par excellence (throughout their last encounter, the queen calls Pisa¬ nelle "my rose"). The flowery mode of death is made all the more significant by the fact that it is precisely the flower that symbolizes each which is used for the murder, be it successful or not. Like the dramatis personae, these flowers are cut off from the world, physically severed and differentiated by their beauty, and are thus made sacred. As in a fatal game of reflections, Sebastian the lily is showered with lilies (the bride in the Song of Songs calls her beloved "he who delights in the lilies"), and Pisanelle, "the rose of the loot" (662), is suffocated by roses. While flirting in her rose garden the queen mother quotes from the medieval French Roman de la Rose, just a few pages before she has her rival killed: "Have you already drowned, lord Narcissus, under the hat of fresh roses? 'Here died the beautiful Narcissus' " (797). 85. D'Annunzio also exploits the contrast of roses and lilies in the grouping of his novels. The first cycle he titles I romanzi della rosa (consisting of II piacere, L’innocente, and II trionfo della morte) and the second, incomplete, I romanzi del giglio (consisting of Le vergini delle roccej.

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Sebastian and Pisanelle encounter the same fate as Narcissus, intensely aware of his own beauty and utterly absorbed by it, killed by a reflec¬ tion of himself and forever metamorphosed into a beautiful but inhu¬ man flower.86 The aestheticism flaunted in Pisanelle's flowery death and in Sebas¬ tian's sensual martyrdom displays a strong intertextual association, at a linguistic, if not spiritual, level with the "beautiful flame" of Mila's human sacrifice, but only by way of blatant contrast can it be related to Orsola's brutish, violent ending, in which aesthetic pleasure, char¬ acterized by a fascination with the ugly, is shaped by the ideals and the techniques of naturalism. The three decades that separate D'Annun¬ zio's early short stories from his French dramatic works are clearly marked by a shift in his literary representation of femininity, of its spirit as well as of its body, and also by a certain continuity. Each of these texts depends for its representational poetics on the ambiguous crossover of religious, erotic, and symptomatic languages, with the cor¬ respondingly diverse hermeneutic modes these different, yet often anal¬ ogous languages offer up to the reader. In the discursive economy of all these texts, then, the frontier between religious ecstasy and hysterical or neurotic conversion, between sainthood and symptom, is, to varying degrees, undecidable. The literary backdrops of naturalism and decadence constitute es¬ sential, although also shifting, points of reference for the exploration of the feminine paradigms used, perused, and sometimes even abused in D'Annunzio's texts. The minute description of Orsola's illness in "La vergine Orsola," for example, in spite of some self-conscious dis¬ tancing from the veristic enterprise by means of liturgical language, still displays sympathetic traces of the clinical gaze developed by pos¬ itivist medicine, a gaze that gave a defined space and an eloquent lan¬ guage to the otherwise silent and hardly visible disease, a gaze that the naturalist writers attempted to employ, with varying degrees of suc¬ cess, in their own literary manipulation of the scientific eye. Already in this early story, however, the scientific intent is undermined by the dialogue with and the ultimate penetration by religious language and

86. The narcissism inherent in the figure of Salome can be read most clearly in Mallarme's "Herodiade" (1864), whose protagonist admires her own beauty throughout the text in a mirror described as a pond and a fountain. Stephane Mallarme, ''Herodiade/' in Poesies, Un coup de des, Vers de circonstance (Lausanne: Grand Chene, no date), 57-74Furthermore, in his essay "L'isteria come immagine perduta nello specchio" (Verdiglione et al., 30-37), Eugenio Borgna carries out an interesting analysis in which the self¬ absorption of Narcissus is compared to the hysteric's inability to encounter the other.

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experience as they are felt in all their metamorphosing corporeality by the protagonist. In La fglia di loiio, the clinical gaze has almost disappeared, and the symptomatic surfaces instead through the oneiric dimensions of the Abruzzese tragedy and through its archetypal ties to the figuration of female sexuality as a theatrical spectacle at once pure and alwaysalready tainted, always an af-fected, if not a downright in-fected body. Mila is a prostitute and perhaps also a witch, but as Omella points out, she is also heaven-bound because of her final imitatio Chiisti, the ex¬ piatory sacrifice that cures the madness infecting the tribal commu¬ nity. The French plays take up and exacerbate the aestheticism of Mila's death, thus making the religious experience at least apparently subor¬ dinate to the hysterical surface of the decadent text. This procedure is perhaps more "readable" in a text that, like La Pisanelle, steers clear of iconoclasm (as well as historical inaccuracy| by not taking as its subject a much-revered episode of early Christian history. But precisely because of the prominence of its religious subject matter, Le maityre de Saint Sebastien is especially successful at pointing out the effective collusion between mystical and pathological experiences, that is, the way in which the centrality of the symptomatic body in each language, far from diminishing the aesthetic or the epistemological validity of one or the other experience, manages instead to clarify the discursive effects of each. Love of man and love of God are expressed in the same language; sexual climax and mystical ecstasy take the same body out of itself; religious conversion and hysterical conversion trope the invisible spirit into a staged body; and this body, all too often, cannot even distinguish in its own experience between pleasure and pain. The terms, if not the experience, of extreme forms of religiosity and the terms of eroticism, pathology, and science frequently correspond to one another, despite critical attempts, on both sides, to tear these discourses asunder, for the spirit can only with difficulty admit its dependence on the flesh for its manifestation, and conversely, the positivist enterprise relies on the exclusion or perhaps the repression of all that appears to be super¬ natural for a confirmation of its methods and its results. The relevance of texts in which the undecidability between these discourses is high¬ lighted and even staged becomes, from this perspective, quite evident. Equally evident is the functioning of this discursive uncertainty in some of D'Annunzio's texts. From a short story such as "La vergine Orsola," in which some traces of positivistic naturalism are still op-

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erative, D'Annunzio's work proceeded, with La figlia di Iorio, to the exaltation of the Christian glorification of mimetic pain (an extreme form of imitatio Christi not unlike the folie de la croix of many a mystic) through the intermediary of the sacrificial madness of ancient religion, to the final explosion in his French plays of all hierarchical structures that might still be separating pleasure from pain and religion from neurosis.

Postscript: Symptoms of Specularity (Luce Irigaray)

If Simone de Beauvoir has to contend in the course of her discussion with the increasing popularity of Freudian psychology, notoriously im¬ patient with the religious sphere, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva work in the equally dark and pervasive shadow of Jacques Lacan, the socalled French Freud. A practicing psychoanalyst as well as a feminist theorist, Luce Irigaray is perhaps best known for her articulation of the concept of sexual difference. Her 1974 book, Speculum of the Other Woman, is a foray into the thickets of Western patriarchal (or "phallogocentric") philosophy in a series of essays (on Freud, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel) tied together by a stress on the mirroring and destabilizing function of the feminine at the level of man's con¬ struction of linguistic and social meaning. Femininity, like mysticism, is for Irigaray a place of dissent and dissolution with respect to the patriarchal order of the social and the symbolic. This link is underlined by the position of mysticism in her book: precisely at the center of Speculum is a complex little chapter titled "La mysterique," clearly an echo of Beauvoir's chapter in The Second Sex, "La mystique."87 Amy Hollywood has, in fact, advanced the hypothesis that "La Mysterique" can be read "as a response to Beauvoir's readings of mysticism and religion as 'justifications' for women's subordinate position within Western culture, as well as to Jacques Lacan's seminar of 1972, Encore, in which he interrogates the relationship between woman, God, and jouissance."88 Through the title "La mysterique," woman's position of mimicry, characteristic of hysterical discourse, is redefined and cele87. This chapter, Carole Slade points out, “functions more effectively to further Spe¬ culum’s project of exposing the repressed feminine foundation of Western philosophy than to represent mystical experience." Slade, "Alterity in Union: The Mystical Experience of Angela of Foligno and Margery Kempe," Religion and Literature 23 (Autumn 1991): 10910. 88. Hollywood, "Beauvoir, Irigaray," 159.

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brated as positive (Irigaray herself mimics mystical discourse through¬ out this chapter). Moreover, Irigaray's reading of mystical discourse is rendered especially complicated by the critic's own advertised self¬ reflection, the specul(aris)ation (this is Irigaray's own spelling of the word) that is the object of the book. "La mysterique" is an untranslatable neologism punning on the words mystique, mysteie, hysterique, and gendered feminine by the article la. The economy of hysteria runs through the book and cannot simply be equated to some facile psychoanalytic interpretation of the mystical experience as equivalent to the hysterical symptomatology of sexually traumatized and repressed women. For in her strategic at¬ tempts to reorganize language itself in the course of her writings (in order to rethink the female body positively by subverting phallogocentric language and its exclusions), the author herself often self¬ consciously takes up the posture of the hysteric. Naturally for Irigaray it is not a question of advocating hysteria as a viable means of rebelling against patriarchal (mis(representations—a self-defeating strategy that an analyst could hardly endorse. Rather, she takes up a critical modal¬ ity that could be described as "positionally" analogous to that of the hysteric. Thus, in her readings of Western philosophy Luce Irigaray mimes the very texts she reads, much as the hysteric mimes organic disorders, in a highly critical fashion that is conceptually removed from the hysteric's self-destructive posture. In "La mysterique," the voice never mentioned yet continuously and subversively mimicked is Jacques Lacan's, whose "God and The Jouissance of T/he Woman" is of course the text that is most immediately evoked. Like Lacan and Beauvoir, Irigaray begins by pointing out the essential femininity of the mystical voice. If it is a man who speaks within mystical discourse, he must do so by appealing to woman's speech. She also peremptorily defines mysticism as "the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly" (191). What Lacan does not explicitly state and Irigaray proclaims is the definition of mystical discourse as a place from which the tenets of patriarchal society can be subverted and the feminine experience ac¬ tively articulated, for the richest revelations and the greatest eloquence of this "atypical, atopical mysteria" have traditionally been reserved for the most ignorant: "Historically, that is, women. Or at least, the 'female' " (192). This exaltation is supported by the second text used as epigraph to the essay, drawn from the writings of the medieval mys¬ tic Meister Eckhart (why does Irigaray cite the work of two men—Jan Ruysbroeck and Eckhart—out of her three epigraphs?). The epigraph, which defines "woman" as the most noble name with which one can

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refer to the soul, can (perhaps too) obviously be appropriated by femi¬ nist vindicatory discourse, but what it underlines instead is the sym¬ bolic reversal at stake in mystic men's self-representations as women, that is, the necessary feminization of the soul in the course of mystical marriage. As Bynum points out, "Man became woman metaphorically or symbolically to express his renunciation or loss of 'male' power, authority, and status."89 Marginality, then, seems necessary, a sine qua non of mystical vision, as Michel de Certeau also points out in The Mystic Fable; yet by the same token, Meister Eckhart's epigraph, for all its brevity, resists the essentializing definition of femininity as in¬ trinsically other and unreachable. In this exaltation of the preferential divine revelation to women (or at least to "the feminine") Irigaray leads Lacan's somber statement con¬ cerning the ineffability of woman's pleasure in a subversive and ce¬ lebratory direction. Woman's jouissance, that which "remains to be said," is resistant to words and can barely be stammered, since words are either too weak or too trite to describe that which has neither a specifiable being nor a time nor a place: "So the best plan is to abstain from all discourse, to keep quiet, or else utter only a sound so inartic¬ ulate that it barely forms a song" (193). Of course the risk here is that the woman mystic will be silenced all over again, confined to the realm of the body, her words unheard, or that the two "mysteries" of woman's jouissance and the ineffability of God will be conflated.90 But while discussing mystical union Irigaray indirectly takes up the question of woman's language again in a discussion of mirrors, the key metaphor for the imaginary: "Thus I have become your image in this nothingness which I am, and you gaze upon mine in your absence of being" (197)The mystic's image is in the One's as the One's is in hers, Irigaray says, and in this pure exchange their two (mirror) images fuse and confuse. It is clear, as Hollywood rightly notes, that "Irigaray's. strategy is to mime rather than cite mystical texts, thereby simultaneously giving voice to and supplanting them."91 The feminine gendering of mystical union is confirmed by its analogy with the two lips, a recurrent image in Irigaray's writings. The (autoerotically self-contained) female lips, neither one nor strictly two and yet one and two simultaneously, are a militant image intended to de¬ construct the Lacanian definition of woman as "not one" through the 89. Bynum, Holy Feast, 284. 90. This approach can also be seen as exemplifying Irigaray's mistrust of the symbolic order of language (implicitly phallogocentric), and her emphasis could be said to rest on a feminized sense of touch rather than the male gaze of Charcot and Lacan. 91. Hollywood, "Beauvoir, Irigaray," 159.

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phrase "this sex which is not one" (also the title of one of Irigaray's books). The mystic's lips are parted with expectation, waiting "for the rapture to return, the ecstasy, the lightning flash, the penetration of the divine touch," awaiting "the food that both nourishes and devours" (195). In a celebratory (yet debatable) collusion with the maternal, lip¬ like, and dyadic imaginary, and in spite of the paternal symbolic (the order of language), it is then upon the woman's (mystical) body that the unrepresentable God has "inscribed His 'will,' even if she is less able to read the inscription, poorer in language, 'crazier' in her speech, burdened with matter) s) that history has laid on her, shackled in/by speculative plans that paralyze her desire" (198).92 The mystic's soul is lacking something with respect to her overflowing or excessive body, so that she is denied much pleasure as her physical ills prevent her from achieving the highest good (although recent historical research, such as, for example, Laurie Finke's, Bynum's, and Gabriella Zarri's, authoritatively questions the validity of the theory describing/prescrib¬ ing the mystic's self-conscious powerlessness). In the same critical line as Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray describes the "masochistic" pleasures of the (sick?) mys¬ tic, whose ecstasy is often taken for demoniac possession because of her crying and moaning fits, her convulsions, her sudden rigidities, her violently self-inflicted pains. Yet the mystic's increasing self-abjection, Irigaray argues, is a means of testing the love of God, as well as finding her purity again "at the bottom of the pit" (199). It is the abject— Irigaray mentions blood, pus, scabs, evoking, for example, the autobi¬ ographical writings of Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena—that will wash away her iniquities by emptying her of her degraded self. The disgusting (abjection, horror) is that to which the mystic has con¬ demned herself in an earlier moment of specul(ariz)ation, but it is also that through which she can overcome the mimetic position of man's other and attain the desired transcendent divinity. The mystic's testing of God's love is successful, as she can see in the body of the Son, "that most female of men" (199)—a gender-bender reminiscent of Eckhart's epigraph and D'Annunzio's Saint Sebastian. Christ's nakedness and wounds offer up a model, for "in his crucifixion he opens up a path of redemption to her in her fallen state" (200). In 92. Irigaray's contention that woman's special access to vision derives from her place outside of representation has been severely and persuasively criticized by Sarah Beckwith through a comparison with the image of extreme objectification so dominant in late me¬ dieval female mysticism. Beckwith, "A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysti¬ cism of Margery Kempe," in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 47.

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such statements Irigaray's psychoanalytic and philosophical theory re¬ joins the historical study of scholars such as Bynum, who claims that Christ's flesh and corporeality have traditionally been gendered as fe¬ male and therefore women mystics in the Middle Ages were encour¬ aged to experience mystical rapture through these. Christ s materiality tied their own with the divinity in a way characteristically different from men's more rarefied experiences of mystical union. Through Christ's painful death, for Bynum as well as for Irigaray, the mystic's wounds, her spiritual or physical stigmata, gain the salvific possibility of becoming holy instead of unspeakably abject. The wound, together with its purifying blood, becomes in this way "the source of our won¬ dering comprehension and exhilaration" (200). Irigaray is careful to dis¬ tance this mystical pleasure in the crucified Christ from a sadistic/ masochistic one by stressing the (pantheistic, perhaps, and heretical) identification of humanity and divinity which is at stake—again mir¬ roring both her epigraph from Angela of Foligno ("The Word was made flesh in order to make me God") and recent studies of medieval women mystics: "But if the Word was made flesh in this way, and to this extent, it can only have been to make me (become) God in my jouissance, which can at last be recognized" (200). The pleasure the mystic derives from her vision of the crucified Christ is caused not by the (painful) sight of his physical torments but rather by the redemption of the body—hence, especially of woman—which this sight represents and even brings about. Irigaray's "conclusions"—if one can in fact speak of conclusions in such an antilinear text—focus on the erotic nature of the mystic's plea¬ sure in her relationship with God, underlining the connecting ho¬ mophony of the words mystere, the mystery of divine revelation, and m’hystere, the self-hysterization inherent in the self-reflective and hence infinite process of specul(ariz)ation. But in this (feminine) mir¬ roring, a transcendence is always being invoked, a transcendence that is both far and near at once, capable of giving pain as well as pleasure, but from which, paradoxically, the mystic in fact never derives destruc¬ tive pain because God "never restricts her orgasm, even if it is hys¬ terical. Since He understands all its violence" (201) The mystic s relationship with God, although reductively limited to the realm of the body, is ultimately described as fulfilling, involving an element of selfhumiliation (or self-abjection) but, more important, involving a com¬ plicity, a courtship, and a sexual dalliance that confessors cannot always be pleased to hear, however little that matters: It is enough to know that 'God' loves for her to live, and die" (202). This final descrip¬ tion constitutes the bond with the first epigraph of ' La mysterique.

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Through a concave, speculumlike mirror, and not one that turns woman into a mere reflection, the sun's rays burn dry matter, and throughout the essay Irigaray punningly writes embras(s)ement, con¬ flating painful burning (embrasement) with the pleasurable embrace (1embiassement)—hence the convergence of divinity and woman's flesh, of body and spirit, in Angela of Foligno's epigraph "The Word was made flesh in order to make me God." The specularity of the mystic-God relationship, the materiality of their intercourse, and the un¬ derlying femininity of the mystical experience are contained in this epigraph, which the body of Irigaray's essay gives itself the task of un¬ raveling.

CHAPTER

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4

Mystical Self-Interpretations: From the Age of Spirituality to the Age of Hysteria

One of the many questions that women's mysticism may arouse in the contemporary reader is whether the self-representation carried out in women's mystical writings is compatible or not with the demands of feminism. This question bears an undisputed relevance for anyone in¬ terested in the relationship between Christianity and women, since it is primarily within the mystical tradition that the religious woman's voice has made itself heard. It is a question that is present, with varying degrees of subtlety, in the work of major French feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—to whose work I have referred in the foregoing chapters—and it could be for¬ mulated as follows: Are women mystics the all-too willing victims of the patriarchal order epitomized by the Catholic church, an order that grudgingly lets them speak but in fact ultimately means to silence the female voice? (I limit myself to Catholic women mystics not only be¬ cause it is with their writings that I am most familiar but also and especially because it is they with whom the scientists and writers I discuss are concerned.) Or are these religious women in fact articulat¬ ing propositions that criticize and disturb the patriarchal status quo, through a discourse, always bordering on the unorthodox and the heretical, which has often turned out to be a fertile ground for re¬ flections on spirituality and womanhood, both in the past and in the present? As is probably obvious from my rhetoric, I sympathize with the latter

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formulation—without intending to reduce its inherent contradictions and not without some skepticism toward theories that expect to deci¬ pher the religious density of mystical writings without granting a mea¬ sure of (personal if not universal) validity to the essential and more or less orthodox belief in the Christian God and the Holy Scriptures which underpins every one of the mystic's propositions. I am not alone in this position; the most innovative theories of mysticism in recent years are characterized by a nonhagiographic, nonpanegyric attempt to go beyond the facile paradigms of hysteria and erotomania which have haunted any interpretation of the mystical experience which did not come from the official, canonizing, and often equally facile intent of the Catholic church.1 The relationship the woman mystic develops with her Other, that is, with the Trinitarian God, is characterized by flashes of intense plea¬ sure and equally intense pain, and it is with the articulation of this "bodily rhetoric" that Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva struggle. For how can a feminist writer discuss the mystic's rev¬ eling, often simultaneously, in pleasure and in pain without reducing her "psychic" economy to masochism and without at the same time having recourse to standard theological explanations? This is the ques¬ tion Beauvoir, Kristeva, and Irigaray all pursue in rather different ways, and it is a question always related in their work to the definition of the feminine and its "topography."2 The mystical project of describing in affective terms the encounter with God as the ultimate Other and the (French) feminist concern with critically describing the description/prescription of woman as the Other of patriarchal society display a convergence that involves con¬ troversial issues of representation. Reading feminists on mysticism, one realizes the resistance of mystical discourse to any neat categori¬ zation of gender—hence the interest that these writers are still able to elicit in sophisticated feminist discussions. Beauvoir, Irigaray, and Kris¬ teva approach mysticism not as a primarily religious issue but rather as a descriptively gendered and prescriptively gendering discourse that affects them directly as a part of a literary as well as spiritual tradition. 1 See for example Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; de Certeau, Mystic Fable; Laurie Finke, Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Giovanni Pozzi and Claudio Leonardi, eds., Scrittrici mistiche italiane (Genoa: Marietti, 1988); and Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive: Cultura e religiosita femminile nella prima eta moderna (Turin: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1990). 2 It seems relevant to note that Amy Hollywood's critique of Beauvoir and Irigaray is analogous to mine of Lacan when she writes: "Beauvoir and Irigaray ignore primary mys¬ tical texts insofar as they read mystical experience as bodily experience or as a jouissance of the body" ("Beauvoir, Irigaray," 160).

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Should we appropriate it in the contemporary projects of writing a his¬ tory of women's writing, or should we instead discard it as an instance of projected male sadistic fantasy, unfortunately introjected by a few masochistic individuals? The representation of pain and pleasure in the writings of women mystics is especially relevant to any analysis of women's subjection and empowerment, for the stakes are high in de¬ ciding whether mysticism is a case of masochistic justification (as Beauvoir implies), of subversive hysterical conversion (as Irigaray de¬ scribes), or of an "other" abjection (as Kristeva claims). Whereas Beau¬ voir quickly dismisses the very possibility of the reality of the unseen the soul, God—Kristeva and Irigaray, both psychoanalysts, are more sympathetic to beliefs in the existence of what cannot be seen.3 It is not only in the writings of feminists that the role of mystical discourse has been reevaluated in recent years. In 1980 the psychoan¬ alyst Guy Rosolato wrote that "mysticism always runs up against a refusal. It is in its nature to belong to transgression. With respect to a rationalism faithful to a materialistic and mechanistic science, mysti¬ cism is nothing but nonsense, which would be enough to define it as pathological."4 Another psychoanalyst, Antoine Vergote, echoes Rosolato's self-distancing from tum-of-the-century diagnoses, remarking of the mystics, "Any science given to establishing its dominion over ex¬ perience invariably attempts to repress them."5 The posture Rosolato and Vergote adopt with respect to the mystics is markedly different from the attitude of the fin-de-siecle scientists I have analyzed. With¬ out necessarily sharing the Catholic mystic's set of beliefs, Rosolato and Vergote study mystical discourse in a psychological, yet not nec¬ essarily a pathologizing manner. Today, retrospective medicine is no longer the object of general med¬ ical agreement. If at the turn of the century the positivist medical con¬ sensus was to pathologize the mystical experience as a more or less serious neurosis, moreover, some scientists were reluctant to accept this sweeping "diagnosis." Nevertheless, the question still arose whether mystical experience was compatible with the hysterical per¬ sonality or whether hysteria made the mystical union with God im¬ possible. In this matter, Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre and William James, 3. Significantly, Elizabeth Grosz places Beauvoir, Kristeva, and Irigaray into three dis¬ tinct categories of feminists according to their conceptions of the female body. See Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)/ 1319. 4. Guy Rosolato, "Presente mystique," in "Resurgences et derivees de la mystique," special issue of Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 22 (Fall 1980): 5. 5. Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological De¬ rivatives, trans. M. H. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 153.

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for example, although both believers in the divine origin of mystical experience, stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. Imbert-Gourbeyre, a Catholic neurologist and professor of medicine at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and a fierce adversary of Charcot, declared as a principle in his massive study La stigmatisation (published in 1873 and extensively revised in 1894) that "hysteria is incompatible with ec¬ stasy, namely, with sainthood."6 The psychologist William James claimed instead at the beginning of this century that "if there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the req¬ uisite receptivity."7 Without contradicting Charcot's or Lombroso's in¬ itial axioms (the neurosis of the mystic), James's interpretation takes them to the opposite direction from where they want to go: the saint deserves a hearing even if—or especially because—medically labeled neurotic. The considerations I develop in this last chapter do not aspire to propose a final explanation for the complicated issues entailed in the discourse of mysticism. Rather, it is appropriate at this point to turn to the mystic's own voice and to read her own interpretation of the much-debated mystical experience. For despite positivistic claims to the contrary, women's mysticism cannot be comfortably appropriated by any other master discourse: not by medicine (the practical accom¬ plishments of the great mystics prevent their classification as incapable madwomen), not by the Catholic church (the mystic's propositions are always on the brink of heresy, if not steeped in it), not by feminists (in spite of their frequent transgressions, orthodox women mystics are still very much tied to that patriarchal institution the Catholic church), not by literary critics (most mystical literature breaks all too many rules of "good writing" in its untiring repetition of the loving encounter with God). In this section, I propose a reading of the turn-of-the-century mystic who was also the first twentieth-century stigmatic: Saint Gemma Galgani of Lucca, who during her lifetime was diagnosed as a hysteric and assiduously photographed much like Charcot's patients in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere.8 Today Gemma is little known,- yet her canonization even though her mysticism has never been free from the hysteria diagnosis makes her especially relevant, if 6. Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation 2:433. 7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 38. 8. On this topic, see my ''Visions of the Mystic / Mystical Visions: Interpretations and Self-Interpretations of Gemma Galgani," Annali d’italianistica 13 (1995): 371-86.

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not indispensable, in the context of my discussion. By contrast, Louise Lateau and Maria de Moerl, the controversial nineteenth-century ecstatics studied at length by tum-of-the-century doctors, were never al¬ lowed anywhere near the Catholic canon of saints, for the church viewed them with much suspicion. After Gemma Galgani, I discuss the medieval Italian mystic Angela of Foligno in some detail, both be¬ cause she has been identified as Italy's greatest medieval mystical voice,9 and because her considerations on the role of pleasure and trans¬ gression in her experience of the divine destabilize the reductions of a text such as Lacan's "God and the Jouissance of T/he Woman." Also, more important, Angela's writings—so perceptive in their analysis of the human psyche—may provide clues in the modem reader's search for some relevant meaning in the Christian mystic's text. Thus, for example, the figure of Angela of Foligno is central to Georges Bataille's atheistic investigations of mysticism in Le coupable [Guilty, 1944/ rich with references to Angela's writings), in which the author concludes that "mystical and erotic experience differ in that the former is totally successful. Erotic licentiousness results in depression, disgust, and the inability to continue. ... In contrast, a promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook." From an explicitly atheistic position, Bataille's Guilty thus argues against the traditional identification of religious ecstasy with sexual climax.10 Finally, I end the chapter with a comparison of two texts that bear some curious analogies to each other (on one plane, seemingly validating the hysteria-mysticism iden¬ tification), in addition to many sharp and essential differences that per¬ manently question the conflation of hysteria and mysticism. They are a passage from Saint Teresa of Avila's Autobiography and a description of one of Freud's patients, Elisabeth von R., in Studies on Hysteria. This juxtaposition, aimed not so much at proving a difference between hysteria and mysticism as at showing some textual contrasts between these two discourses, will allow for a more general, though I hope not a totalizing, discussion of the intricate and fascinating intersection of hysterical and mystical discourses around the question of gender. 9. Pozzi and Leonardi refer to Angela's "mystical consciousness" as "undoubtedly the highest of all Italian medieval women" (Scrittrici mistiche italiane, 136). Rosamaria Lavalva writes of Angela's "mystical madness" that it was "perhaps the most sublime ex¬ pressed by an Italian woman of the Middle Ages" ("The Language of Vision in Angela da Foligno's Liber de vera fidelium experientia,” Stanford Italian Review 11.1-2 [i992l: io7)10. Georges Bataillle, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, Calif.: Lapis Press, 1988), 13. On the importance of Angela of Foligno for Bataille, see my article "Mysticism, Abjection, Transgression: Angela of Foligno and the Twentieth Century," Mystics Quarterly 17 (June 1991): 61-70.

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Gemma Galgani of Lucca The social, historical, and religious context of the life of Saint Gemma Galgani of Lucca (1878-1903), as we have seen, was dominated by two contradictory views of mysticism: as hysterical and erotoman¬ iac phenomena or as celestial sign of divine predilection. Saint Gemma Galgani, whose entire biography may be read as an embodiment (literal as well as metaphorical) of this argument, appears at first sight to have more in common with those controversial nineteenth-century stigmatics who were the targets of the Salpetriere doctors (notably, the "ecstatic hysterics" Louise Lateau and Maria de Moerl) than with great Christian mystics such as Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena. This resemblance undoubtedly owes much to Gemma's historicaltumed-hysterical proximity to the patients. Nevertheless, she is the only twentieth-century stigmatic to have been canonized, and her "symptoms of sainthood" forcefully demand to be read differently. Gemma's story is little known today, despite the hyperbolic claim of the Bibliotheca sanctorum that she "is worthy to be placed next to Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena."11 The daughter of a well-todo pharmacist, she was born near Lucca in 1878; she lost both parents and her brother (and therefore all her worldly possessions) between the ages of eight and nineteen. Her role in the Giannini family in Lucca, with whom she moved in soon thereafter, was somewhere between guest and servant. This social disempowerment, combined with her position at the margins of the family unit and the religious life, was central to her self-perception. She describes herself as orphaned and homeless and signs her name "la povera Gemma," "the poor Gemma." She believed that the reasons why she was always refused entrance at the convent were that she had what she called "a disease called hys¬ teria" and that she had neither money nor family: "I have absolutely nothing, I have no father and mother, and I have no money" (Gesu, 26, 123). She thus polemically linked entrance into the convent with the financial backing of one's family. Although the Passionist nuns refused to let her enter their convent, Gemma nevertheless began to wear long, black, nunlike clothes, cre¬ ating for herself a role with a uniform in spite of the unwillingness of the church to give her an official one, and attracting in the process the 11. Enrico Zoffoli, "Gemma Galgani/' in Bibliotheca sanctorum 4: 108. For a brief discussion of Gemma's cultural and historical background, see Maria Luisa Trebiliani, "S. Gemma, la spirituality del suo tempo, la sua citta," in Mistica e misticismo oggi: Settimana di studio di Lucca, 8-13 settembre 1978 (Rome: Passionisti-CIPI, 1979), 601-9.

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mockery of those around her.12 Gemma's transgressions, legible on the very surface (her clothes, her stigmata, but also her beauty, which she tried in vain to hide, for it made her an object of masculine desire), return time and again as we read her autobiography. She often disagrees with or hides things from her first spiritual adviser, and she goes to someone else when her regular confessor rebukes her for her infrac¬ tions. He forbade her, for instance, to carry out the Thursday and Friday meditations that brought on her stigmata (which, together with other mystical graces such as ecstasies and levitation, first appeared in 1899) and contributed to her ill health. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Gemma died at twenty-five of the same illness and at the same age as her more famous French contemporary Saint Therese of Lisieux.13 Like Louise Lateau's, Gemma's stigmata—her physical (reproduc¬ tion of Christ's wounds on her own body—used to bleed profusely on Thursdays and Fridays, and like Maria de Moerl she often fell into ecstasy (and, less frequently, was the victim of demoniac attacks). But unlike Lateau and Moerl, Gemma was recognized by the Catholic church for the sanctity of her life and for several miracles that were performed through her intercession. She was beatified in 1933 and can¬ onized in 1940. Although the Catholic church does not officially rec¬ ognize Gemma Galgani's stigmata (they are a grace received and not a virtue operated), their spiritual origin and relevance to Gemma's saint¬ hood are mentioned time and again by church authorities. Pope Pius XI described Gemma as "a most faithful copy" of the crucified Christ in her virginal body, and Pope Pius XII said that Gemma in her virginal flesh reproduced the image of Jesus Christ, specifically referring to the wounds on the side, hands, and feet.14 Strangely enough, it was Gemma's spiritual director, Monsignor Gio¬ vanni Volpi, who first doubted the divine origin of her stigmata, and it was he who, against Gemma's wishes, had her examined by Doctor Pietro Pfanner. Volpi even warned the promoters of the canonization to be very careful because Gemma "was a silly girl (and even) a foolish 12. Maria Luisa Trebiliani describes Gemma's mysticism as "very uncomfortable from the human viewpoint/' and as the "object of comments and derision on the part of her fellow citizens." "Santita femminile e societa a Lucca nell'Ottocento," in Culto dei santi: Istituzioni e classi sociali in eta preindustriale, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano (L'Aquila: Japadre, 1984), 984, , , x . . 13. At their death, Gemma had just turned twenty-five, and Therese (1873-1897) was three months short of her twenty-fifth birthday. 14. Quoted in Enrico Zoffoli, La povera Gemma: Saggi critici storico-teologici (Roma: 11 Crocifisso, 1957), 971. For a sensitive psychoanalytic interpretation of mystical stigmata, see Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 189-200.

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one."15 Gemma herself frequently warns her interlocutors and her read¬ ers that what she says may all be the fruit of her imagination: "My head is a little crazy, and now it imagines that it sees and hears im¬ possible things" (Gesu, 115). It is probably for all these reasons that Gemma's spiritual director constantly encouraged her, as Gemma men¬ tions in one of her letters, to be “maschia," "male," to give up her excessive femininity manifested in silliness and hysteria [Gesu, 163). Doctor Pfanner's negative finding, hysteria or "something worse" (de¬ moniac possession?), is mentioned as a possible cause of what would only years later be recognized (by some) as spiritual grace. Doctor Pfanner reveals his Charcot-like tendencies by pointing to the visibility of Gemma's hysteria as the best proof of its diagnosis: “Look, look, it is all the effect of hysteria. They need to act like this, in these illnesses. They pierce themselves with pins, with needles, etc."16 The debate between those who believed that hysteria and sainthood are incompatible and those who thought that illness, even if it is psy¬ chological, does not preclude the action of the spirit is very animated in the history of the cult of Gemma Galgani. The major work on Gemma, Father Enrico Zoffob's hagiography La povera Gemma, spends many pages on this debate. Although he quotes the opinions of Pfanner and other doctors who believed with James that sainthood and hysteria can coexist and who diagnosed Gemma as a hysteric, Zoffoli includes chapters with such eloquent titles as "Gemma ... is healthy" and "No hysteria," dedicated to proving the absence of hysteria in Gemma's physical and psychological makeup (an argument based on what Zoffoli perceives as her obvious psychological balance).17 But Zoffoli's discus¬ sion wavers back and forth between the absence of hysteria and a re¬ habilitation intended to validate Gemma's experience even if her hysteria were to be admitted. Clearly Zoffoli is trying to neutralize his opponents' principal argument. At one point he gives a quotation that shows to what extent he wants to have his cake and eat it too: "In order to make hysterics out of St. Teresa or others among our Mystics, one should create for them a hysteria sui generis, one that has no ex¬ amples anywhere else.''18 Since the hysteria diagnosis seems unavoid¬ able, one way out is to make its definition conform to the saint's requirements; the hysteria sui generis must be a hysteria that does not 15. Quoted in Zoffoli, La povera Gemma, 373. 16. Marco Margnelli, Gente di Dio: Storie vere di estasi, stigmate e miracoli nel ventesimo secolo (Milano: SugarCo, 1988), 65, my emphasis. 17. Zoffoli, La povera Gemma, 393, 400. 18. Lucien Roure, Mysticisme, quoted ibid., 410.

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lie, a hysteria that has no erotic penchant, a hysteria that does not jeopardize the hysteric's psychological balance. Father Germano Ruoppolo, Gemma's second and most dedicated spiritual director (a figure not unlike Catherine of Siena's Raimondo and Angela of Foligno's Arnaldo), ended up becoming an expert in the hysteria theories of Charcot and Bernheim so as to be able to counter their arguments and thus prove Gemma's physical health and spiritual graces. It is these same counterarguments that Doctor Antonelli had to use during the process leading up to Gemma Galgani's canonization.19 Gemma herself often casts a humbling doubt on the authenticity of her own experiences (Gesu, 47)- About hysteria, she unwittingly sides with William James. After a doctor's examination, Gemma remarks with a Jamesian tone: "Let it be as that doctor said, that it's hysteria: precisely because it is so, Jesus loves me more" (189). Her hysteria, by endowing her with an "openness" (a "holy hole") to divine action, makes Gemma a better lover of God, as well as a more lovable one. As is often the case with women mystics, Gemma did not always write spontaneously but sometimes at the request of others. Her writ¬ ten production conforms to the traditional quasi-private and nonsystematic genres of women's mysticism. Her writings, marginalized and dismissed even by the mystical canon, include a Diario (written for a few months in 1900 at the request of her first confessor Monsignor Volpi); an autobiography/confession, dating from 1901 and ordered by the Passionist Father Germano; a large number of letters, chiefly ad¬ dressed to Monsignor Volpi and Father Germano,- and finally, her ec¬ stasies." These were not written by Gemma herself, who actually never learned of their existence,- rather, they consist of what the women of the Giannini family quickly jotted down while Gemma was speaking during her ecstatic experiences (acting in the same role as Saint Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi's fellow Carmelites). The description of Gemma's ecstasies conforms in some ways to the ecstasy Charcot describes in his chapter of Les demoniaques dans 1 art titled "Les extatiques"; unlike "demoniac" hysterics and just like "ec¬ static" ones, Gemma assumes calm and dignified poses that inspire awe and respect. One of the recorded reactions is that of a nun who exclaimed: "How beautiful she was!"20 Zoffoli cites Gemma's beauty, "her charming womanly looks,"21 as physiognomic evidence of her sainthood. Her cult, like her criticism, is inseparable from her body. It

19. See the Responsio ad novas animadversiones (Rome: n.p., 1928). 20. Atti del processo apostolico di Pisa (Pisa: n.p, 1922), 154. 21. Zoffoli, La povera Gemma, 419.

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is this very beauty, interpreted as a visible manifestation of the divine (big eyes like hers were considered typical of the ecstatic person), which inspired the photographs of Gemma. Father Germano gave a camera to Beppe, a member of the Giannini household, so that he might photo¬ graph Gemma while she was in ecstasy. Because of the bad lighting, the pictures did not turn out very well, but at least one of them was clear enough for the painter Francisi to make an oil portrait of it; this painting is the best known representation of Gemma, her hands joined and her eyes upturned in a "pose" of ecstasy. Although most of these photographs are now lost (Zoffoli reproduces the handful that remain), that they were taken at all testifies to the analogous response to the hysteric and the mystic at the turn of the century, both closely ob¬ served and immortalized because of their eminent as well as titillating bodily visibility.22 Gemma Galgani's "writings" are not of the same caliber as those of great women mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno for several obvious reasons. Her language is not especially original; in fact, it is often repetitive, sometimes to the point of tedium. Theolog¬ ically, she does not possess Angela of Foligno's authoritativeness, and no theories or doctrines are ever expounded or explained in her writ¬ ings. As Zoffoli puts it, using a particularly fitting metaphor for Gem¬ ma's unusual experiences which points to the intersection of body and text recurrent in the writings of women mystics, "when she takes up the pen, it seems as if she wanted to carry out a transfusion of her blood."23 Like the ecstasies, her letters are written in a colloquial style that mimics an oral dialogue; this style, characteristic of the writings of women mystics, is due in part to the higher rates of illiteracy or semiliteracy among women (Gemma had little education) and in part to the conscious discursive and literary choice of a dramatic dialogue (perhaps dictated, as Massimo Baldini suggests, by the special affectivity with which women mystics undergo the ecstatic experience).24 The choice of the oral becomes in this case the choice of the physical pres¬ ence of the interlocutor, of his or her "actualization." It is the choice of a theatrical encounter or scenario, and this is another analogy with the hysteric. But unlike the hysteric, the mystic is not only the per¬ former in her "private theater"—to use Anna O.'s words—but also the transcriber and the critic. Gemma's letters and ecstasies consist of the faithful reproduction of dialogues with an Other who is, for different 22. For a more in-depth reading of Gemma's photographs, see my "Visions of the Mys¬ tic / Mystical Visions." 23. Zoffoli, La povera Gemma, 447. 24. Massimo Baldini, 11 linguaggio dei mistici (Brescia: Quaresima, 1986), 72.

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reasons, absent, and this absent other is often addressed as a father or even as a daddy, "babbo" (be he Father Germano or Jesus). Furthermore, a notable and eloquent exception must be mentioned, relevant to the rhetoric of gender-exchange so dear to the decadent imagination. In her last letter to Father Germano, Gemma addresses him as "mamma mia" and "madre mia" ("mom," "mother"), employing a peculiar and un¬ comfortable transgressive gender inversion of which Gemma claims not to be in control: "Forgive me this name (mom): I don't know why, but it comes spontaneously to my lips" (Gesu, 186). Father Germano tries to explain the inversion away—but unconvincingly. This parental diction, "babbo" and "mamma," underlines the child¬ like position in which Gemma usually places herself with respect to both confessor and divinity; nevertheless, on a few important occasions she describes herself as Jesus' bride or even, again somewhat transgressively, his lover. She tells Jesus: "You will always be my father, and I will always be your faithful daughter and, if you like, I will be your lover." It is a relationship of mystic to God which, in the Italian tra¬ dition at least, only Gemma, according to Giovanni Pozzi, dares to evoke.25 Examples of her "childishness" and of the antiapophatic nature of her mysticism also appear in Gemma's relationship with her guard¬ ian angel, who occasionally teases her, leading her to believe that he needs to rest (until Gemma realizes that the angel "was only kidding"), and who on a different occasion, when she does not feel well after a meal, gives her a delicious and healing cup of coffee (Gesu, 50, 66). So also Jesus is described as "joking" with her and as someone who can be "serious and a little angry" or teasingly amused, as, for example, when Gemma asks him about a new convent she wants to enter, and instead of replying, he laughs (135, 47, 137). In a short introduction to Gemma Galgani in their anthology of Ital¬ ian women mystics, Giovanni Pozzi and Claudio Leonardi compare and contrast Gemma's childlike self-identification with that of her con¬ temporary Saint Therese of Lisieux, pointing out that Gemma lacks Therese's dominant project of Christian perfection derived from the childhood matrix: "In [Gemma] there is more childishness, albeit a con¬ scious one, than childhood."26 The applicability of Pozzi's and Leonardi's critique, issuing from a dominant aesthetic judgment, can be effortlessly discerned by the contemporary reader throughout Gemma 25. Pozzi and Leonardi, Scrittrici, 642; Giovanni Pozzi, "L'alfabeto delle sante," in Pozzi and Leonardi, 40. The Christocentrism of Gemma's spirituality is confirmed by the frequency with which Jesus is named—1,805 times in the 166 pages of her Ecstasies. Cf. Jesus Solano, "II Sacro Cuore e Santa Gemma Galgani," in Mistica e misticismo oggi, 691. 26. Pozzi and Leonardi, Scrittrici, 638.

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Galgani's oeuvre, replete with what the two critics somewhat harshly describe as "peevish demands for cuddling and caresses, endless whin¬ ing, moody retorts and whimpering portraits, seasoned moreover with the dewy and insipid ingredients of devout nineteenth-century trash."27 This criticism, however, must remind us of the relativity of aesthetic judgment, so that if we want to read Gemma Galgani's writings we must force ourselves to rethink some of our culturally specific critical assumptions and rankings, both literary and religious. For the critique that the modern reader can make of Gemma's writings, so eloquently articulated by Pozzi and Leonardi, is strikingly analogous to the cri¬ tique of tum-of-the-century sentimental women's novels exemplified by Matilde Serao's, texts dominated by childlike female protagonists who querulously succumb to the suffering caused by their lifelong pas¬ sion for a man. It is here that the struggles and victories of feminist literary criticism may aid in a reevaluation of mystical discourse. Many of these novels have recently been reassessed for recuperable elements of social and literary critique and dissent, usually from a femininefeminist perspective. They are critical even if outwardly conformist. Nancy Harrowitz, for example, contends that, as a woman writer, Serao "adopts what can be characterized as a patriarchal point of view toward woman while at the same time problematizing her marginalized status," and that ultimately the representation of passion as sickness "functions as an indication of the difficult status of Woman and serves to establish her precise identity."28 So also Darby Tench reads Serao's privileging of metonymy over metaphor and of an auscultatory epis¬ temology over a visual one as a female alternative and challenge to male "ways of knowing," as the narrative choice of female listening instead of the male gaze, of female collectivity instead of male individ¬ uality.29 Can an analogous recuperation and sympathetic reading be under¬ taken with respect to Gemma's writings? At this point, I believe it is useful to explore precisely this comparison between Gemma Galgani and Matilde Serao as authors, and to take their texts as eloquent in¬ stances of tum-of-the-century women's self-representation as body and spirit, to suspend an aesthetic judgment (including, first and foremost, my own) which in its social and historical contingency can hardly claim to silence an other's language. The dualisms characteristic of hysteria, of mysticism, and of eroticism (above all, the alleged split 27. Ibid., 639 28. Harrowitz, Antisemitism, Misogyny, 84-85. 29. Darby Tench, “Gutting the Belly of Naples: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Aus¬ cultatory Imperative in Serao's City of Pietd,” Annali d’italianistica 7 (1989): 296-98.

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between body and mind/spirit) is just what these tum-of-the-century women's writings attempt to overcome through an anamorphic mech¬ anism that mimics and yet at the same time also subverts that of "hys¬ terical conversion." The psychological mechanism of conversion, defined by Freud in Studies on Hysteria as "the transformation of psychical excitation into chronic somatic symptoms" (86), is central to hysteria, whether defined as neurosis or as representational strategy (David-Menard thus writes: "In psychoanalytic literature, the prevailing view maintains that hys¬ teria is a symbolizing conversion; and this conversion is always evoked as spectacular and mysterious").30 In either case, the body is troped as the material support of an unconscious syntax, belonging, therefore, to the order of language as well as, or rather than, to the order of anat¬ omy.31 Furthermore, conversion, Serge Andre has pointed out in his psychoanalytic study of femininity, is the opposite of disgust; disgust is a desexualization that makes the body "fall" from the erotic to the organic, whereas conversion consists of a "hypereroticization" of the body or of its parts, "a sexualization and a symbolization."32 In the case of hysterical neurosis, psychoanalysis uses the mechanism of conver¬ sion to explain bodily symptoms—such as pregnancy (Anna O.), cough (Dora), hyperalgesia (Elisabeth von R.)—which have no corresponding organic etiology. But in the analysis of texts such as Gemma Galgani s and Matilde Serao's, the mechanism of conversion can be employed to analyze the ways in which the dualism of body and soul, of organic and psychic, of material and immaterial, is overcome by the female subject, both thematically and structurally. In the texts of both women, the heart—symbolized, sexualized, spiritualized—is selected as the privileged metaphor and metonymy of a conversion at once physical, spiritual, psychological, and erotic, which forever disrupts the body/ psyche dualism. The somatic and the semantic are one and the same. Gemma Galgani's appeal to chastity and the purity of her heart, per¬ ceived as the seat of erotic as well as religious passion, is a structuring topos in her writings. In addition to being a prelinguistic entity that, qua anatomical organ, escapes verbalization, the heart is a construct of science, theology, and literature, and as such it is the privileged me30. David-Menard, Hysteria, 47. 31. The centrality of the concept of conversion to the history of psychoanalysis and hysteria is underlined by Lukacher: "The theory of conversion, before it describes anything else, describes the conversion of the discourse of hysteria into the discourse of psychoa¬ nalysis" ("Epistemology of Disgust," xii). The concept of conversion is discussed at length by David-Menard, who says that "Freud always considered the concept of hysterical con¬ version both indispensable and mysterious" [Hysteria, 9). 32. Andre, Que veut, 101.

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tonymy that may best help us to understand the complex relations of Gemma's words to mystical language, medical diagnoses, and eroticoromantic literature at the turn of the century. Susan Rubin Suleiman's well-known claim that "the cultural significance of the female body is not only (not even first and foremost) that of a flesh-and-blood entity, but that of a symbolic construct," is especially valid in the case of Gemma Galgani for the heart in particular. The body is at once flesh and representation, or in Peter Brooks's words, the body is both "a cultural construct and its other, something outside of language that language struggles to mark and to be embodied in."33 But these theo¬ retical statements, whose implications are so popular in contemporary critical writings, are in a sense an intellectual rewriting of the hyster¬ ic's imaginary (rather than organic) bodily geography. The anamorphic image of the body displayed by the hysterical symptom or by mystical body language is not organic but highly symbolic—of a psychic trauma or of a religious belief. Hysteria, as Pierre Janet puts it, drawing on other hysteria authorities (such as Paul Moebius), "is a set of illnesses of representation,"34 The symbolic construction of the body theorized by Suleiman is precisely what goes awry in the hysteric's bodily self¬ perception. Let us begin with the heart as a theological construct. Throughout her life, Gemma was devoted to the Sacred Heart, whose cult came out of the convents and became widespread precisely in Gemma's time, in the course of the nineteenth century.35 Gemma's first communion co¬ incided with the Feast of the Sacred Heart (June 1887, Gesu solo, 81), as did the first appearance and bleeding of her stigmata (June 1899, Gesu solo, 99-101). The Sacred Heart is a bleeding heart, which brings together sweetness and sorrow and in so doing reconciles one set of opposites. Therefore, in a letter to Father Germano, Gemma writes that "the day of the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is also the day of my feast" [Gesu, 174). It is no coincidence that the first saint to whom Gemma prays in order to be healed is Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647-1690), the champion of devotion to the Sacred Heart (92).36 Fur¬ thermore, Gemma's spiritual director is a priest of the Passionist order, 33. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2; Brooks, Body Work, xiii. 34. Janet, L’etat mental, 415. 35. Frank Paul Bowman, French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 96. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Paris, for instance, was built in 1876. 36. In book 2, chap. 22, of La stigmatisation, Imbert-Gourbeyre sets out to prove that Marguerite-Marie Alacoque's vision of the Sacred Heart was indeed a vision and not a hallucination, as contemporary positivist had implied.

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whose emblem is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and she herself wants to become a Passionist nun, describing her desire as "a thorn in her heart" (242). The heart, converted from blood pump to the place of mystical en¬ counters, is the seat of all of Gemma's passions and of her imitation of Christ's own Passion, which she achieves physically through the reproduction of Christ's stigmata on her own body. Despite the abjec¬ tion of her entire body, which she calls "the evil flesh" or "this dungheap of a body" (167, 174), Gemma spares her heart because it resembles Jesus': "All the body parts I have, all are in sin and all are corrupted, [except] one thing only, the heart, the seat of Jesus."37 Just as her stigmata, by imitating Jesus Christ's, allow her to reproduce the passion of his flesh on her own, so the essence of her heart, alwaysalready "converted," allows Gemma to unite herself with Christ be¬ cause, in their very nature, their hearts are the same: "O my God, Your Heart is of the same nature as mine,- what makes You blessed, can also make me blessed!" (175). As Frank Paul Bowman recapitulates, "The human heart is thus an 'emblem,' and the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the ideal emblem of all harmonious relations and of the meaningful, tele¬ ological structure of history, at the center of which, of course, is the Crucifixion."38 Clearly the heart is not just any anatomical organ; theologically, says Bowman, it is "the locus par excellence of the desire for social unity and for the unity between humanity and the absolute." Erotically, as Barthes puts it, "The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc., like the sexual organs), as it is held, enchanted, within the domain of the Image-repertoire."39 The connotations of the heart as the imaginary origin of love and desire persist today despite the ad¬ vances of anatomical knowledge which have transformed the heart from a generator of feelings into a blood-pumping muscle. But in pos¬ tromantic literature the metaphor of the heart as the physical seat of love and passion appears in all the glory of a swan song, and its presence in Gemma's writings underlines the way in which the tum-of-thecentury converted heart stands at the confluence of religion, literature, and medicine. Examples of this overdetermination can be found in the use of the (woman's) heart in the construction and representation of modem medical discourse, as reflected, for example, in Arrigo Boito's 37. Gemma Galgani, Lettere di Gemma Galgani al Padre Germano (Rome: Postulazione dei PP. Passionisti, 1941)/ 2,86. 38. Bowman, French Romanticism, 102. 39. Ibid.; Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 52.

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"Lezione d'anatomia" (1863), a poem that metonymizes a girl's heart, tom out by an anatomist, as her inviolacy, a mendacious seat of love that falsely bespeaks a lost virginity.40 The representation of the woman's heart which is most relevant in a reading of Gemma Galgani's devotion to the Sacred Heart and her attention to the movements of her own heart is Cuore infermo (The ailing heart, 1881), one of the love novels by the prolific Neapolitan writer Matilde Serao (1856-1927). Throughout Serao's works we can detect a concern with representing the relationship between women and religiosity. Suor Giovanna della Croce (Sister Joan of the Cross, 1901) tells the story of a nun who, along with her sisters, is kicked out of her small convent, considered too sparsely populated to be kept open by an increasingly secular state. More important for the discussion of hysteria and mysticism, one of the two women protagonists of Fantasia (Fantasy, 1883), Lucia Altimare, is a sensual woman often prey to undecidably mystical or nervous crises. As she prays, she is shaken by nervous spasms, she faints, she has "visions" her doctors calls "hal¬ lucinations," and she is "always a prey to a neurosis, at times latent, at times developed," which is sometimes more clearly diagnosed as "hysterical convulsions."41 In high school, Lucia's "mystical folly" had upset everybody—"her penances, her ecstasies, her weeping at the homilies, her fainting fits at communion"—and she had dreamed of becoming a nun and "of falling sick with mysticism like Saint Teresa, 40. Similar representations of women's hearts abound in the late nineteenth-century. In art, such works as Gabriel Max, The Anatomist (1869), Enrique Simonet, She Had a Heart (1890), and J. H. Hasselhorst, Lucae and His Assistants Dissecting a Female Cadaver (1864)—all focus on the anatomical dissection of beautiful women, especially their chests. These have been perceptively analyzed by Ludmilla Jordanova in Sexual Visions: Images of Gender and Science in Medicine between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Sander Gilman in Sexuality, an Il¬ lustrated History: Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Ages of AIDS (New York: Wiley, 1989). Jordanova and Gilman see these dissections as metaphors of masculine quests for feminine truths. Conversely, in medical language the heart has been used metaphorically in Fisiologia dell’amore, by Paolo Mantegazza (1832-1910). The famous physician (longtime friend and then antagonist of Cesare Lombroso) and divulger of medical knowledge in turn-of-the-century Italy urges in his usual "decadent" rhetorical style: "Let us tear out of the chest of two lovers their bleeding hearts, and let us place them while they are still hot and throbbing under the eye armed with lenses, and let us analyze them keenly with the anatomist's needles and forceps,many sexual differences of love, which up until now we have not seen, will then appear most clearly" (Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore [Milan: Brigola, 1882], 234). The meta¬ phor of the anatomist, so popular in realist and naturalist literature, is used in an analogous fashion within the medical field, where dissection is metaphorically posited as the surest method for the attainment of truth. On dissection and gender in nineteenth-century Italian culture, see my essay "Is Beauty Only Skin Deep? Constructing the Female Corpse in Scapigliatura," Italian Culture 12 (1994): 175—87)41. Matilde Serao, Fantasia (Turin: Casanova, 1905), 3, 9, 266, 174, 253.

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of dying in the madness of the cross like Saint Teresa."42 But for all her aspirations to saintliness, Lucia's sensuous and evil hysteria wins over her mystical and pious hysteria (since she embodies both of the forms as described by Legrand du Saulle in Les hystehqu.es). She runs away with the husband of her best friend, the level-headed Caterina, provok¬ ing the latter's suicide. The protagonist of Cuore infermo, Beatrice, is no femme fatale. She is instead extremely cold to her husband. Convinced of his wife's in¬ difference towards him, although he is madly in love with her, he finds a mistress, the seductive, mysterious, and always sick Lalla d'Aragona, whose own husband, we are told, has died because of their passionately unhealthy love.43 But the true cause of Beatrice's behavior is soon dis¬ covered. Beatrice's mother died young of a heart condition because her husband, whom she desperately loved, had a mistress,- thus, when her father reproaches her for not having her mother's heart, Beatrice an¬ swers, "I hope so."44 Beatrice, conscious that her mother's heart disease, her "cuore infermo," is a hereditary condition, has decided not to let herself love so as to be able to live. Women's debilitating and even fatal passione has been identified as a recurrent theme in Serao's narrative, constituting her "coherent, and ambivalent, view of the limits and con¬ sequences of women's desire," as well as indicating "helplessness on the part of the protagonist through a loss of autonomy."45 But just as her husband is about to abandon her, Beatrice confesses her love for him and gives in totally to her passion, recognizing her heart to be "delightfully ill" (205). Within a short time, as the reader is led to expect, Beatrice's heart condition worsens, both because of her exces¬ sive passion for her husband and, especially, because of the pain his adultery has caused her despite her seeming repression of it. Beatrice dies soon thereafter. As she had predicted, "the physical heart and the 42. Ibid., 268-69, 76-77. 43. Ursula Fanning has interpreted Lalla d'Aragona and Lucia as the "doubles" of Be¬ atrice and Caterina, respectively: "In using the double device, women writers found a way to portray the complete female character, by splitting it into two very different female characters, one socially acceptable." Fanning, "Angel v. Monster: Serao's Use of the Fe¬ male Double," in Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture, and History, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Shirley W. Vinall (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), 265. On the represen¬ tation of women in Serao's work, especially Fantasia, see Lucienne Kroha, "Matilde Ser¬ ao's Fantasia: An Author in Search of a Character," in Baranski and Vinall, 245-62. 44. Matilde Serao, Cuore infermo (Turin: Casanova, 1899), I2345. Deanna Shemek, "Prisoners of Passion: Woman and Desire in Matilde Serao's Romanzi d’amore," in Italiana: Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the A.A.T.I., Dec. 27-28, 1986, ed. Albert Mancini et al. (New York: n.p., n.d.), 243; Harrowitz, Antisemitism, Misogyny, 105.

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psychic heart fought an internal struggle, in which one or the other had to die" (225). This oscillation between organic and psychological diagnoses, never resolved by the text, coupled with Beatrice's obsession with Lalla (po¬ sitioned as the "other woman" whom the hysteric must interrogate about the secret of femininity), make her representation conform to some of the features of the tum-of-the-century hysteric. Beatrice must learn to accept herself as an open and penetrable female body, an object of the other's desire, before she can accept passion (that is, sexuality). It is no small critique of married relations on the part of Serao's text that such an acceptance on the part of the woman, instead of having a therapeutic effect as contemporary psychology would have people think ("normal penis, repeated doses" was a distinguished Viennese professor of gynecology's prescription for hysteria), inevitably leads to death.46 It may appear a blatant instance of critique sauvage to juxtapose the recounting of the highest of mystical experiences by a Catholic saint to the tear-jerking device of a feuilleton. There are nevertheless strik¬ ing and illuminating analogies between these two representations, by two women, of woman's physical and imaginary anatomy and espe¬ cially its intimate relation with the spirit—in spite of Beatrice's wish: "If only it were true that there are no ties between the physical and the moral heart!" (Cuore, 125). For just as Gemma borrows from the language of romantic love in order to describe her love of God, con¬ stantly confusing eros and agape, and calling Jesus "the powerful King of hearts," so also late-romantic erotic language, like medieval courtly love, borrows heavily from the language of religion.47 As Deanna Shemek rightly claims, "Serao's heroines are both devoutly spiritual and sensual. . . . Their stirring physical presences, however, are in part a re¬ sult of their intense religious devotion."48 Paolo Mantegazza, the turnof-the-century doctor and one-time friend of Cesare Lombroso, claims that love is religious to the point of superstition and that no religion ever displayed so much idolatry as love does.49 Conversely, the great scholar of mysticism Michel de Certeau maintains that after the Mid¬ dle Ages erotic love slowly replaced the love of God: "In place of the divine word (which also had a physical nature and value), the loved body (which is no less spiritual and symbolic, in erotic practice) is 46. 47. 48. 49.

In Heath, Sexual Fix, 43. Galgani, Lettere, 161. Shemek, "Prisoners of Passion," 247. Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amoie, 172.

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substituted."50 The (con)fusion of the discourses of sexual and reli¬ gious love is no turn-of-the-century novelty, nor is it the mystic's pre¬ rogative. One need only think of the troubadours' lyrics, in which Our Lady and "the lady" are oftentimes interchangeable. In Serao's oeuvre, this connection is novelized and epitomized in the character of Lucia Altimare in Fantasia, with her hysterical religiosity and mystical sen¬ suality. In neotroubadourish terms Marcello, Beatrice's husband, tries to win his wife's love and affection by praying to her and humbling himself before her, "as the Christian to the Virgin Mary" (Cuore, 76). This comparison, by underscoring the religiosity of erotic love, conversely also alludes to the eroticism of religious love. Both are defined as oc¬ curring between a man (if also God) and a woman, and if the latter is physically undefiled the erotic investment is not for that reason an¬ nulled.51 We are again reminded of the intertwining of Mariolatry and the secular love lyric in twelfth-century Languedoc.52 But Serao's text goes further in weaving its allusions. Much later in the book, Beatrice herself wears under her dress a miniature portrait of her husband, whose face is thus pressed against Beatrice's breast, and the golden studs that protrude from the frame cause little scars on her skin when her dress is tight—sometimes even making her bleed. The effects are described in terms that exploit all the ambiguity of the language of extreme forms of religiosity: "She felt a delightful pleasure in those stings, when some small bloodstain appeared on the batiste. She called it her cilice" (267).53 The ambiguous pleasure Beatrice finds in the pain provoked by the image of her beloved is comparable only to the anal¬ ogous "pleasure in pain" (labeled by many, after Krafft-Ebing, as mas¬ ochism) of the Christian ascetic. The antinomy of pain and pleasure, like that of body and spirit, is subverted by a discourse that mimics that of hysteria without falling into hysteria's powerlessness or inabil¬ ity to comprehend itself. Through conversion, the body is sexualized or symbolized in such a way as to effect physical as well as spiritual changes, which disrupt rather than confirm the order that would ven¬ triloquize such a body. 50. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 4. 51. Harrowitz perceptively notes that, "while Marcello as well suffers because of love, he does not express it through his body, as Beatrice, her mother and Lalla all do" (Anti¬ semitism, Misogyny, 89). Harrowitz also provides a fascinating interpretation of Serao's novel Addio amore!, which makes use of religious images of stigmata and relics (89-94). 52. Discussed in Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage, 1983), 134-38. 53. Lucia Altimare wore a real cilice while she was in high school until the director took it away because it made her sick. Serao, Fantasia, 269.

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Gemma's is, similarly, a "tell-tale heart" a la Edgar Allan Poe. After her death, her body is exhumed and autopsied, and her heart is found to be miraculously well preserved, "fresh, thriving, flexible, red, and all full of blood, just as if it were alive."54 Her heart has a peculiar shape, however, being "quite flattened on the two faces, and very dilated on both sides in such a way that it seemed to be wider than it was high."55 This veritable inscription of the flesh by the spirit is a pale reflection of the findings with regard to the medieval mystic Saint Chiara of Montefalco (1268-1308). Chiara's exceptionally large heart turned out to contain, in the course of an autopsy (performed by her fellow nuns so that she would not be defiled by a barber-surgeon), the text of Christ's Passion, images of Christ on the cross and of the instruments of his suffering (the scourge, the pillar, the crown of thorns, the spear, the three nails, and the pole with the sponge).56 Gemma also says, at one point "On Friday Jesus put a nice cross in my heart" (Gesu, 159). Sim¬ ilarly, in the heart of one of Chiara of Montefalco's contemporaries and fellow ecstastics, Margaret of Citta di Castello—who, the hagiographer is quick to note, was blind from birth—three little globes were found which carried the images of the Holy Family; she even used to say, when she was alive, that she held a great treasure in her heart.57 Gemma replicates her predecessors' mutatio corporis (or cordis) on a less-spectacular scale. Throughout her life, Gemma was afflicted by continuous heart pains. Her mystical encounters with Christ provoked painful palpitations and a feeling that her heart "is small, it needs to enlarge itself and finds no room," and this feeling resulted in abundant bleeding (Gesu, 166). On a different occasion, Gemma says that her heart "would like to enlarge itself and break" (170), and this description corresponds to Beatrice's own, whose heart "was swelling as if it wanted to break" (Cuore, 218). In both cases, physiological sensations are immediately and positively interpreted by the subject as having spiritual and hence "higher" causes: they are converted from organic to symbolic but also from symptomatic to spiritual. They are dehysterized as their hearts are implicitly compared to the preserved heart 54. Summarium super dubio (Lucca: n.p., 1907), 823. 55. Atti del processo apostolico di Pisa, 600. 56. As can be imagined, Imbert-Gourbeyre discusses Chiara of Montefalco at length. He also reproduces a picture of her autopsied heart [La stigmatisation 1:35-50). 57. See Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft Murray and Helen Elsom (Cambridge: Cam¬ bridge University Press, 1988), 3-9. In Gente di Dio, a book on twentieth-century stigmatics, Marco Margnelli lists thirteen cases of what he calls “internal plastic stigmatization of the heart," ranging in time from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century (29). The same subject is discussed by Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation 2:37-56.

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of Teresa of Avila, visibly wounded by the angel's burning arrow in that encounter, represented by Bernini, which so fascinated turn-of-thecentury diagnosticians.58 The way Gemma relates conversion to her own heart is epitomized in her usage of the expression "allargare il cuore" ("to enlarge one's heart"), which in Italian means to console or to comfort. Gemma takes this expression quite literally, making it refer to the physiological enlargement of her heart, which, in spite of its painfulness, takes place at the same time as her heart is comforted by the presence of Christ. It is worth remembering here the important role of wordplay in the hysterical conversion of Freud's patients (again, not in order to psychoanalyze Gemma but so as to unravel and debunk some of the diagnostic views of mysticism). As David-Menard explains "We find a relation of identity between the attention paid to bodily positions and the order of the jouissance that is realized in a body and organized by a signifier, by wordplays."59 Gemma's heart is painfully mobile. She frequently complains that when her left ribs rise, they cause her much suffering, sometimes to the point of making her faint [Gesu, 142-43, 153, 155). Still, she sees this as the effect of Jesus' love: "The love of Jesus becomes stronger and stronger in my ribs" (152). One day her heart grew so much that it raised three of Gemma's ribs— a fact confirmed in the course of her autopsy.60 For Gemma, as for Freud's hysterics according to David-Menard, the experience of pain makes the orders of body and soul "homogeneous so that the passage from one to the other may occur. This passage is no longer merely an associative link but becomes a sort of transubstantiation."61 Interest¬ ingly enough, the psychoanalyst David-Menard uses in this situation a Christian metaphor ("transubstantiation," or the mystery of the trans¬ formation of the host into Christ's body and of the wine into his blood) in order to elucidate a psychoanalytic concept. The ability of language, through conversion, to include both literal and metaphorical meaning—physical enlargement and spiritual con¬ solation—is employed in Gemma's text to demonstrate how the effects of the mystical experience can also be at once psychological or spiritual and physiological or bodily. Gemma's text thus deconstructs what crit¬ ics of hysteria and mysticism alike perceived as an essential dualism.

58. Again, Imbert-Gourbeyre devotes many pages, an entire chapter, to Teresa of Avila's heart, which exhales a sweet perfume, displays the signs of a burning (observed by a doctor in 1725), and for the fifty years preceding Imbert-Gourbeyre's writings had been growing thorns on its surface [La stigmatisation 1:160-71). 59. David-Menard, Hysteria, 46. 60. Summarium super dubio, 373-99. 61. David-Menard, Hysteria, 27.

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Gemma's mutatio cordis or "change of heart," equivalent to her stig¬ mata, is a mutatio corporis aimed at reaching the most extreme form of Saint Paul's injunction to "dissolve, and be with Christ." Gemma's desire to unite herself with Jesus and her desire to suffer (Gesu, 46-47) are one and the same desire, because in mystical union pain and plea¬ sure are also one and the same. When she first receives the stigmata, Gemma writes: "Those pains, those sufferings, instead of afflicting me brought me a perfect peace" (10); and later she says that, although Jesus made her suffer, "that suffering is pleasure" (70). Like Beatrice, Gemma converts her pain into pleasure by reinterpreting the social symboli¬ zation of her body and turning her supposed powerlessness into an em¬ braced empowerment bestowed upon her by her relation to the divine. "And the last shall be the first": the madness of the Christian message, its subversive force of self-effacement, turns the mystic's symptom into grace, her pain into pleasure, her death into life.62

Angela of Foligno At the end of her chapter "Sexual Relations," Elizabeth Grosz claims that "Lacan has not left any room for the representation of women in other, more autonomous terms. . . . There are, there must be, other dis¬ courses and forms of possible representation capable of speaking of/as women differently."63 It is as part of this quest Grosz invokes that I turn to Angela of Foligno, for mysticism, as Luce Irigaray somewhat hyperbolically claims, is "the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly" ("Mysterique," 191). This statement Carole Slade says, "if limited temporally to the Middle Ages, does accurately convey the extraordinary nature of the authority at¬ tained by many medieval woman mystics in the public or political arena.64 Although she has been hailed as one of Italy's greatest mystical voices, Angela of Foligno was not officially beatified until the eigh¬ teenth century (July n, 1701); she was never canonized (although her admirers, especially in France, sometimes refer to her as Sainte Angele de Foligno), and she is little known now.65 Some of her experiences are 62. The empowerment with which women mystics were endowed by their relationship with the divine is especially obvious in the case of the so-called "sante vive," Renaissance women considered saintly during their lifetime and who from such recognized saintliness, from their public daily dialogues with Heaven, derived the conscious power to influence the politically powerful. See Zarri, Le sante vive. 63. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), 146. 64. Slade, "Alterity in Union," 109. 65 A thorough introduction to Angela of Foligno's life, theology, and writings can be

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reminiscent of those of the English mystic Margery Kempe. Angela, too, was married and had several children, lived a worldly life (she vaguely refers to her previous sinfulness), and had dramatic spiritual experiences including uncontrollably loud weeping and moaning. Her contemporaries believed her to be demoniacally possessed and later readers diagnosed her as a full-fledged hysteric.66 After her conversion and the death of her family, Angela lived in complete poverty, joined the Third Order of Saint Francis, and undertook a project of total imitatio Christi, which, instead of reducing her to the nothingness to which she aspired, to Christ's nakedness on the Cross, made of Angela a public figure. She had such illustrious followers as Ubertino of Casale and was named "Magistra Theologorum," for she was endowed with a discursive power surpassing that of clerics such as her spiritual ad¬ viser.67 She dictated her mystical experiences to her confessor, most likely her relative Brother Arnaldo, who simultaneously translated her Um¬ brian vernacular into a simple and often stylistically flawed Latin, abounding in vernacular expressions; this constitutes the first part of Angela of Foligno's Liber, the Memoriale (written probably during the years 1292-1296). Despite the male and priestly mediation (Angela was unable to write, though she was certainly educated), scholars of mys¬ ticism generally accept the Memoriale as a transcription of Angela's own voice.68 As Laurie Finke suggests, a study of the medieval con¬ ception of authorship may lead us beyond the notion of the author as "the transcendental signified of her text," and toward an examina¬ tion of "the dialogic cultural activity that structures the writing of any text, whether medieval or modem."69 Certainly Arnaldo had an impor-

found in Paul Lachance, O.F.M., The Spiritual Journey of the Blessed Angela of Foligno According to the Memorial of Frater A. (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1984). See also Beatrice Coppini, La scrittura e il percorso mistico: 11 “Liber” di Angela da Foligno (Rome: Ianua, 1986). x 66. An excellent article comparing the experiences of Angela of Foligno and Margery Kempe from a psychoanalytic perspective is Slade, "Alterity in Union." 67. On the power medieval women derived from their mystical experiences, see Laurie Finke, Feminist Theory, chap. 3, "The Grotesque Mystical Body: Representing the Woman Writer." 68. As Amy Hollywood puts it, "Without denying that women's writings are often— and to varying degrees—male mediated, if we are to learn from the Christian women's mystical traditions, we must give careful attention to the specificity of their writings and self-understanding" ("Beauvoir, Irigaray," 160). The role of male mediation, so pervasive in the case of medieval women visionaries, has also been discussed from a feminist per¬ spective in Finke, Feminist Theory, 99-100. 69. Finke, Feminist Theory, 99-100.

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tant role in the organization of the text; yet we have textual and extratextual evidence for Angela's authorship. For instance, there are Brother Amaldo's requests that Angela repeat her words when he could not keep up with her, and there are many vernacular expressions— Angela's own—used when the scribe could not come up with an ade¬ quate Latin equivalent. He even at times leaves Angela's first person, instead of switching to the third person as he usually does in his tran¬ scription. More generally, we find an unbridgeable intellectual gap be¬ tween the "Magistra Theologorum" and her rather mediocre scribe, who "often acknowledges that her revelations exceeded his ability to understand and report them accurately".70 Paul Lachance reminds us that "Angela, for her part, acknowledged that what he wrote, even if 'truncated and weakened,' was basically faithful to what she had told him." Also, Angela pointed out that, in spite of the weaknesses in Arnaldo's redaction, nothing was "false or superfluous."71 The text was in fact checked for authenticity not only by Angela but also by external readers who examined it and discussed its contents at length with An¬ gela herself.72 The Memoriale tells Angela's story from the time of her conversion (1285) until that of her access to the highest spheres of mystical life (1296). This book is a spiritual autobiography and a "positive" verbal translation of the experiences of a body, as well as a boldly speculative treatise of "negative" theology,- it is an insightful reflection on human language as it is driven to its limits by the mystical experience of the transcendental, and hence, it is intermittently apophatic. The Memohale, as is characteristic of mystical literature, plays the "cruel game of making words say what they literally do not say, without, however, distorting them completely."73 Furthermore, in her Memoriale Angela vindicates the epistemic potential of pleasure and not only that of de¬ sire, at once deconstructing the cultural hierarchy between these two described by Barthes ("[Pleasure's] victorious rival is Desire: we are al¬ ways being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an ep 70 Paul Lachance, O.F.M., Introduction to Complete Works, by Angela of Foligno, trans Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 49- Pozzi and Leonard! also discuss the issue of Arnaldo's mediation in Scrittrici, 135-36. Romana Guamien defines the Memo¬ riale, "even if it does not come directly from Angela's hand, as a true and authentic 'author's text,' no more no less than the writings of a Hadewijch or a Porete, who did not make use of any secretaries." Preface to Complete Works, by Angela of Foligno, 7. 71. Lachance, Introduction, 20, 48. 72. Ibid., 49-50. On the relationship between women mystics and writing, see Prospen, "Lettere spirituali." 73. Pozzi, "L'alfabeto," 24.

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istemic dignity, Pleasure does not") and the unknowability of woman's pleasure postulated by Lacan in Encore.74 In addition to her display of exceptional spiritual gifts, the author's experiences of marriage and maternity thoroughly inform, for example, her descriptions of Christ's corporeality. The representation of her spir¬ itual journey thus draws on a bold and realistic "bodily" vocabulary that aids her difficult project of representing the divine contact. In one of her initial visions, the crucified Christ displays for Angela a pains¬ takingly detailed account of his physical suffering, "showing me his sufferings from head to toe. He also showed me his beard, eyebrows, and hair that had been plucked out and he described all his scourgings."75 As Sarah Beckwith claims in her essay on Margery Kempe, "Positive mysticism has the potential to embarrass that claim to unrepresentability and reveal the extraordinarily heavy ideological in¬ vestment in the immateriality, the unrepresentability of God in his function as the Other."76 Beckwith is referring in this passage to Cath¬ olic reactions to Margery Kempe dating both from the 1930s and from Margery's own time, but the "unrepresentability of God in his function as Other" can be read, mutatis mutandis, as Lacan's postulation of the unrepresentability of W/oman in her function as Other. There is then an obvious parallel at work in critical gestures the focus of which is the attempt to silence (through ridicule or psychologization) Margery's claim to represent God and Angela's claim to represent her pleasure in the encounter with God, claims that are, as Beckwith points out, re¬ vealing and downright embarrassing for the ideology that "represses" them. In spite of critical denials, then, striking and effective representations of the workings of the body in Angela's mystical relation with the di¬ vine may be read throughout the Memoriale. The often frankly erotic tones of Angela's relationship to Christ and to his corporeal nature are nowhere hidden, much less repressed, for repression would imply some degree of mimetic covertness and a physical as well as spiritual lack of satisfaction. Rather they are deliberately and effectively employed. For example, on Holy Saturday Angela sees herself in an ecstatic vision ("in excessu mentis"), clinging to Christ's body in the sepulcher, and her scribe narrates: "At first she kissed Christ's breast. . . and then she kissed his mouth, from which, she said, an admirable and ineffably 74. 75. Abele 1985), 76.

Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 57. Angela of Foligno, 11 libro della beata Angela da Foligno, ed. Ludger Thier and Calufetti (Grottaferrata, Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 140. Beckwith, "A Very Material Mysticism," 40.

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sweet fragrance emanated. .. . And then she placed her cheek on Christ's cheek, and Christ placed his hand on her other cheek, and drew her close to him" (296). Angela explicitly recognizes the part played by the body in her experiences, exploiting it for purposes of representability, and as the author of the Memoriale, she deftly controls her meta¬ phors, instead of being blindly manipulated by the workings of a repressed desire. Thus Angela eloquently describes another of her experiences of God's loving presence, "experientia amantis praesentiae Dei": "And with these words came a great feeling of God's presence, far greater than I had ever experienced. And all the parts of my body also felt this plea¬ sure, and I lay in this experience" (202). In spite of post-Freudian temp¬ tation, it would be very difficult to see these descriptions of spiritual experiences as dictated exclusively by a nexus of unconscious sexual drives (though this Freudian critique may be cruder than Lacan s, it is even more pervasive). To quote Caroline Walker Bynum, Women . . . spoke of their union with Christ in images that continued ordinary female roles (bride, child, mother) and stereotypical female behavior (vulnerability, illness, bleeding)."77 In another essay about late medie¬ val women mystics' images of physical union with Christ, Bynum says outright that "it seems inappropriate to speak of 'sublimation.' . . . sex¬ ual feelings . . . were not so much translated into another medium as simply set free."78 An inseparable complement to this representational poetics (a spiri¬ tual erotics?) is Angela's insistence on transgression, on the necessary blasphemy of her language insofar as it exceeds the accepted and ac ceptable limits implicitly imposed by religious and cultural discursive conventions regarding the divine. This is one of the chief characteris¬ tics of Angela's writings which makes them so relevant to contempo¬ rary philosophical, psychological, and literary concerns. Coupled with her effective descriptions of the pleasure of God's presence, this selfreflective insistence of her language makes Angela s text a destabilizing one for Lacan's assertions about the mystics' emphasis on the essential ineffability of their pleasure, their ecstasy—their jouissance. In the Me77 Caroline Walker Bynum, " ' . . . And Woman His Humanity': Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages," in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 27 78. Bynum, "Women Mystics," 191.1 refer to Bynum's work with both admiration for her redemptive readings of women's history and an awareness of Dominick LaCapra s critique of some of her approaches to reading history—for example her stark, binary opposition between male and female experiences." See LaCapra, Representing the Holo¬ caust, 180.

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moriale, Angela repeatedly makes statements such as "It seems to me that I blaspheme in everything I say," "My speech is more a ruin and a blasphemy than it is a speech," "therefore I say that I blaspheme in speaking about [divine secrets]" (i66, 384, 386). Angela's attempts to express the "inexpressible" through the necessarily inadequate instru¬ ment of human language generate an anomalous language that dis¬ tinguishes itself from other religious genres through overpowering transgressiveness, supporting Paolo Valesio's claim that the topos of ineffability is "one of the richest for the development of discursive structures in the West."79 It is a usage that in Angela's text repeatedly tests the limits of speech, having recourse at times to such singular phenomena as glossolalia and inarticulateness ("Suddenly I could no longer speak, for my tongue had been broken off" [206]) and extreme versions of rhetorical tropes such as oxymorons. (The coniunctio oppositorum is a mystical topos, as in Veronica Giuliani's "I suffer so as not to suffer. ... I cannot speak and I always speak and am not heard").80 There is much talk of "blasphemy" in Angela of Foligno's Memoriale, nevertheless one obviously cannot reduce her complex relation with language and with the body to Sigmund Freud's sweeping gener¬ alization about "the familiar fact that the hysterical deliria of nuns revel in blasphemies and erotic pictures."81 Because of their selfconsciousness, Angela's blasphemies are clearly more complex than the hysterical symptomatology to which Freud refers in this passage; and of course her blasphemies are not curses of God's name (for the defa¬ mation of Christ's name by others' hearts and bodies causes Angela indescribable suffering [290-91]); rather, they qualify as blasphemies only in a metalinguistic fashion. They are an apophatic, negative, and necessarily incomplete way of representing God: "If I say that He is All Good, I destroy Him. . . . anything I say seems to me to either say noth¬ ing or to say it badly. ... It seems to me that I blaspheme" (360). To some extent, these self-accusations are a means of appeasing her Au¬ dience. Angela realizes her representational infractions and accuses herself of blasphemy as a rhetorical strategy, a form of captatio benevolentiae. Yet one could also read her linguistic gesture as confirming Angela's self-conscious authorship of her text, confirming her as the 79. Paolo Valesio, " 'O entenebrata luce ch'en me luce': La letteratura del silenzio," in Del silenzio: Percorsi, suggestioni, interpretazioni, ed. Giovannella Fusco Girard and Anna

Maria Tango (Salerno: Ripostes, 1992), 21. 80. In Pozzi and Leonardi, Scrittrici, 541. 81. Freud, "Preface and Footnotes to the Translation of Charcot's Tuesday Lectures" (1892-1894), in Standard Edition 1:138.

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artifex of its rhetorical strategies. Although what she says cannot be said, in the double sense of inability and especially prohibition, Angela knowingly disregards these limitations and attempts to describe the forbidden and possibly ineffable encounter. Saint Paul himself under¬ lines the prohibitions surrounding the narration of the encounter with the divine when, describing a man's ecstatic rapture (probably his own), he asserts that he heard "unspeakable words, which it is not lawful [non licet] for man to utter" (2 Corinthians 12:4). "Non licet": it is not permitted, even to the mystic, to speak of the divine mystery. In the last chapter of the Memoriale Angela anticipates her upcoming silence by drawing the line between what can and cannot be said: "I was told the highest words which I do not want to be written" (394). In the scribe's use of the verb nolere, we read a reflection of Angela's control over what should and what should not be written, subverting in this way the only apparent helplessness implied by the topos of ineffability. Angela's silence is here a rhetorical choice, an active concept of silence which is the opposite of an externally imposed inability.82 While describing the unitive stages of her approach to God (so suc¬ cessful that her language paradoxically confuses the self with the Other—"You are I and I am you" (362)—Angela exclaims that such union "is what gives me so much pleasure that it cannot be told" (362). "Narrari non potest": it cannot be told (because of the limitations of language), but above all it should not be told (a religious discursive interdiction). What Angela is saying, in this passage, is not simply that she is unable to express the love of God (a protest that is to a great extent a modesty topos, for she does indeed express it, and does so quite skillfully) but also that in using this bold terminology (largely derived from erotic love but also, above and beyond the sexual imagery, over¬ stepping the limits of human discourse concerning God's mystery) she is violating certain prohibitions—of a sacred and of a cultural order.83 Taking Saint Francis's example to an abject limit, Angela washes the hands of a leper, drinks the water used for the washing, and a scab of the leper's skin which gets stuck in her throat tastes to her (bodily and spiritually) as if she had received Communion (242). Angela takes the identification of the Eucharist with Christ's flesh and that of Christ with the least of her neighbors to an abject and transgressive extreme, 82. Valesio analyzes this "active" concept of silence at length in Ascoltare il silenzio. 83. In the words of another Italian mystic, Camilla Battista Varano: "His sweetest and loving words, filled with manna and honey, filled with enough exultation, joy, and hap¬ piness to make a heart of stone soften and fall in love, I will not write, because as the prophet says, 'I hide your words in my heart so as not to sin against you' " (in Pozzi and Leonardi, Scrittrici, 314).

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so that (even in the absence of a priest!) the flesh of the leper undergoes transubstantiation and becomes Christ's own flesh, the Eucharist. As the Word became flesh, so now the (putrescent) flesh miraculously be¬ comes the Word, and the pleasure experienced by Angela in this mo¬ ment of self-abjection renders it excessive with respect to the Christian ideal of self-effacing humility. She transgresses and is conscious of it, but she transgresses vociferously, dictating her violations in detail in order that they may be written and so handed down. Thus, in the sec¬ ond chapter of the Memoriale Angela complains to Brother Amaldo when he prepares to take her dictation on a small sheet of paper, and tells him that such a small sheet just will not do: he must begin to write in a big book "not one little sheet but a large notebook" (i66). And this is because, at the cost of blaspheming, she has much to say. A reading of Angela of Foligno's Memoriale is bound to expose the way in which Lacan's discourse on women's pleasure, his contention that it is fundamentally and unavoidably ineffable, depends upon his suppression of actual representations by women mystics. Grace Jantzen writes that the notion of the mystical experience as ineffable "would have simply baffled many of the medieval women . . . who are stan¬ dardly included in histories of mysticism and who wrote about their insights and experiences with great fluency and creativity, and at great length."84 Angela's case is not an isolated one, for a comparable elo¬ quence can be found, for example, in the copious, if unrefined, produc¬ tion of Veronica Giuliani (1660-1727), who learned to write by writing (her diary alone consists of twenty-two thousand pages!), as well as in the works of the literate and highly educated Camilla Battista Varano (x458—152,4), who constitutes the rare case of a woman mystic who chose to write of her experiences, instead of being told by her spiritual director to do so, as is usually the case.85 Like Angela, both Varano and Giuliani refer to the interdictions surrounding the talk about the di¬ vine,- like Angela's, their brief claims about the ineffability of the en¬ counter with God are followed by pages and pages of highly eloqueht descriptions of such encounters. Lacan's analysis in "God and the Jouissance of T/he Woman" exiles the words of the woman mystic in its fascination with the look of her jouissance. As Irigaray has commented about Lacan's interpretation of women's pleasure, "interpreting [women] where they exhibit only their muteness means subjecting them to a language that exiles them at an 84. Jantzen, "Feminists, Philosophers," 191. 85. Excellent introductions to the life and works of Veronica Giuliani and Camilla Battista Varano, complete with a selection of their writings, can be found in Pozzi and Leonardi, Scrittrici, 505-42 and 303-29.

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ever increasing distance from what perhaps they would have said to you, were already whispering to you. If only your ears were not so formless, so clogged with meaning(s), that they are closed to what does not in some way echo the already heard."86 But a comparative reading of mystical and psychoanalytic discourse can unveil less reductive re¬ flections. For example, mysticism's obsession with questions of lan¬ guage and body (a knot that is particularly relevant in the context of a spiritual autobiography|, love and desire (the mystic's privileged mode of contact with God), the self and the Other (a fundamental mode of awareness during the mystical union), and all the combinations of these terms is recapitulated by the psychoanalyst's considerations on the uttering of pleasure. Is the body representable? Is mystical pleasure comparable to sexual pleasure? Is mystical experience a hystericoautoerotic act, a symptom, or is it a relation with the Other? And can it be communicated? These are psychoanalytic versions of Angela of Foligno's own questions. In the history and prehistory of psychoanal¬ ysis, the question of mystical experience has traditionally been closely connected to the question of female (or of the gendering of) experience. From Charcot's studies of mystical-hysterical women at the end of last century to some of the most recent feminist appropriations of Lacanian theories, especially Luce Irigaray's in "La mysterique," the quintessen¬ tial mystic has been thought of as being a woman and a hysteric of sorts (although the notion of hysteria has recently been complicated and positively redefined by some feminist thinkers). Furthermore, both Angela's and Lacan's texts self-consciously violate the boundaries set by their respective discourses, be they scientific or religious. Angela speaks of the unspeakable Other, God, and Lacan speaks of the unspeakable Other, Woman. In French prohibition is most commonly expressed by the verb inter dire, which explicitly as¬ sociates prohibition with speech (dire = to say). Mystical and psycho¬ analytic discourses display a radical, even a shocking critique of the culture about and from which they are speaking, through a critical analysis founded on the postulation of a space other than the one in which their text is being written and read—the space of the mystical encounter with the divine for the mystic, the space of the analytic dealings with the Other (the unconscious) for the psychoanalyst. It is not a coincidence, then, that during a television interview Jacques La¬ can described the psychoanalyst as someone who in the past would have been called a saint—that is, someone who, instead of command86. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 112-13-

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ing a certain respect, functions as the locus of "trash" rather than caritas ("Se met-il a faire le dechet: il decharite," are Lacan's words)—so as to allow the subject of the unconscious to take him as the cause of the subject's own desire—hence perhaps the disturbing yet irreducible otherness of both saint and psychoanalyst.87 In addition to this common transgressive stance (namely, the psy¬ choanalyst's and the saint's commerce with the abject), the parallel reflections on the uttering of intense pleasure, or of jouissance, in mys¬ tical and psychoanalytic texts are also bound to strike the reader as especially relevant to the representation of the language-body relation. The body, for the psychoanalyst as well as for the mystic, brings forth its own symbolic speech, which does not necessarily follow the dictates of verbal language, and it is the body itself, through the symptomatic act as well as through mystical phenomena such as stigmata or levi¬ tation, which may produce a truth unknown to the linguistic order. In his discussion of the pleasure of the text, Roland Barthes points out the intimate bond between transgression and ecstasy (jouissance) by contrasting the repetitive "encratic" language (i.e., "language which is produced and spread under the protection of power") with the lan¬ guage of the "new," the language of jouissance. Barthes describes in this passage the dichotomy of banal linguistic repetition, "the Rule," and the marginal rapture toward the new, "the exception" (a rapture that always runs the risk of destroying speech itself). Barthes contends that, "at certain moments it is possible to support the exception of the Mystics."88 Two years later, Barthes will speak in his autobiographical book Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes of his own obsession with the mystics.89 Angela's discourse is what Barthes would term a dis¬ course of pure pleasure, a "jubilant discourse," the expression of a com¬ plete "overwhelming" of the subject by God, a pleasure that exceeds desire and makes the subject deviate. For a good formulation of this pleasure, Barthes contends, we must turn to the mystics. In spite of his own reference to Lacan in The Pleasure of the Text to corroborate the tenet of the ineffability of jouissance, two years later Barthes will defer to the mystics' authority, citing Ruysbroek, for the successful formu¬ lation of jouissance in language (a question that haunted him for years), in open contradiction of Lacan's theory of the ineffability of jouis¬

sance.90 It is the expression of the apparently inexpressible, the language of 87. 88. 89. 90.

Jacques Lacan, Television (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 28-29. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 41. Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975)/ 116. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 21; Barthes, Roland Barthes, 116.

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"exception," which constitutes one of the principal tasks of the mystic, as the etymology of the word itself implies. The Greek mystikos refers to the initiates to the mysteries, and the connection between mystery and mysticism is evident. But the Greek mysterion is related to the verb muein, which means to close one's eyes or one's lips—so as to keep a secret, for example, Angela's "divine secrets"—and the etymol¬ ogy of the word mystic is thus related to that of terms such as mute and mutter.91 The mystics are just those people, then, who are muted because they should not speak of the mysteries to the uninitiated. De Certeau points out that the very expression "mystical phenomena" rep¬ resents a coincidence of opposites, an oxymoron: a phenomenon is something visible, apparent, whereas what is mystical is secret and invisible.92 The confrontation with ineffability is then a veritable con¬ dition inherent to the mystics' linguistic enterprise, rather than an insurmountable impediment preventing their speech. Ineffability, as Valesio has persuasively argued, is a successful literary strategy fre¬ quently used to elude the obstacle of silence, which is the backdrop of all poetry; in this sense, "ineffability defines the object of every poetic operation as such."93 In this evasion, the mystic's text, like Barthes's "text of jouissance," brings itself to the limits of language and thus "undoes nomination, and it is this defection which approaches bliss [jouissance]."94 As a reflection on the concept of jouissance will make clear, the language of the mystic approaches that of the body. In a book that interprets Lacan's theory of woman's "nonwholeness" as "empower¬ ing" (primarily by stressing its implication of woman's innate and unique "ex-sistential" knowledge), Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni writes: "The only knowledge is revealed through the jouissance of the love of the Other. This knowledge is the prerogative of women. It makes men's science crumble."95 Surely the idea of a bodily form of knowledge is fashionable and attractive, and it finds many resonances in the mystic's discourse of ineffability: the "body" holds a knowledge that is other than or in excess of conscious knowledge (and we are reminded here of psychoanalysis). To a certain extent, even common sense can also attest to the ineffability of bodily experience. The inexpressibility of

91. For a discussion of the evolution of the word mysticism and its cognates, see de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 94-112. 92. Michel de Certeau, "Mystique," Encyclopaedia universalis, 20 vols. (Paris: Ency¬ clopaedia Universalis France, 1968), 11:523. 93. Valesio, " 'O entenebrata/ " 21, 23. 94. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 45. 95. Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, Partage des femmes (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 99-

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physical pain, for example, has been impressively discussed by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, and some of her conclusions can also be applied to the (in)expressibility of extreme physical pleasure—the mys¬ tic being the subject and object of both.96 But even if we grant that the body has a language, and that the mys¬ tic's experience takes place, at least in part, on and around the body, what would be the value of the mystics' writings, vehicles of a knowl¬ edge that is necessarily linguistic, if mystical experience were utterly beyond the symbolic order, beyond communication? At best, and this is already a concession to the mystic's power of speech, they could fall under Barthes's category of "texts of jouissance," texts that discomfit their readers by unsettling their relationship to language.97 But even within this Barthesian framework the mystic's intense pleasure must be manifested through language and not only through linguistic an¬ nihilation or somatization, if her texts are to be at all successful. As Adelia Noferi explains, the cultural function of mysticism is to " 'trans¬ late' into the code of cultural semiosis an extrasemiotic reality that at once evades semiotization and presses toward, through, that boundary, so as to penetrate (beyond the closing that separates it) into the space of human communication and knowledge."98 It is this "pressure" to¬ ward semiotization which characterizes Angela of Foligno's linguistic efforts, even and especially when she tells of the ineffable. Angela's "linguistic theory" can best be read in her achievement of a perfect unity between body and language, under the aegis of love, while she makes the sign of the cross: "When I make the sign of the cross quickly and I do not place my hand on my heart, I do not feel anything; but when I first place my hand on my forehead saying 'In the name of the Father,' and then I place my hand on my heart saying, 'And of the Son,' I immediately experience a love and a consolation, and it seems to me that I find there the one I name" (310). Through a perfect referential movement, the mystic finds what she names, that is, the referent under the sign, and the consolation of love, her jouissance, is one with her verbal articulation of it. "The mystical experience," writes Pozzi, "contrary to those who predicate it as the realm of silence and absence, is founded on the word 96. "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before a language is learned" (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 4). 97. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 14. 98. Adelia Noferi, "Ripensare la mistica," Introduction to Coppini, 9-10.

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around a presence: a word received and given."99 Similarly, de Certeau says, "Mystical language is a social language," and Valesio posits si¬ lence as a "type of language" which "springs, like a necessity, out of a described experience at the edge or at the limit."100 Lacan, on the other hand, reduces the mystic to a forever silent statue, frozen in the mo¬ ment of ecstasy or jouissance, which, as long as it lasts, precludes speech. The choice of a statue as the icon of mystical discourse is sig¬ nificant, the marble doubling by its hardened immobility the silence of the ecstasy. As Grosz puts it, "If Lacan's interrogation is directed to a man's stone representation of a woman, i.e., to Bernini's representa¬ tion of St Teresa, it is not surprising that 'she' has nothing to say!"101 But this silence is also a moment that, in the itinerary of the mystic, is inevitably followed by profuse verbal communication. Just as Lacan states that nothing can be said about W/oman and then proceeds to hold an entire seminar about her, so Angela of Foligno affirms God's ineffability and then goes on to dictate a long book, a "quatemum mag¬ num," describing her experience of the divine at length—deconstruct¬ ing in this way Lacan's claims. Mystical experience concerns itself with the ineffable,- yet it clearly implies and even demands a sustained effort on the part of the mystic to say or to write of what happened. The mystic writes under the coercion of the divine—her absent-present ref¬ erent, the ineffable par excellence—and this force pushes her language toward and beyond its limits. As a comparison between Angela of Foligno and Gemma Galgani makes clear, not all women mystics (or all their writings] should/could be lumped together in one large category that can then be subjected to a collective analysis or diagnosis about its health or lack thereof. Let us take for example the question of imitatio Christior the mystic's attempt to reproduce Christ's physical pain on her own body. Imitatio Christi involves that practice of abjection which has often led to a diagnosis of masochism (as in Beauvoir's analysis of mysticism in The Second Sex). Yet abjection, as Julia Kristeva has discussed in Powers of Horror, is a double-faced phenomenon that intrinsically defies catego¬ rization. The abject is neither the self nor the other, is neither subject nor object. And the mystic's words are always in or on the brink of abjection; they are always, as Angela herself puts it, "blasphemies," which defile the divine by dragging it into the essentially unclean and

99. Pozzi, "L'alfabeto," 29. 100. De Certeau, "Mystique," 524; Valesio, Ascoltare il silenzio, 355. 101. Grosz, Jacques Lacan, 146.

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fleshly human/woman's mouth. At the same time, being neither self nor other, the abject represents the point of junction between the sub¬ ject and the invading agency, be it the hysteron or the spirit. Through the practice of abjection, then, the mystic undoes the hierarchy of self and other and "becomes," through mystical union, one with the Other, one with her God. Angela of Foligno's imitation of Christ is a self-consciously trans¬ gressive practice that defies and exceeds the limits of human language. Thus, as Karma Lochrie has persuasively maintained, Angela "does not, then, become victimized by her practice,- rather, she unsettles the very terms of victimization."102 Although more work needs to be done on her story and her writings, Gemma Galgani clearly does not possess the same degree of authority and, at the same time, of sustained trans¬ gression as Angela does. Her childish and childlike posture, whether chosen by herself as a way to perfection ("Unless you become like one of these children . . ."), or imposed from the outside by her orphaned and homeless state, has made her often-prattling voice subservient to her spectacular suffering flesh. This body-over-language hierarchy was all-too attractive to the turn-of-the-century psychiatrist, and if at An¬ gela's time the body was not yet "colonized" by medicine, Gemma's reader is never allowed to forget the positivistic psychiatric imperial¬ ism expanding its dominion over her body. Nevertheless, she reacts, and not only by bleeding and self-abjection. Her hermeneutic practice of converting the bodily into the spiritual is an eloquent antidiagnosis that her reader cannot afford to ignore.

Postscript: Reading the Symptoms (Freud and Teresa of Avila)

The attention, one might even say the obsession with the alwaysalready eroticized body is at the root of all comparisons of the hysterical woman and the woman mystic. It is precisely this peculiar relationship of the self (of the psyche or the soul) with the body as both flesh and sign that makes the hysteric and the mystic appear doubly "feminine" in the tum-of-the-century imagination and perhaps even in today's. Hysterics have traditionally been represented as women suffering from a woman's disease, women afflicted by their own femininity gone awry and tormented by a metonymic and animallike uterus. Analogously, 102. Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: Uni¬ versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 56.

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Vuarnet has claimed that "true mysticism is fundamentally female" and that it is "among female saints, doubly women, as mystics and as women, that ecstaticism gave its most beautiful flowers."103 Double womanliness brings the hysteric and the mystic together. The effects of both disease and religious belief manifest themselves in a spectacular way on the female body, pierced by the ambiguous, often incompre¬ hensible stigmata of hysteria (later named "traumatic reminiscences" by Freud) or of an angel's burning arrow. It is the mystic's peculiar bodily manifestations that attracted Char¬ cot's clinical eyes and those of his charcoterie. Positivist doctors perceived the mystic's corporeality—her ecstasies, her stigmata, her lev¬ itations—as her primary if not her only means of communication. The mystic's body, like the hysterical body, was seen as "a body seized by language," as Wajeman says, speaking like a voice and becoming, in An¬ dre Vauchez's words about the mystics, "an instrument of privileged communication."104 Thus in The Mystic Fable, de Certeau refers to the bodies of women mystics as "speaking bodies, living Bibles spread here and there in the countryside or in the little shops, ephemeral outbursts of the 'Word' erstwhile uttered by a whole world."105 In spite of this com¬ mon function of the body as linguistic sign, one finds a crucial difference between the hysteric and the mystic in the articulation of the intersec¬ tion between the body and its speech, or lack thereof (a difference that would have been hardly perceptible to Charcot's deaf ears). For is the mystic's body language, then, a symptom, uttering and muttering a re¬ pressed trauma, like the hysteric's, or is it a miracle, the result of a po¬ rousness between the supernatural and the natural? In order to shed some light on this larger question, a microscopic textual comparison can be made between one of Freud's hysterics of 1895, Elisabeth von R., and Teresa of Avila's vision of "the angel in bodily form" who plunges his spear into her entrails,- this is the vision described in Teresa's Autobiography and immortalized by Bernini's fa¬ mous statue ("in a marble," Vergote contends, "that in no way cools or tempers the physical and corporeal ecstasy of the vision").106 It is also the passage that is most frequently invoked in the diagnosis of Saint Teresa of Avila as hysterical: 103. Vuarnet, Extases feminines, 7. 104. Wajeman, Le maitre, 165; Vauchez quoted in Danielle Regnier-Bohler, "Voix litt6raires, voix mystiques," in Histoire des femmes en Occident, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, 5 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1991), 2:484. 105. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 26. 106. Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 161. For a comparison between another patient in Stud¬ ies on Hysteria (Anna O.) and another Catholic mystic (Catherine of Siena), see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 8-9.

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The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease. . . . This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share. ... I had no wish to look or to speak, only to embrace my pain, which was a greater bliss than all created things could give me. . . . But when this pain of which I am now speaking begins, the Lord seems to transport the soul and throw it into an ecstasy. So there is no opportunity for it to feel its pain or suffering, for the enjoyment comes immediately.107 With the oxymoron that characterizes the attempt of mystical dis¬ course to overcome the ineffable, pain is said to cause "sweetness," to be "a greater bliss," to transport the soul into an "ecstasy," an "enjoy¬ ment." The matter is further complicated when the pain is said to be spiritual, although the body has "a considerable share" in it. The mys¬ tic's body (as we have seen in the case of Angela of Foligno and Gemma Galgani) participates in the spiritual experience, be it painful or plea¬ surable, and this participation, often leading to conversion, requires the use of a language of "excess." The metaphor employed by Teresa of Avila is a penetration analogous to sexual penetration. As was the case with Angela, however, one cannot use repression as an accurate label, for Teresa herself clearly recognizes the importance of the body in this experience of ecstasy (as do Angela and other women mystics).108 In this context, the text also evokes the mystery of the spirit/body dual¬ ism that characterizes much of the discourse around hysteria, as well. How does the conversion from the psychic to the physiological come about; how does mental or spiritual pain turn into organic symptoms; and beyond all this, how does (or can) one speak of pain (and pleasure), when pain, like jouissance, is not only what resists language but, more important, what actively destroys it?109 The ambiguity of pain and its expression, about which Saint Teresa can speak at length because she has a voice and not a choking globus hystericus, also constitutes an enigma for those women whose cases are discussed by Breuer and Freud in their Studies on Hysteria. It is no coincidence that in his chapter on women's madness in A Social His¬ tory of Madness, Roy Porter features first the medieval mystic Margery 107. Teresa of Avila, The Life, 210-n. 108. A persuasive account of the transcendental meaning given to sexual imagery by a major Italian woman mystic may be found in Anna Antonopoulos, "Writing the Mystic Body: Sexuality and Textuality in the Ecriture Feminine of Saint Catherine of Genoa," Hypatia 6 (Fall 1991): 185-207. 109. Scarry, Body in Pain, 4.

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Kempe and then Freud's most famous female patient, the hysterical Dora.110 The issue of the expression of pain, for example, so crucial in Teresa of Avila's description of her transverberation, turns into an issue of painful expression in the case of Fraiilein Elisabeth von R., whose reactions to his treatment Freud describes: If one pressed or pinched the hyperalgesic skin and muscles of her legs, her face assumed a peculiar expression, which was one of plea¬ sure rather than pain. She cried out—and I could not help thinking that it was as though she was having a voluptuous tickling sensa¬ tion—her face flushed, she threw back her head and shut her eyes and her body bent backwards. . . . Her expression of face did not fit in with the pain which was ostensibly set up by the pinching of her muscles and skin; it was probably more in harmony with the subjectmatter of the thoughts which lay concealed behind the pain and which had been aroused in her by the stimulation of the parts of the body associated with those thoughts. (Studies 137) In both Teresa's and Elisabeth's texts, something "other," an agency proceeding from a more or less unknown elsewhere, makes itself seen or felt. Yet, inasmuch as Elisabeth's body is not yet symbolized she does not have a voice, she is not in control of the tropes of her language,what speaks through her body is the traumatic reminiscence from which she, qua hysteric, suffers, and her expressions are a symbolic representation of concealed "thoughts" of which she is not aware,- they are representations of what Freud will name, a few years later, the dis¬ course of the unconscious, in a case of ventriloquy of the hysteric's muted voice. The symbolic significance of hysterical stigmata, unlike that of mystical stigmata, remains unknown to their subject until she is brought back to health by her doctor.111 Unlike Teresa, Elisabeth does not, or better yet, cannot tell her own story, and the oxymoron of pain as pleasure is played out entirely at a nonverbal, organic level; she must leave it up to the other, in this case Freud, to interpret her corporeal ambiguity—doubly ambiguous because, as David-Menard notes while no. Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World through the Eyes of the Insane (New York: Dutton, 1989), 103-24. in. For Freud, according to Sarah Kofman, "Woman lacks sincerity: she dissimulates, transforms each word into an enigma, an indecipherable riddle"—hence the very title of Kofman's book, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 43. Yet for Kofman it is because woman "does not have the right to speak, she stops being capable or desirous of speaking; she 'keeps' everything to herself, and creates an excess of mystery and obscurity as if to avenge herself, as if striving for mastery" (43). These secrets are precisely what make woman ill. "Hysteria," Kofman notes, "is nothing else" (42).

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discussing this very passage, "'bodily movements are perceived variably according to what one is expecting to find in the first place: the phys¬ iological body or the imaginary one."112 Elisabeth's hysterized body, symbolic, yet also organic, is turned into a means of uncontrollable expression even as it is stripped of its eroticism. Unlike Teresa's, Elis¬ abeth's body, because it is hysterical, is not allowed to be the place of the other's desire and pleasure. The hysteric's inability to love is a topos in the psychoanalytic literature on hysteria. Because she is a hys¬ teric, Letizia Lionello notes, for Elisabeth von R. "a love relationship is impossible, something is missing, there is a remainder which reveals its incompleteness."113 Indeed, Eugenio Borgna says, "the inability to encounter the other and, as a consequence, the inability to love are the radical and emblematic foundations of every form of hysterical expe¬ rience."114 Similarly, Moustapha Safouan writes, it is difficult for the hysteric "to accept herself as an object of desire, if choosing an object implies making herself an object."115 Now, all this is difficult to rec¬ oncile with the essentially successful amorous essence of the mystical experience. Unlike Elisabeth von R., Saint Teresa rejoices as she directs the her¬ meneutic value of her own metaphors. The pleasure of the desired ecstasy comes to replace the pain of the angel's spear (through subli¬ mation? or could it be that God's love, real or imagined, is more ful¬ filling than neurosis?), and the ineffability of the senses is at least partly overcome, so that the body is not in her text the inarticulate and inarticulatable receptacle of the darts of unconscious and traumatic rem¬ iniscences. Through its comparison with a mystical text, the passage on Elisabeth von R. I have quoted shows the undeniable continuity between Charcot's work and Freud's. Despite the commonplace that Charcot was oriented visually and Freud auditorially, in 1895 the hys¬ teric's theatrical attitudes still commanded Freud's attention.116 As Herve Huot points out, in Studies on Hysteria "hysterics play their role too well not to be, once again, on the stage of a theater, as with Charcot."117 Mysticism and psychoanalysis in the passages about Teresa of Avila

112. David-Menard, Hysteria, 21. 113. Letizia Lionello, "Come annodare bordi impossibili," in Verdiglione et al., 4. 114. Borgna, "L'isteria," 30. 115. Moustapha Safouan, "Che cosa vuole una donna," in Verdiglione et al., 8. 116. Heath, Sexual Fix, 38. 117. Herve Huot, Du sujet a l’image: Une histoiie de l’oeil chez Freud (Begedis, Bel¬ gium: Editions Universitaires, 1987), 39.

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and Elisabeth von R. are two hermeneutic tools used to decipher the ambiguous corporeal experiences of pain and pleasure, but whereas the mystic may interpret her own text (thus emancipating herself, to some extent, from the shackles of another's ideology), the hysteric, who is more thoroughly absorbed by her daydreams than the mystic is by her visions, must wait for the other to answer or at least to verbalize her questioning expression.118 Drawing a stimulating analogy between the mystic's subversive language and her transcendental experience, Gio¬ vanni Pozzi writes: "Female mysticism had already inaugurated its very own way, a direct and experimental one, leading us to understand that just as the ineffable is overcome through grammatical oxymoron, so also neurosis is overcome through the oxymoron of the divinity."119 The rhetorical figure of the oxymoron, Pozzi posits, is crucial to the mystical experience as well as to its linguistic recounting. Vergote, a psychoanalyst, writes on this subject, "Through this transposition be¬ tween language of the body (not, as in hysteria, language through the body) and the body of language, desire, of whatever order it is, expresses itself through the metaphors of the body, and the body in turn becomes the metaphorical vessel that gives experience, including spiritual ex¬ perience, a special resonance. Otherwise how would one find joy in spirituality?"120 Whereas the hysteric is disgusted with her body, unable even to ver¬ balize its contradictions, the mystic, even in moments of abjection, revels in her corporeality as a means of coming into contact with God the Bridegroom. In place of the hysteric's conversion phenomena (the corporealization of psychic pain defined by Freud as "the transforma¬ tion of psychical excitation into chronic somatic symptoms" [Studies, 86]), the mystic gives her body over to language, so as to compensate for the loss of Christ's body—a loss and subsequent finding officially celebrated with every transubstantiation and unofficially celebrated with the mystic's jouissance. To quote de Certeau once again, "The production of a body plays an essential role in mystics. What is termed a rejection of 'the body' or of 'the world'—ascetic struggle, prophetic rupture—is but the necessary and preliminary elucidation of a histor¬ ical state of affairs; it constitutes the point of departure for the task of 118. The doctor-hysteric relationship, however, has also been interpreted in a different way by feminist critics such as Dianne Hunter, who reclaims the hysteric's importance in the early development of psychoanalysis and asserts that "psychoanalysis can be seen as a translation into theory of the language of hysteria" ("Hysteria, Psychoanalysis," 114). 119. Pozzi, "L'alfabeto," 42. 120. Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 162.

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offering a body to the spirit, of 'incarnating' discourse, giving truth a space in which to make itself manifest."121 For the mystic, then, the pain of being taken out of herself, the disgust of abjection, the selfannihilation in the Other are amply rewarded by the assumption of a/ her body by and in the divine and by the pleasure felt at the presence of God within the self. In this process, the dualisms of body and spirit, of pleasure, and pain, of self and other, are disrupted and thus over¬ come. 121. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 80.

CONCLUSION

From Hysterical Anguish to Mystical Ecstasy: Old Symptoms of a New Sainthood

"Every being cries out silently to be read differently."1 The twentiethcentury French mystic Simone Weil employs the term "reading" (lec¬ ture| in a way analogous to its usage by contemporary cultural critics, although she advocates a compassion in reading not necessarily found in academic accounts. Weil says, "We read, but also we are read by others. Interpenetrations in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). A mechanical process. More often than not, a dialogue between deaf people" (188-89). In these pages, I have been reading readers reading other readers, readers enslaving and readers con¬ quering. The often deaf diagnostic activity I have outlined made it its quest to draw inner conclusions from the mystic's outward behavior— to read the unwritten and thus to impose an interpretive slavery. It is not such a diagnosis that I want to replicate in these final remarks, for I do not wish to emulate those who read hysteria as "the open sesame to impenetrable riddles of existence: religious ecstasy, sexual deviation, and, above all, that mystery of mysteries, woman."2 (But Simone Weil reminds me: "Who can flatter himself that he will read aright?" [189]). On one hand, an attentive reading of the mystics' writings may lead 1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (New York: Putnam, 1952), 188. 2. Roy Porter, "The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient: Negotiating Hys¬ teria," in Gilman et al., 227.

198

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some to agree with Weil that "there is an essential difference between the mysticism which turns toward God the faculty of love and desire, of which sexual energy constitutes the physiological foundation, and the false imitation of mysticism, which, without changing the natural orientation of this faculty, gives it an imaginary object upon which it stamps the name of God as a label. To discriminate between these two operations, of which the second is still lower than debauchery, is dif¬ ficult, but it is possible" (104). At the same time, Weil herself warns readers of mysticism: "To reproach mystics with loving God by means of the faculty of sexual love is as though one were to reproach a painter with making pictures by means of colors composed of material sub¬ stances. We haven't anything else with which to love."3 It is tempting to believe in the possibility of the discrimination evoked by Weil between true mysticism and its "false imitation." But, as I hope will now be clear, this possibility relies on a more or less selfevident difference between the mystic and her "pathological other," a difference that in fact may or may not be discernible.4 At times, if not always, one must admit that the "dangerous proximity" of mystical and neurotic experience blurs their frontier, because of a hermeneutic undecidability that has been eloquently described by Michel de Certeau: "Between madness and truth, the links are enigmatic and do not form a bond of necessity. But it is even more erroneous to hold social conformism as the criterion for spiritual experience. Psychological 'bal¬ ance' answers to certain social norms (which in any case are subject to change) that the mystic exceeds again and again."5 Because of its in¬ trinsic excess with respect to the norm(al), a degree of autonomy must be conceded to the mystical experience if one is not mechanically to diagnose sainthood as a hysterical symptom. We encounter the begin¬ ning of this very autonomy in the pages of Pierre Janet's medical trea¬ tise De Tangoisse a Textase (From anguish to ecstasy), and we find it fully developed in Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair as well as throughout Simone Weil's life and works. It is by giving space to these symptomatic voices, advocates of a new sainthood, that I would like to conclude. 3. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 2 vols., trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 2:472. It is in this passage that Weil criticizes psycho¬ analysis: "The whole of Freudian doctrine is saturated with the very prejudice which he makes it his mission to combat, namely, that everything that is sexual is base." 4. John Hoyles discusses scholars from different religious backgrounds who all believe that mysticism "can be distinguished, and recuperated for the good of the human race, from its own aberrant forms which are self-evidently abnormal and evil" ("Beyond the Sex-Economy," 239). 5. De Certeau, "Mystique," 525.

Conclusion Pierre Janet,

199

De l'angoisse a l'extase

Between 1926 and 1928, Pierre Janet (1859-1947), one of the bestknown doctors at the Salpetriere, published the two volumes of De l’angoisse a l’extase: Etudes sur les cioyances et les sentiments (From anguish to ecstasy: a study on beliefs and feelings), the crowning point of his lifelong interest in religious experience and its relation to psy¬ chopathology.6 In this book, Janet tells the story of his dealings with Madeleine (which lasted twenty-five years), a middle-aged mystical hysteric or, as Janet calls her when comparing her experiences with Teresa of Avila's, "a poor contemporary mystic."7 Madeleine (a signif¬ icant name chosen by the patient herself) showed all the symptoms of that "religious neurosis" which had so fascinated doctors and writers alike during the preceding sixty years: frequent ecstasies, crucifixion postures, bleeding stigmata. But times had changed. Although in his introduction to the book Janet claims that a lay study is "perhaps freer and more complete, on certain points," than religious observation (and the words "perhaps" and "on certain points" already mark a difference from Charcot's positivistic attitude toward religious hermeneutics), he also says that his analysis "remains entirely respectful of the beliefs and the religious sentiments that are at the basis of these phenomena" (1:3). Indeed, in reading De l’angoisse a l’extase one can see how, as George Frederick Drinka puts it, "this professor of the College de France loved the logical, theological, and philosophical discussions he had with the little Parisian bag lady."8 Madeleine was admitted to the Salpetriere because of a contracture of her leg which allowed her to walk only on tiptoe (she believed she stood on tiptoe because she was about to be assumed into heaven body and soul, like the Virgin Mary). Janet treated the devout and sickly Madeleine between 1896 and 1904. Although she also had a spiritual director during her hospitalization, Madeleine consistently called Janet "mon pere," "father"—in which the addition of the possessive "mon" suggests in French a religious, rather than a paternal, view of their re¬ lationship. She was discharged from the Salpetriere in 1904 when the doctors decided she had achieved a state of psychological equilibrium, but she kept in close touch with Janet through copious letters until 6. For an account of Janet's ever-evolving psychology of religion, see Ellenberger, Dis¬ covery of the Unconscious, 394-400. 7. Pierre Janet, De l’angoisse a l’extase: Etudes sur les croyances et les sentiments, 2 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1926-28), 1:166. A summary of the relationship between Madeleine and Janet may be found in Drinka, Birth of Neurosis, 347-56. 8. Drinka, Birth of Neurosis, 348.

200

$•

Saint Hysteria

she died in 1918. Madeleine's case was controversial. Some Catholics charged Janet with atheism in spite of his obvious respect for Made¬ leine's personality, not to be found in any of Charcot's writings. Other Catholics, such as the theologian Father Bruno de Jesus-Marie, recog¬ nized Madeleine's neurosis (she had a history of neuropathic accidents, obsessions, and depressions [Angoisse 1:17]), while insisting that she "was also a fine and remarkable person whose mysticism was a mixture of psychopathology and genuine religious feeling."9 Madeleine was a difficult case. She was caught time and again scratching and worsening her stigmata, but Janet also observed the spontaneous appearance of stigmata on her skin—among other places, on her left side (rather than the usual right) because, as Madeleine her¬ self said, the Christ in the church of the Salpetriere is wounded on his left side. Janet, as I mentioned, had previously defined hysteria as a disorder of "representation," and Madeleine's visual orientation (she painted several religious pictures that are reproduced in De Vangoisse) pushed her more toward the (self) representation of visual images than toward written texts. Janet says her knowledge of religious and mys¬ tical writings was very limited (1:13).10 Janet was not without admiration for this "poor contemporary mys¬ tic," calling her "an intelligent and reasonable woman"—something of which she often had to remind him when he tried to persuade her that her religious convictions were delirious (1:181). Janet remarks on her "just and delicate mind," on the good use she made of the little primary education she received, and on the talent and taste she displayed in her writing and painting. He concludes, in a tone that is light-years away from Charcot's: "It is these same qualities, although more developed, that have allowed certain mystics with the same pathological problems to carry out nevertheless some remarkable works" (1:181). A nonreli¬ gious man, Janet nevertheless underlines, with a touch of admiration, the practical accomplishments of the mystics despite their probable ill health, in much the same way as Josef Breuer commended Saint Teresa of Avila in Studies of Hysteria. De Vangoisse a l’extase is an eloquent instance of the persistent in¬ terest in the relationship between hysteria and mysticism into the twentieth century and the dramatic changes the interpretation of this troublesome intersection was undergoing. It is sufficient to scan Janet's footnotes to be made acutely aware of the large number of twentiethcentury publications on this topic by psychologists and religious think-

9. Quoted in Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 396. 10. Janet, L’etat mental des hysteriques, 412-15.

Conclusion

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201

ers. A notorious reduction of mysticism to hysteria, for example, is to be found in Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933, in which the author, who believes that "the religious feeling is the same as the sexual feeling, except that it is imbued with a mys¬ tical, psychic content," claims: "In no social class do hysteria and per¬ versions flourish to such an extent as they do in the ascetic circles of the church."11

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair This continued fascination with the crossover of the saintly and the symptomatic can also be discerned in twentieth-century literary texts. As late as 1991 Ron Hansen published Mariette in Ecstasy, the dust jacket of which portrays a colorized and stylized close-up of Saint Ter¬ esa's ecstatic face in Bernini's sculpture. Set, not surprisingly, at the turn of the century (in 1906), Hansen's novel tells the story of Mariette, a beautiful seventeen-year-old postulant at a French convent in upstate New York, who experiences mysterious mystical phenomena—most notably, bleeding stigmata. Like Gemma Galgani, Mariette warns her confessor against believing her own words, for her head "is a bit strange."12 As she takes up the posture of crucifixion, "her hands spread wide as if she were nailed just as Christ was," stigmata make their appearance and "blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor" (107). A self-conscious mod¬ ernist awareness of the body-as-text metaphor informs Hansen's de¬ scriptions of Mariette's mystical experiences—one of the many traits that distinguish this novel from tum-of-the-century representations of analogous phenomena. But again, no definite conclusion is possible for Hansen as for many of his nondiagnostic and nonhagiographic prede¬ cessors in the reading of mysticism. The puzzled and puzzling ques¬ tions of Mariette's prioress about the postulant's stigmata are phrased so as to allow them to mirror the reader's and perhaps even the writer's own: "I see no possible reasons for this. Is it so Mariette Baptiste will be praised and esteemed by the pious? Or is it so she shall be humili¬ ated and jeered at by skeptics? Is it to honor religion or to humble science? And what are these horrible wounds, really? A trick to anat¬ omy, a bleeding challenge to medical diagnosis, a brief and baffling injury that hasn't yet, in six hundred years, changed our theology and religious practices" (160). Be it hagiographic, atheistic, or scientific,

11. Reich, Mass Psychology, 154, 149. 12. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy: A Novel (New York: Harper Collins 1991), 58.

202

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Saint Hysteria

every explanatory answer to the question of mystical stigmata is in¬ sufficient, as the prioress perceptively underlines, keenly aware of the antiutilitarian function of such a phenomenon. Although its representation of the intersection of mysticism and hys¬ teria is less explicit than in Mariette in Ecstasy, the twentieth-century novel that deals most effectively with the hysteria-mysticism connec¬ tion and with the questions to which it gives rise is The End of the Affair (1951), considered to be Graham Greene's most overt treatment of Catholic themes, although it is clearly no orthodox profession of faith. It is the story, told retrospectively in the first person by Maurice Bendrix, of two love affairs: his affair with Sarah Miles, an unhappy and sensuous woman married to a civil servant, and Sarah's mystical affair with God. Sarah ends the first affair after making a vow, during an explosion, that she would give her lover up if he were to return to her alive. In keeping her vow, she experiences a mystical conversion to Catholicism, while Bendrix becomes an increasingly bitter hater of God. His outspoken religious skepticism makes the account of Sarah's conversion convincing, utterly devoid as it is of hagiographical over¬ tones. Shortly after converting, Sarah dies of pneumonia, ending the first, earthly part of her love affair with God. Like many a mystic, and like Madame Gervaisais and Piero Maironi, for example (as well as Simone Weil), Sarah had taken little care of herself in the rainy London weather, so that she seems to bring on her own death. Though she is sick, however, through her intercession, a child smitten with her is cured of a stomach ailment and Richard Smythe, an unbeliever in love with her, has a disfiguring birthmark removed from his cheek. Bendrix subverts the identification of hysteria and religion by identifying Smythe as "an hysterical type," since "dis¬ belief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief."13 It is altogether appropriate that Sarah's sainthood be manifested through miraculous healings of corporeal shortcomings, since the bodies in Greene's novel are all imperfect to the point of humiliation, and in dire need of healing. Bendrix, for example, has a lame leg, and Henry's bald patch metonymizes his powerlessness toward his wife. Although the body's pleasures are far from being rejected in The End of the Affair (the descriptions of Bendrix and Sarah's lovemaking are richly sensual), the body itself needs to be saved through the inscrutable powers of the spirit. It is only when she replicates in her relationship with God the total abandonment and gift of herself she has shown in the sexual act that the desperate Sarah is healed—and heals.14 13. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (London: Heinemann, 1951)/ 17 514. Greene remarked that he was inspired by Friedrich von Hiigel's life of Saint Cath-

Conclusion

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203

Significantly, the novel is introduced by an epigraph by Leon Bloy, whose explorations of the hysteria-mysticism connection were among the most extreme of the fin-de-siecle. In Le desespere, published in the same year as Charcot's Demoniaques dans Tart (1886), Bloy tells the story of the relationship between an ascetic Catholic writer and a beau¬ tiful prostitute who falls in love with him and whom he takes home so as to "save" her.15 She becomes intensely, mystically Catholic, re¬ naming herself Madeleine, and when she discovers her "savior's" desire for her, she shaves her head and rips out all her teeth to make herself undesirable (needless to say, he still wants her). Madeleine finally goes mad and is interned. But The End of the Affair, although it shares some of the themes of Le desespere (above all, the figure of a sensuous woman who renounces sexual love for the mystical love of God), has a totally different tone. Its mysticism is lyrical and fertile rather than repulsively self-destructive, representing a sympathetic and even a de¬ sirable picture of religion and holiness. The End of the Affair takes up most of the points raised by the hys¬ teria-mysticism nexus at the turn of the century in a subtly subversive way that crumbles the psychologization-canonization polarity. Cer¬ tainly the analogies between mystical and erotic love are brought up continuously throughout the novel. Bendrix reflects that since "the words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God," then "we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman" (52) It is the rhetorical strategy we have already encountered, most notably in Serao's Cuore infermo but also, for example, in D'Annun¬ zio's "Vergine Orsola". The two loves may be discursively interchange¬ able, for Sarah's love for Bendrix in particular and for men in general (she had several lovers before him and even one after him) is replaced by the love of God, whom Bendrix for a while believes to be just an¬ other lover, named "X" (86). Once he discovers the truth, he continues to call God his rival (154, 202, and so on). It may even be said that Sarah's love for God, like that of Antonio Fogazzaro's women charac¬ ters and Leon Bloy's Madeleine, proceeds from her physical love for a man. Through sexual love she comes to experience mystical love, for both are characterized by an intense participation of the sexual body. But there is a fundamental difference between the human and the di¬ vine lover even at the linguistic level. If Bendrix had to read of Sarah's

erine of Genoa (1477-1512), an unhappily married saint and mystic who tended to the most ignored segments of society—lepers, incurables, foundlings, prostitutes. R. H. Miller, Understanding Graham Greene (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 85. 15. Ldon Bloy, Le desespere (Paris: Bernouard, 1947)-

204

#

Saint Hysteria

love for him "between the lines" of her writing, as she put it, her love for God "had burst the cage of lines. It had refused to be kept between them out of sight" (60). She is impelled to write freely about it in her journal or on scraps of paper. Like Piero Maironi's in 11 santo, the mysticism of Sarah's religious love prevails over the eroticism of her earthly attachment. Further¬ more, like Mme Gervaisais's, Sarah's conversion is also preceded by a disgust for the Roman Catholic "emphasis on the human body." Yet unlike Mme Gervaisais, who remains unselfconscious about the pro¬ cess of her conversion, Sarah is aware that she is "trying to escape the human body and all it needed," that she wants it "destroyed for ever," "rotted with last year's vermin" (130). Sarah also realizes that she was hysterical when she made her vow and that she is hysterical when she writes about it in her journal (112), but the word "hysterical" is emp¬ tied of its pathologizing impact inasmuch as Bendrix also calls himself, Richard Smythe, and people in general "hysterical" (234-35). Never¬ theless, the self-awareness and self-doubt that make her a sympathetic character—she writes to Bendrix: "I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love" (178)—are inseparable from her desire to get up on the cross to take Christ's place (144). And the meta¬ phor of religion as disease returns in Henry's mouth after Bendrix finds out that Sarah's mother had her baptized when she was two years old. "It's like an infection," Henry says of Catholicism (231). But Sarah, like Christ and D'Annunzio's Saint Sebastian, is the wounded healer. Through her own illness, Sarah cures, so that her symptoms in fact reveal her miracle-working sainthood.

Simone Weil In spite of the sympathetic representation of Sarah's mysticism in The End of the Affair, Graham Greene harshly criticized Simone Weil (1909-1943), her "contradictions," "the wide wash of her mystical thought," her "Gnosticism," her "pride," her "blunt claims." He ac¬ cused her of verbal transgressions, much as others had done to many of her predecessors: "She claims too much (St Joan heard rightly when she was told to tell no one of her visions), and sometimes too stri¬ dently."16 Like the hysterics, Simone Weil overspeaks,- like the mystics, she crosses the boundaries of what may/should be said. Weil even con¬ tradicts herself on this topic, for in spite of her prolific writings on the 16. Graham Greene, "Simone Weil" (1951), in Collected Essays (New York: Viking, 1969)/ 375-

Conclusion

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205

subject of God, she chastises "Christianity (Catholics and Protestants alike)" because it "talks too much about holy things." God, in Weil's opinion, should not be spoken about, and the word God should not be pronounced, "except when one is not able to do otherwise" (Notebooks 1:230, 234). Simone Weil at the same time speaks at length about God, claims that God should not be spoken about, and is in fact silent about her mystical experience of union with Christ. In the contradictoriness of her interpretations and self-interpretations, Weil embodies in our own century the persistent reading of mysticism as neurosis, and ac¬ cording to Susan Sontag, that is precisely what makes her so attractive to "our liberal bourgeois civilization." Her "unhealthiness is [her] soundness, and is what carries conviction."17 As was the case with her mystical predecessors, it is difficult to sep¬ arate Simone Weil's life from her writings (all published posthumously and most not intended for publication).18 Philosopher and religious thinker, farm and factory worker, mystic, political theorist and social activist, Simone Weil became in the course of her life increasingly at¬ tached to the Catholic faith (she was bom in a nonpracticing Jewish family), although she always refused to receive the sacraments. Her vocation, she said repeatedly, was to remain at the margins of the church. In fact, marginality may be seen as characteristic of Simone Weil in general, since as Paola Melchiori and Anna Scattigno comment, "her entire story rests at the margins of our interpretive categories."19

17. Susan Sontag, "Simone Weil," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octagon, 1978), 50. The figure of Simone Weil has recently been attracting much attention on the part of Italian feminist philosophers,- see for example Giannina Longobardi et al., Simone Weil: La provocazione della verita (Naples: Liguori, 1990); Paola Melchiori and Anna Scattigno, Simone Weil: 11 pensiero e l’esperienza del femminile (Milan: La Salamandra, 1986); Wanda Tommasi, Simone Weil: Segni, idoli e simboli (Milan: Angeli, 1993); Chiara Zamboni, Interrogando la cosa: Riflessioni a partire da Martin Heidegger e Simone Weil (Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1993). Furthermore, Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati have written a film script about Simone Weil's life, which unfortunately almost completely skirts the question of her religiosity and mysticism, concentrating ex¬ clusively on her political and social activism. Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati, Lettere dall’interno: Racconto per un film su Simone Weil (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). 18. A bibliography of those who "have portrayed her as a sort of saint" and those who "have seen her as an aberrant personality—sexually obsessed, or psychologically dis¬ turbed," can be found in John Heilman, Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982), 4-5. 19. Melchiori and Scattigno, Simone Weil, 9. Weil speaks of such marginality, for ex¬ ample, in "Letter to a Priest," in Gateway to God, ed. David Raper (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 93. Yet at the same time Blanchot points out that "if it is difficult not to feel her to be irreducibly at the margin, this margin, when defined in relation to the Christian religion and Christian mysticism, is soon absorbed by them." Maurice Blanchot, The In¬ finite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)/ 107.

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Saint Hysteria

Weil's refusal to submit her intelligence to the dogmatic authority of the church is reminiscent of earlier mystics' transgressions of ecclesi¬ astical law, claiming the primacy of their direct relationship with God.20 Hospitalized in England after a life of privations (most of which she imposed on herself), Simone Weil refused to eat and died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis and malnutrition, heiress to the "holy anor¬ exics" diagnosed by Rudolph Bell and accused of intentionally starving herself to death.21 The strangeness and excesses of Simone Weil's story are analogous to those of the women mystics with whom she shares several "symp¬ toms of sainthood," but her reflections are those of a thinker well im¬ mersed in the twentieth century. Elizabeth Hardwick has written of Weil that "the language of the ascetics and of the saints appears to fit her radical worry about the Europe of her own time" but that "she, for all her intense religious feeling, nevertheless was a mind that con¬ nected with the radical, alienated, secular intellectuals of the time."22 Weil herself writes, "Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent."23 Despite her call for saintliness, Weil was suspicious of the extraor¬ dinary graces associated with sainthood. This suspicion again associ¬ ates her with her mystical predecessors: "Although closely bound up with religious fervor, [the visions of the saints] are related to human weakness. A saint's life is marvellous; it would be still more marvel¬ lous if it had been what it was without visions or voices. But human weakness—even in the case of the saints—is never or hardly ever capable of this" (Notebooks 1:272). Her suspicion, so far from the psy¬ chological naivete the post-Freudian reader is tempted to read into the 20. Angela of Foligno, as I have noted, bypassed the authority of the priest and per¬ formed her own transubstantiation after swallowing the scab of a leper's skin. 21. The coroner's report said "the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed." Quoted in J. P. Little, Simone Weil: Waiting on Truth (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 45. But as Little observes, "It is likely that she was physi¬ cally unable to nourish herself by that time." Furthermore, "convinced as she was that her vocation was to share the sufferings of her fellow-countrymen, it would have been impossible for her to eat any more by that time, since depriving herself was the only means she had of expressing solidarity" (46). 22. Elizabeth Hardwick, "Reflections on Simone Weil," Signs 1.1 (1975): 87, 91. Tho¬ mas Merton claims that Weil's writings "speak directly to the anguish and perplexity of modern man," even as they provide "the core of a metaphysic, not to say a theology, of non-violence." Merton, "Pacifism and Resistance in Simone Weil," in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 78. 23. Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: McKay, 1977), ii4-

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mystic's account, surprisingly leads Weil to wonder about the "analogy between mysticism and mental pathology. This analogy needs to be understood. There is a right way of approaching the study of mental pathology, which has no doubt not yet been thought out. (Ought it to be regarded exclusively as a study of the imagination?)" (Notebooks 1:311). Yet Weil objects to the positivism of scientists such as Charcot and Lombroso, most explicitly in her "Lettre a un religieux" ("Letter to a Priest")—addressed ten months before her death to the Dominican Pere Marie-Alain Couturier. Weil asserts from the very first paragraph that she identifies with and believes in the religion of the mystics, for it is the mystics, so similar to one another despite their differing faiths, who constitute the "truth" of every religion (92, 112). Weil's discussion of miracles in this letter destabilizes the positivists' superficially selfassured answers to questions such as those raised by the phenomenon of stigmata. Writing about the relationship between science and reli¬ gion, Weil declares: "Facts termed miraculous are compatible with the scientific conception of the world if one admits as a postulate that a sufficiently advanced form of science would be able to account for them" (115). In this passage, Weil seems to agree with the chaicoterie of the Salpetriere: apparent miracles can in fact be explained, "ac¬ counted for" by the scientific laws of nature. She also admits that mir¬ acles, being natural phenomena, can be brought about not only by sainthood but also by hysteria (Notebooks i:244).24 But Weil continues. "This postulate does not do away with the link between such acts and the supernatural" ("Letter," 115). Our understanding of nature, that is, does not exclude the effectiveness of supemature. When a saint's tears are caused by charity, Weil contends, they are just as supernatural as alsmgiving or walking on water, the only difference being that walking on water is less common (116).25 Sainthood for Weil pervades the world, in symptoms, in miracles, and in the quotidian experiences of human beings, even (or especially?) when such experiences are steeped in the abject. In a sense, Weil seems to anticipate Kristeva's discussion of abjec24. For Weil there is no difference between the doctors' and the Catholics' interpreta¬ tion of the miracles taking place at Lourdes. Be it "suggestion" or "faith," "where is the difference? Solely in the value accorded to the state of soul itself" (Weil, Notebooks 1: 315). If apparent miracles (she mentions stigmata) lead some to believe, she also says, then it is the will of God that they should take place (Notebooks 2:360-61). 25. So also in Gravity and Grace we read: "Christ healing the sick, raising the dead, etc., that is the humble, human, almost low part of his mission. The supernatural part is the sweat of blood, the unsatisfied longing for human consolation, the supplication that he might be spared, the sense of being abandoned by God" (139).

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Saint Hysteria

tion. When she cannot understand why God took possession of her, she muses, "Perhaps God likes to use castaway objects, waste, rejects. After all, should the bread of the host be moldy, it would become the Body of Christ just the same after the priest had consecrated it" (Reader, 18). Human nothingness coincides with divine predilection in spite of or perhaps because of its abject nature. As Wanda Tommasi puts it, for Simone Weil "the culmination of abjection coincides with the greatest authority of the word."26 Psychoanalytically, abjection leads the subject to the dissolution of the self. This is for Weil the only means of access to God (decreation, abdication of power as imitatio Christi and even as imitatio Dei): "Disgust, under all its forms, is one of the most precious natural evils that are given to Man as a ladder by which to rise. (My personal share in this particular favour is a very large one)" (Notebooks 1:301). But for Simone Weil what seems to most of us a distasteful appre¬ ciation for pain (she polemically claims: "Every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ I commit the sin of envy" [Reader, 26]) cannot be separated from her double commitment to empathize with those who suffer and to fight against the injustice that condemns certain human beings to pain and affliction, affliction being defined as the participa¬ tion in the cross of Christ through redemptive suffering, physical as well as spiritual. The afflicted are on the side of abjection, or as Maurice Blanchot puts it in his discussion of Simone Weil (echoing, again avant la lettre, Julia Kristeva), the afflicted "are ridiculous, inspiring distaste and scorn. They are for others the horror they are for themselves. Af¬ fliction is anonymous, impersonal, indifferent. It is life become alien and death become inaccessible. It is the horror of being where being is without end."27 In her writings, Weil uses the figure of Christ's cruci¬ fixion as the emblem of affliction and injustice. This is a silent figure because pain is for Weil that which cannot be spoken, both because it is unspeakable (as Elaine Scarry has argued at length in The Body in Pain) and because those who suffer the most are usually those who are uneducated in "the art of speech" (Reader, 316). The association between pain and speechlessness stands at an op¬ posite yet mirrorlike end of the spectrum from the association between jouissance and ineffability. Earlier women mystics are steeped in a cul¬ ture and a religiosity that often makes their enterprise difficult for us

26. Wanda Tommasi, "L'immagine prigioniera: Immaginazione e bellezza in Simone Weil,” in Longobardi et al., 35. 27. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 120.

Conclusion

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209

to understand fully. Weil, by contrast, though she undertakes a project strikingly similar to, for example, Angela of Foligno's, expresses it in a language that the twentieth-century reader may find, if not sympa¬ thetic, at least comprehensible. At a most superficial level, the medi¬ eval mystics' mysterious and often paralyzing ailments, seen as a gift from God, are reflected in Weil's all-too understandable chronic mi¬ graine headaches, which she locates at "the meeting place of soul and body" (Reader, 90) and which have been rightly interpreted as "the direct message of an incurable conflict" (something quite different from a hysterical symptom).28 So also Angela of Foligno's experience in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, which made her shriek and cry with love to the embarrassment of Brother Amaldo, is replicated in Simone Weil's 1937 conversion experience in Assisi, where for the first time she fell on her knees in prayer. But Weil's writings are especially helpful in unraveling the more complex issue of mystical self-mortification, perceived by so many in¬ terpreters since Krafft-Ebing as thinly veiled masochism.29 As Laurie Finke writes persuasively about medieval holy women, "The mystic's pain—her inflicting of wounds upon herself—allows her to poach upon the authority of both Church and state, enabling her to speak and be heard, to have followers, to act as spiritual adviser, to heal the sick, and to found convents and hospitals. Fier body bears the marks, the 'signs,' of her own spiritual power."30 This feminist interpretation of the medieval mystic's experience, reading empowerment where others have insistently presumed powerlessness, is analogous to Simone Weil's injunction to "empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time. To nothing. To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world" (Gravity and Grace, 57). It is in self-emptying that the fullness of knowledge is gained (Blanchot is moved to remark, explicitly and per28. Melchiori and Scattigno, Simone Weil, 22. 29. Weil responds quite directly to this accusation: "It is wrong to desire affliction; it is against nature, and it is a perversion; and moreover it is the essence of affliction that it is suffered unwillingly. So long as we are not submerged in affliction all we can do is to desire that, it if should come, it may be a participation in the Cross of Christ (Gateway to God, 77-78). Lucy Bregman questions the very validity of the category "masochism": "Is masochism itself a false transposition of mystical self-annihilation, a religious goal reduced erroneously to a disease?" (Bregman, "The Barren Fig Tree: Simone Weil and the Problem of Feminine Identity," in Mysticism, Nihilism, Feminism: New Critical Essays on the Theology of Simone Weil, ed. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Josephine Zadovsky Knopp [Johnson City, Tenn.: Institute of Social Sciences and Arts, 1984], 101). 30. Finke, Feminist Theory, 95.

2io

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Saint Hysteria

haps rightly, "We cannot but sense that there is in this humbling a great spiritual pride").31 Through the mystical paradox (a literal application of Christ's dic¬ tum, as quoted by Weil, "Whosoever humbleth himself shall be exalted" [Notebooks 1:217)), powerlessness is empowerment. This statement is now often read into (but never openly admitted by) the medieval mystic,- yet it is explicitly acknowledged by Weil herself, who, one could argue, thus disputes the thesis of her former classmate Simone de Beauvoir concerning the paralyzing nature of the mystical enterprise. Weil is even bolder when she claims that it is by renouncing being that we become like God, since God, in creating the world, re¬ nounced being everything and thus performed an act of self-denial and abdication of power. It is in the act of creation, as well as in Christ's Passion, that God experienced "decreation" (Reader, 350-351).32 Of this immolation of the self, Gemma Galgani—orphaned, home¬ less, penniless—had written a few decades earlier: "Oh my God. . . Look at me from head to toe: I have nothing, I am all ruined, I really have nothing to give you. Enlighten me, if you want me to give. Ah, now I know. This life which you have given me and preserved for me with such strength of love, this life is what I sacrifice to you. Well, oh Lord, I have nothing else to give you" (Gesu solo, 263). Gemma's characteristically naive style diverges from that of Simone Weil, the educated intellectual; yet their basic definition of self-giving as empow¬ erment (above all, empowerment to imitate Christ) is comparable. Weil echoes Gemma Galgani when she writes: "We possess nothing in this world—for chance may deprive us of everything—except the power to say T.' It is that which has to be offered up to God, that is to say, destroyed. The destruction of the T is the one and only free act that lies open to us" (Notebooks 2:337). Choosing self-immolation is the sine qua non of spiritual and physical freedom. It seems fitting to conclude with Simone Weil's exploration of alter¬ natives to the traditionally binary relationship between the spirit and the flesh, the word and the body, an exploration that takes place in spite of the dualistic Platonic language on which Weil so often relies. These very oppositions lie at the foundation of the discourses on and of hysteria and mysticism,- they are based on a dualism that the sup¬ posed antagonism between the two discourses attempts to replicate. In this exploration Weil draws from her own multifarious experience as 31. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 116. 32. On Weil's notion of decreation, see Miklos Veto, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, trans. Joan Dargan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994)/ chap. 1.

Conclusion

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211

farm laborer and religious philosopher, an experience that in itself de¬ constructs the notion of mysticism as a private and ineffable experience as well as the consequent and arbitrary separation between spirituality and the pursuit of justice. The deconstruction of these alleged dual¬ ism—between flesh and word, between spirit and politics—is obvious when Simone Weil writes: "If I grow thin from labour in the fields, my flesh really becomes wheat. If that wheat is used for the host it becomes Christ's flesh. Anyone who labours with this intention should become a saint" (Reader, 435). Certainly unorthodox, perhaps even heretical, this definition of transubstantiation and of the mystical body of Christ and church is emblematic of Simone Weil's story and its essentially ecumenical attempt to bridge the gap between desks and fields, the contemplative mind and the laboring body, the flesh of Christ and the flesh of human beings—and ultimately, between the Word and our hu¬ man expedients, words. Transubstantiation becomes a figure for the redemption of the flesh (whatever gender we may assign to it) and for its fundamental role in the transformation of culture. Transubstantia¬ tion becomes the challenge to the binary opposition between self and other, culture and nature, mind and body, the word and the flesh. The deconstruction of these traditional dualisms is reiterated when Simone Weil writes: "The Word is the silence of God," but we are nevertheless invited "to hear all noises through the screen of silence" [Notebooks 1:266, 2:549). The divine conflation of the silent Word with a speaking flesh reflects the human transition from the silent flesh to words, that passage from body to language over which both mystics and hysterics agonized so spectacularly. "Every being cries out silently to be read differently" [Gravity and Grace, 188). Once the dualism is overcome, words may be silent and the body may speak; yet human affliction remains incompatible with attention and therefore with language. Simone Weil's seeming pursuit of pain becomes the most effective means to reach such unspeakability and speechlessness, an instrument used to turn private suffering into the pursuit of a "differ¬ ent" dialogue with the other and, ultimately, a tool to be used in the pursuit of universal justice. Simone Weil's methods are clearly not suit¬ able or even desirable for most of us. Yet the pain of the hysteric, the jouissance of the mystic, and more generally the afflicted, those beings who cry out silently to be read differently, remain inarticulate until we lend them an attentive ear. It is only by listening to affliction, however abject, that one can hear its silent cry, read it differently, and finally endow it with the power to speak itself.

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Index

abjection, 15, 84, 158, 186; and affliction, 207-8, 211; and mysticism, 86-89, 15 3— 54, 170, 183-84, 189-90, 195-96; and possession, m-13, n6; and the sacred, 69-70, 73/ 85-89, 134 Adonis, 138-39 Aesculapius, 8 Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie, 50, 169 anatomy, 91, 170-71, 173, 175-76. See also stigmata Andre, Serge, 7on, 168 androgyny, 134-37, i44 Angela of Foligno, 50, 53, 164-65, 177-90, 192, 2o6n, 209; and abjection, 87, 89, 15 3-5 5/ 183-84; and Brother Arnaldo, 164, 178-79, 184; and jouissance, 16061, 181, 184, 186-89 Anna O., 44, 165, 168, 19m Anthony of Padua, 28, 41 Antonelli, Doctor, 164 Antonopoulos, Anna, i92n Aphrodite, i38n apocrypha, 125, 127, 129-30, 134 Apter, Emily, 67n Amaldo, Brother, 164, 178-79, 184, 209 Backman, E. Louis, I43n, i45n Baldi, Agnello, i03n Baldini, Massimo, 165

Barthes, Roland, 55, 83, 170, 179, i8on, 186, 188 Barzman, Karen-edis, 38n Bataille, Georges, 160 Beard, George Miller, 94n Beardsley, Aubrey, 133 Beatrice of Nazareth, 27 Beauvoir, Simone de, 49-53, 86, 150; and mysticism, 15, 47n, 50-53, 87, 89, 13839n, 150-51, 156-58, 189, 210 Beckwith, Sarah, i53n, 180 Beizer, Janet, 3, 5, 47n, 48, 49n, 83n, i36n Bell, Rudolph M., 19m, 206 Bernard of Clairvaux, 85n Bernheim, Hippolyte, 19, 29n, 94, 109, 164 Bernheimer, Charles, i2on Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 38, 40, 46, 47n, 88, 176, 189, 191, 201 Bertani, Odoardo, i22n Biasin, Gian Paolo, 64 Blanchot, Maurice, 205n, 208-9, 2ion Bloch, Ernst, 119 Bloy, Leon, 203 Boito, Arrigo, 170-71 Borgna, Eugenio, i48n, 194 Bourbon Conde, Louise-Adelaide de, 59 Bourgaux, Jacques, 9n

228

0

Index

Boumeville, Desire-Magloire, 17, 23, 25, 2611, 27, 2911, 32, 135 Bowman, Frank Paul, 1690, 170 Bregman, Lucy, 209n Breuer, Josef, 18; and hysteria, 2in, 24-26, 42-44, 113, 115, 192; and mysticism, 42-44, 200. See also Freud, Sigmund: Studies on Hysteria Briquet, Paul, 32n Bronfen, Elisabeth, 64 Brooks, Peter, 57n, 76n, 83n, 169 Busst, A. J. L., i34n Bynum, Caroline Walker, 82, 88, i39n, 152-54, i57n, 181 Cabanes, Jean-Louis, 55, 58, 62, 63n Cacilie M., Frau, 44 Caillois, Roger, 73n Camporesi, Piero, i75n Cannata, Pietro, i35n Carroy-Thirard, Jacqueline, 14, 19, 33n Catherine of Genoa, 41, i92n, 202-30 Catherine of Siena, 52-53, 82n, 161, 16465; and abjection, 87, 153; and hysteria, 3-4, 27, 19m Cavani, Liliana, 2050 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 17-30, 91, .94, 112, i52n, 194; and definition of hysteria, 2, 13, no, 144-45; and ecstasy, 12, 74, 164; and faith healing, 18, 20-21, 42; and hypnosis, 20, 34, 109; and mysticism, 17, 24, 32-33, 37, 39, 43~44, 46-47, 49, 61-62, 90, 115, 159, 163, 185, 195, 19 9; and witchcraft, 9, 125. See also hysteria; Salpetriere Hospital Chertok, Leon, 19 Chiara of Montefalco, 175 Christ, 47n, 123, 128, 140, 147, 211; and pain, 102, 127, 129, 131, 137, 153-54, 204, 207n, 208; and psychopathology, 10, 67, 69; and sensuality, 6, 68-69, 7981, 130, 166, 173, 180-81; and stigmata, 25, 139, 170. See also crucifixion; imitatio Christi-, Sacred Heart Cixous, Helene, 2, 9n, i45n Claudel, Paul, 135, i36n Clement, Catherine, 2, 9n, 46n, i45n Colombo, Giorgio, 3m Columni Camerino, Marinella, ii7n conversion, hysterical, 69, 134, 168, 195; and eroticism, 97, 174-77; and mysticism, 76-77, 118, 148-49, 158, 170, 174-77, 190, 192; and stigmata, 83

convulsionaries of Saint-Medard, 12-13, 23, 36, 66 Coppini, Beatrice, i78n Coulont-Henderson, Frangoise, 56, 69n Courmont, Nephtalie de, 60 Courtivron, Isabelle de, 5 on Couturier, Marie-Alain, 207 Craveri, Marcello, i2n crucifixion, 170, 175, 208; and hysteria, 13, 23, 27, 139, 199; and stigmata, 24, 32, 201 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 15, 71-74, 82n, 9192, 95, 121-50 works of: La figlia di Iorio, 15, 73, 78, 121-31, 141, 148-5 O; Le martyre de Saint Sebastien, 15, 79, 120-22, 131-50, 153, 204; he novelle della Pescara, 7274, 122; La Pisanelle, 15, 127, 131-32, 141-5O; "La vergine Anna," 74-76; "La vergine Orsola," 15, 54~5 5/ 71-83/ m, 123, 127, 130, 148-50, 203 Daudet, Alphonse, 29n David-Menard, Monique, in, 47n, 76n, 77n, 83, ioon, 168, 176, 193 Davies, J. G., i43n Debussy, Claude, i33n decadence, 92, 131-33, 138; and femininity, 141-42, 148-49; and naturalism, 15, 57, 71, 76; and psychopathology, 5, 18, 54-5 5/ 7^, 91, 115, 119; and religion, 6, 121-22, 125, 129. See also D'Annunzio, Gabriele,flower symbolism; Fogazzaro, Antonio; Huysmans, Joris-Karl De Certeau, Michel, 12, 14, 27; and mysticism, 82, 152, i57n, 173-74, i87/ 189, 191, 195, i96n, 198 Didi-Huberman, Georges, I7n, 21, 23n, 25n, 27, no Dijkstra, Bram, 63n, i45n Dora, 48, 68, 168, 193 Drinka, George Frederick, 4on, 94n, 199 Eckhart, Meister, 6, 151-53 ecstasy, 23, 32; and hysteria, 27-28, 3234, 36, 61, 75, 148, 159/ 199; and madness, 10-n, 74, 118, 140; and possession, 22, 138, 140, 153, 162; and sexuality, 41-42, 64, 76, 90, 149, 160, 165, 192, 194. See also mysticism Elisabeth von R., 44, 160, 168, 191, 19395

Index Elizabeth of Genton, 41 Elizabeth of Hungary, 86 Ellenberger, Henri F., 4on, 19cm, 20on Ellmann, Richard, i33n Emmy von N., Frau, 43-44 epilepsy, 74, 90 Esquirol, J.-E.-D., 68n Evans, Martha Noel, 2, 23n, 390 Eve of Saint John, 126 Falret, J.-P., 43 Fanning, Ursula, i72n fantastic genre, 103-5, 108-10, 115, 117 Fattorini, Emma, 21 feminism, 50-53, 150-59, 157 feminization, 122, 133-37, 144; and hysteria, 94, 100, 114, 117, 132, 134-37; in masochism, 40, 42,- in the mystical experience, 6, 94, 100, 140, 147, 152, 154, 166. See also androgyny Ferrero, Guglielmo, 31 Finke, Laurie, 153, i57n, 178, 209 Flaubert, Gustave, 39, i2on, 126 Fliess, Wilhelm, 113 flower symbolism, 138, 141-44, 146-48 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 15, 91-101, 203 works of; Leila, 92, 95-96, io8n; Malombra, 15, 93, 95-97, 102-18; "Per una nuova scienza," 94, m-12, 119,Piccolo mondo moderno, 94-100, 102-3, 105; II santo, 15, 92-102, 104, 106, 11820, 202, 204 Foucault, Michel, 10, nn, 17, 22, 24, 49, 58, n8n France, Anatole, 92 Francis of Assisi, 82n, 128, 135, 161, 209; and abjection, 87, 89, 183; and hysteria, 20, 2728; and stigmata, 24, 25n, 35-36, 138 Francis of Sales, 86 Francisi, 165 Frazer, James George, i38n Freud, Sigmund, 16, 18-21, 30, 47, 57, 6768, 78, 83, 93-94, 97, 108-9, 112, 134, 146, 182; Studies on Hysteria, 24, 26n, 42-44, 49, 112-13, 115, 160, 168, 19195, 200. See also conversion, hysterical; psychoanalysis; repression,- sublimation; unconscious Fumaroli, Marc, 6on, 7m Galen of Pergamon, 8 Galgani, Gemma, 16, 61, 129-30, 159-77, 189-91, 201, 210

0

229

Gargiulo, Alfredo, i25n gaze, clinical, 24, 38, 163; and Charcot, 19, 22, 26, 28, i52n, 191, 194; and Lacan, 46-47, i52n; in literary texts, 98, 100, 120-21, 148 Giacanelli, Ferruccio, 3 m, 35n, 36n Giannini family, 161, 164-65 Gilman, Sander, 2, 22-23, 39, non, 17m Gioanola, Elio, ii5n Girard, Rene, 122-23, i24n Giuliani, Veronica, 41, 182, 184 globus hystericus, 8, 42, 192 Goldstein, Jan, 2, 26, 6in, 68n, 94n Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 54-71, 75 works of; Journal, 59n, 63, 65n, 66n, 67; Madame Gervaisais, 15, 54-71, 78, 202, 204; Renee Mauperin, 56, 64, 70 Gospel of Mark, 10 Gourmont, Remy de, i44n Gramsci, Antonio, 35 Greene, Graham, 198, 201-4 Grosz, Elisabeth, i58n, 177, 189 Guamieri, Romana, i79n Guy on, Jeanne, 50, 52, 85n Hadewijch of Antwerp, 46 hagiography, 73, 91-93, 119-21, 132, 138, 144, 175, 202. See also D'Annunzio, Gabriele; Fogazzaro, Antonio; Greene, Graham,- Huysmans, Joris-Karl Hahn, Father, 37 Hansen Ron, 201 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 206 Harris, Ruth, 2, 26, 28, 29n Harrowitz, Nancy, 24n, 3m, 167, i72n, I74n Hartmann, Eduard von, 10in heart, image of, 56, 168-73, 175-77 Heath, Stephen, 44, i73n, i94n Heine, Heinrich, 126 Heilman, John, 205n Hello, Ernest, 38, i2on Higgins, Lynn A., 79n Hippocratic corpus, 7-8, 22, 74 Hollywood, Amy, 47n, 150, 152, i57n, i78n Hoyles, John, 118-19, 198 Huchard, Dr., 5 Hiigel, Friedrich von, 202n Humphries, Jefferson, 55n Hunter, Dianne, 44, 195 Huot, Herve, 194

230

0

Index

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 21, 91, 93, 119-20 works of: A reborns, 71, 126, 145 ■, En route, 6n, 37-38, 119, 12011, 134, 135n; La-bas, 1, 3, 12, 27, 119; Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, 92, 119-21 hypnosis, 18-20, 33-34, 42, 94, 109 hysteria, 2, 5, 43; and dancing, 13, 143-46; and demoniac possession, 1, n-13, x7, 32, 108, 113; etymology of, 7-8, 21, 113-14; in men, 5, 134; and mysticism, 4-5, 28, 34-35, 37, 42, 72, 98, 120, 14546, 157-58, 160-61, 169, 176, 190, 198, 200-201, 203, 207, 210; and sexuality, 38-41, 100, 141, 194; symptoms of, 22, 25-27, 191; and theatricality, 28-29, 43, 65, 139, 165, 194; and witchcraft, 8-9, 31-32, 128-29. See also Anna O.; Beauvoir, Simone de,- Boumeville, Desire-Magloire; Breuer, Josef; Charcot, Jean-Martin; conversion, hysterical; Dora; ecstasy,- Elisabeth von R.; Freud, Sigmund; globus hystericus-, hypnosis; Irigaray, Luce; Krafft-Ebing, Richard von; Legrand du Saulle, Henri; Lombroso, Cesare; photographs; Salpetriere Hospital

jouissance, 4, 82, 145, 154, 176, 195; and abjection, 86-87, 89; and ineffability, 44-49, 150, 152, 181, 184, 186-89, 192, 208, 211 Jullian, Philippe, i33n Kempe, Margery, 178, 180, 192-93 King, Helen, 2, 7, 22 Knight, Philip, I42n Knowles, David, i4n Kofman, Sarah, i93n Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 18, 38-42, 49, 67, 68n, 174, 209 Kristeva, Julia, 70, 84-89, 150, 189, 207-8; and mysticism, 15, 84, 86-89, 153, 15658 Kroha, Lucienne, i72n Kurella, Hans, 3 on, 34 Kuryluk, Ewa, i26n

Ignatius of Loyola, 90 Imbert-Gourbeyre, Antoine, 4n, 25-27, 37,

Lacan, Jacques, 18-19, 70, 87, 113, 177; and mysticism, 44-50, 150-52, 15 711, 160, 180-81, 184-87, 189 LaCapra, Dominick, ii3n, 18in Lachance, Paul, I78n, 179 Laforgue, Jules, 126 Lasegue, Charles, 2, 6 Lasowski, Patrick Wald, 66n, 67 Lateau, Louise, 18, 24, 27, 32-33, 135,

43-44, 158-59, i69n, I75n, i76n imitatio Christi, 33, 170, 175, 178, 18990, 208, 210; in literary texts, 125-26, 137, 139, 149-50. See also Christ;

160-62 Lavalva, Rosamaria, i6on Lee, Jonathan Scott, 48 Legrand du Saulle, Henri, 3-4, 11, 13-14/

crucifixion,- stigmata ineffability, 145-46, 191, *94-95/ 208; and jouissance, 48-49, 152, 180-84, 211; and mystical experience, 89, 180-84, 18689, 211. See also speechlessness Irigaray, Luce, 2, 15, 150-58, 184-85; and mysticism, 47n, 50, 150-58, 177, 185 James, William, 19, 158-59, 163-64 Janet, Pierre, 6n, 19, 39n, 94, 169, 198201 Jantzen, Grace, 48, 184 Jardine, Alice A., 45n Jarman, Laura Martin, 57n Jesus-Marie, Father Bruno de, 200 Joan of Arc, 3-4, 52-53, 128, 135-37, 204 John the Baptist, 126-27, 147 John of the Cross, 52 Jonte-Pace, Diane, 84n, 85 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 17m

34/ 172 Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugenie, 187 Lenardon, Robert J., i38n Leonardi, Claudio, 1571I/ i6on, 166, 17911, i82n, i83n, i84n Liebeault, Ambroise-Auguste, 94 Lionello, Letizia, 194 Little, J. P., 2o6n Lochrie, Karma, 190 Lombroso, Cesare, 18-20, 24, 30-36, 49j 74/ 91/ 93/ 159 works of: La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale, 31-33/ 43/ 65, 95, 108, iii; Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici, 33-36; L’uomo di genio (Genio e follia), 33-34 Longobardi, Giannina, 205 n

Lorrain, Jean, 143 Loudun, convent of, n-i3/ 23, 32 Lourdes, 207

Index Lubke, Wilhelm, 40 Lukacher, Ned, 70, i68n Macey, David, 48 madness, 106-7, 109-11, 114, 116-18; and Christianity, 9-11, 102-3, 124, 130, 137, 140; of the cross [folie de la croix), 10, 55, 61, 129, 139-40, 150. See also ecstasy,- possession, demoniac Maeterlinck, Maurice, 92, 143-44 Maire, Catherine Laurence, i2n Mallarme, Stephane, 126, i48n Malleus Maleficarum, 9 Mannoni, Octave, 20 Mantegazza, Paolo, 17m, 173 Margaret of Citta di Castello, 175 Margnelli, Marco, 163n, i75n Marks, Elaine, son Marxism, 119 Mary Magdalene, 78, 127-28, 130, 140-41 masochism, 40, 49, 67; and religiosity, 4142, 49, 56, 67, 81, 89, 137, 153-54/ 15758, 174, 189, 209 Matlock, fann, 2on, 2in, s6n Matter, E. Ann, 6n Maupassant, Guy de, 29n, 93, 103, 109, hi, 114-15 Mazzoni, Cristina, I59n, i6on, 17m Melchiori, Paola, 205, 209n Melman, Charles, 7n menopause, 56, 58, 61-62, 64, 67 menstruation, 135-36, i38-39n Merton, Thomas, 2o6n Mesmer, Franz Anton, 20 Micale, M. S., 26n Michaux, Didier, 20 Michelet, Jules, son, 54, 135-36 Miller, R. H., 203n Mills, Leonard, i33n miracles, 13, 18-20, 23, 137, 143, 191, 202, 204, 207 modernism, Catholic, 93, 100-1 Moebius, Paul, 169 Moerl, Maria de, 32-33, 160-62 Moi, Toril, son, 84n monomania, 68, 70, 93, 95, 102, 107, 10910, 114 Moreau, Gustave, 126 Moreau de Tours, Jacques-Joseph, 59 Morford, Mark O., i38n Morzine, possession of, 13-14 Moscati, Italo, 205n Munthe, Axel, 29n

0

231

mysticism, 6, 86-90, 101, 187; and demoniac possession, 12, 178; and eroticism, 38-41, 46-49, 67, 69, 77, Si82, 98, 146, 154, 157, 160-61, 166, 17374, 180, 185, 198, 202-3; and hysteria, 4-5, 28, 34-35, 37, 42, 71, 98, 120, 14546, 157-58, 160-61, 169, 176, 190, 198, 200-201, 203, 207, 210; and patriarchy, 50-53, 86-87, 150-57; and women, 5053, 150-55, 185. See also abjection; Beauvoir, Simone de; Bynum, Caroline Walker,- ecstasy,- hagiography; ImbertGourbeyre, Antoine; imitatio Christi; ineffability; Irigaray, Luce,- jouissance; Kristeva, Julia,- Lacan, Jacques,- stigmata; transubstantiation; individual mystics names, 105-8, 111, 116-17 Narcissus, 147-48 naturalism, 15, 54, 57, 71-72, 76, 91; and femininity, 71-72, 77-78; and pathology, 60, 64, 67, 72, 77-78, 81, 100, 102, 121; and religion, 62, 66-67, 74-77, 81, 102, 119, 148-5 O; and science, 54-58, 70-76, no, 114-15, 148-50,• and verismo, 7273, 148. See also D'Annunzio, Gabriele; Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de; Verga, Giovanni,- Zola, Emile, necrophilia, 63-64 neurasthenia, 94, 97 neurosis. See Freud, Sigmund; hysteria; masochism; monomania; nymphomania; psychoanalysis; sadism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58, 71, 74, 76, 78 Noferi, Adelia, 188 Nordau, Max, 90, 146 nymphomania, 15, 36, 38-39, 40, 50, 77 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 144 Papin sisters, 46 Passionist order, 161, 164, 169-70 Paul, Saint, 183 Pazzi, Maria Maddalena de', 41, 164 Peladan, "Sar" Josephin, 135 Pelicier, Yves, 11 Pfanner, Pietro, 162-63 photographs, 23-24, 39, 47, 159, 165 physiognomy, 30 Pierrot, Jean, 6, 90 Piromalli, Antonio, io3n Pius X, 101 Pius XI, 162

232

0

Index

Pius XII, 162 Plato, 7 Poe, Edgar Allan, 103, 175 Porter, Roy, 2, 10-n, 192, i93n/ 197n possession, demoniac, 1, 35, 138; and hysteria, 22, 80, 112-13; and madness, 10, 14, 107, 124, 130, 140; and women, 8, 74, 83, 153, 162-63 Pozzi, Giovanni, i57n, i6on, 166, i79n, i82n, i83n, i84n, 188, i89n, 195 Pressly, Nancy, i32n Prosperi, Adriano, i2n, 38, i79n prostitution, 56, i36n, 203; in D'Annunzio, 78, 122-23, 127-28, 132, 140-41, 147, 149; in Fogazzaro, 105; in Lombroso, 31-32, 36, 65-66 psychiatry, 5-6, 15, 18, 6on, 93-94, I03n, 109-10, 115, 118, 190 psychoanalysis, 16, 19-20, 112-13, l68, 185-86. See also conversion, hysterical; Freud, Sigmund; hysteria; Irigaray, Luce; Kristeva, Julia; Lacan, Jacques; repression; sublimation; unconscious Pollaiuolo, Antonio del, 133 Puysegur, Marquis of, 20 Pym, Anthony, i32n Regnard, Paul, 23 Regnier-Bohler, Danielle, 19m Reich, Wilhelm, 40, 41, 119, 201 reincarnation, 104-5, 107-10, 114, 116-17, 118 Reineke, Martha J., 88n repression, 57-58, 78, 80, 84-85; and hysteria, 68-71, 113, 151, 191; and mysticism, 101, 149, 158, 180-81, 192; and sexuality, 64, 97, 172; return of the repressed, 19, 21, 28-30, 55, 59-60, 71, 108 Ricatte, Robert, 59n, 6on, 65n Richer, Paul, 21, i45n Ripa, Yannick, 21, 39 Robinson, James, i27n, i3on, i34n Roman de la Rose, 147 Rose, Jacqueline, 45 Rosolato, Guy, 158 Rossi, Paolo, 92 Roure, Lucien, 163 Rousseau, G. S., 2, 9n Rubinstein, Ida, 131-33, 142 Ruoppolo, Father Germano, 164-66, 169 Ruysbroek, Jan, 6, 151, 186

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 40 sacred, the, 73~75, 77, 79-8o, 121-25, 127, 140, 146-47 Sacred Heart, 169-71 sadism, 81, 154, 158 Safouan, Moustapha, 194 Salome, 126-27, 132-33, i37, 140, 142, 145-46, i48n Salpetriere Hospital, 14, 17-23, 26n, 37, 43, 46-47, 121, 161, 207; and literature, 56, 74, 109, 139. See also Boumeville, Desire-Magloire; Charcot, Jean-Martin; hysteria; Janet, Pierre,- Legrand du Saulle, Henri Sanguineti, Edoardo, 108 scapigliatura, 103, 115. See also fantastic genre; Tarchetti, Igino Ugo Scarry, Elaine, 188, 208 Scattigno, Anna, 205, 209n Schor, Naomi, 55, 71 Screech, M. A., 10 Sebastian, Saint, 6, 91, 135 semiotic, 84-87 Serao, Matilde, 24n, 167, 171-75 works of: Cuore infermo, 171-75, 177, 203; Fantasia, 171-72, 174 Serbo, Ubaldo, io6n sexuality, female, 5, 8, 21-23, 30-31, 35, 44-50, 56, 62, 76, 79, 123. See also ecstasy; hysteria,- jouissance-, menopause; menstruation; mysticism; nymphomania; prostitution,- syphilis,uterus Shaw, George Bernard, 135-36 Shemek, Deanna, i72n, 173 Showalter, Elaine, 2, 7, 2 3n Silver, Brenda R., 79n Slade, Carole, i5on, 177, *78n Solano, Jesus, i66n Song of Songs, 6, 81, 85n, 147 Sontag, Susan, 6on, 68n, 205 Soubirous, Bernadette, 21 Spackman, Barbara, 3, 75-76, i37n speechlessness, 75, 208, 211 spiritualism, 34-36, 93, 95, 97, I02, 115, 117-18. See also possession, demoniac; reincarnation stigmata, 23-25; as hysterical symptom, 25-27, 32-33, 35-36, 91, 135-36, 138, 191, 193, 199-200; in literary texts, 83, hi, 120, i74n, 201; in mystics, 138-39/ 134, 161-62, 169-70, 177, 186, 193, 207. See also crucifixion; imitatio Christi

Index stultifera navis, 118 sublimation, 40, 50-52, 86, 97, 181 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 169 Suso, 52 symbolism. See decadence syphilis, 25, 56, 66-67 Szasz, Thomas, 9n Tagliavini, Annamaria, 94n, i07n Tarchetti, Igino Ugo, 2, 93, 103, 111, 11517

#

233

uterus, 74, and etymology of hysteria, 1,5, 7-8, 21, 24, 80, 112, 136, 145, 190; and sexuality, 39, 62, 64, 78, 114, 121, 136 Valesio, Paolo, 71, 12in, i29n, 133, i42n, 182, i83n, 187, 189 Varano, Camilla Battista, 183-84 Vauchez, Andre, 191 Veith, Ilza, 2, 7n, 8-9 Verga, Giovanni, 72-73 Vergote, Antoine, 158, i62n, 191, 194 verismo, 72-74, 79, 103, 148 Veto, Miklos, 2ion Virgin Mary, 21, 58, 78, 84, 125, 130, 142,

Tench, Darby, 167 Teresa of Avila, 16, 19, 35, 77, 98, 135, 199; and eroticism, 40-42, 90, 192-96, 200; and hysteria, 3-4, 20, 23, 37-38, 40-44, 50-53/ 160, 163, 171-72/ 191-96. See also Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Tessari, Roberto, 10in Thaler, Danielle, 57n Therese of Lisieux, 143, 162, 166 Todorov, Tzvetan, 104, 115 Tommasi, Wanda, 205n, 208 Torres, Monica, 134 Tourette, Gilles de la, 37 transubstantiation, 65, 139, 176, 184, 195, 206, 208, 211 Trebiliani, Maria Luisa, 16in, i62n Trelat, Ulysse, 59 tuberculosis, 56, 58, 60-63, 66-67, 69, 162, 206

Wajeman, Gerard, 2, 7, 14, 29, 112, 191 Waksman, Selman, 6on Warner, Marina, 174 Weil, Simone, 16, 197-98, 202, 204-11 Weyer (Wier), Johannes, 9 White, Lancelot, ioin Wilde, Oscar, 126, 132-33, 142, 145-46 Wilson, Ian, i38n, i39n witchcraft, 112, i24n, i36n; and hysteria, 14, 31-32, 80, 106-7, 125; and mysticism, 11-12, 8o; and prostitution, 122, 128-29, 149

unconscious, 1, 86, 185-86; and hysteria, 112-13, 168, 193-94; in literature, 15, 57, 91; and mysticism, 101-2, 105 Underhill, Evelyn, 119 Ussher, Jane, 9, i24n

Zagona, Helen Grace, i26n Zamboni, Chiara, 205n Zarri, Gabriella, 153, 157n, i77n Zoffoli, Enrico, 16in, i62n, 163-65 Zola, Emile, 21, 55-56, 60, 63n, i42n, 146

174/ 199

Volpi, Monsignor Giovanni, 162, 164 Vuarnet, Jean-Noel, 6, 191