The Secret Wound: Love/Melancholy and Early Modern Romance (review)

This well-argued book explores the malady of love, that is, the moment when love becomes psychologically unmanageable and turns into delusional disease. As the author shows, lovesickness and love-melancholy have proved strategically important to early modern romances, where typically love finds its fulfillment in longing, the beloved is internalized, and passio reigns. The volume is divided into six chapters: chapter 1 treats love melancholy from the point of view of the medical profession and concentrates on doctors and philosophers, while chapter 2 explains how love melancholy generates the optical infection and the secret wound of the title. Then specific cases come to the forefront: chapter 3 delves into Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, chapter 4 Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, while chapters 5 and 6 examine Spenser’s Fairie Queene.

Marion Wells begins with medical history. Doctors, she argues, understand love melancholy as a degrading as well as a potentially deadly disease that shows itself through an irregular pulse. For Marsilio Ficino love is a form of infection, of spiritual dissipation; for Avicenna love melancholy can be recognized by its obsession. Wells then moves to contemporary psychoanalytical theory where the object of desire has phantasmic qualities; Freud, Kristeva, and Abraham all connect the loss of the object with the original lost object. A particular jewel in this section is the author’s examination of how Lucretius’s idea of love is metamorphosed by Ficino, who recommends a sublimation of phantasmic simulacra in order to keep a Platonizing theory in place.

Chapter 3 concentrates on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, as the amorosa inchiesta of Orlando for Angelica becomes a fixation and love turns into longing and melancholic aspiration. This love emasculates the hero and subjugates him to a love object. Orlando’s dream of Angelica illustrates perfectly how the melancholic understanding of loss engenders a romance narrative. As Angelica turns into the bad mother figure who refuses to satisfy her lover, the hapless hero can do no more than hysterically keep his search going. In the movement from the heroic register to the melancholic, he becomes feminized and infantilized. In Ariosto the dolce errore of Orlando starts as a Petrarchan fixation when the lover creates a mental phantasm of the beloved, but already in Tasso hysteria sets in, and from ennobling the love passion of the hero Tancredi for his elusive woman warrior Clorinda becomes disabling. Love turns into a secret wound. Unable to go through the mourning process, the lover searches for his ideal in the body of the beloved and this engenders the series of errore-errare at the center of all early modern romances.

Chapter 4 shows what it means for a hero never to be released from melancholy. Unlike Orlando in the Furioso, Tancredi fuses with his beloved after her death and is unable to do the work of mourning and separate the woman from the mother in whose body he longs to return. Wells’s argument is particularly fascinating when she deals with Tasso’s final swirl back to romance in the lyric scene of Erminia’s encounter with Tancredi in the woods. In this chapter too she examines the loss of the mother and the turn to melancholia exclusively in terms of its effect on men. But given that Clorinda’s loss of her mother is dealt vividly in the Gerusalemme liberata, as it will be — and quite to the point — in chivalric romances authored by women writers, such as Moderata Fonte’s Floridoro published the same year, I think that a critical move away from a restricted masculine focus would have been richly rewarded.

In chapter 5, Wells chronicles in depth Spenser’s movement from love melancholy to its medieval antecedent, acedia, as famously did Petrarch in his Secretum, by showing in Arthur’s dream of a Faerie Queene how the lost object can be replaced with a substitute sign. Romance thus turns mournful. Wells argues that...