Vir Melancholicus/Femina Tristis: : Towards a Poetics of Women’s Loss

VIRMELANCHOLICUS/FEMINA TFJSTIS: T O W A R D S A P O E T I C S O F W O M E N ' S L O S S Julian Olivares University of H o u s t o n The notion of melancolia as a gendered affliction began with Aristotle, who in his Problems (XXX), affirmed that it was a malady that afflicted "all great men."1 Women, being essentially cold and moist, according to the theory of the humors, were unable, like'the warmer and drier men, to become atrabilic; that is, men were able to produce "black bile," the agent of melancholia, whereas women were incapable of producing it. With the cultivation of the classics during the Renaissance, this Aristotelian notion was revived and enhanced by Marsilio Ficino, in his De vita (Book I), who "reconceived [melancholia] as a kind of wisdom," and "who defined the affliction as the privileged subjectivity of the lettered " (Schiesari 131,113). Thus, melancolia came to be conceived as a "blessed gloom"; it became the illness that caused great men—or men became great because of it—to become moral spokesmen for their community , to express loss and truth in terms of transcendent statements, and to "become exemplary of the 'human condition'" (Schiesari 141,265). Centuries later Sigmund Freud affirmed that the melancholic has a heightened sense of morality and "has a keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic ... [and] it may be ... that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we can only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind" (cited in Schiesari 5, 9, emphases mine). Juliana Schiesari, in her book The Gendering ofMelancholia. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, explains that this gendered concept of melancolia was a "cultural myth" that privileged the loss and lack of men over that of women. Simply put, men's loss was-more Significanfthan women's loss, such that said notion of melancolia resulted in a discursive practice that excluded women. In the love lyric, for example, melancolia as a discursive practice allowed men to use women as metaphors for loss, at the same time that it devalued and divested women of their own subjectivities. Women, as biologically and culturally defined, could not be melancholic; they could only be "mournful" and thus they "were reduced to the banality and particularity of their existence" (Schiesari 265). This conception produced, as I term it, a cultural dichotomy: Vir melancholicus/Femina tristis. CALIOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 263-293 264 «5 Julian Olivares With regard to Spanish letters of the Golden Age,2 we can envision Quevedo, for example, as the type of melancholic described by Freud in his famous sonnet "Mire los muros de la patria mia," ruminating his decaying "muros," his crumbling house, his curved staff, and feeble sword, in order to lament the quick passage of time, man's mortal destiny, and, on an allegorical level, to lament the loss of empire. In the courtly and Neoplatonic traditions, loss is symbolized by the woman, either as the lost or unattainable object of desire, desire itself, or as the means to overcome loss through an ascent and union with the sublime idea of beauty. In Garcilaso's courtly Soneto I, woman is a metaphor of the unattainable object: Yo acabare, que me entregue sin arte a quien sabra perderme y acabarme si ella quisiere, y aun sabra querello; que pues mi voluntad puede matarme, la suya, que no es tanto de mi parte, pudiendo, ique hara sino hacello? (35) In the Neoplatonic tradition, woman becomes a metaphor of recovery, as a means for searching and recuperating that something else that lies beyond woman, as exemplified by Herrera in the conclusion to Soneto 38, addressed to his "Serena Luz": "Que yo en essa belleza que contemplo / (aunque' a mi flaca vista ofende i cubre) / la immensa busco, i voi siguiendo el cielo" (125). In the amorous tradition, then, the expression and recuperation of loss is expressed and attained by using women as a means of cultural exchange or currency with...