The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

1. Violence, Subjectivity, and Paradoxes of Pleasure

t q chapter one iolence, ubjectivity, and aradoxes of leasure hat a new idea or awareness of the self emerged in the Renaissance has become a simple statement to make but a complex one to qualify. In the past twenty years, new historicist and cultural materialist literary critics have repeatedly asserted that the human subject as known today—variously labeled as “liberal,” “humanist,” or “bourgeois”—began to emerge during the early seventeenth century.1 Although the breadth of these claims has recently been quite appropriately questioned,2 it is indisputable that developments in several areas complicated and extended the ways in which people in early modern Europe thought about their own existence. The advent of the printing press and the growth of literacy made it possible to read and internalize privately the words of other people; the Protestant Reformation emphasized the spiritual life of the individual; the growth of commerce presented a new array of items for personal consumption and display; the spread of the arts brought new images and perspectives on life before the populace. “What is striking is the way in which such a monumental change in self-understanding is fed from a multitude of sources,” Charles Taylor observes in his authoritative historical survey Sources of the Self.3 No one would seriously suggest that human beings underwent some cognitive change around 1600, but available evidence both supports the notion that a new idea of the self came into existence and accounts to some extent for why it did so. A relevant question follows: what sort of self was it? The humanist movement , encouraging a delight in the human being as the glory of creation, and the growth of rationalism, culminating (at least in the standard historical narrative) in the Cartesian cogito, together fostered a sense of the conscious, self-determining individual as the one sure point in the universe. But while such was the emerging ideal, any number of signs indicate an experiential slippage from it. The violence accompanying the establishment of new forms of religious and state authority gives vivid testimony to the uneasiness or even terror with which many people in the early modern era confronted their autonomous existence. A focus on the individual self was morally suspect within a Christian ideology that encouraged selflessness and humility. Moreover, the ideas of personal autonomy and individuality presented ontological difficulties, challenging established patterns of cognition through which people were accustomed to thinking of themselves as unstable in some very fundamental ways. Indeed, various discourses give evidence to a concept of the self in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England as not merely volatile but paradoxically affirmed in its moments of selfcanceling or shattering. The degree to which early modern subjects were conflicted in their emergent selfhood, not just unstable structurally but dynamically and often simultaneously pulled toward opposite extremes of dissolution and coherence, has been downplayed by humanism’s developmental emphasis. In fact, the contradiction between autonomy and instability defined the emerging subject. In the early modern period, dominant psychological and physiological models, derived from Galenic humoralism, fostered a concept of the human person as literally fluid, since the body was understood as porous, volatile, and highly susceptible to outside influences. Gail Kern Paster’s important work on early modern humoralism has suggested the extent to which the drama of the period refers to a leaky body and a tumultuous set of emotions, indicating a popular self-understanding radically at odds with the upstanding subject of moral discourse.4 Humoral theory emphasized the invisible but ineradicable differences within a person. The physician Timothy Bright explains that, “although to the outward viewe” bodily nourishment may appear “uniforme,” it actually “consisteth of diversitie of partes,” refined through the digestive processes. Likewise, “the bloud which seemeth in all parts like it selfe, no egge liker one to another, is preserved distinct in all partes,” actually consisting of four “partes,” or humors, with variable functions and effects. Physical and mental health depended on the proper balance of these humoral t 14 q The Shattering of the Self fluids, yet individual bodies seem rarely to have enjoyed equilibrium. Women especially were understood to be unstable in their fluidity. If a strongly dualistic conception of the self had held sway, the body’s volatility would have been less important, but in this pre-Cartesian era what we now consider the psychological correlates of the...