The Spectacle of the Suffering Body: Seventeenth-Century Aesthetics of Violence”

“The Spectacle of the Suffering Body: Seventeenth-century Aesthetics of Violence” SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Melanie Elizabeth Bowman IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Juliette Cherbuliez, Adviser July, 2015 Melanie Elizabeth Bowman, 2015© Acknowlegements First and foremost, I would like to thank my adviser, Juliette Cherbuliez for her deep intellectual commitment to, and inexhaustible encouragement of, this project throughout all its stages. It also gives me great pleasure to thank my committee chair, Daniel Brewer, who has helped me see the dissertation through in innumerable ways. I very much appreciate my many productive conversations with Mary Franklin-Brown as well as the breadth and depth of her engaging seminars. The same can be said for Michael Gaudio, who introduced me to many early modern Art Historical curiosities that inspired my work on French tragedy. I have benefited greatly from a network of colleagues and friends. Some of these collaborative exchanges are formal, as is the case for Theorizing Early Modern Studies (TEMS), and some informal. Of particular note has been support both moral and scholarly from Sara Wellman, Anna Rosensweig, Joan and Kathleen Costello, and Courtney Guildersleeve. I am also indebted to many colleagues at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University (CSBSJU) for their support of both my research and teaching, especially Karen Erickson and Jeffrey Dubois. And, while I have done this writing in many spaces, a CSBSJU faculty writing retreat at Koinonia Retreat Center as well as several stays at the Costello family home did much to bring this dissertation to a successful conclusion. i Abstract This dissertation treats the aesthetics and ethics of theatrical violence, focusing on late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France. Tragedy took on the impossible task of presenting, to use Elaine Scarry’s formulation, “world-destroying” pain, using a variety of stage techniques to absorb, amplify, and dissimulate violence. It managed a constant alternation between terror and its foreclosure. Suffering is impossible to represent, and yet it regularly informs the way in which individuals and the theater of state conceive of power, learning, and productive work. Throughout, I consider the ways in which these figure amplify or circumvent an aesthetics of confrontation between tyrant and rebel. Daggers, bloody cloth, and female witnesses to violence absorbed, amplified, and dissimulated the strong affects associated with scenes of suffering bodies. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the weapon in plays such as Didon se sacrifiant (circa 1605), Scédase (circa 1610), and Le Cid (1637) absorb the affects and efficacy associated with sacrificial violence. These plays present violence as a compelling theatrical enactment that could spread itself like a contagion. Chapter 2 focuses on bloody cloth, which in La mort d’Hercule (1634), and Cinna (1639) both stands in for scenes of bodily suffering and facilitates a transformation from gore to glory. In Chapter 3 I study the shifting status of the witness to state violence by focusing on plays featuring female protagonists who survive brothers. In Garnier’s Antigone (1580), Rotrou’s 1637 play of the same name, Hardy’s Mariamne (circa 1610) and Tristan l’Hermite’s La Marianne (1637), sororal mourning increasingly masked suffering and violence. ii Table of Contents List of Figures............................................. iv Introduction................................................. 1 Chapter 1..................................................... 57 Chapter 2..................................................... 107 Chapter 3..................................................... 166 Conclusion................................................... 217 Bibliography................................................ 227 iii List of Figures 1. Mémoire pour la décoration des pièces qui se représentent par les Comédiens du Roy pl XII…………………………………………….......227 iv Introduction: From Gore to Glory While secular tragedy in France from 1580 to 1630 underwent a profound transformation in its aesthetic of violence, the spectacle and concept of terror remained among its most important features. From Robert Garnier’s 1580 Antigone to Pierre Corneille’s 1641 Cinna, gory violence in these plays used the same motifs: daggers, bloody cloths, and female bystanders. Studying these motifs uncovers this generation of theater’s relation to terror. Terror is a coercive mental force that shapes thought and is frequently indexed in theater featuring sublimated violence. Terror is the result of a collective societal effort to self-regulate. Made invisible by being transformed into glory, pain seems useful rather than arbitrary. This invisibility is a way to deny the individual body’s vulnerability and the social body’s contingent or arbitrary existence. In early modern society, the king’s body represented the social body. Spectacles of terror gestured away from thoughts of the king’s vulnerability by centering spectacles of violence on non-royal bodies and by truncating scenes of conflict and confrontation that revealed the precarity of royal power. This shifting away from the king’s body impeded consideration of the king’s vulnerability and the desirability or advantages of his murder. These shifts away from scenes of conflict and their truncations created what I call blind spots: places where beliefs appear unquestioned. This theater reinforced cultural blind spots about the nature and legitimacy of political authority. We can further enrich our understanding of these tragedies and their relation to monarchy by focusing on how these plays thematized and redirected the terror of discontinuity by using the suffering body and its motifs as a kind of screen. Additionally, when we consider these plays as a larger body of literature, the rupture or aesthetic 1 change is remarkably consistent: all these secular tragedies deal with instrumentalized violence no matter how it was depicted. Instrumentalized violence is violence that is presented as useful, necessary, and inevitable. Instrumentalization legitimates the arbitrary and meaningless experience of pain within a codified ideological framework. Even in the goriest tragedy, audiences were directed away from paying close attention to the physical, embodied experience of pain. Instead, pain, no matter how explicit, became a tool, which characters appeared to misrecognize as a source of agency. This misrecognition is similar to René Girard’s understanding of how sacrificial violence works in that its social regulatory and other functions cannot be recognized as such for people to believe the ritual was successful (19). The audience, mirrored in characters onstage, had to believe that certain kinds of violence solved problems, when that violence in fact simply removed sacrificeable characters from the equation. Later, more decorous tragedies also mystified pain by presenting glorified bodies that denied the reality of suffering and the potential for social disorder that this violence precipitated. If we analyze these plays as cultural artifacts that normalized terror as they instrumentalized it, we see them as a series of performances where cultural blind spots are created. These blind spots cohered around personal agency under tyrannical rule. In these plays, protagonists called for change, and attempted to make it by committing political, performative violence on their own bodies or on other non-royal bodies. However, these attempts were ultimately ineffectual, leaving social change to the power of the gods, or to an undetermined future justice. Early modern French audiences did not simply receive messages about violence’s use value or the supposedly invulnerable body of the king. Terror was an effect, produced as a consequence of the 2 plays. The terror enacted on the spectator affirmed and furthered the inevitability of violence. Theater structures thought as opposed to reflecting or passively communicating social discourse. Theater is a medium as well as a cultural artifact. It is an instrument with which people are able to cope with and function in a traumatic, dysfunctional world by externalizing and instrumentalizing pain and allowing it to have meaning. Theater creates blind spots that allow the world to seem livable. Histories of Violence Theater contained violence throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Instead of a new theater for a new time, a violent medieval theatrical aesthetic continued to influence secular tragic drama. The early modern period was one of profound political and epistemic crisis, and violent theater served as the analogical substantiation for this crisis of belief. Compounding the violent religious conflicts between Catholic and Protestants culminating in the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre were complex political allegiances, problems of succession, and a series of political assassinations. Ultimately, this conflict between king and nobles underpinned the French Wars of Religion, which, while frequently motivated by religion, were irreducible to it.1 Much power was local at this time and not centralized geographically or consolidated politically. There were three main centers of power with many shifting alliances. First were increasingly radicalized Protestants who were protected by many prominent nobles, including Henri de Navarre, future king Henri IV and his more radical uncle, the Prince

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