UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Reading the Lovesick

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Reading the Lovesick Woman in Early Modern Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Allison Brigid Collins 2020 © Copyright by Allison Brigid Collins 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reading the Lovesick Woman in Early Modern Literature by Allison Brigid Collins Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Massimo Ciavolella, Chair In early modern Europe, love was not a feeling, but a physiological change in the body. In its extreme, love was lovesickness, a deadly disease. Love makes the patient a desiring subject who seeks to author his own experience. The disease raises the stakes: if he cannot fulfill his desire, he will die. Yet lovesickness decreases the subject’s agency because sickness makes the patient an object to be "read" and diagnosed by outside authorities. This paradox of increased agency and decreased control is particularly fraught when the patient is a woman. My dissertation analyzes the representation of lovesick women in early modern literature. While scholars have claimed lovesickness empowers women, I argue that the disease highlights the potential for female agency, but ultimately subjects women to external interpretation and control. A lovesick patient’s body may speak for her through its symptoms, or she may voice desire. The first two chapters look at these two types of speech, with the first analyzing how narrators read lovesick female bodies and the second considering how women express ii lovesickness. Chapter one argues that in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Margaret Tyler’s The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the narrators underscore the act of reading the lovesick woman. Lovesickness makes her body legible, and the narrators, in turn, interpret the value of her desire based on how it affects the narrator’s control. Chapter two turns to the lover’s voice, examining female lovesickness in Gaspara Stampa’s Rime and María de Zayas y Sotomayor’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos. Both authors connect the disease to female authorship, with Stampa using it to grant her speaker authority/authorship and Zayas using the diagnosis as a misreading that the patient must correct in order to achieve authority. These texts show constant anxiety about how vulnerable women’s bodies and voices are to misreading; this anxiety recalls how the narrators in chapter one read and interpreted lovesick women as a way to maintain their control. The last two chapters turn to how lovesickness is used to rewrite desiring bodies. Chapter three analyzes lovesickness as a mechanism of control in Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In both texts, the disease enables female characters to seize interpretive control. In interpreting others, they also rewrite them, reshaping or creating desire. The texts cast doubt on the merits of this re-writing. The final chapter examines Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, in which outside authorities exert interpretive control to justify an unsettling “cure.” Men misdiagnose the Jailer’s Daughter with lovesickness so they can impose their desired narrative upon her body. Love and lovesickness are separate: while female desire is positive and creative, its diagnosis as a disease leads to medical, masculine control and a bed trick tantamount to a rape. Desire no longer produces interpretive possibilities or competition for control; instead, control obliterates women’s agency and forecloses possibilities rather than creating them. iii The lovesick female body invites diagnosis, an act these texts compare to reading. To be diagnosed, read, and interpreted is to risk being misinterpreted and rewritten. The patient’s agency yields to the doctor’s control much like an author’s intentions become subject to a reader’s interpretation. This study of female lovesickness thus adds to gender studies and medical humanities, as well as to critical work on the history of authorship and readership. iv The dissertation of Allison Brigid Collins is approved. Barbara Fuchs Efrain Kristal Robert N. Watson Massimo Ciavolella, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 v TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page ………………………………………………………………………………………… i Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………….......... ii Committee Page …………………………………………………………………………………. v Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………………….. vi List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………….. vii Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………………...... viii Vita ………………………………………………………………………………………………. x Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Figure 1 ………………………………………………………………………………… 19 Chapter 1: Speaking of Women: The Value of Female Desire in Renaissance Romance……... 28 Chapter 2: Speaking as a Woman: Women Writers and Lovesickness ………………………... 80 Chapter 3: Putting Words in Her Mouth: Language and Bodies in Celestina and As You Like It ……………………………………………………………………………………… 126 Chapter 4: Her Word Against Theirs: Competing Narratives in The Two Noble Kinsmen…… 177 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………. 209 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………..…. 218 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem: Vesalius Conducting an Anatomical Dissection. ………………………………………………………. 19 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I am immensely grateful to have had Professor Massimo Ciavolella as my advisor throughout this process. Few people can say that they never left a meeting with their advisor feeling worse than when they walked in; I am one of those lucky few. He has been an unflagging champion of my work and my progress as a scholar, and I cannot thank him enough for his kindness and encouragement. Professor Barbara Fuchs has been a careful and exacting reader of my work, always pushing me to think bigger and write more concisely. Her questions and feedback have integrally shaped this project, and will continue to do so as it moves into new iterations. I am grateful to her for reading my work with an eye toward how it could be deeper, richer, and more generative. I would like to thank Professor Robert Watson for his time and feedback throughout his project. His comments often connected my work with other texts, creating provocative intertextual connections that broadened my thinking. I would also like to thank Professor Efrain Kristal for his feedback. Professor Kristal’s healthy skepticism about my project pushed me to write more persuasively, explain more thoroughly, and argue more vigorously, and I am grateful for the effect this has had on the dissertation. I owe a debt of gratitude to my writing group: Elizabeth Crawford, Adriana Guarro Romero, Kirsten Lew, and Melanie Jones. Their feedback and support in the early stages of messy writing and even messier thinking were fundamental to this project. I am thankful to have worked with such generous readers, and privileged to have read, and been inspired by, their scholarship. viii I would also like to thank Marilyn Gray and UCLA’s Graduate Writing Center. This dissertation would not have been possible without the training and support I received as a writing consultant. This project was generously supported by the Ahmanson Research Fund and UCLA’s Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship. Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Matthew McCollum. The most precious gifts you can give to a dissertation writer are time and support. Matthew has created time for me by doing the dishes, driving me to campus so I don’t have to wait for the bus, and a million other little everyday gifts. He has been patient with the many ways in which graduate school puts life on hold. He has been supportive of my work and of me as a person. While I have spent two years writing this dissertation on unfulfilled, impossible, and pathological love, I have been lucky enough to have happy, healthy love at home. I am grateful to him, and proud to be his wife. ix VITA EDUCATION University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), C.Phil. Comparative Literature June 2017 UCLA, Graduate Certificate in Early Modern Studies March 2019 UCLA, Graduate Certificate in Writing Pedagogy January 2019 New York University (NYU), M.A., Humanities and Social Thought May 2014 Yale University, B.A. Renaissance Studies May 2011 PUBLICATIONS “Translating the Female Body: Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood.” Accepted pending revisions at Comparative Literature Studies. “Rethinking Romance: Erminia and Epic in the Gerusalemme liberata.” Italica, vol. 95, no. 3, 2018, pp. 315-333. Review of Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Unbecoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (U of Pennsylvania P, 2018) in Comitatus, vol. 49, 2018, pp. 227-229. SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2019 “Performing Love, Performing Gender: Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” PAMLA, San Diego. 2018 “Unconventional Teaching Methods in Conventional Academic Spaces,” Pedagogy Conference, UCLA Dept. of Comparative Literature. 2017 “Pastoral Mirrors, Pastoral Selves: Reflection as Self-Construction in Garcilaso and Marvell,” PAMLA, Honolulu. 2017 “The Gendered Body in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” RSA, Chicago. 2016 “Arden of Faversham and the Locality of Love and Murder,” Love and Death in the Renaissance, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS). 2015 “Salves and Salvation: Lovesickness and Healing

Load more