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Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature DESIRE IN THE RENAISSANCE DESIRE IN THE RENAISSANCE PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE EDITED BY VALERIA FINUCCI AND REGINA SCHWARTZ PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright 1994 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Desire in the Renaissance : psychoanalysis and literature / edited by Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz. p. cm. Includes index. eISBN 1-4008-0228-8 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Psychoanalysis and literature. 3. Desire in literature. 4. Renaissance—England. I. Finucci, Valeria. II. Schwartz, Regina M. PR428.P75D47 1994 820.9’353—dc20 94-14499 This book has been composed in Adobe Sabon To Our Students CONTENTS Introduction:WorldsWithinandWithout3 Regina Schwartz with Valeria Finucci FAKING IT: SEX,CLASS,ANDGENDERMOBILITY TheInsincerityofWomen19 Marjorie Garber MistakenIdentities:Castiglio(ne)’sPracticalJoke39 Natasha Korda TheFemaleMasquerade:AriostoandtheGameofDesire61 Valeria Finucci OGLING: THECIRCULATIONOFPOWER Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s GardensofAdonis91 Harry Berger EmbodiedVoices:PetrarchReading(HimselfReading)Ovid120 Lynn Enterline ThroughtheOpticGlass:Voyeurismand Paradise Lost 146 Regina Schwartz LOVING AND LOATHING: THEECONOMICS OF SUBJECTION LibidinalEconomies:MachiavelliandFortune’sRape169 Juliana Schiesari FemaleFriendsandFraternalEnemiesin As You Like It 184 William Kerrigan DREAMING ON: UNCANNYENCOUNTERS FromVirgiltoTasso:TheEpicToposasanUncannyReturn207 Elizabeth J. Bellamy viii CONTENTS Writing the Specular Son: Jonson, Freud, Lacan, and the (K)notofMasculinity233 David Lee Miller LISTOFCONTRIBUTORS261 INDEX263 DESIRE IN THE RENAISSANCE INTRODUCTION WORLDS WITHIN AND WITHOUT REGINA SCHWARTZ WITH VALERIA FINUCCI HE LITERATURE of psychoanalysis is preoccupied with the liter- ature of the Renaissance. Exploring homosexuality, Freud turned Tto Leonardo da Vinci; inquiring into identification and art, he went to Michelangelo; studying the creative process, he cited Ariosto; ruminating on the compulsion to repeat, he examined Tasso; focusing on mourning and melancholia, he went to Shakespeare’s Hamlet; and inves- tigating gender relations, he turned to the stories of daughters and fathers in The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. Conversely, the writers of Renaissance literature were preoccupied with their versions of the inner life, concerns that would come to constitute the purview of psychoanaly- sis. Surely, the dynamics of sexual identity, gender definition, doubling, identification, voyeurism, memory, melancholy, the uncanny, even the unconscious, were concerns that arose, not in the context of nineteenth- century Vienna, but were already evident in the social, political, and reli- gious upheavals of the early modern period (as they were in the classical world). Literary history attests to the peregrinations of the Ovidian and Virgilian traditions throughout the Renaissance, traditions that include cross-dressing, twinning, sibling rivalry, sexual conquest, rape, and mis- taken identity. This volume will explicitly bring these discourses—clearly already akin—together.1 For all of their differences—Shakespeare did not read Freud (if Freud did Shakespeare)—Renaissance literature and psy- choanalysis are both obsessed with the “inner life” and the ways in which it interacts with the more external spheres. But both the literature of psy- choanalysis and Renaissance literature are testimony to how specious that distinction between inner and outer worlds is, embracing, as they do, a continuum between the psychological, social, economic, scientific, and physical realms. Freud maintained that the workings of civilization itself are propelled by our drives, and in the Renaissance, it was generally be- lieved that even nature is animated by our loves and hates. Taken as a whole, then, these essays do not privilege any single psycho- analytic narrative; instead, they explore the dynamics between that psychoanalytic discourse known as “Renaissance literature” and that 4 INTRODUCTION psychoanalytic discourse more commonly (and erroneously, we would add) believed to have begun in the nineteenth century. They are also per- sistently grounded in history, economics, and nonliterary cultural forma- tions of the period, as imagined identities necessarily are. We have also joined discussions of the literatures of England and Italy, for to isolate works according to nationality is to create stronger boundaries than ex- isted in the early modern period; to isolate Spenser from Ariosto, Milton from Tasso, the English sonnet from Petrarch does not do justice to the cultural texture that so deeply intertwined them. The desire we trace in this volume, then, not only crosses the borders of England and Italy, and the discourses of Renaissance literature and psychoanalysis, it also bursts through the disciplinary borders that have isolated psychoanalysis from our other cultural codes. When we begin to historicize, to distinguish the forces that shaped the thought on the inner life in the early modern period from the forces pro- pelling nineteenth-century psychoanalytic preoccupations, we confront that inextricable interweaving of economic, demographic, and environ- mental factors. The differing household structures, child-rearing prac- tices, educational conventions, the impact of capitalism, of industriali- zation, and of urbanization—let alone the vast epistemological gulf between early modern England and Italy and fin de siècle Vienna with their differing religious, philosophical, and scientific assumptions—all are vital parts of this vast puzzle. To raise the specter of just a few of these factors: What effect did the gross inflation of dowries in Italy during the early modern period, endlessly regulated but never successfully curbed, have on rivalry between men and on relations between husbands and wives? Did the new emphasis on childhood as a distinct stage of develop- ment change household arrangements and thereby affect household rela- tions? How did the common practice of routinely beating children to dis- cipline them disfigure their psychic development? Among aristocrats and the nouveaux riches of the early modern period, the common experience of bonding with a wet nurse for the first years of life, then abruptly losing her and acquiring a mother, must surely reconfigure any facile applica- tion of nineteenth-century oedipal drive theory. Changing demographics are no small factor in imagining a Renaissance psychology: husbands were typically twice the age of their wives; fathers in early modern Italy were the age of men who were grandfathers in nineteenth-century Vi- enna. Was such a father less a sexual role model than a bequeather of property? And how did he influence the sexuality of his developing daughters? Broadly speaking, how did the generalized shift from the ex- tended to the nuclear family affect intergenerational relationships? Inher- itance laws have everything to do with how sibling rivalry is configured. In England, where the rule of primogeniture held fast, second sons and INTRODUCTION 5 illegitimate sons were not even competitors for inheritance—unless, that is, the eldest suffered an untimely death, one of Shakespeare’s favorite plots. In Italy, inheritance was bequeathed “in fraterna,” divided between the sons, a practice that soon issued in “restricted marriage” wherein only one of the sons could marry; dowried daughters were rushed to the altar while their sisters typically found the roads to the convent or prostitution the only ones they could travel. In the early modern period the rise of capitalism—and with it the shift of the workplace from the shop upstairs to a location away from home—shaped new gender roles, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the construct we know as “the angel of the house” developed. Clearly, there is no obvious delimitable area of the inner life that is not impinged upon by the external world.2 And vice versa: to the extent that social and economic “necessities” are expressions of inner impulses, conflicts, desires, and expectations, the ex- ternal landscape changes in response to the internal one. Early modern assumptions about the inner life shaped their outer landscape as thor- oughly as our beliefs about human psychology shape our social struc- tures. The fear that excessive grief could be disruptive of the social order gave rise to laws regulating public lamentation.3 Anxiety over sexual be- havior led to an outpouring of sodomy laws.4 Assumptions about male sexual desire in tandem with the social norm of late marriage not only kept courts occupied with trials of stuprum and defloratio but also led to the institutionalization and elaborate regulation of prostitution. In turn, prostitution institutionalized misogyny: prostitutes were typically the vic- tims of gang rape or were sold into the profession by their parents.5 Epis- temological notions of vision underwrote the raging iconoclastic contro- versies of the Reformation, and a magical understanding of the power of anger—the fear that anger against the deity could provoke his wrath— gave rise to blasphemy laws.6 Marriages were economic arrangements, love something else altogether (and that something was potentially dis- ruptive to the social order until Reformers saw fit to advocate joining love to
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