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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Swoon: The Art of Sinking Naomi Booth PhD, Creative and Critical Writing University of Sussex March 2014 1 Acknowledgements My greatest thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Nicholas Royle, for his generous and insightful criticism, and for his support and inspiration throughout the writing of this thesis. I am extremely grateful to readers of various chapters of this work, in particular Dr Catherine Packham and Dr Katie Walter. I am also grateful to Dr Abi Curtis for her encouragement and support at the beginning of this project. The suggestions of various creative readers of the creative part of this thesis have been extremely useful; these readers include Thomas Bunstead, Kieran Devaney, Helen Jukes, Kate Murray-Browne and Toby Smart. Dulcie Few has been an insightful and generous reader, and conversations with her have often galvanised me during the development of this work. I am indebted to Thomas Houlton and Laura Ellen Joyce, extremely generous and thorough readers whose ready conversation and creative suggestions have helped me enormously. Michael Fake is to be thanked for his support and patient reading over the last three years. I am grateful to him for his unfailing encouragement, his historical fine- toothcomb, and much more besides. Final thanks go to my parents, Jane and Ian Booth, for supporting and encouraging me during this research in myriad ways. My gratitude is also owed to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research. 2 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Naomi Booth, PhD Creative and Critical Writing SWOON: THE ART OF SINKING SUMMARY This thesis is a diachronic exploration of literary representations of swooning, which theorises the swoon’s relation to concepts of gender, to narratives of radical transformation and to the rhetorical figure of bathos. In my first chapter, I focus on swooning in late medieval literature, when knights and ladies swoon with equal regularity. I consider the early etymologies of “swoon” and posit a relationship between swooning and dying, whereby recovering from the swoon is the symbolic possibility of waking into new life. I read hagiographies alongside Chaucer’s historical romance, Troilus and Criseyde, to demonstrate the swoon’s power as a strongly suggestive symbol of transformation. In my second chapter, I focus on sentimental accounts of swooning in the eighteenth century, when the swoon undergoes a process of gender acquisition, becoming symbolically feminine. By the early nineteenth century, swooning is often stigmatised as a spectacular display of morbidly excessive feminine sensibility, which leads writers such as Jane Austen to take an anti-swoon position. In my third chapter, I consider writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who incorporate the sickly, feminine symbolism of the swoon into their work in order to challenge masculinist narratives of health and power. I consider the work of Keats, Poe and Joyce and propose the notion of “swoon-aesthetics”, whereby the artist is depicted as emerging into a radically transformed world following a swooning epiphany. In my fourth chapter, I focus on the swoon in vampire literature, positing its threatened terror and erotic excitement as a symbolically feminine immobility. I theorise this queer swooning in relation to “dark ecology”, a recent deconstructive denaturing of concepts 3 of nature. My fifth chapter focuses on bathos as the rhetorical figure of sinking, suggesting that the female-only faints in contemporary erotic fiction might be seen as the bathos of certain radical hopes for the transformation of gender relations. The final part of this thesis is a novella, which imagines the desire to swoon in a contemporary female character, and speculates on what might be at stake in abandoning a fixation on passing out in favour of new models of engagement with the world. 4 Contents Acknowledgements 1 Summary 2 Abbreviations 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Heart-Stopped Transformations: Swooning in Late Medieval Literature 11 Chapter 2: Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman 38 Chapter 3: Dead Born: Swoon-Aesthetics and the (Re)Birth of the Artist 68 Chapter 4: Vampiric Swoons and Dark Ecology 100 Chapter 5: Bathetic Masochism: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking 130 Passing Out 159 Novella: Hartshorn 161 Illustrations 220 Bibliography 222 5 Abbreviations MED Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, 2001), available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ OED The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 6 Introduction Has anyone ever swooned? It might seem perverse to begin a thesis on swooning by questioning its very existence; but by posing this question, I wish to highlight the strange status of the swoon. A number of sources suggest that swooning, seemingly the most extravagant of bodily demonstrations, might be constitutively literary. One dictionary definition, for example, describes the verb-form as “a literary word for faint”.1 The frequency of swooning as attested to by literature varies enormously at different points in time. The swoon is so ubiquitous in medieval literature, for instance, that Barry Windeatt cautions us to consider whether a swoon is sometimes “not a swoon”.2 Windeatt suggests here that the many swoons described in earlier literatures should not be seen as evidence, per se, of a medieval propensity towards frequent unconsciousness: they are not reliable medical records of hazardously frequent passing out. Rather, we might read the swoon at different points in its literary history as evidence of shifting attitudes towards descriptions of physical demonstrativeness commensurate with shifting literary sensibilities. This is the strange territory into which the literary swoon falls, sinking between bodily action and literary stylisation; between involuntary reaction and studied rhetorical flourish; between private response and public legibility; between feeling and performance; between corporeality and textuality. In this thesis, the swoon will be explored as an event of the body that always also calls for the practice of hermeneutics.3 1 The Free Dictionary (by Farlax), available online at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/swoon: “1. (Medicine / Pathology) a literary word for faint”. 2 Barry Windeatt, “The Art of Swooning in Middle English” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (eds Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan) (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2011), p.211. 3 I draw here on some of the analyses made in respect of blushing, a “somatic testimony” given considerably more attention in recent criticism than swooning. See, for example, Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Blush (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), where she describes the blush as “an event of the body … And as an act of interpretation” (p.4). 7 The swoon and gender acquisition “How to interpret the cultural difference that is swooning goes to the heart of the perennial question of how to evaluate texts now far removed in time,”4 Windeatt suggests. This thesis gives new perspectives on that “perennial question” through an attentiveness to changes in the writing and reading of swooning over time and across genres. One of the key “cultural differences” that will be addressed here is the relation of gender to evocations of the swooning body. Modern readers might expect the swoon to be particularly associated with depictions of the female body. I begin my study in the medieval period, however, when knights and ladies swoon with equal regularity. In my first chapter, “Heart-Stopped Transformations: Swooning in Late Medieval Literature”, I revisit the most critically-reviewed swoon of that period: the swoon of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “weldy” knight, Troilus. To expect swooning to be feminine in this period is anachronistic: but it is an instructive anachronism, because it highlights the “extravagant trajectory”5 that the swoon has travelled since the medieval period in terms of becoming symbolically feminine. By paying attention to the differences between swooning in the literature of the Middle Ages and in later periods, we might see through a new lens some of the ways in which gender has been fantasised and narratively constructed at different points in time. The critic Gretchen Mieszkowski has suggested the mid-eighteenth century as the crucial period during which swooning undergoes a process of gender acquisition: swooning emerges by the end of the eighteenth century as a symbolically feminine activity. My second chapter, “Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman”, focuses on this process, suggesting that the cult of sensibility feminised swooning, which was consequently stigmatised as a morbid susceptibility to disease, to seduction and to radicalism. Mieszkowski argues that after the eighteenth century men

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