Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 3, December 2007
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Wells, Marion A. The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. 368 pp., 0-8047-5046-7 (Hbk). $60.00.
Reviewed by
Utah State University
While this fine and noteworthy book is written in impeccable academic prose and terms, what Marion A. Wells portends here boils down to this: love (read: erotic human passion) corrupts (read: infects) the body and the mind of the affected; and, more importantly, that the medieval-contemporary medical study of this physical effect of love holds the key to a seminal study of early modern romance. Puzzling questions of this genre—questions that have delighted as well as bemused its enthusiastic audience for all those centuries ever since—seem to be tamed and plausibly vindicated by this book.
On the whole, Wells argues that medieval medical writing provides a vital critical context for understanding the unique and often puzzling characteristics of early modern romance. She draws heaviest on Ficino’s De Amore (1469) and its analysis for the medical-theoretical background, which she then applies to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser’s Faerie Queen in their own chapters. In her final chapter, Wells briefly examines how this literary and medical legacy is explored in Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
This book is a truly interdisciplinary one; as such, it renders itself in the newly emerging literary critical theory that may not have established itself yet as an “ism,” but has been producing the more remarkable works of late. Another praiseworthy feature of this book is its tight logic and organization not just on the chapter level but also in the threading of the supporting evidence and its exploration. Wells maintains throughout that in the historical contemporary medical literature, love-melancholy is indeed considered a physiological condition that creates the pattern of corporeal suffering which, in turn, brings forth a quasi-material object, the phantasm, to substitute for the object of wounded love. At the core of this suffering, we find the lover’s denial of the loss of the loved one.
By engaging a medical profiling of the melancholic lover, Wells claims, much of the epistemological uncertainties and narrative complexities of early modern romance can be better understood. For instance, “the introduction of figural consolation into the narrative rehabilitates romance as a genre by deftly avoiding the tension between epic and romance that polarizes the treatment of love in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poems” (13).
As for a modern contemporary treatment of loss and melancholia, Wells draws on the theories of Freud, Julia Kristeva, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. She “interpret[s] Ficino’s analysis of love-melancholy as a case study of the soul’s potential alienation from itself in terms of his larger exploration of the nature of subjectivity that may justly be termed ‘psychoanalytic’” (57). Her stance here is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on such treatment of early modern romance.
Possibly the most prominent chapter—at least for this reviewer—is number six, in which Wells examines female love-melancholy, also referred to as “uterine fury” (221). Wells contends here that “Britomart’s quest necessitates a reevaluation of female love-melancholy that implicitly revises misogynist contemporary accounts of the female body as a dangerous and even maddening influence on the mind” (221); and at the end she concludes that Spenser breaks away from the Petrarchan atra voluptas (dark pleasure) by creating a female representative whose “bodily sufferings” bring forth the future of the nation as opposed to causing disorder within (259).
While the last chapter makes a commendable effort to explore the overarching legacy of the medico-literary study of love-melancholy into Romanticism, it also feels a bit hurried; yet, it could segue into a thorough exploration of the same theory applied to the Romantic Era. I certainly would applaud such an endeavor.
In all, this book is a significant and valuable addition to the study of early modern romance and should soon be adopted by fellow researchers as well as in courses dedicated to the genre.