Lydgate's Affective Turn: Masculinity and Melancholy in Bycorne and Chychevache

Abstract

This paper argues that John Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache marks an important shift in the literary uses of emotion by revising the discourse of melancholic suffering in order to help a merchant-class patron confront socio-economic anxieties. In his misogynist poem, Lydgate imagines a world where wives dominate their husbands and force them to fall victim to a man-eating monster. The poem thus focuses on a melancholic masculinity that is captive to grief and trapped in a feminized subject position. Bycorne and Chychevache 's masculine melancholy addresses the fifteenth-century merchant's concerns about household governance, business success, and the building of a lasting legacy. But, in a striking reversal, Lydgate reimagines melancholy as a sign of power and privilege, and departs radically from the traditional narrative of melancholy as he converts feelings of disempowerment into signs of masculine exceptionality. In so doing, Lydgate anticipates early modern writers' understanding of melancholic suffering as not only a mark of spiritual and intellectual greatness in men, but also an affect that a man might adopt by choice.