Gaspara Stampa Research Articles

The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (review)

Reviews179 were quite unknown to me at first hand, and I appreciated introductions to Calderón de la Barca, Max Jacob, and Mario Luzi, in particular the last with his indebtedness to Bergson and TeUhard. Yet I am left wondering who the reader is who would require preliminary introductions to some and could manage advanced essays on others. Occasionally the editors do slip in clues about their prejudices. Thus, Robert Royal, in his essay on Péguy, suggests that "one of the most deep-seated critical prejudices in the twentieth century is that religion is bad for literature" (p. 160). I am not convinced of the truth of that claim—though pardy true, the very opposite might be a more sustainable position. What is needed is more editorial energy. This could be a very important collection, but it simply falls apart, and fails to engage with the real issues of the ludic as a central element in the reworking of theological thinking today, not least through literary exercises. The profoundly liturgical (and spiritual) dimension of that reworking is recognized in Marion and in the last essay by Louis Dupré, "Ritual: The Divine Play of Time." Dupré's excellent comments on temporality and drama as ritual are hardly sustained by any previous close readings and provide no real conclusion to the book. And his final sentence is revealing—suggesting that we live in an age suspicious of religion and religious language. What is needed is a much clearer theoretical sense of the postmodern so profoundly recognized by Jean-Luc Marion, and its deep theological implications, not least in its sense of play in text and literature. In his endorsement of the book, Gerald Gillespie acknowledges the "brilliant synthesizing" by Nemoianu and Dupré in their essays. This is just what is lacking in a book which contains individual papers of great insight and literary scholarship. University of GlasgowDavid Jasper The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, by Juliana Schiesari; xii & 267 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, $36.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Schiesari contends that "melancholia is not simply a pathological condition of either medical or psychological interest, but a historically specific discursive practice that differentiates along gender lines . . . between those 'losses' that are considered significant and those that are not" (p. 186). Citing Hamlet as a favorite traditional figure of melancholy, she suggests that the question is not "To be, or not to be," but who is meaningfully empowered to ask and rewarded 180Philosophy and Literature for doing so (p. 63). That there are laurels to be received by male melancholiacs is the substance of much of Schiesari's work. It is an argument she makes most convincingly in her analysis of Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," Ficino's De amore and De vita, and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. In such works, male melancholy is seen as a source of genius, brought about, in part, by the melancholic 's higher moral character and his special relationship with the transcendent . His status is achieved, however, by a devaluation of mourning, traditionally associated with the feminine and the vulgos: ". . . the 'significant' losses ofthe melancholic are themselves appropriated from what, from his standpoint, can only be called 'insignificant others'" (p. 186). Schiesari argues that women's melancholia, on the other hand, is historically situated as demonic at worst, incoherent at best. The modern version of melancholia , depression, is given no attributes of transcendent value because it is predominandy associated with women. Against this gender-differentiating tradition , Schiesari cites the work of Hildegard of Bingen, whose alternative vision of melancholy was that it was a debilitating illness shared equally by men and women. Schiesari finds, in the works of Gaspara Stampa and Isabella di Morra, attempts to articulate female melancholia, in opposition to an overwhelming Petrarchan influence which objectified women while effectively silencing them. She is critical, however, of contemporary feminists Irigaray and Kristeva for the absence she finds in their works of a constructive response to female melancholia , particularly in Kristeva's assertion that women must "kill off the mother" (p. 81): ". . . the reactivation of the gendered categories of melancholia in conjunction with Kristeva's own particular...

The Currency of Eros. Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 by Ann Rosalind Jones

Book Reviews Ann Rosalind Jones. T h e C u r r e n c y o f E r o s . W o m e n ’s Lo v e L y r ic in E u r o p e , 1540-1620. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 242. Feminist criticism occasionally distinguishes between gynocriticism, the resurrection of obscure or almost forgotten feminine literary figures of the past, and gender studies, the discernment and analysis of male-dominated literary ideologies and techniques according to which women writers, and women in general, are gendered, marginalized and controlled in any given historical period. In this forceful and perceptive study of eight women poets of the European sixteenth century, Ann Rosalind Jones has fused gyno- and gender criticism superbly and produced one of the most important works on the European renaissance lyric in this decade. Using a Marxist-feminist model of negotiation, Professor Jones studies four pairs of women lyric poets and their strategies for maneuvering within social and ideological restric­ tions and turning the contradictions among different discourses to their advantage. The pairing of the women (Isabella Whitney and Catherine des Roches, Pernette du Guillet and Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa and Mary W roth, Louise Labe and Veronica Franco) transcends national boundaries, the rationale for the ordering and pairing being neither national nor chronological but following “ a continuum that moves from most adaptive to most oppositional positions, from less to more overtly contestatory responses” (8). The strength of this book does not merely reside in its theoretical positions, which are so elo­ quently argued in the Introduction and in Chapter One. Some of the virtues of the four ensuing chapters reside in the author’s selection of poems to argue her point, the precise English translations that immediately follow each selection, and the close readings and per­ ceptive commentaries Jones brings to bear on each text. One can only admire and defer to Professor Jones’s breadth of knowledge as a com­ parative literature scholar. To read her analysis of the poetry of Isabella Whitney, Tullia d ’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Mary W roth, and Veronica Franco was for this reviewer to be reading much of this poetry for the first time. One might arguably speak of a “ renais­ sance” of sixteenth-century scholarship in the past two decades due to feminist critics such as Tilde Sankovitch, Ann Larsen, and Ann Rosalind Jones, not to forget the broadened historical perspectives provided by the research of Natalie Zemon Davis, Barbara Hanawalt and others. One recalls that in his classic study on Rabelais’s religion, Lucien Febvre argued (against Abel Lefranc) that atheism was an ahistorical notion not part of the outillage men­ tal of Rabelais’s time, and that Lefranc was applying it ahistorically and retrospectively to Rabelais. To argue that a notion such as “ sexual power relations” is also an historical con­ cept is to state the obvious, especially if in saying so one fails to distinguish between a con­ cept implicitly and explicitly present. To say that the notion of “ sexual power relations” is not explicitly present in sixteenth-century literature is not to argue that it is not powerfully and implicitly present in the poetry itself. We cannot read the lyric poetry of the sixteenth century with the relative ideological innocence of that century, i.e., as if Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Derrida, or Irigaray had never existed. There is no possible quarreling with Pro­ fessor Jones’s theoretical perspective. Any disagreement with Jones’s readings should be, in this reviewer’s opinion, within the theoretical framework she herself has set. Within this framework, my disagreement with a few of Jones’s readings are a matter of nuance only. In her subtle reading of Pernette du Guillet Jones argues that Pernette used the technique of dialogue with, and imitation of, VOL. XXXI, NO. 2 85 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r her mentor, Maurice Scève, in order to achieve (implicit) self-celebration. Personally I would see Pernette celebrating the category of the relational in sexual relations rather than superiority of one sex over the other. Posing as the weak, ancillary, or...

The Currency of Eros. Women's Love Lyric in Europe 1540-1620

Foreword by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar Acknowledgments Introduction: Imitation, Negotiation, Appropriation One The Mirror, the Distaff, the Pen: The Ideological Climate of WomenOs Love Poetry Two Writing to Live: Pedagogical Poetics in Isabella Whitney and Catherine des Roches Three The Poetics of Group Identity: Self-Commemoration through Dialogue in Pernette du Guillet and Tullia dOAragona Four Feminine Pastoral as Heroic Martyrdom: Gaspara Stampa and Mary Wroth Five Eros Equalized: Literary Cross-Dressing and the Defense of Women in Louise Labe and Veronica Franco Notes Bibliography Index

Gaspara Stampa's Poetics of Negativity

Gaspara Stampa's Poetics of Negativity

Gaspara Stampa: The Ambiguities of Martyrdom

Gaspara Stampa: The Ambiguities of Martyrdom