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An odd kind of melancholy: reflections on the glass delusion in Europe (1440-1680
Gill Speak
History of Psychiatry 1990 1: 191
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X9000100203
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191-206. Printed in England
History ofPsychmoy, i ( 1990), 191
An odd kind of melancholy:
reflections
on
the glass delusion in Europe
(1440-1680)
GILL SPEAK*
A history of psychiatry, says Tellenbach, should ideally be a ’history of
problems’, describing not only abnormal psychic states, but also historical
attitudes towards them, by recourse to ideological and sociological factors.
This research should then lead to rediscoveries of the past, often conceived
as new revelations. In accordance with these premises, the present study
describes the glass delusion of Early Modern Europe, not as a series of
isolated cases, but viewed within a contemporary cultural setting, for the
Glass Man’s cry of pain is only truly audible through the layman’s literature.
A brief survey of modern variants on this delusion reveals that man’s preoccupation with the problem of body-soul remains largely unchanged.
Introduction
It has been said that psychology underwent popularization in the last years of the
sixteenth century. This process allegedly led to an unreal differentiation between
’man’ and ’man under passion’, with the implication for today that only studies
of the first type merited the attention of empirical psychology, whilst the literary
stereotype had little reliable to offer except a ’psychiatry of the philosophers’.
But psychiatry is concerned with the most difficult of all medical-physiological
problems: the body-soul problem, which still remains unsolved today. As ’man
under passion’ is more likely than his rational counterpart to voice that inner
conflict, it is possible that behind the posturing of the literary melancholic, there
lies sufficient material with which to reconstitute the ’problem’, as perceived
Department of Spanish Studies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M139PL,
England.
I should like to thank Roger Cooter and Roy Porter, of the Wellcome Institute for the History of
Medicine in Manchester and London respectively, for their enthusiasm and help with an earlier draft
of this article. For expert guidance in the research and valued moral support, special thanks to Barry
White and P. Cummings of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Department of Spanish
Studies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, England.
*
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192
and articulated by contemporary writers.lThe aim of this paper is to examine
the contribution of literary works to the corpus of knowledge on Melancholy,
and to assess its value for medical historians today. The study will focus on
glass delusions affected or experienced by scholars and lovers in Early Modern
Europe: probably the best-documented, but the least-studied melancholic aberration.2 Eclectic by definition, the study examines all parallel cases regardless of
national boundaries. The term delusion is used in its modern sense of: ’Anything
that deceives the mind with a false impression; a fixed false opinion with regard
to objective things, especially as a form of mental derangement’ (OED).
The melancholic generally succumbed to some form of self-delusion which
alienated him from his fellows. In fact the difference between poseur or
genuinely-afflicted melancholic, and his literary stereotype was only one of
degree, for as the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius remarked, melancholics
had as many affectations, gestures and fancies as though they were Stage Players.3
Two quite distinctive symptoms, however, set the Glass Man apart from other
melancholics: an irrational fear that he was fragile and therefore likely to shatter
into pieces, and an aversion to sunlight.
I. Fragility: the earth-bound body
The fragile delusion received relatively more attention than the second symptom
in its day. Classical and Medieval accounts of Earthenware Men abound, and
whilst they persist into the Early Modern period, it is an obsession with glass
bodies which comes to the fore.4 The Glass Man came in a variety of forms. He
1
For general ideas on the history of psychiatry, which influenced the structure of this paper, see
Hubertus Tellenbach, Melancholy: History of the Problem Endogeneity, Typology, Pathogenesis, Clinical
Considerations, translated by Erling Eng, Duquesne Studies - Psychological Series, 9, third edition
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 1-2, and 4. For ’psychiatry of the philosophers’ see E. A.
Ackerknecht, Kurze Geschichte der Psychiatrie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1957), I, 2, cited in Tellenbach, Melancholy, 1. For comments on ’literary and scientific types’ see Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass: the
Elizabethan Mind in Literature, fifth edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 115-117; Lawrence Babb,
The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642, second edition
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965), 72; and J. S. Madden, ’Melancholy in Medicine
and Literature: some Historical Considerations’, British Journal of Medicine and Psychology, xxxix (1966),
125-130 (125).
2
Titles and texts have been translated, where appropriate, into English. Unless otherwise indicated, all
translation is my own. For comprehensive studies on Glass Men in the North of Europe see F. F. Blok,
Caspar Barlaeus: from the Correspondence of a Melancholic, translated by H. S. Lake (Amsterdam: van
Gorcum, Assen, 1976); and J. M. W. Binneveld et al., Een Psychiatrisch Verleden: Uit de geschiedenis
van de psychiatrie (Baarn: Amboboeken, 1982). I am indebted to Roy Porter for this last source.
3
Levinus Lemnius, De habitu et constitutione corporis (Antwerp: apud Guilielmum Simonem, 1561),
fol. 147v-8v, cited by Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 114. Compare Tellenbach, Melancholy, 127, for a modern
of role and identity.
interpretation
4
Thomas Walkington, The Opticke Glasse of Humours or the Touchstone of a Golden Temperature,
reproduced from Henry E. Huntington Library (London, 1607), 69v, 71r; Reginald Scot, The Discoverie
of Witchcraft (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1584;1964), 64; André Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation
of the Sight: of Melancholicke Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age ... , translated out of French ... by
Richard Surphlet, practitioner in phisicke, introduction by Sanford V. Larkey, Shakespeare Association
Facsimiles, 15 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 97,102.
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193
might be a urinal, an oil lamp or other glass receptacle, or else he might himself
be trapped within a glass bottle.
Possibly the first case of a man believing his whole body to be made of glass
was the French king, Charles VI, who allegedly refused to allow people to touch
him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself.5
A later case was recorded by the physician to Philip II of Spain, Alfonso Ponce
de Santa Cruz (c.1614). The man in question, possibly a contemporary French
prince, was also described by the chief physician to Henri IV, Andr6 du Laurens.
At the instigation of his physician, this Glass Man languished on a straw bed to
avoid being broken, until a conveniently-arranged fire quickly restored his wits.
The Flemish poet and philosopher, Gaspar van Boerle (1584-1648), known as
Barlaeus, suffered from periods of Melancholy throughout his life, but his glass
delusion is unsubstantiated, based only on certain lectures he gave in 1635, in
which he detailed that obsession as one manifestation of Melancholy: ’But how
often the fantasy wants to act absurdly and ridiculously in melancholics, of how
much does it convince the unhappy fellows! This one thinks he is made of glass,
and, terrified, is fearful of people standing close to him’. Barlaeus wrote about
his Melancholy to the Dutch diplomat and writer Constantijn Huygens, another
melancholic, who had lampooned the glass delusion in his satirical poem Costly
Folly (1622).6
Men of letters, or members of the nobility, these Glass Men could have learnt
of the delusion from earlier medical treatises, and from contemporary literary
accounts accessible to them in the embryonic literary academies. The distinction
between medical account and its literary version is particularly diffuse in this
period, marked as it is by a sudden plethora of literary Glass Men. One of
these is Cervantes’s Glass Licentiate, Tomas Rodaja. Obsessed with the idea
that he is made of glass, and traumatized by any physical contact, he refuses
to wear shoes or any restrictive clothing. He eats only fruit offered to him in
a urinal-pouch (vasera de orinal) on the end of a stick, and drinks fresh water
with his hands. He sleeps outdoors or huddled in some hayloft, takes refuge in
the country during a storm, and walks in the middle of the street to avoid injury
from falling roof tiles. 7
5
Pius Secundus Pontifex Maximus, ’Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope: the Commentaries of Pius II,
Books VI-IX’, translated by Florence Alden Gragg, Smith College Studies m History (Massachussets), xxxv
IV, 413-618 (425).
(1951),
6
Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz, Dignotio et Cura Affectuum Melancholicorum (Madrid: apud Thomam
Iuntam, 1622), in Antonio Hernández Morejón, Historia bibliográfica de la medicina española (Madrid,
1842-50), IV, 170-2; compare du Laurens, A Discourse, 102. (Barlaeus) De Animae Humanae Admirandis
(1635), in Orationum Liber (Amsterdam, 1643), 111, cited in Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 110; Barlaeus to
Huygens, 22 November 1647, Leyden U. L., MS. Hug. 37, No. 180, in De Briefwisseling van Constantijn
Huygens: 1608-87, edited by J. A. Worp, 6 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1911-17), IV (1915), 437,
No. 4704; Constantijn Huygens, Satyra. Dat is’t Costelick Mal (Middelburgh, 1622), lines 103-8, in De
Gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, edited by J. A. Worp, 9 vols (Groningen, 1892-1899), I, 246, cited in
Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 115 .
See Hardin Craig, Enchanted Glass, 119, for an account of psychological tracts available to Renaissance
7
writers. El licenciado Vidriera,
in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Obras completas, edited by A. Valbuena
Prat (Madrid: Aguilar, 1962), 875-88.
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194
Less well-known is the Glass Man Tactus in the English play Lingua (1607) by
Thomas Tomkis. Sitting bolt upright, hands clenched, musing on the brittleness
of life, Tactus rebuffs a bewildered Olfactus, who asks if he is hatching eggs.
Still insistent, Tactus warns him that any contact will break his life, saying: ’I
am an urinal, I dare not stir for fear of cracking in the bottom’. Even loud voices,
apparently, threaten his physical integrity. In the same year Thomas Walkington
records that a ’ridiculous fool’ from Venice thought that his shoulders and
buttocks were made of brittle glass. Consequently he refused to sit down, and
recoiled from company lest he might break his ’crackling hinderparts’. A fear
that he might be used by a glazier to make the lights in a latticed window
prevented him from leaving the house. Another man with glass buttocks is
found in a fictitious mental asylum by the Spanish writer Polo de Medina.
The man is a dandy, inordinately concerned with his appearance. One day,
attending to nature’s needs, he had smashed his buttocks and was left badly
scarred. Unable to face the world with these imperfections, he had admitted
himself to the asylum. 8
These and other contemporary medical and literary accounts possibly
originated in a treatise by Lemnius written in 1561. Johan van Beverwyck
cited a patient of Lemnius in 1636, who had to relieve himself standing up,
fearing that if he sat down his buttocks would shatter. Eighteen years later
the Dutch poet Jacob Westerbaen and the Danish physician Thomas Bartholin
wrote about a man with glass buttocks, whilst in France a contemporary compiler
of anecdotes about crazed or eccentric people, Tallement des Reaux (1657),
described the same derangement in Nicole du Plessis, a relation of Cardinal
Richelieu. Many of these accounts restricted themselves to a simple statement
of facts, but a report by a royal physician, Louis de Caseneuve (1626), reveals
that the medical profession was not averse to anecdotal embellishment. The man
concerned was a glass-maker from the Parisian suburb of Saint Germain, who
constantly applied a small cushion to his buttocks, even when standing. He was
cured of this obsession by a severe thrashing from the doctor, who told him that
his pain emanated from buttocks of flesh.9
8
Thomas Tomkis, Lingua, in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, edited by Robert Dodsley and W.
Carew Hazlitt, fourth edition, 15 vols (London, 1874-6), IX (1874), 331-463 (351); Walkington, Opticke
Glasse, 71r; Salvador Jacinto Polo de Medina, Hospital de mcurables y viaje de este mundo y el otro (1636),
edited by J. M. de Cossio, Los clásicos olvidados, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (NBAE), 10
vols (Madrid, 1928-31), X (1931), Obras escogidas, 281-318 (301).
9
Lemnius, De habitu, 141v. Compare Johan van Beverwyck, Schat der Ongesontheyt, third edition, 2
vols (Dordrecht, 1642), 380; Jacob Westerbaen, Arctoa Tempe. Ockenburgh (The Hague, 1654), 123;
Thomas Bartholinus, Histonarum anatomicarum rariorum centuria I & II (Amsterdam: apud Joannem
Henrici, 1654), I, 114; Tallement des Réaux: Historiettes (1657-9), edited by Antoine Adam, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, 142, 2 vols (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967), I, 316; Ioannes Pierius Valerianus, Hieroglyphica ... : authore Ludovico a Casanova, consiliario et medico regio (Leyden: apud Paulum Frellon,
1626), 58, in Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 114; see also Simon Goulart, Admirable and memorable Histories,
translated by E. Grimeston (London: G.Eld, 1607), 375, and Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little
World: or a general History of Man in six Books (London, 1678), II, 95, citing Bartholinus, Historiarum
anatomicarum, I, 114.
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195
Some fragile delusions affected other parts of the body. Reports of glass
bones, arms, and legs appeared much later, but Early Modern accounts were
particularly rich in allusions to glass hearts/chests, and fragile heads. Tommaso
Garzoni, an Italian monk, wrote a series of character sketches of mentallydisturbed people in 1586. In one of these cameos, drawn from Galen, the
fragile delusion presents as a man who thought that his body consisted of only
a large head, which he protected from injury by avoiding all contact with his
fellows. lo
Garzoni’s melancholics frequently revealed an obsession with urine and the
urinal. This seems to have been a general feature in other literary accounts.
The Siennese melancholic who refused to urinate is one of several examples.
Many Glass Men even admitted to being a glass urinal. This was a contemporary
synonym for a small flask, but it also carried a certain mystique, probably due to
the classical diagnosis of melancholy from urine, and also to the recent emergence
of ’piss-pot prophets’: specialists in urinary infections and syphilis.ll Tactus
thought he was a urinal, and so did Cervantes’s Glass Licentiate, who assumed
the name Vidriera (urinal). The Urinal Man seems to have been a poor relation of
the Glass Man, as contemporary attitudes show. James Howell, Historiographer
Royal to Charles II, spoke disparagingly of a Urinal Man in Venice ( 1621 ): ’Considering the brittleness of the stuff, it was an odd kind of melancholy in him that
could not be persuaded but he was an urinal, surely he deserved to be pissed in
the mouth’. And in an obscure Spanish dramatic version of the Glass Licentiate
by Agustin Moreto, Carlos cries out when he accidentally knocks himself. His
lackey, Gerundio, asks if he has chipped himself, and Carlos replies, ’No, but
I think I may be cracked.’ Gerundio suggests he take a drink to see if he is
leaking anywhere, offering to plug up the affected part with wax. When the
danger is past, still teasing, Gerundio persuades Carlos to equip himself with
a protective sheath (vasera), but his comment that now he looks like a urinal
enrages Carlos. 12
Reasons for this fear of breaking are complex. Folk culture and biblical tradition supplied several interpretations, chiefly connected with chastity,
10
For glass feet see du Laurens, A Discourse, 10. For glass bones, arms and legs see Binneveld, Een
Psychiatrisch Verleden, passim. See also ’The Broken Heart’ (1633), in John Donne: The Elegies and the
Songs and Sonnets, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 51-2. For head delusions
see Tommaso Garzoni, L’Ospidale dei’ pazzi incurabili, in Opere, edited by Paolo Cherchi (Naples: Casa
Editrice Fulvio, 1972), 254; Goulart, Admirable Histories, 372; and Thomas Milles, The Treasurie of
auncient and moderne Times, 2 vols (London: W. Jaggard, 1613-19), I, 477.
11
For urine obsessions see Garzoni, L’Ospidale, 336, 343; Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 70r-72v; Du
Laurens, A Discourse, 132; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Holbrook Jackson
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972), I, 400, citing Cristóbal de Vega, Opera nempe: Liber de arte medendi
(Leyden: apud Gilielmum Rovillium, 1576), and du Laurens, A Discourse. Thomas Brian, The PissProphet, reprint of first edition (London, 1637; 1968); K. D. Gardner, Jr., ’The art and gentle science of
pisse-pot
prophecy’, Hawaii Medical Journal, xxx (1971), 166-9.
12
James Howell, Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), I, 63.
Agustin Moreto y Cabaña, La Gran Comedia: El licenciado Vidriera, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles
(BAE), 71 vols (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1858-1902), XXXIX (1873), 264.
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196
purity, or fortune. Several Spanish writers represented the goddess of fortune
as a glass figure to denote her inconstancy. Fortuna’s palace in Juan de
Mena’s Labyrinth of Fortune (1444) was supported by glass pillars. By the early
seventeenth century the modified emblem reflected recent optical innovations.
In a play called The Melancholic Gypsy (1614) by Gaspar Aguilar, for instance,
the benighted Numa protests that although a lover is blind, he can still see
if he wears the spectacles of his honour. As fortune made them out of glass,
which makes them very fragile, their use, he says, is to be commended. The
specific application to women of this capricious honour is chastity. There are
countless images in popular works of the misogynistic ’fragile-fickle’ kind, but
literary usage also had its lighter moments. Trying to ingratiate himself into the
Family of Love, the gallant Gerardine in Thomas Middleton’s work (1608), says
to one of the Brothers, a merchant: ’0 my most precious Dryfat, may none of thy
daughters prove vessels with foul bungholes... but all true and honorable Dryfats
like thyself.’ 133
Purity, of course, had another meaning for the mystical writers. Speaking of
chastity, the French bishop Saint Franqois de Sales compared human bodies to
glasses, because they could not be carried together without danger of collision
and breakage. The motif of fragile vessels also appears in Sebastidn de Cordoba’s
expurgated version of Garcilaso’s poetry, and in Santa Teresa’s works, for whom
the broken vessel meant sinfulness: ’Lord, put not so precious a liquid in this
fragile container, for you know that I shall spill it’.14 Something similar was
intended by Sancho Panza, who said of Quixote’s ingenuousness that he had
a soul like a pitcher, to which the Knight of the Wood replied, somewhat
enigmatically, that if the blind were to lead the blind, they were both in danger
of falling into a pit. 155
Cervantes was clearly alluding to the complex, and often conflicting biblical
tradition of earthenware vessels, one aspect of which, as Sancho knew, stood
for simplicity and truthfulness. Another aspect, referring to man’s fleeting
existence, attributed his origins and destiny to clay or earth. Saint Augustine
and the Church Fathers had warned of man’s ephemeral nature by reference
13
Juan de Mena, El laberinto de Fortuna, edited by J. M. Blecua, Clásicos castellanos (Madrid:
Espasa-Calpe, 1943). Gaspar Honorat de Aguilar, La gitana melancólica, BAE, XLIII (1857), 150.
Thomas Middleton, The Family of Love, edited by Simon Shepherd (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama
Texts,
1979), IV. 2. 1312.
14
Saint François de Sales, Introduction a la vie dévote (1604), edited by Henry Bordeaux, Collection
Nelson (Paris: Nelson, Editeurs, [1910]), 182; ’Vida’, in Obras de Santa Teresa de Jesús, edited by P.
Silverio de Santa Teresa C.D., Biblioteca Mistica Carmelitana (BMC), 9 vols (Burgos, 1915-24), I. 131;
see also Sebastián de Córdoba Sacedo, ’Egloga I’, in Garcilaso a lo divino (1575), edited by Glen R. Gale
Editorial Castalia, 1971), 165, line 279.
(Madrid:
15
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 13, edited by F. Rodriguez Marin, fourth edition,
10 vols (Madrid, 1947-9), IV (1948), 283. Also see Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Comedia Eufrosina,
edited by Eugenio Asensio (Madrid: CSIC, 1951), III. 4. 209, et passim; and Baltasar Gracián, El Criticón,
edited by Antonio Prieto (Barcelona: Planeta S.A., 1985), 467.
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197
the fragile, corruptible body.l6 This was still in vogue in the seventeenth
century, especially after official Tridentine recognition of the Apocryphal books
as Scriptural Canon in 1546. Their eschatological imagery overlapped with that
of Saint John’s Apocalypse, except that the optimistic note of bodily resurrection
was missing: life ended when the soul left the body. Consequently Man’s
body was represented as a fragile, transient, earthenware receptacle, whose
integrity signified possession of wisdom (Ecclesiasticus 21. 17; 22. 7; Isaiah
30. 14), and vitality, and conversely the broken jar or boat denoted death.
The image is used in Velez de Guevara’s play, The Potter of Ocana, which
revives a medieval fable of the ass who stumbles and smashes his load of
glass jars. Cursing the ass roundly, its owner suddenly reflects, as did the
earlier English fable, on the connection between broken crockery and the
Day of Judgement: ’Earth returns to the earth,/ And the clay returns to
to
clays
Photophobia: windows on the mind
Emphasis on the body thus accounts in large measure for the Glass Man’s fragile
delusion. The second characteristic of the Glass Man was his aversion to sunlight.
Hippocrates was among the first to refer to this photophobia. Apparently of only
passing interest to physicians in relation to other manifestations, it nevertheless
presented contemporary dramatists with a useful emblem in their melancholic
stereotyping. When the king asks the melancholic Hamlet: ’How is it that the
clouds still hang on you?’, his reply signals photophobia: ’Not so, my lord; I am
too much in the sun’. Tactus was also troubled by sunlight:
II.
No sooner had I parted out of doors,
But up I held my hands before my face,
To shield mine eyes from th’light’s piercing beams;
When I protest I saw the sun as clear
Through these my palms, as through a perspective.
No marvel; for when I beheld my fingers,
I saw my fingers were transformed to glass8
The Glass Man’s fear of sunlight
must
have been connected with the notion that
16
Genesis 2. 7; 3. 19; Psalms 114. 29; Job 34. 14; Daniel 2. 31; Ecclesiastes 12. 6; Saint Augustine,
Specchio dei peccatori, edited by Ugo Antonio Amico, reprint of 1866 edition by Gaetano Romagnoli
(Bologna: Editrice Forni, 1968), 6-7. See also Fray Juan Eusebio Nieremberg y Ottin, De la diferencia
entre lo temporal y eterno, y crisol de desengaños (1640), in Obras escogidas, edited by D. Eduardo ZepedaHenriquez,
BAE, 104, 2 vols (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1957), II, 39, and 53.
17
Luis Vélez de Guevara, El ollero de Ocaña, BAE, XLV (1858), 151b. Compare A Mirror for Fools. The
Book of Burnel the Ass by Nigel Longchamp of the Benedictine Priory of Christchurch, Canterbury [ 1180],
edited by J. H. Mozley (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 13-14; and Thomas Lodge,
’Sonnet XI’, Phillis: Honoured with pastorall sonnets, elegies, and amorous delights (London, 1593), 17.
18
Hippocrates Liber de insania et melancholia, cited by Burton, Anatomy, I, 386; Du Laurens, A
Discourse, 89, 82, and 96; Hamlet, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Peter Alexander
(London and Glasgow: Collins, 1964), I. 2. 66-7; Tomkis, Lingua, 350.
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198
his body was, not fragile, but transparent, as the poet John Donne said:&dquo;Tis
much that Glasse should bee/ As all confessing, and through-shine as I’. Tactus
described this phenomenon, whilst also providing an exposition of one side of the
contemporary debate on the seat of the soul and its rationalizing faculty:
Opening my breast, my breast was like a window
Through which I plainly did perceive my heart:
In whose two concaves I discern’d my thoughts
Confus’dly lodged in great multitude. 19
The other side of the debate is seen in a reference to photophobia by Lope de
Vega, whose melancholic character, Fernando, in La Dorotea apparently favours
a link between the soul and the eyes. Exclaiming after a lover’s quarrel that he
is dying, he has the window closed to stop the light from striking his eyes.
His soul, he declares, has departed for ever. Lope’s inspiration for this scene
probably comes from a similar scene in La Celestina [ 1499] .2° Barlaeus’s letter
to Huygens in 1647 reveals that he has suffered the same ’spiritual blindness’
during his latest bout of Melancholy. He says that he was senseless like Niobe,
and like Morpheus, a creator of idle, fanciful imaginations. Claiming to be the
equal of Huygens’s Moria and Eufrasia, imprisoned by his eyes, he says he merits
a place in the latter poem. Eufrasia (Eyebright) was written to comfort a woman
for the loss of an eye, pointing out that many with two eyes are still blind in
spirit. Among those listed in this category are victims of delusions arising from
the vapours of inflamed blood.211
The controversy over spiritual blindness was long and fierce. Galen had said
that the melancholic’s inordinate fear originated in a blindness of the brain
produced by looking on a black substance, whose colour it absorbed. Rejecting
this, du Laurens agreed with Averrhoes that as colours were only a visual object,
they influenced nothing but the eyes, and that although there was a reciprocal
relationship between mind and eyes, there was no eye in the brain. Besides
disclosing his familiarity with trends in optical sciences, the passage also betrays
the persistent animosity between philosopher and physician. And yet it is curious
how closely his argument runs to that of the fifteenth-century philosopher, Pico
della Mirandola (1463-94), a pioneer of the Renaissance Neo-Platonist movement. Pico had compared the mind to an eye, saying: ’The eye on the corporal
world is the mind in the spiritual field’. Even if the eye possessed its own innate
19
’A Valediction of my Name in the Window’, in
John Donne: The Elegies, 64. Compare also: ’These
follies are within you, and shine through you like the water in an urinal, that not an eye that sees you but
is a physician to comment on your malady’ (Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1584), II. 1. 35).
Tomkis,
Lingua, 350.
20
Lope de Vega y Carpio, La Dorotea, edited by José Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Ediciones de la
Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1955), I. 5. 155; Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Caltsto y
edited by Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1969), 47.
Melibea,
21
Barlaeus to Huygens, loc. cit. (ref. 6); Huygens, Eufrasia: Oogen-troost, in De Gedichien, IV, 89.
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light, he claimed, it still needed external light with which to see colours and enjoy
the gift of vision. 22
By the early seventeenth century the developing sciences of optics, physiognomy, and psychology were still borderline disciplines which attracted many
literate men. Looking at the world through corrective spectacles became a
literary commonplace, and countless works were published bearing the words
’Looking Glass’ or similar in the title, with the implication for the layman that
optical glass facilitated discovery of one’s inner nature. An allegorical work, El
Criticon by Gracian is laced with these clairvoyant devices. One notable character
is the Seer of Everything, who claims to penetrate mens’ hearts and brains as if
they were made of glass. Such perspicacity has taught him that many living people
lack a soul. 23
Given this prevailing spirit of inquiry, it is likely that the melancholic’s photophobia was related to a fear of self-revelation. Yet paradoxically, the very source of
this apprehension also exerted a strong attraction on its victim. Walkington
explained this paradox using a traditional biblical emblem: although the soul was
not completely blind like a bat, it was, like an owl, dazzled by sunlight, seeing as
if through a latticed window, the body casting a sable night over the understanding. The Knight of the Wood’s rejoinder to Sancho Panza about the blind leading
the blind may allude to this emblem. It could have also inspired the bat delusion
suffered by Cellini’s jailer, the constable of the castle of Sant’Angelo. This man,
Cellini implies, was not truly afflicted with Melancholy, as it is Cellini himself who
xperiences a blinding mystical revelation whilst he is immured, in response to his
fervent prayers to see the sun. Inspired by this vision, he prophesies his imminent
release, which both impresses and frightens his jailers. His poetic interpretation
of the experience, written for the constable, earns his release.24
The poem describes his soul illuminated with a divine light. This was a
well-known conceit in the sixteenth century. The concept of light striking the soul
as through a latticed window had come from a passage in Song of Songs, which
was repeatedly used by the mystical writers San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa,
Sebastidn de Cordoba, and Giordano Bruno.25 However, accounts of their efforts
I
22
Du
A Discourse, 90. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De Hominis Dignitate Heptaplus de Ente
Laurens,
Uno, edited by Eugenio Garin, 3 vols (Florence, 1942), I, 289.
For corrective spectacles see Don Quijote, II. 19, edited by Rodriguez Marín, V, 92; Salvador Jacinto
Polo de Medina, Academias del Jardín (1630), in Obras escogidas, 105-270 (136); Rodrigo Fernández de
Ribera, Los anteojos de mejor vista, edited by Victor Infantes de Miguel (Madrid: Edición Legasa Literaria,
1979). Between 1475-1640 at least 28 known works printed in England bore this title (Titles of English
et
23
of Foreign Books Printed in England, edited by A. F. Allison & V. F. Goldsmith (Folkestone:
I, ’1475-1640’). Gracián, Criticón, 467.
Dawson,
1976),
24
Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 11. Benvenuto Cellini: la Vita, edited by Guido Davico Binino (Turin:
Giulio Einaudi, 1973), I, CVII, 237ff; CXXII, 268-71.
25
’Noche oscura’, in Obras de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by P. Silverio de Santa Teresa C.D., BMC, 5
vols (Burgos, 1929-31), II (1929), 457, et passim; ’Vida’, in Obras de Santa Teresa, BMC, I, 157; Sebastián
de Córdoba, ’Canción IV’, Garcilaso a lo divino, 131, line 65; Giordano Bruno Nolano, ’Primo Dialogo’,
De gl’heroici furori (1585), edited by Francesco Flora, Collezione di Classici Italiani, second series, 374 vols
(Turin: Editrice Torinese, 1918-), XIX (1928),13, quoting Song of Songs 2. 9.
Books and
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separate soul from body (commentatio or meditatio mortis) frequently evoked
images of light as a consuming source of heat. A mystical love poem by Giordano
Bruno, for example, crystallizes his religious Melancholy into condensed images
of dryness and heat, and establishes a relationship between eyes, soul, and body:
’Beauty’, he said, ’coursing through the eyes to the heart, made a hot furnace in
my breast, first absorbing all the visual humour in a glaring viscous wave, and
then devouring the other bodily fluids, and liberating the dry element, with which
it rendered me into formless dust’.26
This strange polar attraction-repulsion towards light experienced by mystics
and melancholics found an explanation in Pico’s philosophy. Light as a source
of heat was seen as the optimum means of heating and reviving the spirit or
luce, which linked the celestial soul to the earth-bound body. Developing this
theory a hundred years later, the philosopher Donio explained photophobia in
similar terms. The spirit, he said, should ideally be surrounded by hot, lucent
substances, ’but in the body it is enclosed in cold, dark, crass flesh and bones.
A sign of its resultant discontent is that it cannot bear the direct light of the sun,
which should be eminently congenial to it
A related literary convention, that of the soul imprisoned in a dark, clay body,
owes much to this debate, as also to the Song of Songs, seen as an allegorical
account of the flight of the soul towards communion with God.28 Imprisonment
had, in any case, become one of life’s vicissitudes, which lent the motif added
flavour. Writing from prison about his Melancholy in 1643, James Howell said:
’I consider that my soul while she is cooped within these walls of flesh, is but
in a kind of perpetual prison. And now my body corresponds with her in the
same condition; my body is the prison of the one, and these brick walls the
prison of the other’. Cervantes’s Vidriera was presumably referring to the soul’s
ambivalent photosensitivity, when he invited his friends to test his remarkable
understanding, acquired through being made of glass instead of flesh. As glass
was transparent and delicate, he explained, the soul could function more efficiently than if it were enclosed in a dense, earthen body.29
It seemed that acquisition of intellectual genius, as the first stage in the soul’s
to
26
For an authoritative account of commentatio see M. A. Screech, ’Good Madness in Christendom’, in
The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, edited by W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, &
Michael Shepherd, 3 vols (London: Tavistock Publications, 1985-8), I (1985), 25-39 (29). Bruno,
’Dialogo quarto’, De gl’heroici furori, 205. For other mystical trances see Sebastián de Córdoba, ’Egloga
II’ Garcilaso a lo divino, 185, lines 500-08; and Thomas Lodge, ’Sonnet XIX’, Phillis, 25.
De Hominis Dignitate, 271. He said that, according to Moses, uomo came from Latin HUMUS.
Donio cited by D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (London:
of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 193.
University
28
See The Merchant of Venice [1594], V. 1. 58-65; José de Valdivielso, ’El Hospital de Locos’, in Teatro
completo, edited by Ricardo Arias y Arias and Robert V. Piluso (Madrid: Ediciones Isla, 1975), I, 84, and
105; Sebastián de Córdoba, ’Soneto XXV’, Garcilaso a lo divino, 119; and Ferreira, La Eufrosina, III. 2.
177.
29
’To Sir Bevis Thelwall, knight (Petri ad vincula), at Peter House in London’ (1643), in Howell,
Familiar Letters, II, 79. See also’To Sir Ed.B., knight’ (1635), II, 54. Cervantes, Licenciado Vidriera, 880b.
27
Pico,
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mystical ascent, was caused by dryness of the brain, more than by temperature.
Du Laurens specifically mentioned the Glass Man in this context, stressing that
dryness was at the root of the melancholic delusion. If these men happened to
look at some common household article, he said, such as a pitcher or glass, this
object would impose itself upon their self-perception. But he also endorsed the
Aristotelian theory of over-heating, saying that when the humour grows hot,
it causes a kind of divine rapture called Enthousiasma, which incites men to
imitate philosophers, poets, and prophets. Dryness was indeed a notable feature
of mystical experiences, as San Juan de la Cruz confirmed. In popular literature,
Cervantes’s Vidriera also becomes very thin, and ’dried up’ after his illness, and
in Lingua Olfactus attributes Tactus’s Melancholy to dryness of the brain.3o
The ultimate stage of these mystical excursions of the soul was evidently a
purification by fire on the Day of Judgement. According to the Book of Revelations all bodies fused on this day into one ’glassy sea’. The ascetic writer
Padre Nieremberg explained that Saint John used the symbol to signify Man’s
transparency in the sight of God, whose divine vision penetrates Man as easily
as if he were glass. A lay variation on this meaning is found in a report from
Venice in 1621 about glass-making, when James Howell mused on the apparent
connection between glass and the Day of Judgement:
But when I pried into the materials, and observed the furnaces and the calcinations, the transubstantiations, the liquefactions that are incident to this art, my
thoughts were raised to a higher speculation: that if this small furnace-fire hath
virtue to convert such a small lump of dark dust and sand into such a precious
clear body as crystal, surely that grand universal fire which shall happen at the
day of judgement, may by its violent ardour vitrify and turn to one lump of
crystal the whole body of the earth, nor am I the first that fell upon this conceit.311
There could be no literary metaphor more germane to this eschatological
concept than that of the alchemist’s still or ’limbeck’. Just a few years before
Howell’s observation, John Donne’s ’Elegy to the Lady Marckham’ had portrayed
the hand of Death, like a potter, re-fashioning the dead body into porcelain. The
poem ends by describing the fire on the Day of Judgement, which will blend all
into an elixir capable of giving new life. 32
30
Du Laurens, A Discourse, 97, 95, and 86. Compare Historia Vitae et Mortis (1623), in The Works of
Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols
(London, 1857-1901), II (1857), 119. Saint John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, edited by
Thomas Baker, fourth edition (London, 1916), 38; Cervantes, Licenciado Vidriera, 888b; Tomkis, Lingua,
351. Compare Lope, La Dorotea, I. 5. 167-68.
31
Nieremberg, De la hermosura de Dios y su amabilidad, in Obras, 373-4; compare The Seer of
Everything in Gracián, Criticón, 467. Revelations 4. 6; 15. 2; compare Daniel 12. 3; and Wisdom 3. 7.
Familiar Letters, 63.
Howell,
32
’Elegie uppon the Death of the Ladie Marckham [1609]’, in The Complete Poems of John Donne, edited
by Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols (Blackburn: The Fuller Worthies’ Library, 1872-3), II, 128, lines 18-28;
Thomas Lodge, Phillis, 54.
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III. The familiar in a bottle : immortal quests
The Glass Man’s fatal attraction for light thus betrayed a profound concern for
the welfare of the soul as the substance of life. Many contemporary medical
accounts of melancholics list a series of delusions focussing on the existential
question - men of butter, wax, mud, and straw - all motivating elaborate
schemes of protection for the body. But evidence of a preoccupation with the soul
is also found in a series of derangements which, like photophobia, concentrated
more on essence than accident. They merit inc’usion here because of a common
purpose: to preserve the contents of a fragile vessel and so guarantee its vital
function. One obsession was based on the oil-lamp principle. Garzoni cites one
Nicoletto da Gattia who thought that he was the wick of an oil-lamp. A fear of
burning too weakly motivated his request that people blow on him from all sides
to fan the flame. The same delusion was recorded by Walkington. Existential
confusion also afflicted Cellini’s jailer at Sant’Angelo, who periodically imagined
that he was either dead or a pitcher of oil, although it is unclear what behaviour
this last aberration provoked. 33
Emphasis on contents and/or function rather than container suggests a variant
on the body/soul preoccupation which probably still originates in Aristotle, but
which aspires, not to commentatio, but to immortality. Aristotle’s image of a
burning lamp as a metaphor for life was subsequently assimilated into Galen’s
humoral physiology. Comparing the heart to the wick of an oil lamp, and
the blood to oil, Galen claimed that the heat of the wick attracted the oil
in a continuous process. Doubtless influenced by Galen, Walkington’s tract
incorporates the motif, comparing man’s heart to the flame of a burning lamp,
the moisture serving as its oil. As in the lamp, he said, there had to be efficient
use of fuel; too much heat exhausted the oil, whereas an excess of oil suffocated
the flame. He warned against extravagant living which would exhaust the supply
of oil and extinguish the lamp prematurely. 34
Besides medical influence on the Lamp Man’s self-perception, popular folklore also contributed the notion of the Life-Index - a charm consisting of an
absent person’s urine or blood preserved in a corked bottle. Any changes in
its appearance signified illness or death. When used as a repository of luck,
guaranteeing protection against evil spells, this was known as the ’witches’
bottle’. It was a short step from the idea of a vessel containing a beneficent
genius, whose release by breaking the pot would bring disaster, to the idea that
the vessel was the prison of a disarmed evil spirit. This must have been the basis
33
For Oil Lamp/Candle Men see Garzoni, L’Ospidale, 254, and Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 70v. For
Oil/Water Jug Men see Cellini, La Vita, I, CVII, 237; and Lorenzo Selva, Della Metamorfosi cioè
trasformazione del virtuoso, second edition (Florence: Filippo Giunti, 1598), 154, cited in G. Hainsworth,
’La source du Licenciado Vidriera’, Bulletin Hispanique, xxxii (1930), 70-2 (71).
34
Peter H. Niebyl, ’Old Age, Fever, and the Lamp Metaphor’, Journal of the History of Medicine, xxvi
(1971), 351-68 (356). Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 33r, and see 57r. See also Luigi Cornaro, ’La vita
sobria’ (Padua, 1558); Leonard Lessius, Hygiasticon (Antwerp, 1614), cited in Niebyl, 363.
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of the final variant on the Glass Man - the familiar in a bottle. Generally defined
as a ’familiar devil or spirit supposed to be under man’s power’, and obliged
to ’attend at call’ (OED), the most famous of these was the fifteenth-century
Spanish sorcerer/alchemist, Enrique de Villena, who was popularly supposed
to have preserved himself in a glass flask. Literature through the ages kept
this tradition alive, and his name became a metonym for the familiar in Spain.
Quevedo alluded to him in several works. The connection between familiars
and melancholics is also evident in Salas Barbadillo’s The Inveterate Malcontent,
whose protagonist is served by ’ministers of the flask, those the world call familiars’, in his quest for happiness.3s
By the early seventeenth century, it seems, awareness of familiars was acute.
Scot and Wier described and derided the practice, whilst in Spain the execution
of the hated Italian Caraffa brothers invited allusions to familiars, because
garrafa was another synonym (besides vidriera and redoma) for the urinal or
flask. Said the court chronicler Luis Zapata (c.1592): ’On reflection, one
could say that they lived up to the meaning of their name: bottling up all
the wealth and estates they could during the papacy of their uncle, and
finally breaking like fragile flasks, when one was garrotted, and the other
quartered’. The same imagery recurs in a burlesque application for entrance
into a literary academy, when a candidate declares: ’Licentiate Garrafa, Butler
of Hippocrates, Dispenser of Dioscorides, desires to infuse himself into this
academy, and although he is so crafty/bottle-shaped (redomado), as everyone
agrees, he would undertake to evacuate conceits, because he has as many
graduations as the best university by virtue of the courses he has conducted’.
His application is rejected because no poet, say the Junta, ever came out of a
bottle.36
Conclusion
Throughout this study of melancholic glass delusions - the Glass Man, the Urinal
Man, the Lamp Man, and the Familiar in a Bottle - there emerges a constant
preoccupation with the nature of body and soul, doubtless influenced by a recent
schism in the Christian world over the question of salvation and the after-life.
35
On Villena see Polo de Medina, Obras completas, 274; Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, ’Sueño de la
muerte’, in Sueños y discursos de verdades descubridoras de abusos, vicios y engaños en todos los oficios y estados
del mundo (1627), edited by Felipe C. R. Maldonado (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1972), 206-15; and
Quevedo, ’Entremés de las sombras’, Premáticas, desenfados, y entremeses (1600), edited by M. Aguilar,
Colección de Autores Regocijados (Madrid, 1929), 267. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, ’Entremés
de el Malcontentadizo’, in Colección de Entremeses, Loas, Bailes, Jácaras y Mojigangas desde fines del siglo
XVI a mediados del XVIII, NBAE, XVIII, edited by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, 2 vols (Madrid, 1911), I,
and see Luis Vélez de Guevara, El Diablo Cojuelo (1641), BAE, XXXIII (1871), 21-45.
280;
36
Scot, Discovene, 342-58; Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis daemonum (French text of 1579), reprinted by
Bibliotheque Diabolique: Histoires, disputes et discours des illusions et impostures des diables, edited by T.
Erastus, 2 vols (Paris, 1885), I, 303-4; Luis Zapata, Miscelánea, in Memorial Histórico Español, 50 vols
(Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851-1963), XI (1859), 244. For Licenciado Garrafa see José
Sánchez, Academias literarias del Siglo de Oro Español (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1961), 119.
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Theologians reacted to this period of free-thinking by defining strict boundaries
between orthodoxy and heresy. Many mystics came under interrogation by the
Inquisition, and in this maelstrom the layman struggled to understand weighty
doctrinal issues in some meaningful way, but his simple imagery often brought
him into the Inquisitorial courts. 37
For those whose faith was strong enough to shoulder the Church’s advocation
to prepare oneself for dying (and there was a prolific literature on this topic) the
melancholic delusion manifest itself in
a
fervent wish
to
be released from this
earthly forum. 38 James Howell’s reflections as he languished in prison embody the
diverse manifestations of the glass delusion: ’The soul is a spark of immortality,
she is a divine light, and the body is but a socket of clay that holds it. In some this
light goes out with an ill-favoured stench. But others have a save-all to preserve it
from making any snuff at all’ . 39
Meanwhile, those men who faltered under the burden of ’dying a good death’
embraced the marginal quest for immortality, as professed by the medieval
sorcerors, but in the final reckoning the doctrine was the same - that is, health
and longevity depended upon preserving a vital life force within a fragile
and translucent container. Men of letters dabbling in the newer sciences of
physiognomy, psychology, optics and natural philosophy in their quest for
a solution to the existential problem often saved themselves from ecclesiastical censure by reserving their discussions for the academies where they
congregated.4° The legacy of these academies to the modern world, often
masquerading as fiction, is probably the best account there is of Melancholy.
Allusions to Melancholy and theories pertaining are consciously and liberally disseminated through their works. These, together with the ’unwitting testimony’
accompanying them, constitute a fascinating mosaic for medical historians
today.
Surveys of modern psychiatric institutions have only revealed two specific
(uncorroborated) cases of the glass delusion. Foulche-Delbosc reports finding
one Glass Man in a Paris asylum, and a woman who thought she was a potsherd
37
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos ofa Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by John
and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1980); Sara Tilghman Nalle,
’Religion and reform in a Spanish Diocese: Cuenca, 1545-1650’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
John
Hopkins University, 1983), 32, n.60,124, and 249-52.
38
For literature on purification of the anima see Martin B. Becker, ’Aspects of Lay Piety in Early
Renaissance Florence’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, edited by
Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 10 (Leyden: E.
J. 39Brill, 1972-), II (1974), 177-99 (195, n.2).
’To the incomparable Lady, the Lady M. Cary. London, [1657]’, Howell, Familiar Letters, III, 107.
See also ’The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, edited by Agnes M. C.
Latham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 49-50; and Donne, ’A Valediction’ in The Elegies.
40
On learning as a means of conquering the fear of death see Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning and
Novum Organum (1605), revised by James Edward Creighton (New York: Willey Book Company, 1900),
35.
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recorded at an asylum in Meerenberg.41 However, certain variations endure
in life and literature with the same existential connotations. Michael Jackson, the
popular screen star, reputedly lives inside a plastic bubble in an aseptic world. In
literature Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking-Glass explores a strange world
beyond the glass. Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda, threaded with allusions
to the after-life, uses glass variously as a cipher for the soul, for purity, and for
life. ’Glass,’ he says, ’is a confession, an accusation, a cry of pain’.42 Finally, a
recent poem by George Szirtes resurrects that earlier Glass Man, burdened with
existential apprehension, expressing himself through familiar images of glass,
clairvoyance, and psychopathology:
was
You leave one body, enter another, thinner than
The one you wore. Having nothing to declare
The customs do not bother you. You pass
To other gravities, no longer man or woman,
But neuter as the clothes you wear
As thin and transparent as glass.
In the glass you see anatomies,
Bacteria and germs in broken places.
You see the future in slivers and shards
Faint, farcical lobotomies.
I try to discover my disease in traces
Of tea-leaves, life-lines, livers, tarot-cards.
Impossible to read the auguries:
The future waits on fiercer surgeries.
For Szirtes the thin, frangible quality of glass makes it an ideal emblem of exposure and danger, keeping things at a distance, whilst still exposing what is inside.
He relates glass to ’the traumatic process of destabilized identity - fleeing one’s
country and upbringing for example, undergoing official and personal questions
which raise doubts about the validity of your whole existence’. Szirtes adds that
a collection of poems titled ’Being Glass’ by Emma Rose was inspired by the
alcoholic breakdown of her father.43
If, as Lillian Feder believes, delusions are ’distorted communications of deeply
41
Le Licencié Vidriera nouvelle traduite
en
français,
edited
by
R. Foulché-Delbosc
(Paris: Librairie H.
Walter, 1892), 36. J. Van Deventer, Verslag betreffende het gesticht Meerenberg over het jaar 1896 (Haarlem,
1897), 79, cited in Binneveld, Een Psychiatrisch Verleden, 30, n.25. See also F. F. Blok, & D. Folmer,
’Zeldzame hypochondrische wanen’, in Tijdschrift voor psychiatrie, xvi (1974), 294-300, cited in Blok,
Caspar
Barlaeus, 117.
42
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (London
& Boston: Faber &
Faber, 1988), 376, 83, 134-5, 16, and
134.
43
George Szirtes, ’Border Crossings’, in Metro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); also
communication. Emma Rose, Being Glass (Berkhamsted: Priapus Press, 1982).
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private
206
suppressed human impulses’, then these literary works must contain the key
to understanding twentieth-century man in his milieu. Melancholics may well
have been trapped in myths (some of their own making) but as several modern
writers have pointed out, the responsibility for myth-making lies just as much
with psychiatrists. To divorce fact from fantasy simply by labelling the one as
’history’ or ’medicine’, and the other as ’fiction’ is merely to create a new myth
about ourselves. Life is inextricably linked with literature, and that is why there
are no passports to a myth-free future. As Porter observes of madness in general:
’What kind of a delusion would that be?’. The myth of Melancholy, at any rate,
is self-perpetuating. 44
44
Lillian Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),281. On madmen
myths see ibid., 9; and Roy Porter, ’Grounds of Mental Cruelty’, The Sunday Times, 9 July 1989,
p. G5, reviewing Social Order, Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective,
Andrew Scull (London: Routledge, 1989).
and
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