“I cannot name the disease”: Male Hysteria and Converted Homoeroticism in The Winter’s Tale
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“I cannot name the disease”: Male Hysteria and Converted Homoeroticism in The Winter’s Tale This essay explores the pathological jealousy of Leontes, the King of Sicilia, in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). Although the king blindly believes his wife, Hermione and his friend, Polixenes have committed adultery, which seems to reflect Leontes’s male anxiety about femininity, the true cause of his jealousy is his homoerotic desire for Polixenes. The king’s notorious condemnation of Hermione’s sexuality actually involves a defense mechanism to cover up Leontes’s unstable masculinity; indeed, his physical symptoms expose his same-sex love for Polixenes. Despite the assumed incompatibility of psychoanalysis and historicism, this essay combines the two methodologies, and relies on the fact that both early modern and Freudian accounts of hysteria claimed it as a bodily disease. First, I examine Edward Jorden’s book, A Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), highlighting that the tyrannical king suffers from hysterical bodily symptoms, which were presumed to indicate a female disease in early modern England. Furthermore, based on Freud’s argument about hysteria and conversion, this essay argues that Leontes’s homoerotic desire is transformed into heterosexual jealousy. Finally, by employing Rene Girard’s theory of triangulated desire, I identify the mediator of this love triangle as Hermione, not Polixenes. Leontes thus converts his homoerotic desire into heterosexual jealousy, while his body displays hysterical symptoms.
Abstract
“I cannot name the disease”: Male Hysteria and Converted Homoeroticism in The Winter’s Tale This essay explores the pathological jealousy of Leontes, the King of Sicilia, in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). Although the king blindly believes his wife, Hermione and his friend, Polixenes have committed adultery, which seems to reflect Leontes’s male anxiety about femininity, the true cause of his jealousy is his homoerotic desire for Polixenes. The king’s notorious condemnation of Hermione’s sexuality actually involves a defense mechanism to cover up Leontes’s unstable masculinity; indeed, his physical symptoms expose his same-sex love for Polixenes. Despite the assumed incompatibility of psychoanalysis and historicism, this essay combines the two methodologies, and relies on the fact that both early modern and Freudian accounts of hysteria claimed it as a bodily disease. First, I examine Edward Jorden’s book, A Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), highlighting that the tyrannical king suffers from hysterical bodily symptoms, which were presumed to indicate a female disease in early modern England. Furthermore, based on Freud’s argument about hysteria and conversion, this essay argues that Leontes’s homoerotic desire is transformed into heterosexual jealousy. Finally, by employing Rene Girard’s theory of triangulated desire, I identify the mediator of this love triangle as Hermione, not Polixenes. Leontes thus converts his homoerotic desire into heterosexual jealousy, while his body displays hysterical symptoms.
참고문헌 (25)
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