Swoon

A poetics of passing out

Naomi Booth

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526101181
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526101266
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Swoon is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on swooning's rich history as well as its potential to provide new insights into the contemporary.

This study demonstrates that passing-out has had a pivotal place in English literature. Beginning with an introduction to the swoon as a marker of aesthetic sensitivity, it includes chapters on swooning and generic transformation in Chaucer and Shakespeare; morbid, femininised swoons and excessive affect in romantic, gothic, and modernist works; irony, cliché and bathos in the swoons of contemporary romance fiction. This book revisits key texts to show that passing-out has been intimately connected to explorations of emotionality, ecstasy and transformation; to depictions of sickness and dying; and to performances of gender and gendering. Swoon offers an exciting new approach the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.

1
Heart-stopped transformations: Swooning in late medieval literature

1 Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, c.1435, Museo del Prado

To be true is to be vulnerable to death.

Stephen A. Barney, ‘Troilus Bound’ (1972)¹

In some of the earliest surviving literary examples of swooning, its symbolic power is bound up with the potential it allows for dramatic alteration: for conversion, for renewal, for sudden changes in direction, for revival into life from symbolic death. Saints and romance lovers alike are laid low by a swooning that is the low point of a parabola of possible transformation.² In this chapter I focus on instances of the swoon in late medieval literature where it allows for the possibility of dramatic change at the very edge of life; swooning in the literature of this period is often a phenomenon at the extreme of existence, connoting a dangerous vulnerability to death. There is a rich vocabulary for swooning at this time, and many of its forms are intimately connected to mortality. The verb form ‘swelten’, for instance, initially meant, ‘[t]o die, perish’ (c.888),³ but comes by c.1330 also to mean to swoon.⁴ Another common form, ‘swouen’ (c.1250), is derived from the Old English geswogan (meaning insensible, or in a swoon), a past participle of swogan, which could mean to suffocate.⁵ Coming round from a swoon is coming back to life from death.

The first swoons that I examine in this chapter are found in the ‘Life of Mary Magdalen’ (c.1290); in this text, the suggestiveness of swooning as a feint of death and resurrection in Christ, and as an expression of maternal suffering, is richly demonstrated. I then focus in detail on the most famous swoony text in medieval literature: Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (c.1380). Troilus’ swoon has been the focus of a much recent criticism, some of it reflecting a post-medieval correspondence between swooning and femininity, whereby the swoon is seen to affect the representation of Troilus’ masculinity.⁶ I reconsider the relationship between passivity and passing out in terms of the construction of the gender of the swoon in these early appearances. As we shall see, in medieval literature swooning is common to both male and female characters in a way that contemporary readers might find surprising, and it is not in conflict with medieval concepts of masculine love. I am indebted in this discussion to Gretchen Mieszkowski, who, reading Troilus and Crisyede with and through Judith Butler's work, has shown that the anachronism of some modern responses to the text is a result of the spectacular way in which the swoon has been co-opted into the production of gender over the past six centuries, such that it can be said that the swoon ‘acquires gender’ through its literary performances in the eighteenth century and therefore appears to modern readers as a ‘feminine’ act.⁷

Chaucer provides us with a strikingly physiological account of swooning: Troilus’ heart, and the way it is described as being violently overwhelmed, reflects the potential dangerousness of swooning in medieval medical and literary discourses. The swoon is one of the tortuous delights of courtly love; an exquisite formulation of physical suffering. It is a bedfellow of other figurations of a lover's disequilibrium and physical danger: it is contiguous with falling in love, lovesickness and heartbreak, for example. But the risk of death, I will argue, is key to the swoon's thrill. To claim that there is a connection between physical risk and eroticism in the literature of this period is not, of course, new. Slavoj Žižek has posited a relationship between courtly romance and personal jeopardy in deliberately anachronistic terms when he tells us that ‘it is only with the emergence of masochism, of the masochistic couple, towards the end of [the nineteenth century] that we can now grasp the libidinal economy of courtly love’.⁸ I hope to add something new to this account by thinking about the dangerousness of swooning in the context of theorisations of masochism that position it as a potential transformation in, and of, subjectivity.

Leo Bersani is perhaps the critic best-known for making this kind of radical claim about masochism as a ‘self-shattering’ of the subject, and I will read his work in order to help us think about the erotics of suffering rendered through literary swooning. I will re-present Troilus’ swoon as a vulnerability he shares with Criseyde under the erotic charge of physical risk, and I will focus on Criseyde's own (often overlooked) swoon and its asymmetrical but paired relationship to Troilus’, to think about the different kind of physical risk that it represents. In so doing, I want to suggest that attentively reading the swoons in the poem helps us to understand its larger patterns of possible transformation and of eventual failure – which is finally formalised as tragedy.

Saintly swooning in the ‘Life of Mary Magdalen’

The ‘Life of Mary Magdalen’ (sic) is a saintly biography collected in the Early South English Legendary of approximately 1290,⁹ and it contains some of the earliest surviving Middle English examples of swooning. There are numerous examples of earlier French depictions of swooning, many of which are detailed by Judith Weiss in her extensive work on medieval swooning.¹⁰ Barry Windeatt suggests that swooning reaches a peak in the medieval period, in excess of anything that may have preceded it: ‘It is not hard to find cases where instances of swooning were added to medieval versions of stories from earlier times and different cultures, and these cases might be presented as evidence that demonstrative sensibility is more pleasing to medieval taste than to taste before or since.’ ¹¹

Swoons are crucial to the narrative in the hagiography of Mary Magdalene – and this particular legend may be from an earlier source than most of the rest of the Legendary.¹² In the 1290 version of Mary's life, saint ‘Marie’ is described as a beautiful woman, ‘fair’ beyond compare (63). But she is also ‘sunful and forlein [unchaste]’ (6); Marie is full of pride, and when she inherits a third of her parents’ estate she wishes to adorn herself yet more exquisitely. The more beautiful she becomes, the narrator tells us, the more sinful and unwise (65). She pursues the desires of her flesh (‘hire flechses wille’ (51)) and lies with rich men for great reward (‘gret mede’ (54)): she becomes known to all as ‘Sunfole wumman’. The decisive change from sinner to saint occurs after Marie's first encounter with ‘Jhesu’. Marie approaches Jesus unbidden, kisses his feet, bathes them in her tears and dries them with her hair. She is absolved of her sins and becomes a bold and devoted evangelist of Christ.

After the Passion, the Legendary tells us, Christians were forced to flee from persecution. Marie boards a ship, which is blown to Marseilles. Here Marie sets about evangelising and petitioning for support, as the Christian group are destitute and close...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A poetics of passing out
• 1: Heart-stopped transformations: Swooning in late medieval literature
• 2: ‘Fall’n into a pit of ink’: Shakespearean swoons and unreadable body-texts
• 3: Feeling too much: The swoon and the (in)sensible woman
• 4: ‘Dead-born’: Shadow resurrections and artistic transformations
• 5: Vampiric swoons and other dark ecologies
• 6: Lovesick, lesbian swoons and the romantic art of sinking
• Passing out: Contemporary catatonia
• Select bibliography
• Index