Friday, July 4, 2014

Mirrors of Madness: Trans Suicide in Gower's Narcissus


“Man, the which, for his complexioun is mad upon divisioun"


*************************************

The following is a transcript of "Queer Gower"
from the Theoretical Approaches to John Gower Roundtable
June 30th-July 4th, 2014

*************************************

A beautiful “lordes sone,” wanders away “unto the forest gan to fare” (Gower.I.xiii.2275-2291). While performing the chivalric masculinity of a hunt, he wanders away, feeling disordered by his hot and dry body. He finds a “lusty welle” and in it sees his “ymage” (Gower.I.xiii.2306-2316).  Suddenly his proud, unified world is unmade. He sees himself and begins “To sette his herte and to beginner / Thing which he mihte nevere winne.” Despairing he may never fulfill the desire for the thing he sees in his reflection, “He smot himself til he was ded” (Gower.I.xiii.2342). 

We know this story as well as our 14th century counter-parts: the Tale of Narcissus. As many readers in as many times look into the text and see their lives and world reflected in it. Among its famous readers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan see in it an allegory for subject formation; the process of looking into a mirror and using fantasy to form ourselves as a unified “I.”

We assume, they do not tell us, that they have read Ovid’s myth and yet what if they had instead read their John Gower? Set within a treatise about “love” and “division,” in the 14th century, Gower reflects on Narcissus in his section on “pride,” seeing a queer man “no womman for to love,” gazing into the mirror and “Wene / It were a womman that he syh” (Gower.I.xiii.2279-2321As historians of change it is our responsibility to tend not only the to this well as a literary site for “ymaginacion” but the “diversité” readers see reflected in it (Gower.Prologue.988). We must pause to consider the possible histories and futures such tales offer queer readers.



*************************************

*************************************

In 2003, Diane Watt looked into Gower’s Narcissus Tale from the Confessio Amantis and saw the impossibility of homoerotic desire and the refusal of moral man to imagine a man’s desire for the male form (Watt, Amoral Gower, 2003). Watt’s central argument, that the changes and inconsistencies between the Confessio and its sources, as well as different parts of the Confessio with other parts, suggests an approach to the text that is always relative and evolving, providing queer “ymage” of the “diversité” of the world in which he and we live (Gower.Prologue.988).

Watt’s groundbreaking queer reading of Gower’s Narcissus opened up a text and an author to theoretical ways of reading that remains largely to be explored. Yet, despite putting her analysis of the text in a chapter alongside what she identifies as “transvestite, transgender, and transsexual” stories (the Tale of Deianira, Achilles and Deidamia, and Iphis and Ianthe), Watt was more able to see resisted homosexuality than transgender in her Narcissistic reflection of the man who saw himself as a woman (Watt). 


This pivot from trans possibilities to gay impossibilities in the medieval imagination may accurately reflect a surprising truth about the medieval period, i.e. it may have been more acceptable to be trans in fourteenth century England than to show same-sex attraction, but this conclusion fails to see or acknowledge the trans possibilities of the Narcissus myth.


*************************************
*************************************

In this short paper I examine how Gower offers Narcissus’s trans desire and death as emblematic of the division of unity as the “the vice of alle dedly sinne,” that must end in death (Gower.Prologue.1009). Seeing himself as a woman, becoming “most bejaped in his wit” through the self-division and madness of gender dysphoria, Narissus despairs and dies (Gower.I.viii.2363). Unexpectedly, in Gower’s Confessio, we find a haunting story of Transgender suicide.

By brining critical attention to the way in which constancy and ablebodiedness is defined against the trans and mad body of Narcissus, push Watt’s queer reading further. In doing so, I exemplify two critical definitions of “queer” beyond 21st century understandings of homosexuality or transgender (1) the look towards death, a division which disturbs the unity of a norm (Edelman, No Future, 2004); and (2) the look towards a “livable life,” a diversity that transforms the norm (Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004). 


In this way, a Trans reading is as much a continuation of these tensions in queer readings of Gower as a transformation (queering) of it. A queer/trans Gower is a poet of diversity, straddling male and female, unity and division, past and future, constancy and change.


*************************************

*************************************

As Gower scholarship has dually argued, the Confessio Amantis struggles to find “unity” in a world generated by “division,” “diversité,” and change. This week we have heard Gabrielle Parkin  ("Hidden Substance and Dynamic Matter") and Arthur Bahr ("Reflecting on Mirrors") unpack Gower’s alchemy, while Pamela Yee ("Narrative Medicine") and William Youngman ("the Alchemy of Age") practiced Gower’s medicines, projects of purifying substances to find their hidden and unified “nature.” In many places Gower’s Confession of Love desires a return to an original undivided state. It is suggestive that Gower then begins by considering the Sin of Pride, wherein we find the tale of Narcissus, signaling that division is perhaps at its most dangerous and immediate when it takes the form of self-isolation.

The problem for Narcissus then is a person feels cut off from community with their world: "Ther was no womman for to love. / So hihe he sette himselve above / Of stature and of beauté bothe, / That him thoghte alle wommen lothe" (Gower.I.viii.2279-2282). 
We don’t know why Narcissus is compelled to solitude. The text states that "So was ther no comparisoun / As toward his condicioun" suggesting that he considered himself too distinct, too queer to experience kindness with women (Gower.I.viii.2283-2284). This “presumption” leads Narcissus to wander alone in the woods, a place signaling a spiraling into feminine internality as well as madness, i.e. Lancelot and Tristan's becoming "wood" in the forest in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur  (Gower.I.viii.1883-1976). This spiraling leads him to turn his social isolation into internal division ending in death.


*************************************
*************************************

Since the early 20th century, transsexuality has been medically diagnosed as form of narcissism and schizophrenia (Harry Benjamin, 1954; David O Cauldwell, 1949). 
Watt stresses that Gower's "trans-" stories are commonly described by Gower under the terms "false-semblant" and "false-witness" (emphasizing transphobia of artificial bodies), it should be noted that a commonality between the vices that head these sections (Envy and Sloth) keep with the theme of transgender as kind of madness. Envy reflecting the "divisioun" across lines of sex of gender dysphoria (once understood as a type of schizophrenia) that lead to "false-semblant" where "word descordeth to his thoght" (Gower.II.iv.1893).  Likewise, "Sloth" or "Accidiam" bears in its passive formulation traits describing what is currently diagnosed as "manic-depression" (now understood as congenital with schizophrenia) as Ann Cvetkovich explored in her 2012 book, Depression a Public Feeling.

This diagnostic classification of transgender, works like Gower’s exemplum, looking into the hidden substance of its being to purify it of its faults so as to salvage a unity with the past. The call for Trans Narrative is in part a search for origins as we struggle to unify our own divisions: male and female, sane and mad, self and other, past and future. In this way, Gower’s Narcissus reflects the mission of the Confessio and medieval studies: to seek in the past answers to who we are and how we got here. 

Looking back into Gower’s Narcissus, described as “sotie” (i.e. foolish or mentally impaired) we witness a history for transgender bound up in classifications of madness (Gower.I.viii.539). It is critical that “mad” in Middle English signals both the meanings of “making” and “insanity,” as a careful attention to madness in medieval literature, such as in the case of Narcissus, reveals that the pathology comes not so much from a break in the continuum of a “kynd” nature but rather the revelation of the division and inconstancy undergird our bodies.



*************************************


*************************************

Narcissus enters into the madness of his division, the trans desire to “ymage” ourselves as another gender, “Thurgh fol ymaginacion” (Gower.I.viii.2269). As a result, he becomes “most bejaped in his wit” when “he caste his lok / Into the welle and hiede tok, / He sih the like of his visage, / And wende ther were an ymage / Of such a nimphe as tho was faie… and made him wene / It were a womman." (Gower.I.viii.2313-2321). This looking at the self in the water reflects a tired trope in Transgender film where the characters stares at themselves in the mirror, giving a sense of doubled or trebled vision. It is the audience looking at the trans body as it looks back at itself, an entre into the divided reflection that Gower gives of Narcissus.

Although the Amantis Gower claims after the story of Narcissus to be free of this vice, his own work testifies against him, revealing the creativity of division and his investment in the world of diversity, where “man; / The which, for his complexioun / Is mad upon divisioun / Of cold, of hot, of moist, of drye, / He mot be verray kynde dye.” (Gower.I.viii.974-978). In humoral science, everybody is made of these elements. 


When Narcissus rebels against his own masculine dryness on a hot day (According to Hippocrates and Galen, male sex was generated by bodies that contained more heat and dryness) and goes to a “lusty welle” to drink where upon seeing his image as a woman, "For whanne he wepte, he sih hire wepe, / And whanne he cride, he tok good kepe, / The same word sche cride also" (Gower.I.viii.2325-2327). Overflowing with feminine wetness (According to Hippocrates and Galen, female sex was generated by bodies that contained more cold and wetness), the makings and inconstancy of his gender reflects on itself. To know of our making is to know of our own madness: we will be unmade, transformed, and die.


*************************************

*************************************

The narrative of queer failure and unmaking is as seductive as it is fatal. Gower writes that what we desire more than any object is the experience of desire itself; lack of fulfillment that leaves us wanting: “Bot for ther is diversité / Withinne himself, he may noght laste, / That he ne deieth ate laste” (Gower.I.viii.988-990). The diversity of Narcissus constantly disturbs his sense of wholeness. The longing to be and to have a feminine body sets him on a course for transformation. Unfortunately, the only transformation imaginable to Narcissus and Gower is the metamorphosis of death (a path forged by Ovid and affirmed by Gower's theory of Christian sin). The Trans Narcissus must die. Eros and Thanatos, love and division are intertwined. This queer fatalism turns the trans Narcissus into a presence that is always already becoming the past. It is a desire that has, as Lee Edelman writes: “No Future” (Edelman, No Future, 2004). 

To adapt a sentiment from Carolyn Dinshaw, we reach out to touch a trans history to fight the isolation that comes from the insistence that we are a product of only the past century (Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 1999). To deny us a past is to deny the power of continuity that allows us to imagine a future for ourselves.

These are the stakes for queering Gower’s Confession of Love: dwelling in a world where diversity is akin to sin, we may not escape the sentence for sin: death. In the past decade since Watt’s reading, the number of Trans persons that commit suicide by the age of twenty has increased from 50% to 60%. Half our population looks into the mirror, sees no future and becomes history. To be a trans person today over the age of twenty one is be in the minority, a survivor in a silent genocide of our children, executed by their own hands.

Gower gives us a mirror to reflect on ourselves and our world: where Trans youths are isolated for their diversity and internalize that division until they become so estranged from themselves that the violence against the self is not seen as such. A queer Gower allows us to sit in the subjectivity of Narcissus, to reflect on his desire for change, to reach out with him for it. Perhaps that is why we keep on looking back at the water: we wait to see change, to see a different ending. That is why it is critical that we share these stories. Even if it is only ripples in the clear pond of the past, representing trans histories keeps desire alive, the refusal to foreclose the possibilities for our past or our future.


*************************************
*************************************
Thank You!
*************************************

No comments:

Post a Comment