‘The dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open’: The Recision of the Male Melancholic Genius in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

Abstract

The widely accepted assumption that melancholy was an epidemic in early modern England has recently been challenged. As Agnus Gowland has shown, medical records from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries do not support the notion that melancholy was an epidemic disease (77–80). In general, it is perhaps more appropriate to conceive of melancholy as a metaphorical concept lacking a corresponding physical condition (Bader 20–4). While blood, phlegm and yellow bile were actually known as real matter to Hippocrates, Theoprastus and Galen, no medical authority throughout antiquity and the Renaissance really claimed that he had actually seen black bile. It is perhaps largely owing to this mysterious somatic nature that there was a sustained interest in discussing the melancholic condition. Thus, as Gowland has argued, ‘[i]nstead of asking why people were afflicted with melancholy, we must ask why people described themselves or others as melancholic, and consider what they meant by this’ (83). In his assessment Gowland identifies two main causes for the heightened interest in melancholy during the seventeenth century: first, ‘the increased interest in the occult aspects of natural philosophy and medicine’ (83) and, second, a sustained fascination with ‘religious, moral-philosophical and political discourses on the passions of the soul’ (84).¹ If we follow Gowland in his assessment of early modern discourses of melancholia (and I think that his assessment is convincing) and if we agree that melancholy as a discourse still existed in the nineteenth century, it is fruitless to focus on the ‘interest in occult aspects of natural philosophy and medicine’.