Staging Exotica and Ecophobia

Abstract

Tomaso Garzoni begins Hospitall of Incurable Fooles (1600) with a startling description that draws together images of monstrosity and sheer ugliness with the general category of “folly,” at once defining madness as female, monstrous, and polluted, while representing a composed mind as male, pure, and, oddly, passive. It is a strange inversion of metaphor, where the colonizer is female and the colonized male: “Folly… is she, who being spred and dispersed, ouer all prouinces and countries in the worlde; sorely vexeth mortall men, and holdeth in subiection under her tyrannicall empire, an infinite number of people and men” (2). This kind of metaphor, unusual in that it implicitly associates men with the land, is consonant with metaphors that depict women as polluted and polluting. As we have seen in previous chapters, discourses that produce difference in terms of commodifiable attributes configure corporeal diffraction as the normative ideal for the body of the Other; yet theorizing this corporeal diffraction does not address the ways in which discourses of less-apparent corporeal significance (specifically discourses of madness) spatialize, transcode, and commodify bodies. The transcodings between the Other and the bestial in discourses of madness, as this chapter shows, is at once speciesist and ecophobic, and there is a generalized environmental loathing implied in the exoticization of early modern Others.