Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Staël were both celebrated as singular geniuses in their day, a status tinged with suffering as well as glory. Rousseau overtly sought “a fame for naturalness, a fame for inner qualities,” and that fame earned him godlike status in the eyes of some fans—particularly those enthused by his best-selling sentimental novel La Nouvelle Héloïse.1 Although he encouraged the intense emotional identification those readers felt with him and his works, Rousseau disliked the unwanted attention it attracted. He thus embraced solitude, the state he considered most compatible with his love for liberty and distaste for the duties associated with civil life.2 He also refused to be seen as a man of letters in the conventional sense: he denounced the frenetic, ambition-driven lifestyle he considered typical of that type and championed reverie in pointed opposition to more deliberate modes of mental application.3 However, despite his efforts to fashion a singular identity, Rousseau was commonly diagnosed as a melancholiac, one of the typical attributes of the intellectual according to many contemporary accounts.
Staël, for her part, was widely declared a “superior” being. “From childhood on, her family and entourage constantly asserted Mme de Staël’s genius”—even though her mother, Suzanne Necker, was cold toward her, and her father, the powerful Swiss banker and French statesman Jacques Necker, “did not like what he called her scribbling.”4 Staël’s public identity was merged with that of the fictional woman genius she created in Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), as is attested by Vigée Le Brun’s well-known portrait of Staël as Corinne; and she was considered “intellectually the greatest woman that ever lived” for almost a century.5 Maintaining respect as a woman of intellectual renown was nonetheless far from easy during Staël’s lifetime, a dilemma she addressed in the chapter “Des Femmes qui cultivent les lettres” in De la littérature (1800): “As soon as a woman has been noted as a distinguished person, the public in general is biased against her.”6 Staël lived this plight very personally: after weathering the storms of the Revolution, which forced her to retreat from Paris to her family château at Coppet, she spent many years in exile because of Napoleon’s hostility toward her. Those experiences clearly shaped her worldview, which combined a steadfast belief in the perfectibility of the human race with a tragic perspective on the situation of “superior beings” in the contemporary era. As she lamented in her journal, “Genius in the midst of society is a pain, an intermittent fever that one would have to have treated like a malady, if the compensations of glory didn’t ease its sorrows.”7
Considered in tandem, Rousseau and Staël illustrate the complex interrelationship that existed between melancholy and genius during a period when both conditions were undergoing a major theoretical reappraisal, along with an upsurge in cultural prestige. Those developments were tied to a range of factors, including the rise of new forms of life writing, the popularity of nerve theory as a causative explanation for psychological suffering, the emergence of mental medicine as a distinct discipline, and changes in thinking about the “nature” of the sexes.
As Jane Darcy points out, there was a close connection between the literary biographies that flourished during the eighteenth century and the self-labeling of their authors as melancholiacs or “hypocondriacks”—the term that James Boswell, an admirer of Rousseau, applied to himself.8 Thanks to transformations introduced by writers like Samuel Johnson, the focus of literary biography shifted away from the achievements of illustrious subjects (the point of emphasis in Plutarchian biography, much admired and imitated in the early modern period) toward their personal suffering. Moreover, acute sensibility was widely held to be a sign of intellectual and social refinement on both sides of the English Channel. This was so well before the rise of the brooding Romantic/Byronic type, “the writer whose creative genius springs from the depths of melancholy.”9
Whereas melancholy is understood today in psychoanalytic terms (rooted in a tradition that runs from Freud to Kristeva), Enlightenment Europe associated it with a variety of factors, physical as well as moral.10 The best-known type of melancholic disorder in the eighteenth century was the “English malady,” which Dr. George Cheyne (author of the well-known 1733 treatise by that name) described as a cluster of ailments that included poor digestion, lethargy and listlessness, “autumnal intermittent fever,” vertigo, and feeling “jumbled and turbid.”11 Like melancholy in general, the English malady had ethical as well as bodily components. For the individual, it could function as “a silent protest against that society in which one is anxious to participate,” but it was also identified by some social theorists (including Staël) as a “precondition and result of political freedom.”12 Even in those more morally directed formulations of melancholy, the body was not abstracted out: quite the contrary, melancholy was a vehicle for reflecting on the moral-material unity of the human being.13
Melancholy lost some, but certainly not all, of its age-old religious orientation during this period. As Jeremy Schmidt argues in regard to the British context, the religious understanding of melancholy as “godly sorrow” was largely displaced by a medicalized perspective that “located melancholy very concretely in the body as an organic condition of the nerves.”14 That displacement was arguably more radical in the French context, where religious melancholy was often discredited though association with superstition and fanaticism.
Across Europe, physicians treated the disorder with a mixture of moral and physical remedies, including several that involved diet and exercise. Echoing the old proverb “Le bon vin chasse la mélancolie”—“good wine chases away melancholy,” cited in the definition of melancholy given in the 1762 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française—French doctors often prescribed wine as an antidote. Wine was “one of the great anti-melancholic remedies” in the estimation of the author of the Encyclopédie article “Mélancolie,” who added, “In treating this illness, one can count a good deal on a change of air, the return of springtime, travel, horse-riding, frictions applied to the lower abdomen, venereal exercises (especially when their lack has brought on the malady), and even more from the enjoyment of a beloved object.”15
Melancholy was sometimes associated with dramatic alterations in mental state and self-perception. The sufferers featured at the outset of the Encyclopédie’s medical article “imagine that they are kings, lords, gods; others believe they have been transformed into beasts, such as wolves, dogs, cats, rabbits, etc.”16 Patients who related their bouts of melancholy often mentioned physical symptoms like pain and heat due to hypersensitivity. As Micheline Louis-Courvoisier stresses in her study of the dozens of consultation letters that Samuel-Auguste Tissot received about this illness, melancholic patients sometimes located their symptoms in places that we, as modern readers, usually don’t associate with the condition: for example, the skin, the blood, the stomach, the eyes, and the internal cavities of the body.17
To understand how the psychic and the somatic intermingled in eighteenth-century notions of melancholy, it is useful to consider its place within the larger syndrome popularly called “the vapors.” In pre-Revolutionary Europe, this was an umbrella term for the cluster of jointly physical and mental ailments that doctors grouped together, with little clear demarcation, in a “mixed hystero-hypochondriasis concept.”18 Although melancholy had richer emotional and poetic resonances than hysteria and hypochondria, it was distinguished from those ailments in degree rather than in kind. Moreover, eighteenth-century doctors situated melancholy rather loosely between the humors (that is, the ancient notion of black bile) and the nerves: both explicative models were evoked, sometimes in combination. Anne-Charles Lorry, for example, identified two species of melancholy: humoral, which manifested itself through indigestion, versus nervous, a variety whose symptoms included convulsions. What he and like-minded physicians proposed to treat nervous melancholy was gentle stimulation of the nerves to restore homotony, “the judicious readjustment that brings the strings of this delicate, fragile instrument, the human organism, in tune once more.”19 As Jean Starobinski notes, some odd therapeutic procedures were suggested in the second half of the century, “at the moment of transition between the humoral interpretation and the nervous conception of melancholy”: these included rotating chairs and swings that twirled patients about while also making them vomit.20 Other methods devised to shake the mind out of a low emotional state involved immersion in cold water—either prolonged or sudden. More conventional therapies were travel, the music cure, taking the waters, and, for women, marriage.21
The vapors were, in the minds of many, a “polite” malady, peculiar to members of the upper crust. When the soubrette Suzanne of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s famous comedy Le Mariage de Figaro (1784) asks to borrow the count’s flask of ether to calm her mistress’s vapors, and he suggests that she save some of it for herself, she replies, “You think women of my station get the vapours? It’s an affliction of status; you catch it only in boudoirs.”22 Although moralists from Mme de Lambert to Louis-Sébastian Mercier ridiculed those who made a fashion of being vaporous, some doctors insisted that the vapors were a true illness—albeit one that was devilishly protean in nature.23 Tissot’s perspective on vapors sufferers was as ambivalent as his views on sickly intellectuals. He expressed irritation in his Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde (1770) with the “ridiculous name of vapors” and with people who were so hypersensitive that “the slightest impression becomes for them an intense sensation,” making their tastes and desires as unstable as their nerves.24 Yet he took a sympathetic approach in Avis au peuple sur sa santé (1761), where he described the vapors as an involuntary disorder brought about by a vice of the nerves, whose symptoms varied greatly because there were so many branches of nerves within the body.25 The mutability or “bizarreness” of the vapors did not, he stressed, make them any less real. In his Traitédes nerfs et de leurs maladies (1778–80), Tissot recommended either calming or stimulating remedies to treat the vapors, depending on the symptoms.26 He added that, although rarely fatal, such nervous ailments tended to destroy the sufferer’s happiness, warp his or her perception of life, and “transform” the patient, “always for the worse.”27
Medical authors often tied the vapors to an ennui rooted either in an unwholesome lifestyle or in chagrin (violent chagrin, as Tissot maintained in the Traitédes nerfs, could also lead to other nervous ailments, including catalepsy and epilepsy). The gender distinctions they made regarding this disorder usually targeted people of the upper class. Vaporous women were perceived as widespread in European aristocracy because of high living, a lifestyle associated with physical inaction as well as overindulgence in eating, gambling, theatergoing, and romantic dalliances. Elite men were held to contract the ailment through a somewhat broader range of passion-related causes that included ambition and overstudy. The author of the Encyclopédie article “Vapeurs” (1765) summed up both etiologies when assessing why the illness had become more prevalent: “This illness is more common today than it ever was, because the bad education of the fair sex disposes women to it quite a lot, and because young men indulge either in the passion for study or in some other passion just as furiously, without measure or judgment.”28
Not everyone accepted the negative causal link between the vapors and mental or creative application. The cosmopolitan Isabelle de Charrière, for example, was diagnosed as vaporous at the age of sixteen, when she was known as Belle de Zuylen, and some in her social circle saw this as proof of her refinement and exceptional mind. As Philip Rieder has shown through his analysis of her correspondence, young Belle de Zuylen believed she had a strong constitution, thanks to the good “blood” she had inherited and her physical capacities; yet she worried about the liveliness of her imagination and her inability to master her body, and she was keenly aware of the pressures to adhere to social norms like marriage.29 The future Mme de Charrière refused to accept the conventional medical opinion (echoed by some of her friends) that her poor health stemmed from her incessant intellectual activities. She argued just the opposite, insisting that the only way to combat her low moods was to keep her mind intensely occupied: “What people don’t realize is that, susceptible as I am to dark melancholy, I have neither health nor, so to speak, life except through the means of continuous mental occupation.”30 The regular health bulletins she sent to her friends and acquaintances could be viewed as an illustration of the social advantages of suffering from “nerves”: for some, the vapors were “a flexible means of self-fashioning, self-stylisation, and self-dramatisation.”31 However, they also attest to the personal battles that Zuylen/Charrière waged throughout her life: she was tormented by the effort to find an equilibrium between her intense emotional states, her active imagination, and her health.32 Similar torments confront two of the most striking novelistic characters Charrière created: Mistriss Henley of Lettres de Mistriss Henley publiées par son amie (1784), who sinks into deep melancholy over the emotional distance between herself and her proper English husband; and the talented actress-musician heroine of Caliste, ou Continuation des lettres écrites de Lausanne (1787), who is forsaken by the man she loves but continues to receive public expressions of esteem, some addressed to Aspasie, as she lies mortally ill at the novel’s end (her sobriquet alludes to Aspasia of Miletus, consort of the statesman Pericles, and a scholarly woman who exerted intellectual influence in Athenian culture).33 Charrière gave a distinctly heroic quality to the acute sensitivity, exalted imagination, and refined intelligence of both characters.
Although the word vapeurs lingered on in European culture after the end of the Old Regime, it ceased to be an accepted nosological term among physicians. Historians have attributed this shift to two developments: the demolition of the aristocratic life that had provided the overarching social frame for the vapors, and the emergence of new conceptions of the nerves. Some pro-Revolutionary political writers imbued nervousness with a positive value by associating it with a combative masculine vigor, and doctors who frequented aristocratic circles reported a marked decrease in the number of fits of vapors, which they attributed to fear of the guillotine.34 Expanding on both ideas—and drawing on reports made by Benjamin Rush that hysteria had disappeared in the American colonies during their struggle for independence—Dr. Marc-Antoine Petit of Lyon declared in 1796 that the French Revolution had “destroyed through its salutary shocks the hysterical and hypochondriacal diathesis. It has thus corrected this nervous idiosyncrasy, too mobile and too easily excited by the soft life of yore, by injecting more energy and spirit into mainsprings [ressorts] that were formerly too delicate and too weak.”35 Other physicians writing during the 1790s concurred that the Revolution had brought a swift and salutary end to the nervous and chronic ailments that had previously plagued the French nation. The pioneering alienist Philippe Pinel and the biomedical theorist Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis initially celebrated the Revolution’s invigorating health effects, with Pinel declaring in a 1790 letter to the Journal de Paris, “People can be heard to say, ‘I feel better since the Revolution.’”36 Their confidence in the salutary jolts of the Revolution was, however, short-lived: within a decade, alienists were declaring that nervous/mental illness was afflicting more people than ever in the new French nation.
Melancholy continued to be a culturally saturated term, one that still carried some of its Old Regime connotations of upper-class ennui, or of the “sweet,” tender languor associated with love or pity in sentimental literature. It was also involved in the complex gender realignment of nervous pathologies that took place during and after the Revolution (a topic to which I will return in Chapter 6, while discussing the separation of hypochondria from hysteria). Melancholy’s national associations persisted, too, as Staël illustrated in her literary-historical essay De la littérature (1800), where—building on the pre-Revolutionary topos of “English spleen”—she attributed the melancholic imagination of English poets to that nation’s penchant for meditation as well as its political liberty.37 Staël did not, however, confine this mode of imagination to a particular national culture: rather, she saw it as a trait shared by intellectually superior persons in general—including her literary idol, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
No thinker embodied the ambiguities of singularity more fully than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared in “Mon portrait” that “I am not concerned with being noticed, but when I am, I don’t mind if it is in a somewhat distinguished manner; and I would prefer to be forgotten by the entire human race than to be regarded as an ordinary man.”38 Rousseau always insisted that he had become a writer by accident: that is, through the feverish illumination he had while walking along the route to Vincennes in 1749, an experience that produced the First Discourse. He also contended that his temperament bore no resemblance to the jealous, hateful personality of the typical homme de lettres.39 To cite his sharpest critique of that figure, “in all of mankind, people of wit [gens d’esprit] and especially men of letters are the ones who have the greatest intensity of self-love [amour-propre], and who are the least inclined to love and the most inclined to hate.”40 Hatred—and the wish to avoid it—clearly played a complex role in the personal myth of Rousseau, his intellectual identity, and his conception of literature.41 So, too, did melancholy.
The diagnosis of Rousseau as a melancholiac started in 1761, when Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a French royal administrator sympathetic to Rousseau (and to the encyclopedists), wrote him a letter arguing that Rousseau’s illumination had emanated from “an extreme sensitivity [sensibilité], a deep ingrained melancholy, and a great tendency to see things from the darkest angle.”42 It was this letter that prompted Rousseau’s first autobiographical effort, the four letters he wrote to Malesherbes in 1762 (which were published in 1782, shortly after Rousseau’s death in 1778). The diagnosis was reinforced by various contemporary physicians.
One was Johann-Georg Zimmermann, who referred to Rousseau while discussing the effects of excessive mental application in his treatise on experience in medicine (Erfahrung in der Arzneikunst [1763]; first French translation 1774). Rousseau appeared there as part of a series of biographical vignettes that also included Voltaire, whose “triangular” face was, in Zimmermann’s opinion, an outward sign of the weak stomach, thin constitution, and overly mobile nerves found in many gens de lettres.43 Rousseau, with his head perpetually bowed in reflection and sadness, typified what Zimmermann perceived as the great writer’s constitutional tendency toward debilitating melancholy—a condition that always hovered on the edge of the pleasure savored by those who pursued a studious, contemplative existence. Rousseau’s posture also illustrated the old adage that “all gens de lettres have a weak stomach”; intriguingly, on the same page, Zimmermann recounted the stomach ailments Tissot suffered in 1762. Zimmermann returned to Rousseau as a clinical case in his book on solitude, Über die Einsamkeit (1784–85), first translated into French by J. B. Mercier in 1788 as La solitude considérée relativement à l’esprit et au coeur. There, citing Rousseau’s letters to Malesherbes, Zimmermann presented Rousseau as a melancholiac who was drawn to solitude because of his taste for the life of the imagination.44 He aimed, in part, to counter the misanthropic image that had been circulated by Rousseau’s detractors.
Other physicians discussed Rousseau’s case at around the same time. In 1787, for instance, Pierre Fabre added a chapter to his Essai sur les facultés de l’âme (first ed., 1785) in which he examined the seminal moment of intellectual “effervescence” that Rousseau had experienced back in 1749.45 Like Zimmermann, Fabre used Rousseau’s letters to Malesherbes as the basis of his remarks—but for less sympathetic purposes. He described Rousseau’s internal revolution as a “hypochondriacal frenzy” that made him believe “he had come into the world to reform the Universe,” much like certain “fanatics,” “convulsionnaires,” and “magnetized” people, who thought they were divinely inspired when, in fact, they were in the grips of emotions produced by the constant irritation of their nerves by an “atrabilious humor.46 What these case studies illustrate is that, despite Rousseau’s effort in his letters to Malesherbes to disprove his friend’s diagnosis of him as consumed by black bile, those letters provided armchair clinicians with a rich foundation for pathography. A similar pattern is apparent among the French alienists of the Revolutionary and Bonapartist eras who drew on Rousseau’s autobiographical works to support their theories on melancholy or hypochondria.
But what did Rousseau himself have to say about the role of nervous ailments in his life? The most explicit answer, beyond the letters to Malesherbes, lies in book 6 of the Confessions, which describes a period when, despite his bodily sufferings, Rousseau felt more purely happy than at any other moment in his existence: the time he spent as a youth at Les Charmettes. The Charmettes episode is singularly important in relation to Rousseau’s mission to explain and chronicle his emergence both as an author and as a self-described unique being: it is here that he recounts how he ended his youthful floating, describes his first experience of crippling illness, and relates the climax of his intense, ambiguous relationship with Mme de Warens. Book 6 also contains some of Rousseau’s most lyrical reflections on the melancholic pleasure he derived both from reading—a prominent theme in the episode—and from the act of writing about his past moments of bliss.
The tale recounted in book 6 is a continuation of an illness narrative begun in book 5, concerning the years 1735–36: young Rousseau abruptly falls into a state of fragile health after a failed scientific experiment involving sympathetic ink, and he begins to suffer from chronic ringing in the ears, palpitations, arterial throbbing, and shortness of breath. He had been reading ardently prior to this attack, consuming “obscure” books on music by Rameau and reading the imaginary misfortunes of Prévost’s hero Cleveland “with fury.”47 Forced into sedentariness by his poor health, he succumbs to melancholy, a term he uses interchangeably with “vapors” to describe his languor and sadness over what he takes to be his impending death (LC, 221). This crisis is, however, temporarily cured by increased intimacy with his beloved “Maman” (Mme de Warens), who undertakes to restore Jean-Jacques to full vigor by prescribing a milk regimen and taking him away to the country estate of Les Charmettes (223).
Once settled in this bucolic retreat, he finds himself drawn “irresistibly” to book learning, a compulsion triggered by his weakened physical state and growing acquaintance with Maman’s Cartesian-minded physician M. Salomon, who encourages him to follow the orderly method of study recommended in Bernard Lamy’s popular Entretiens sur les sciences (232). Although the young Jean-Jacques follows that advice, he is hardly methodical about it: he promptly “devours” Lamy’s book and many others, alternating his time between readings of philosophy, geometry, Latin, and books that mix “devoutness with the sciences,” and fonctions champêtres like turning the garden and taming pigeons (234). At several points in his narrative, Rousseau notes that he was ill-suited for the kind of prolonged mental application he pursued at Les Charmettes. However, he attaches a great, enduring personal value to this studious idyll: “Two or three months went by in this way testing the inclination of my mind and enjoying, in the most beautiful season of the year and in a place that it rendered enchanting, the charms of life whose value I felt so well, that of a society as free as it was sweet (if one can give the name of society to such a perfect union), and that of the fine knowledge that I proposed to acquire for myself; . . . the pleasure of learning contributed a great deal to my happiness” (LC, 235–36; TC, 197). Far from repudiating the pursuit of knowledge as unhealthful or denaturing (as he did so famously elsewhere), Rousseau describes his youthful attempts to cultivate his mind as “enjoyments, but too simple to be capable of being explained” (LC, 236; TC, 198). Study, as much as the bucolic setting and the presence of Mme de Warens, is integral to the happiness he enjoys at Les Charmettes; yet that happiness also involves illness.
Rousseau’s conviction that he is gravely ill ensures the uniform quality of his daily existence, and it drives him to learn as much as possible with as much speed and diligence as he can muster: “I felt myself being carried away toward study with an irresistible force in spite of my condition, or rather because of my condition, and all the while looking at each day as the last one of my life, I studied with as much ardor as if I must live forever. . . . That application for which I was impassioned became so delightful to me that, no longer thinking of my illnesses, I was much less affected by them” (LC, 232; TC, 195). What is extraordinary about this passage is that the very same Rousseau who elsewhere heaped condemnation on book learning embraces here a conception of study that is more typically associated with philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot, who glorified intellectual endeavor as both exhausting work and as a “delightful” passion known only to true initiates. One could, of course, interpret the passage as a sort of morality tale about the dangerously absorbing charms of study, comparable to this declaration: “The charm of study soon renders any other attachment insipid . . . the cultivation of the sciences withdraws the heart of the philosopher from the crowd.”48 However, in the Charmettes episode, young Jean-Jacques’s affection for Maman and devotion to his household duties do not wane as a result of his ardor for learning. Moreover, the mature Rousseau speaks affectionately of his adolescent efforts to combine reading, agricultural labor, veneration for the wonders of God and nature, and devotion to Mme de Warens in a single, harmonious system (LC, 235).
There is no mention of melancholy in this part of the story—although Jean-Jacques is filled with the “terror of Hell” by the harsh Jansenist theology preached in the writings of Port Royal and the Oratory, “the ones I read most frequently” (LC, 242; TC, 203). Those sad impressions are counterbalanced by the gentle morality of his Jesuit confessor, along with Maman’s efforts to soothe his soul. Rather than melancholy, Jean-Jacques is dominated by an ardor for learning so intense that it reaches the point of “mania”: he tries to read even while working the fields, thereby ruining a good number of his books; and he goes about in a stupor, “incessantly and totally occupied as I was with muttering something between my teeth” (LC, 242; TC, 202–3). Recounting the experience, Rousseau draws increasingly on medical vocabulary to describe the condition he was in: “I was as pallid as a dead man and thin as a skeleton. My beating of the arteries was terrible, my palpitations more frequent. I was continually oppressed, and my weakness finally became so great that I had trouble moving; I could not walk quickly without suffocating. I could not bend over without becoming dizzy, I could not lift up the lightest load; I was reduced to the most tormenting inaction for a man as restless as I am” (LC, 247; TC, 207). And then, very interestingly, he adds, “It is certain that the vapors were very much mixed up with all of this”—by which he means that he was suffering “the malady of happy people.” Given that the other symptoms Rousseau describes here are unequivocally physical, this mention of the vapors comes as a surprise. He explains it by describing the vapors as “a boredom of well-being” (ennui de bien être) that makes the sufferer cry without reason, take fright at the sound of a leaf or a bird, and exhibit other symptoms of an “extravagant” sensibility of a sort felt only by those who are fully happy.
Happiness, of course, is an ephemeral state in Rousseau’s philosophy, which is the register in which he concludes his remark on the vapors: “We are so little made to be happy here below that either the soul or the body must necessarily suffer when both of them are not suffering, and the good condition of one almost always injures the other” (LC, 247; TC, 207). What this reflection suggests is that, far from impeding his happiness, Rousseau’s physical frailty during the Charmettes episode was the condition of possibility for his being fully happy: it allowed him to realize, albeit briefly, the dream of perfect happiness with Maman, which he had glimpsed seven or eight years earlier (LC, 245). The vapors, in other words, are a vehicle for poetic melancholy: Rousseau’s youthful case of vapors prepared him to feel later, as he was writing the Confessions, an extraordinary “vigor and life in myself for suffering” (TC, 207).
Returning to his story, Rousseau relates what “finished him off” and made him truly sick: the books on physiology and anatomy that he added to his readings. In a passage that would go on to attract significant attention from turn-of-the century medical diagnosticians interested in hypochondria, he describes this as a “fatal study” (LC, 248; TC, 207) because those books persuade him that he has a heart polyp. Some critics have argued that Rousseau invented the heart polyp as a pretext to leave Les Charmettes to seek a cure in Montpellier, thereby extricating himself from a suffocating attachment to Maman.49 However, the strange mixture of happiness and ennui that Rousseau associates with the vapors is tied to more than his amorous adventures: it also involves his youthful obsessive attachment to books and reading.
Biographical vignettes of suffering scholars were common not just in books on the health of gens de lettres, but also in the works of the early French alienists. Rousseau was one of the case histories most often discussed by these physicians. This was due, in part, to his theories on education and the passions: as Jan Goldstein puts it, Rousseau reigned like a “crowning deity over the birth of French psychiatry” because of the “implicit and diffuse Rousseauism” of the theorists who founded alienism in France.50 She particularly notes the parallels between Pinel’s famous moral treatment and the principles of Rousseauean schooling, and the connection between Pinel’s grand theory of insanity and Rousseau’s idea that socially created passions factices have pathogenic tendencies. There was, however, another reason for the regular mentions these authors made of Rousseau: they viewed him, like the other famous thinkers on whose lives they drew, as a prototype of the diseases they were trying to define and classify. Claude Wacjman underscores that turn-of-the-century French physicians considered “mediate literary observations” to be more useful than immediate clinical observations for establishing nosological classifications of mental illness.51 In other words, methodology was a factor in these doctors’ interest in Rousseau’s “autobiographical display of psychological suffering”: they found it useful for their larger nosological enterprise.52
The alienists’ methodological preoccupations were connected to the larger effort to reform the medical profession by bringing it more in line with Idéologie, the “science of ideas” that dominated Revolutionary-era philosophy and pedagogical theory.53 To achieve the goals of linguistic precision and sound therapeutic practice, doctors specializing in mental pathologies undertook to establish clear-cut distinctions among the species they observed among their patients: mania, melancholy, hypochondria, hysteria, dementia, and idiotism. They drew their information from three sources: the extensive bank of clinical observations they were amassing at newly formed asylums like Bicêtre and Salpêtrière; patient histories gleaned from earlier works on nervous maladies; and famous literary or historical cases of mental alienation.
Rousseau’s status as a leading psychiatric prototype may have been enhanced by the fact that he was singled out in Nouveaux éléments de physiologie (1801), an influential physiological textbook in which Anthelme-Balthasar Richerand described Rousseau as a “perfect” example of the melancholic temperament. Rousseau also proved, in Richerand’s mind, the reciprocal influence of the mental on the physical and the physical on the mental: the mysteries of that interdependence could be solved if physicians paid closer attention to the ancient and modern biographies of illustrious men.54
The image or persona of Rousseau available to turn-of-the-century French readers had diverse, sometimes conflicting facets: it included the “friend of humanity” face, which he put forth in his political writings; the moral portraits of him written by Staël and other near contemporaries; the highly patriotic eulogies of Rousseau written for the 1791 Académie Française competition; and the post-Thermidor construction of Rousseau as a “sentimental champion of the disinherited and reformer of female morals.”55 Physicians of this period also viewed Rousseau through the lens of pre-Revolutionary doctors who did not wholeheartedly endorse his extreme ideas on the ills of civilization and the pursuit of learning.
Pinel’s views on the health effects of intellectual work resembled those of his medical predecessors Tissot and Zimmermann. As he declared in the Nosographie philosophique (1797), “The cultivation of the sciences and arts, when undertaken without moderation, combined with deep meditations and prolonged late nights, is undoubtedly very conducive to developing the same nervous ailments [hypochondria and melancholy]. Indeed, if study is conducted without method, and exercises the judgement less than the imagination and the memory, these ailments can degenerate into mania.”56 He repeated that idea in his Traité sur la manie, where he cited the registers of the Bicêtre asylum as proof that literary writers, musicians, and painters were most at risk for mental illness because they exercised their imagination more intensely than those who worked in fields like mathematics or science.57 In other words, imagination—rather than mental application per se—was to blame for the pathologies that most concerned him. Regarding Rousseau himself, Pinel cited his manifestations of melancholy in the last two parts of Rousseau’s Confessions and in the Rêveries, which illustrated his conviction that “all men are his enemies,” his tormenting “mistrust,” and his continuous fears.58
Along with Rousseau’s autobiographical writings, early French alienists cited Staël’s Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an intellectual biography first published in 1788 and more widely diffused in a second edition that appeared in 1798. Written in the Enlightenment tradition of the laudatory “great-man” eulogy, this work began on a highly sentimental note.59 It took on a more clinical tone in the sixth and final letter, “Sur le caractère de Rousseau,” which opened with a physiognomic analysis close to that presented by Zimmermann: “He almost always had his head lowered, but it was not flattery or fear which had bowed it; meditation and melancholy had made it lean over like a flower bent by its own weight or by storms.”60 Staël also attached significance to Rousseau’s pronounced eyebrows, which “seemed made to serve his unsociability [sauvagerie], to protect him from the sight of other men” (83). Staël then turned to the subject of his real or rumored moral transgressions, the most notorious being the reputed abandonment of his five children. That behavior, she argued, should be understood in the context of his exalted, “delirious” genius: “Rousseau was not mad, but one of his faculties, the imagination, was in a state of dementia; he had a great power of reason over abstract matters, over objects that have no reality except in thought, and an absolute extravagance regarding all objects whose measure is taken outside of ourselves; he had too great a dose of everything: by dint of being superior, he was close to being mad” (85).
Staël clearly sympathized with the moral pain that Rousseau endured as a result of his deep feeling but unsocial temperament. However, by dwelling at length on his “demented” imagination, she helped to transform the question of his genius into a properly medical issue. Although she described melancholy as the sentiment naturally felt by anyone who “considers at length the destiny of man,” she depicted Rousseau’s case as pathological in its intensity, its self-destructiveness, and the generalized mistrust it triggered in him: “Rousseau increased through reflection all of the ideas that afflicted him; soon a look, a gesture from a man he met, a child who ran away from him, seemed to him to be new proof of the universal hatred of which he thought himself the object . . . he believed himself destined to suffer, and did not act against his destiny” (94). Although she briefly entertained the fantasy that she might have saved Rousseau, had she been there to console him and steer his thoughts back to happier, more hopeful subjects (95), Staël regarded his melancholy as incurable: “Rousseau’s despair was caused by that somber melancholy, that discouragement over living, that can seize all isolated men, whatever their destiny. His soul was withered by injustice; he was afraid of being alone, of not having a heart near to his own, of returning incessantly to himself, of neither inspiring nor feeling any interest, of being indifferent to his glory, tired of his genius, tormented by the need to love, and the unhappiness of not being loved” (96). This, she suggested, played a role in his death: “Rousseau may have allowed himself to commit suicide without remorse, he felt so insignificant in the immensity of the universe.”61 She ended letter 6 by shifting out of the clinical register and assuming a tone of lament more conventional in a eulogy: here, she exhorted all sensitive souls to cry with her over Rousseau’s tomb and make a common cause of defending genius against the insidious forces of envy and mediocrity (97–98).
One of the earliest alienists to draw on Staël’s portrait of Rousseau as a melancholiac was Jean-Baptiste Louyer-Villermay, an early affiliate of the Pinel circle, who cited the 1798 edition of Staël’s Lettres sur Rousseau in his Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie, isolée, par l’observation et l’analyse, de l’hystérie et de la mélancolie (1802).62 Villermay explicitly referred to Staël’s theory that Rousseau’s melancholy led to suicide, and he also alluded to Staël when he spoke of writers who had judged Rousseau with “fitting severity.”
Villermay used a lengthy sketch of Rousseau’s life to establish a clear distinction between hypochondria and melancholy: as he argued, “Jean-Jacques” was suffering from a pronounced case of moral melancholy with none of the digestive or nervous symptoms typical of hypochondria.63 Rousseau’s entire existence was, Villermay maintained, shaped by melancholy: the sad circumstances of his birth, when he lost his mother; the extraordinary development of his mental faculties as a young man, combined with the emergence of his touchy character, somber imagination, and “philosophical” vanity; the series of vexations experienced by Rousseau after he became famous, which aggravated his prideful, antisocial disdain for his fellow philosophes; his excessive reaction to the putative stoning at Motiers; his haughty behavior in London—a place where, Villermay pointed out, the splenetic Rousseau should have fit right in; the pathological terrors and suspicions that he exhibited in his later years; and, finally, the suicidal projects that may have caused Rousseau’s death.64 Moving away from the details of Rousseau’s case, Villermay then addressed another consequence of the moral tendency toward melancholy: namely, the hateful passions and taste for tyranny evident in men like Nero, Louis XI, Cromwell, and the “bloodthirsty scoundrel” Robespierre.65 Given that Villermay had himself suffered greatly during the Terror, there is nothing surprising about his denunciation of the radical Revolutionary Robespierre;66 however, its juxtaposition with the Rousseau case is intriguing. Villermay ended by aligning Rousseau with melancholic but virtuous thinkers such as Socrates, Plato, Pascal, Tasso, and two eighteenth-century medical luminaries, Zimmermann and Bordeu.
Echoing many of Villermay’s arguments, C. A. T. Charpentier devoted his 1803 thesis Essai sur la mélancolie to presenting the various causes that could trigger melancholy: climate, age, bad diet, suppressed evacuations, overstudy, idleness, celibacy, heredity, violent chagrin, religious or political terrors, unrequited love, superstition, and stormy social passions such as hate or ambition. In his case histories, Charpentier showed a clear preference for the special, “Aristotelian” class of melancholiacs who were predisposed to contract the disease because they possessed an “excessive and profound” sensibility and ardent imagination. It was, he added, these people who “feel the most intense moral affections, the most violent emotions, men of genius, whose vast conceptions are the fruit of the deepest meditations, men of letters, whose unrelenting work ends up producing mental exhaustion, those who cultivate the fine arts with enthusiasm, and whose overly exalted imagination is not counter-balanced by an adequate exercise of the other functions of the understanding.”67 Insisting that melancholy of this sort was specific to men, Charpentier cited a number of famous male thinkers who had fallen victim to the obsessive delirium characteristic of melancholy. His list included Huyghens, Pascal, Tasso, Zimmermann, the anti-philosophe poet Gilbert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.68
One could, of course, dismiss medical biographies of this sort as taking excessive liberties with Rousseau’s autobiographical writings.69 That argument was, in fact, made at the time by E. Frédéric Dubois d’Amiens, who, in his Histoire philosophique de l’hypochondrie et de l’hystérie (1833), refuted Villermay’s diagnosis of Rousseau as a lifelong melancholiac.70 Dubois also took a swipe at Jean-Guillaume Fourcade-Prunet, author of the 1826 treatise Maladies nerveuses des auteurs, for arguing that Rousseau was suffering from an “irritability of the brain” that, gradually and inevitably, increased to the point of darkest melancholy.71 Dubois’s own hypothesis was that there were two very distinct periods in Rousseau’s life, “one in which he showed all the symptoms of hypochondria, and the other during which he sunk into the deepest melancholy.”72 To prove this, he gave a long transcription of book 6 of the Confessions, about which he observed that “no one else could trace in a truer, more vigorous, and more picturesque manner the symptoms of the first stage of hypochondria.”73 Dubois’s conclusion was that Rousseau’s reading of medical books while he was a young man living at Les Charmettes had made him hypochondriacal—but not melancholic, a condition that did not afflict him until much later in his life.74
Dubois’s refutations illustrate a broader tendency among the alienists who referred to Rousseau’s biography from a clinical perspective: generally speaking, they subjected their colleagues’ anecdotes about Rousseau to more rigorous standards than those that circulated about more temporally distant celebrities like Pascal or Tasso. Moreover, they often used direct citation of Rousseau himself as a measure against which to judge each other’s rewritings of his life story.75 They also departed from the ideological Rousseauism of placing the blame for mental disorder at the door of society. Rather than attributing Rousseau’s melancholy to his social circumstances, most diagnosed it as a temperamental condition exacerbated by excessive irritation of the nerves or the brain.
Rousseau thus embodied a disorder that, in these physicians’ eyes, loomed over the health and happiness of intellectuals in general—not least the alienists themselves, many of whom included self-observations or the case histories of other physicians in their remarks on the illnesses to which thinkers were most prone. Villermay, for example, alluded to his own experience with nervous maladies in the preface to his 1816 treatise on the subject.76 A particularly poignant biographical vignette appears on the title page of the edition of Maurice Roubaud-Luce’s work available at Harvard University’s Countway Medical Library: it features the sad handwritten comment “the author of this work hanged himself in Tours on August 4 1817,” along with a quote said to come from Roubaud-Luce’s suicide note: “Spleen is more or less the disease that has forced me to end my existence.”77 It may be, therefore, that the founders of mental medicine in France enlisted Rousseau as a model because they identified with him personally.
Whatever their personal motives for citing certain literary writers, the early French alienists contributed to the practice of pathography that became widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, taking such forms as phrenology, “cerebral biographies,” and the school of “physiological” literary criticism.78 Pinel summed up the logic behind those endeavors when he asked rhetorically “Can the physician remain a stranger to the history of the most intense human passions, since these are the most frequent causes of mental alienation? And from that point on, shouldn’t he study the lives of people who have been the most famous through their ambition for glory, their enthusiasm for the fine arts, the austerities of monastic life, the delirium of an unhappy love?”79 Three out of four of those conditions (excluding monastic life) were integral to the existence of Germaine de Staël and her fictional woman genius Corinne—both of whom embodied the dilemma particular to women intellectuals in their era.
That was not an entirely new situation. During the Old Regime, learned women enjoyed greater social prominence than in centuries past, but they were still vulnerable to the biting ridicule made popular years earlier by Molière’s satires of pretentiously intellectual précieuses. Despite efforts made by women moralists as well as certain male authors to refute the notion that learning could be nothing more than a vainglorious fad among women, that idea sometimes tainted the public image of learned women: for example, Émilie Du Châtelet, who was attacked after her death for having appeared too “singular” in both her scholarly aspirations and her love life.80 The double bind that confronted learned women is evident in Voltaire’s memorial tribute to Du Châtelet, where he underscored that “never was a woman more scholarly than she, and never did anyone deserve less that one say of her: ‘she’s a femme savante’ . . . amidst a mass of projects that the most laborious scholar would scarcely have undertaken, who would have believed that she found time not just to fulfill all the duties of society but avidly seek out all of its amusements? She devoted herself to high society as she did to study.”81 In other words, a woman like Du Châtelet might be just as adept as a man at cultivating knowledge, but she had to counterbalance her scholarly achievements with dutiful attention to social obligations—obligations that were particularly extensive for Du Châtelet, given her status as an upper-class, wealthy woman (of course, that status also allowed her to pursue intellectual distinction with greater ease than those of more modest social standing).
This double bind became more acute in the wake of a theoretical development in a normative area of biomedical theory: namely, the effort to define the essential “nature” of the male versus female sex. Starting in the 1770s, vitalist physicians like Pierre Roussel began to argue that the female constitution was “soft,” hypersensitive, and womb-centered. Praising Rousseau for drawing attention to the radical specificity of women’s “nature” in book V of his famous pedagogical fiction Émile (1762), Roussel undertook in his Système physique et moral de la femme (1775) and the Système physique et moral de l’homme (unpublished before his death) to justify that idea in terms of physiology and anatomy.82 He also sought to give greater precision to the contemporary theory of sensibility: he differentiated this property along gender lines by assigning a physiologically and morally heightened sensibility to women and a “higher,” mentally concentrated sensibility to men, whose stronger physical constitution also made them less susceptible to nervous disorders. Women, as Roussel portrayed them, had a keen but volatile sensitive constitution, one that was highly conducive to empathy, maternal tenderness, and social sagacity, but incompatible with the “dangerous labors” involved in study.83 Echoing Tissot’s warnings, he argued that the acquisition of knowledge almost always came at the price of one’s health, a truth familiar to men of letters, who tended to contract “vapors or hypochondriacism” if they engaged too much in deep meditation.84 Any woman reckless enough to imitate such men would not only lose her natural beauty and graces, but also make herself sick. Roussel insisted that although women’s sparkling, uncultivated natural intelligence was perfectly designed for the sort of refined social intercourse characteristic of the salon, it was altogether unsuited for the “sweeping views of politics,” “great principles of ethics,” and “scientific erudition” that occupied certain male minds.85
Roussel’s ideas were taken up by other prominent medical thinkers such as Cabanis, who developed them in a memoir on the influence of sex on the character of ideas, which he included in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802)—where he branded women with serious intellectual aspirations “ambiguous beings [des êtres incertains] who are, properly speaking, of neither sex.”86 Because of the sexual dimorphism these theorists promoted, the intimations of monstrosity that had long been implicit to the literary tradition of femme-savante parodies burst into the open during the Revolution and the Bonapartist era, the period that ushered in a new medical doctrine of incommensurability between men and women, along with widespread attempts to exclude women from politics, education, and most other areas of the public sphere.87 Biomedical justifications for the view of the mind as embodied, and of female intellect as “naturally” inferior to male, did not, of course, reshape the entire conceptual field surrounding women’s role in cultural and intellectual production.88 Champions of a woman’s right to education and authorship continued to be vocal at the turn of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth, as the writings of Staël, Condorcet, and Mary Wollstonecraft (among others) make abundantly clear. However, one side effect of the French Revolution was a pervasive sense that society needed stabilization, and politically minded medical theorists like Cabanis were eager to provide that by evoking the notion of “indelible” femininity as a reason to relegate women to a highly restricted cultural role.89
A related factor was the new definition of genius that emerged in the final decades of the eighteenth century, when, as Christine Battersby has argued, the ancient Latin concept of genius (male procreativity, or the begetting spirit embodied in the males of a clan) merged with that of ingenium (innate or God-given mental capacity, wit, artistic talent) to form a single model in which creative energy and vigor of mind were seen as deriving from male strength—indeed, quite literally from male sperm.90 Revolutionary-era biomedical researchers like Xavier Bichat also proposed a theory of limited vital energy, according to which an individual with highly developed intellectual faculties was necessarily underdeveloped in other areas.91 Applying this theory, the medical vulgarizer Julien-Joseph Virey declared that women were destined by nature never to enjoy what he called “the ardent transports of genius.”92 The limited vital energy theory also had implications for intellectuals in general: Virey argued that there was an essential antagonism between the “cerebral” and “genital” poles in men (a topic to which I will return in the next chapter).93
Given Staël’s literary fame and very public persona, we might expect her to have mounted a vigorous challenge to the Bonapartist era’s narrow definition of women’s social role and mental abilities. However, Staël’s writings are full of contradictions: she fashioned herself as both a daughter of the Enlightenment and a social exile who identified deeply with Rousseau; and she championed the cause of the “exceptional” woman even while accepting the constraints that Rousseau and others perceived in women’s capacities for study and creative achievement.94 As a public figure, Staël was branded a virago by Napoleon, among others;95 yet as a literary/social theorist, she did not make gender the major issue in her effort to uphold the principles of genius, refined sensibility, and individual self-improvement.96 Her most famous fictional work, the novel Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), is likewise rife with ambiguity: written against the backdrop of the French Enlightenment cult of the great creative genius, Corinne is designed to celebrate a great woman genius, but it spends as much time evoking Corinne’s beauty, femininity, and amorous longings as it does describing what makes her so exceptional as a thinker and artist.
One way to understand those ambiguities is to consider the psychological condition that Staël attributed not just to Rousseau, but also to her fictional heroine: melancholy. Corinne does not start out as a melancholiac; that role initially falls to her admirer Lord Oswald Nelvil, who suffers from both a splenetic constitution and psychological anguish (he is racked with guilt over having not lived up to his late father’s expectations). Nor does she contract melancholy from excessive mental work: although she periodically whips herself into a state of enthusiasm while doing a poetic improvisation, we do not see her absorbed in study or isolating herself from society in pursuit of learning. The novel doesn’t, in fact, give us much information about Corinne’s intellectual training. In “Corinne’s Story” (“Histoire de Corinne”), the four-chapter epistle she writes to Oswald to explain the mysteries of her half-Italian, half-English heritage, Corinne passes quickly over the instruction she received as a youth, declaring simply that when she arrived in England to rejoin her father at the age of fifteen, “my talents, my tastes, my very character were already formed.”97 Initially, at least, Corinne’s temperament is as sunny as the climate of Italy: she is “a miracle of nature” (166), an astonishing person who possesses “diverse charms that would seem mutually exclusive: sensibility, gaiety, depth, grace, abandonment, modesty” (93). Staël thus takes pains to avoid making Corinne constitutionally melancholic, just as she avoids giving her heroine even the slightest air of pedantry.
Corinne is unfailingly ladylike: amid the joyous fanfare that accompanies her opening appearance as “the most famous woman of Italy . . . poet, writer, improvisatrice, and one of the most beautiful people of Rome,” she performs her every gesture—even that of receiving a crown on the steps of the Capitol—with such touching “nobility, modesty, sweetness and dignity” that her main observer, Oswald, is moved to tears (49, 54). This tableau of Corinne at her greatest moment of public triumph ends, moreover, with a highly conventional exchange of glances: Oswald looks in her eyes and sees a gaze that implores “the protection of a [male] friend, protection that no woman, however superior she may be, can do without; and he thought to himself that it would be sweet to be the defender of one who would need a defender solely because of her sensibility” (54). The narrator’s delineation of sex roles in this passage—the male as strong, valiant protector; the woman as meek, sensitive, and in need of protection—is identical to that of separate-sphere advocates like Rousseau or Roussel; and Staël goes to great lengths to depict Corinne as a woman who could be a wonderful domestic companion to the sensitive, somber Oswald (212). Corinne is a hybrid, but she does not defy the gender stereotypes of the day: rather, she fuses typically feminine qualities with what her creator saw as the mythic, superhuman qualities of genius.
Nor, contrary to what some critics have contended, is Lord Nelvil a gender hybrid, if we keep in mind the historical context from which he arises.98 Far from feminizing him, Oswald’s melancholy and tendency to cry easily place him squarely in the tradition of the noble-hearted male as defined in the sentimental tradition. It is, precisely, Oswald’s sensitive, suffering qualities (in addition to his handsome figure and heroic feats) that make him deeply appealing to Corinne: “There existed between Oswald and Corinne a singular and all-powerful sympathy: their tastes were not the same, their opinions rarely agreed, and yet, deep down in their soul, there were similar mysteries, emotions drawn from the same source, in short a sort of secret resemblance that supposed a same nature” (398–99). In other words, Staël simultaneously adheres to gender conventions in constructing the novel’s lovers, and designs them to be “sister souls,” morally superior beings whose heightened capacity for feeling and reflection draws them together even as it sets them apart—fatally, for Corinne—from contemporary society.
Although his melancholy originates in his natural temperament as an Englishman and is exacerbated by his remorse over memories of his dead father, Oswald also suffers from the “contrast between his soul and society, such as it is in general” (308). This, the narrator underscores, is the sign of a noble spirit: “Pain in our modern times, in the midst of our social state, so cold and oppressive, is the most noble thing there is in man; and, in our day, a person who has not suffered, has never felt or thought” (216). This “cold and oppressive” social state is represented by the rigidly proper English country life from which Corinne fled during her adolescence. However, we should not overlook the narrator’s insistence on “modern times,” nor on the era to which modernity is contrasted in the next sentence: antiquity, an age when “there was something nobler than pain: it was heroic calm, it was the sense of one’s strength that could develop in the midst of free and open institutions” (216–17). A distinctly antique quality attaches to Corinne, evident in the admiration she expresses for ancient Roman statues and monuments throughout the long walking tours she and Oswald take in books 4 to 9, in the Sapphic undertones of her role as improvisatrice, and above all in the lengths to which she goes to develop her intellectual strengths in the relative freedom of Italy. This aspect of her persona is confirmed by Oswald’s late father in the letter he writes to Corinne’s father to explain why he has rejected her as a match for his son: “Your daughter is charming; but I seem to see in her one of those beautiful Greeks who enchanted and subjugated the world” (466). Corinne is, in short, larger than life, not of this world; and the all-consuming passion that kills her and her genius once Oswald abandons her for her younger half-sister Lucile has an explicitly mythic, Phaedra-like quality.
Clearly, the aspect of Corinne that Staël wants most ardently to defend and illustrate is her status as a “superior” being—one who, like Rousseau, should be admired for her immense creative powers, heeded like an oracle, and handled with the precautions befitting a profoundly sensitive heart. However, as Corinne underscores in her long epistolary self-portrait, that world is full of mediocre people who, slavishly devoted to what they call duty, are incapable of appreciating an intellectually distinguished person’s enthusiasm, delicate moral sensibility, and need for respect and expansive expression—whether the person in question is a man or a woman (366). The novel flirts with the idea that Corinne’s brilliance makes her not only inimitable but also above convention: as the admiring Oswald exclaims, “Who could resemble you? And can one make laws for a unique person?” (86). If we disregarded the ominous elements that shade the lovers’ brief, intense scenes of bliss, we might think that Oswald and Corinne could marry happily if only the austere mores of his English homeland were softened to accommodate the gifts that Corinne possesses on top of her mainstream feminine charms. Indeed, Corinne raises the possibility that she would have found a more hospitable climate in the company of the superior beings drawn to more cosmopolitan places like London or Edinburgh (369). However, because the enemy camp of unfeeling or mediocre characters not only outnumbers but resents deep-feeling, deep-thinking souls, neither Corinne nor Oswald can find enduring happiness.
Corinne is too much of an anomaly to exist outside of the tolerant, art-loving, but—as the novel underscores—politically impotent, emasculating climate of contemporary Italy (156–65). Lady Edgermond, Corinne’s hostile, rigidly English stepmother, is assigned the task of passing the most damning judgments on Corinne and her genius. In a heated debate with Oswald over Corinne’s respectability, Lady Edgermond declares: “I set no store by talents that divert a woman from her true duties” and insists that, because Corinne has forsaken her family name for a public life, she is as good as dead in the eyes of proper society (458). She warns Oswald that Corinne will have a corrupting, denaturing influence on his character if he proceeds with his plan to marry her (461). Clearly, however, Corinne is not an agent but a victim of moral contagion: she becomes despondent as soon as Oswald reads her self-portrait, and she swiftly falls ill to the unspecified contagious malady that happens to be raging through Rome (401–6).
Although Corinne recovers from that illness, it nonetheless hastens her definitive decline into melancholy. Moved by Oswald’s passionate devotion to her while she is ill (406), Corinne turns to loving him with “idolatry” and resolves to follow him without knowing what fate awaits her. As the narrator observes, “When passion takes over a superior mind, it entirely separates reason from action”—a way of foreshadowing the reckless acts Corinne is about to commit out of passion for Oswald. She creates a veritable cult for him: “I regard you as an angelic being, as the purest and noblest character who has appeared on the earth . . . all this genius, which in the past inflamed my thought, is now nothing more than love. Enthusiasm, reflection, intelligence, I no longer have anything except what I share with you” (440, 443). And she follows him, secretly, when he returns to Scotland, eventually learning that he has become attached to her half-sister Lucile but hesitates to marry her because he still loves Corinne. After a series of torturous scenes in which she spies, ghostlike, on Oswald and Lucile, Corinne resigns herself to what appears to be her fate: she writes a letter freeing Oswald of his promise to her, then returns to Italy in a state of unrelenting fever and utter dejection (510).
Corinne’s melancholy carries unmistakable traits of the amorous and religious brands of melancholy. Yet it also has an intellectual dimension that brings to mind the “Aristotelian” class of melancholiacs featured in certain medical works of the period: “Lord Nelvil was wrong to believe . . . that the brilliant faculties of Corinne could give her means of happiness independent of her affections. When a person of genius is endowed with a true sensibility, her chagrins are multiplied by her very faculties: she makes discoveries in her own pain, as in the rest of nature, and the unhappiness of the heart being inexhaustible, the more one has ideas, the more one feels it” (419). Corinne’s melancholy is thus another of her hybrid qualities, a malady rooted in futile love but driven to pathological extremes by her exquisite sensibility and highly developed mind: “If anyone can guess how a person reaches madness, it is surely when a single thought seizes hold of the mind and no longer allows the succession of objects to vary its ideas. Corinne was, moreover, a person with such a lively imagination that it would consume itself when her faculties no longer had any outside source” (470). When Oswald abandons her to marry Lucile, she blames the loss of her talents not on him but on her amorous passion—the force that makes her imagination turn solely around her idealizing cult for her lost lover (565). Corinne finally wastes away from moral anguish, but not before reproducing herself (after a fashion) by transforming Oswald’s daughter Juliette into a Corinne-like artistic talent and instructing his wife, Lucile, on how to live harmoniously with him (575, 578).99 She also manages to stage a somber public recital in which a young woman dressed in white sings Corinne’s swan song: “my genius, if it still subsists, can be felt only through the force of my pain . . . of all the faculties of the soul I received from nature, that of suffering is the only one that I fully exercised” (583–84).
In the end, Staël’s fictional woman genius is, indeed, an ambiguous being—but not in the terms that Cabanis had in mind when he applied the term to women intellectuals. She joins Rousseau by developing, via melancholy, an extraordinary “vigor and life in myself for suffering” (LC, 207).100 Corinne exemplifies the fate of a sensitive, intellectually superior person living in an inhospitable world; and what she, like “Jean-Jacques,” embraces as her mantle is the prerogative of self-definition—a prerogative that clearly existed in tension with contemporary definitions of the intellectual, including some that emanated from medical discourse.
Medicine was not, for all of that, inhospitable to Staël. Contemporary alienists frequently cited her works to support their theories on the passions or suicide.101 Dr. Réveillé-Parise included Staël in his gallery of thinkers found, during autopsy, to have possessed extraordinarily large brains.102 Corinne itself was turned into a medical document, of sorts, in Études cliniques: Traité théorique et pratique des maladies mentales (1852–53), where Bénédict Auguste Morel quoted two long excerpts from the novel to illustrate “primitive or simple lypemania.” “Lypemania,” as Morel defined it, was a “state of sadness and despondency with or without tears”—a condition of profound heartache that eventually led to “a prostration of all the intellectual forces . . . a cruel state that, depriving the individual of all her energy, seems to leave her with nothing but the sad faculty of suffering.”103 No one, in his eyes, had described this state more eloquently than Staël when she depicted Corinne’s dejection after returning from Scotland to Florence: she tried “a thousand resources to calm that devouring faculty of thought that no longer presented her, as it once did, with the most varied reflections,” but she failed, and realized with anguish that she had lost her creative talent.104 Morel could not, as he put it, “resist the pleasure of citing this description.”105