History as Cure

Memory remains as the trace of the other. Memory, however, is an active faculty, and it cannot be ignored that the subject which bears or incorporates the other, the absent object of memory, is the widow.^[5] She does so, if

[4] Ibid., Preface.

[5] On the creative force of memory, a power well recognized in law, see, for example, Doderidge, English Lawyer at 12–13, depicting memory as "the chest of an inestimable treasure, given from God for the preservation of all kinds of knowledge: it is as Plutarch says, the store house of all our understanding; and as Plato says, Mater Musarum , the Mother of the Muses: as Aristotle says, it is the guide of our experience, and the ground-work of all wisdom." For more general studies, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

she observes her calling, because of a duty to the dead husband and so as to live on as his memory, as a widow, unmarried, chaste yet not a virgin.^[6] The duty of mourning and of recollection of that which has passed should therefore be understood actively and therapeutically as instituting a type of being through a restrained although never passive rite of loss.^[7] The purpose of recollection is not only to preserve and further the image of the departed but is equally to train the soul and to remind the widow or the friend of a separation that they too will experience. The widow is cautioned "not to be conformed to this world"^[8] and further advised that death should remind her of the vanity, the folly, and the bitterness that are aspects of all temporality: "The time that's passed is vanished like a dream or shadow. . . . Already we are dead to all the years we have lived, and vain it is to expect to live them over again."^[9] The act of mourning impresses upon the soul the intimation or shadow of mortality. It preaches the inevitability and constancy of death as such—not simply of the husband's death. It equally defines death, past and future, as something ordained by providence, signaled by Saturn, by law, and yet sent to cure or to relieve the husband and the widow alike of unhappiness. More than that, how-

[6] Allestree, Ladies Calling at 80, recommends that the widow not marry again. In ecclesiastical terms remarriage would be a concession to lust and sexual pleasure. For the patristic grounds of this view, see, for example, St. Ambrose, De Viduis, in The Principal Works of St. Ambrose , Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 10 (Oxford: Parker and Co., 1896). Generally, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987); M. Ingram, Church and Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); A. Blamires (ed.), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Madeleine Lazard, Images littéraries de la femme à la renaissance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).

[7] That the widow's mourning should be restrained is a theme pursued in Thomas Allestree, A Funeral Handkerchief (London: for the author, 1671) at 8, forbidding "inordinate passion; not tears simply but their excess; not tears of sympathy . . . but despairing repining tears." Also on widows and melancholy, see Burton, Anatomie of Melancholy at 193. More broadly on femininity and melancholy, see Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Anne Juranville, La Femme et la mélancholie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).

[8] Richard Allestree, Whole Duty of Mourning and the great concern of preparing ourselves for death practically considered (London: J. Black, 1694) at 56.

[9] Ibid. at 5.

ever, mourning prepares the widow. It works upon her soul. Memory is the technique that will cure her of her loss by instituting innumerable images of that which has passed, by providing a vision or reordering of the past that will include the absence of the husband and so detach the widow from her loss.

The model of such detachment is broadly that of the crucifixion, of an exemplary death which is both a sacrifice and a redemptive communication with the spirit. Mourning is classically depicted in doctrine as the requisite manner of recollection of the spirit. In the terms of one Reformation defense of the Catholic faith: "Preach [docente ] so as to move the people [ecclesia ] not to clamour but to mourning. Let the tears of the audience be your commendation."^[10] Doctrine, like history or as history, thus mourns so as to recognize the reality of the past and to detach the faithful, or those that recognize their calling, from the form of the past, its absence or loss. It is in the latter respect that the treatises on bereavement represent the rituals of mourning as curative: consideration of the dead institutes a "house," a commonplace or "school of mortification."^[11] Recollection of that which has passed at the time of its passing, remembrance or reflection upon the last periods of a life, will act "to make a deeper impression on the soul, and be retained in the memory more than all the memorials that have been rehearsed."^[12] The realization of the vanity and the transience of the body will prepare the widow for a life of renunciation consoled only by the images preserved in memory and a knowledge of the advantages of death. In the modern and less poetic language of psychoanalysis, mourning, which is also almost a symptom of femininity,^[13] is equally depicted as working upon the soul or, in the terms of the modern discipline, as freeing the subject from its attachment to the object it has lost. For Freud, the "work" of mourning is that of the subject's coming to terms with the reality of loss.^[14] The process is depicted as being one of intense struggle through which the mourner slowly parts with a continued existence, the internal image or hallucination through which the lost

[10] Thomas Stapleton, A Fortresse of the Faith first planted amonge us englishmen, and continued by the Universal Church of Christ (Antwerp: Ihon Laet, 1565) at sig. 138r.

[11] Allestree, Whole Duty of Mourning at 55.

[12] Ibid. at 57–58.

[13] See Luce Irigary, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) at 66–70; Juranville, La Femme et la mélancholie particularly 77–107.

[14] Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" at 154: "Now in what consists the work which mourning performs? I do not think there is anything far-fetched in the following representation of it. The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object. . . . Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished. . . . When the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again."

object lives on in the mind of the mourner.^[15] The process is depicted by Freud as one of separation or distancing, a curious and painful "mental economics" of detachment. This process of detachment could also, however, be interpreted as a species of hermeneutics, an analysis, another series of histories of, let us say, woman, image, and law.^[16]

It is initially and inevitably the case that mourning is not for the benefit of the dead, nor does it endeavor to change the past but only, although such is not an insignificant act, to multiply and ameliorate its images in the present. The function of mourning, like that of all historical writing, is expressive of a contemporary event and endeavors either to excise a past, a fantasm, which threatens the health of the mourner, or to manipulate the images of vanished time as a resource for the future or, in the most spurious of contemporary notions, for living well. In either event, the curative virtue of mourning shares many features with the institution of historical writing, which is itself inevitably also an interpretation and displacement of the past: "Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language. The latter always remains to be decoded. These two 'heterologies' (discourses on the other) are built upon a division between the body of knowledge that utters a discourse and the mute body that nourishes it."^[17] The object of history is most obviously and most directly the alien realm of loss: the passed is that which is foreign, obscure, inert, and irrecoverable. The past can only be deciphered, and the only reason for that decipherment is the interest, pleasure, crisis, or peril of the contemporary. The institution of history, like reflection upon our own senescence, is multiple, varying, and purposive; it is the most powerful and the most social of the

[15] Ibid. at 154.

[16] For a critical appraisal of Freud's thesis coinciding with the advice of the Ladies Calling, see Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation, Drives (London: ICA, 1992) at 172–173: "Everything rests here upon the notion of detachment (Losung ) which Freud, in an entirely inadequate understanding, considers as the liberating severing of a bond with the object, and not as an analysis . Upon the fabric of my existence, woven with the web of the other (now lost), loss causes me to perform an unravelling, a painful meditation. But each thread, although I indeed separate it off from the whole, is not broken as Freud claimed. It is, on the contrary, over-invested, contemplated separately, reintegrated into its history and beyond this history in common, of the couple for instance, reintegrated into a more inclusive and much longer history."

[17] Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (Now York: Columbia University Press, 1988) at 3. Both existential and psychoanalytic approaches to history repeat this point extensively. It was an important theme in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason I, Theory of Practical Ensembles (London: New Left Books, 1976) and may be traced more recently in another important critique, Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), as, for example, at 115: "History is always a secondary force that must be preceded by an impulse of the moment."

species of thought, it is unconscious in its effects and yet active as either therapy or domination of an invisible or lost cause.^[18] Retrospection is a kind of sorcery that imagines, invents, and reinvents those losses that mark survival or that constitute, in its most ancient sense, the image of contemporary identity as person, institution, collectivity, or law. The curative power of remembrance or, in institutional terms, of historical memory, lies not in the accuracy of the recollection nor in the similitude of the image to the subject recollected but rather in the internal effects of the play of past, image, and imagination.

Mourning, in psychoanalytic terms, stands between the subject and melancholia^[19] either by virtue of separating the subject from the object or by reinterpreting the history of the subject so as to incorporate the loss of the loved object. Memory thus cures by instituting innumerable images of that which has passed, by providing a vision or reordering of the past that will include the absence of the husband or the loss of some other abstraction or ideal. Time, in another Renaissance conception of such recollection, "must play the physitian," to which the anonymous author of The Lawes Resolutions of Women's Rights adds, "I will now help him a little: why mourn you so, you that be widows? Consider how long you have been in subjection under the predominance of parents, of your husbands, now you be free in liberty, and free proprii iuris at your own law."^[20] The widow comes to reinterpret the past and eventually to inaugurate a novel present, not least by virtue of the legal recognition of her civil status, of her will, upon the death of the husband. The multiple images of the husband, the fragmented reflections of a previous life, the shattered specular remains, are the opposite of a classical fidelity to the image or death mask of the paterfamilias . The widow inherits a life; she may love again although it is recommended that such a love be of the church, of the spirit and not of the flesh. The fragmentation of the past acts finally as a spur either to the integration of the self or to a more wayward and idolatrous mobility, a flux and renewal of form, the becoming of the widow now separated from her former subjections.

Separation has also been the technique of the historian whose interpretations depend upon that breakage, rupture, or periodicity which places

[18] On the fantasmatic character of individual and collective memory, see Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1942), especially ch. 4; also Sigmund Freud, "Screen Memories" in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), vol. 3 at 303–322.

[19] In the Freudian vocabulary, melancholia is an extended mourning which is differentiated from simple mourning not only by the pathological persistence of grief but by the unconscious character of the loss. See Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" at 155.

[20] Anonymous, The Lawes Resolutions of Women's Rights or, the Lawes Provision for Woemen (London: J. More, 1632) at 232.

the object of historical knowledge in the past. Against that breakage which constantly threatens to suggest the externality of both the past and of the event, the Baroque conception of plurality, of a past that constantly dissolves and reforms, is suggestive of an internality of the other or of its meaning, an internality toward which the history of mourning itself points. The truth of death, according to Allestree, was not privation but "permutation and change."^[21] Death sent on—it was nothing less than the sign of all future possibility, the augur of an "impossible mourning," a distant "premonition of the other," the source of "a law which speaks to us through memory."^[22] The other cannot ever be in us as a resurrected self, nor can the image of the other in any way accurately represent the reality of its remains. The image is the repetitive and numerous object of survival, it is the constant or occasional reminder of the dissolution of the subject, it is a fantasy that identifies both subject and death in the plural or dissipated reinterpretation of what has gone. The image as memory exists only in constant dissolution, in the corruption or deferral of presence, in the shattered unity of all identity over time. In similar terms the history of the institution or the history of law is subject to the same process of dissolution, it lives in the scriptural mirror or written remains of innumerable cases, diverse and fragmentary jurisdictions, in permutation and change obscured by the glass of reason or the distance of norms.