Before Intimacy: Modernity and Emotion in the Early Modern Discourse of Sexuality

Author(s): Daniel Juan Gil

Source: ELH, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 861-887
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032048
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BEFORE INTIMACY: MODERNITY AND EMOTION IN
THE EARLY MODERN DISCOURSE OF SEXUALITY

BY DANIEL JUAN GIL

Much researchinto earlymodernsexualityhas been drivenby the

Foucauldianparadigmthat sexualityis not constituted as a personal
identitybefore the nineteenth century.Criticshave pointed out how,
absent a discourse that organizes facts of sexuality into personal
identities,sexualitycould inhabita whole rangeof social relationships
not specificallydesignatedas sexual.Such workhas often focused on
the implications of this situation for male-male relationships,and
here Eve KosofskySedgwick'snotion of homosocialdesire has proved
an invaluableframework.'Sedgwick points to the way prestigious
relationshipsbetween men are mediated by women, but part of the
point Sedgwickmakesis thatthere is a continuumbetween homosocial
and homosexualbonds. The concept of homosocial desire captures
how sexualitycan inhabitthe veryheartof relationshipsbetween men
that are not specificallydesignated as sexual. And as Alan Bray has
shown in his analysisof sexualitybetween men in the early modern
period, when homosocial relationshipsare attacked as instances of
sodomy the charge typicallyarises not from the sheer fact of sexual
contactbetween men but from a failureto respect the conventionsof
a rank-boundsociety.2 As JonathanGoldberg puts it, in the early
modern period "sexuality. . . does not stand apart as a separate
domain,"and therefore can, by turns, flourishat the very core of the
most valorizedsocial relationsand, then again, radicallyunsettle the
smooth operationsof social business as usual.3
My aim in these pages is to describe one early modern discourse,
cultivatedin sixteenth-centuryliteratureincluding the poetry of Sir
ThomasWyatt,that does single out facts of sexualityand distinguish
sexual experience from other domains of early modern social life.
This discourse relies upon intense emotions to define the space of
early modern sexuality.Wyatt'spoetry (and other literature of the
same period) takes advantageof early modern uncertaintyabout the
connection between emotions and selves to celebrate the ability of
intense emotional states to define what Foucault might call a "limit

ELH 69 (2002) 861-887 © 2002 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress 861

experience" that unsettles the self and its normal connections to the
social world. I will argue that in sixteenth-century culture emotional
limit experiences open the door to a bond that is sexual and not
social.4 Such experiences define a new class of felt connections to
other persons (and occasionally to nonpersons) that constitute a
discursive space with a certain durability of its own. If much of the
best work on sexuality in the early modern period has pointed to the
unsettled and unsettling ability of sexuality to slip in and out of the
central nodes of early modern society, then the discourse of sexuality
I discuss here essentially defines sexuality as a social node of its own,
one which stands at a tangent to the other nodes of social life. Neither
social nor antisocial, sexuality will come to seem asocial insofar as it
constitutes a place apart where powerful connections spring up
between people who have in some important way dropped out of the
functional dimensions of early modem society. To invoke a remark-
able phrase of Leo Bersani's, the brand of sexuality recorded in early
modern literature drives people together but without providing the
terms for functional social ties between them.5
I will offer some readings of poems by Wyatt to illustrate how the
asocial, emotionally defined sexuality I explore here appears in
literary texts in practice. First, however, I wish to elaborate a broad
theoretical and historical account of the emergence of this particular
approach to sexuality in the early modem period. In some ways, the
early modern category that I am exploring here resembles the
modern notion of private intimacy which is also a sexualized experi-
ence of others that stands apart from society and yet is recognized by
it. I contend, however, that the category I am describing here is, in an
important sense, an alternative to modern intimacy. This sexual
alternative was able to flourish for a time and was eventually
displaced by the intimacy increasingly imagined by early novels. I
want to review one influential genealogy of modern intimacy in order
to begin to develop my account of the alternative to intimacy that is
archived in early modern literature.
In Love as Passion, Niklas Luhmann describes the gradual emer-
gence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a code of
privileged, intimate relationships that he sees as distinctive of an
emerging modernity. 6 For Luhmann, modernity is defined by social
organization based on impersonal systems like the economy which
gradually displace the heritable hierarchies of traditional society. As
traditional hierarchies wane people are less and less likely to derive
their sense of personal identity from their position within the social

862 Before Intimacy

world, and instead they must derive their sense of themselves from
their particular way of looking at the world, from their personality.
Luhmann writes that:

Possessing a name and a place within the social framework in the

form of general categoriessuch as age, gender, social status and
professionno longersufficesas a meansof both knowingthat one's
organismexistsandof self-identification--the basisfor one'sownlife
experience and action. Rather, individualpersons have to find
affirmationat the level of theirrespectivepersonalitysystems,i.e. in
the differencebetweenthemselvesandtheirenvironmentandin the
mannerin which they deal with this difference-as opposedto the
wayothersdo.7

For Luhmann, the "personality system," which has value precisely

because it sets someone apart from others, must, paradoxically, be
affirmed by at least one privileged spectator. What Luhmann de-
scribes as the code of intimacy deals with the paradoxical task of
affirming the particular life-world of an individual as something
particular, as something that essentially cannot be communicated at
all or at least cannot be communicated easily. For Luhmann, roman-
tic, intimate relationships carry out the increasingly important func-
tion of mediating between individuals who have disparate experi-
ences of the world and who value this disparate experience as a
source of personal identity. Luhmann concludes that even as modern
society relies more and more on impersonal connections, it also lays
the groundwork for increasingly deep personal connections. These
intense personal bonds are part of the individual's effort to cultivate a
sense of self that does not rely upon a stable position within a social
hierarchy. At the same time, intimate relations compensate persons
for the alienation that comes from exposure to impersonal social
systems that are not respecters of persons.
According to Luhmann, this defensive and compensatory form of
social bonding seizes upon sexuality and physical passion in order to
accomplish its paradoxical task. Because intimacy is charged with
communication about personalities that are defined as being non-
communicable and separate from the shared world, the code seizes
upon bodily passion to say what cannot be said. Luhmann writes that
"love solves its own attendant communicative problems in a com-
pletely unique manner. To put it paradoxically, love is able to enhance
communication by largely doing without communication."8

Daniel Juan Gil 863

 The sixteenth century stands at an early moment in Luhmann's
narrativeof modernization.It is certainlytrue that normativehierar-
chies are being challenged and that their ability to deliver stable
social identities is not assured. In fact, in part because of the
breakdownof traditionalhierarchyand the consequent pressure to
seek other supports for personal identity, there are instances of
intensely intimate connections that do provide compensation for a
loss of traditional social identity. In the sixteenth century such
intimacies occur between men and men or between women and
women more frequentlythan they occur between men and women.
But unlike modern intimacy, such relationships are not seen as
separate from the public world of impersonalties. Rather,they are
frequentlycelebrated,under the rubricof friendship,as fundamental
pillarsof social stability.Bray'sanalysisof sodomysuggests that such
intimacies can be made to seem profoundlytransgressiveprecisely
because the weight of the social world standsupon their shoulders.9
In the early modern period intimacyis not yet institutionalizedas a
realm apart from the public world. Nonetheless, early modern
friendship may indeed be the precursorto the intimacy Luhmann
models. But precisely because Luhmann'snarrativeis so strongly
teleological, leading inexorablytowardmodern intimacy,it does not
allow room for alternativesto modern intimacythat arise duringthe
tumultuous process of modernization.I wish to recover such an
alternativethat flourished,for a time, and which is preserved,I will
argue, in sixteenth-centuryliterarytexts.
In order to recover this alternative I wish to turn to another
account of modernizationthat parallelsLuhmann'sbut which leaves
room for alternativesocial formationsthat, strictlyspeaking,have no
future after the version of modernitywe now inhabit coalesces. In
The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias connects the rise of modern
social organizationto changes in the emotionaland psychicorganiza-
tion of individuals.10For Elias, as for Luhmann,modernsocieties rely
upon an unprecedented degree of interconnection between indi-
viduals upon which the life and safety of each individualdepends.
Elias writes that in the modern condition every person is embedded
in long, seamlesswebs of social dependancythat are not regulatedby
an external hierarchy."To make these chains of interdependence
possible, so goes Elias's argument, the instinctual life of every
individualhas to be dampened. Elias argues that Renaissancecon-
duct manuals encourage a new emphasis on elegant and refined
mannersthat are designed to conceal and disguisethe life of the body

864 BeforeIntimacy
beneath a veneer of civility.People are encouragedto pay constant
attentionto the impacttheirown bodieshaveupon otherswithinsocial
life in order to lubricatethe countlessinterpersonalencountersupon
which modern social life depends. To use one of Elias'smost forceful
slogans,the civilizingprocess raises the thresholdfor feeling shame.
Elias'smodel occasionallyseems an instanceof what Foucaultcalls
a repressivehypothesis,but given Elias'slargersociologicalargument
it is clear that he is describing not a quantitative reduction of
instinctuallife but a qualitativechange in the nature of human ties.
This change can best be graspedin the widening scope of civilized
manners. The earliest conduct manuals Elias examines are specifi-
cally courtly-they are written for members of an aristocraticelite
and are not even in principleapplicableto other people in the social
world. In Medieval courts, manners are framed exclusively as a
markerof class. But Elias argues that during the Renaissancethese
standardsof restraintand civilityare graduallyapplied to wider and
wider segments of the population until they apply, in principle, to
everyone.Renaissanceconduct manualspresent mannersas a way of
recognizingand affirminga hypotheticallyuniversalcore of humanity
shared by all. Again and again in his Civility in Boys, for example,
Erasmusemphasizesthat the basic rationalefor good mannersis the
need to avoidoffendingothers, and he encourageshabitsof sensitive
observationof and even identificationwith other human beings.'2
The universalitythat Renaissanceconduct manualsconjureup opens
the door to a new world in which massive social interconnection
projects a new ideal: the vision of a universallyshared human core
that governs all relationships that are properly social. The real
referent of this hypotheticalhumanityis the interconnected social
world that is only slowly emerging in the early modern period. In
other words, in the discourseof civilitya new social reality-defined
by complexityand interrelatedness-is dimly recognized through a
new way of envisioning human relationships-as expressions of
universalhumanity.The civilizingprocess does repress patterns of
emotional and bodily life that characterize an older and simpler
world, but at the same time it cultivatesnew emotional experiences
(like shame, for example) that are calibratedto recognize a human
core hypotheticallysharedby all. What Eliasdescribesas the civilizing
process amountsto the uneven emergence of a new, productiveideal
in human interactions,the ideal of a humane relationship.
This new ideal of a humane relationshipand the hypotheticalcore
of humanitythat underpinsit are important,in part,because they act

DanielJuan Gil 865

as a model towardwhich real behavioris directed. Once it comes into
focus, people reallydo aim for humane relationships,and on an ever
expandingscale. But the new ideal is equallyimportantinsofar as it
makes it possible to recognize spectacular violations of a shared
human core identity. The most obvious violations of the emerging
ideal of sharedhumanityduringthe early modernperiod come from
the continuingpresence of vestiges of the traditionalsocial frame-
work. The modern conception of the social world, organizedaround
the ideal of universallysharedhumanity,failsto displacean older,and
radically less dynamic, conception of the social world in which
relationshipsare mediated by a clear status hierarchy.From the
standpointof this feudalworld-view,inheritedfacts of rankand status
are the prime engines of social relationship.This traditionalsocial
hierarchyand the stable social identities it anchors allow for fierce
love between those bound together by kinshipties and equallyfierce
hatred of blood enemies; it also allows, however,for utter indiffer-
ence toward those whose social position renders them beyond the
social horizon. Aristocraticblood lust, unconditional hatred, and
social indifferencecollide with the emergingideal of sharedhuman-
ity. In essence, it is a collisionof differentways of picturingthe social
world, a collision of social imaginaries.
There is another,allied, violationof universalhumanity,however,
which paradoxicallyoccursinside the worldbroughtinto existenceby
the universalizingdiscourseof civility.Since universalcivilityhas its
roots in the medieval"courtliness"which applied only to the courtly
elites, adopting a veneer of manners is still most advanced at the
absolutistcourts of the Renaissance.There the quest for civilityis a
form of symbolic competition;it aims for a kind of self-fashioning
that will elicit recognitionand respect. At court, mannersand civility
have a status effect; they distinguish, and as such they are an
important field of contest for courtly elites.13 By applying the
standardsof civilityto everyone,the humanistsparadoxicallyincrease
the prestige of the new elites at court who become a kind of civility-
vanguard.Humanistconduct manuals,in fact, frequentlybetraytheir
origin in medieval courtliness and reassert their commitment to
sociallydistinctivebehaviorwhen they claim to find in the members
of the social elite, the courtiers around the absolute monarch, a
model for good behaviorthat all of the social world ought to try to
imitate.Thus, even as civilitytries to civilize everyonein the name of
respecting the core of humanityshared by everyone, it also makes
civilized and refined behavior into a powerful guarantor of the

866 Before Intimacy

superior social status of the courtly elite. Moreover, this cultural
distinction is often folded back upon the terms of the feudal world
view to make different degrees of acculturation seem to be borne by
different degrees of aristocratic blood. Much of elite court culture is
oriented toward the paradoxical project of acting well-born. Here the
unevenness of the civilizing process gives rise to a fissure within the
theoretically universal fabric of civility, one which yawns all the
deeper when it is superimposed on incompatible social imaginaries.
Thus the discourse of civility oscillates between, on the one hand,
providing universal terms for social interactions and, on the other,
defining insuperable, quasi-heritable differences between people.
During the early modern period, friction between these incompat-
ible social imaginaries and the different norms of sociability that
characterize them defines a massive and recurring crisis in which the
very possibility of establishing functional social ties is threatened.
The brand of sexuality I examine here is one important response to
this social crisis; in essence, literary texts open sexuality in order to
convert social trauma into pleasure by converting the impossibility of
establishing a functionally social tie into the felt reality of a sexual tie.
Literary authors use the terms of civility to foreground moments
when characters are pulled together by the gravity of a hypothetically
shared humanity only to be actively repelled from one another, like
negatively charged particles, because of a sudden resurgence of
difference or alterity defined by a premodern social imaginary. This
experience of corporeal repulsion is often identified as painful, and
yet insofar as it becomes the sign of a very different mode of relation
to others it is a pain invested with a peculiar pleasure.
The sexual intensity attained by short-circuiting humanity, by
catastrophically undermining the terms of humane ties, places the
participants in a social bubble, neither part of the social world nor
fundamentally dangerous to it. It is an intense form of bonding that is
not social and yet is impossible to imagine apart from the incompat-
ible social ideals that early modern society delivers. Like modern
intimacy, this discourse defines a place apart from the social world in
which sexuality can flourish. But unlike intimacy, the experience of
characterscaughtin the attraction/repulsion
loop of earlymodern
sexuality never affirms a rich, human personality. Quite the opposite
in fact; the early modern discourse of sexuality I examine here
celebrates sexuality as a way of violating the increasingly prestigious
norm of humanity that compels respect for all other persons in the
socialworld.

Daniel Juan Gil 867

 The terms of this sexual experience stronglyanticipate Bersani's
account of modem sexuality.In his influential 1987 essay "Is the
Rectuma Grave,"for example,Bersanisees (andcelebrates)sex as "a
radicaldisintegrationand humiliationof the self."14 Embracingthe
view that sexualityis fundamentallyantisocial,that it underminesties
that otherwisepass as functionallysocial,Bersanicelebratessexuality's
abilityto suspend the norms that constrainand regulateother forms
of relationship.In the early modern period, an analogousbrand of
sexuality opens precisely because of the collision of incompatible
norms of personalidentity and social bonding. Earlymodern sexual-
ity, to use Bersani'swords, is "sociallydysfunctionalin that it brings
people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and
solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart."15 The early modern
contradictionbetween incompatibleforms of social bonding drives
individualsto the very limits of their social universesand opens the
door to an experience of anotherkind.
One of the hallmarksof this earlymodernmode of sexualityis that
its experienceis articulatedprimarilythrougha vocabularyof power-
ful, often one-sided, and sometimes painful emotions. Again and
again literarytexts use the contradictionsof the civilizingprocess to
elicit intense emotionsthat seem to define the realityof sexualbonds.
In seizing upon physicalemotions to describe the felt realityof ties
that cannot be translated into any of the social categories early
modernsocietyuses to thinkaboutitself, literarytexts take advantage
of an unsettledqualityin earlymodernthinkingaboutthe connection
between emotion and selves. To understandhow literarytexts use
emotions to define connections between bodies that supercede
connections between persons it might be useful to review the role
that emotionsplay in a modem accountvery much committedto the
value of intimacy as a support for rich, individuatedpersonality.I
want to examine Martha Nussbaum's Upheavalsof Thought: The
Intelligence of Emotions because it offers an exemplary,carefully
arguedaccountthat capturesmuch of a modernconsensusabout the
emotions.16 As the subtitle of Nussbaum'sbook alreadyimplies, hers
is a cognitive approach to the emotions; she sees emotions as
possessinga kind of intelligence, an intelligence aboutthe self and its
deepest interests and concerns.
In Nussbaum'saccount emotions are judgmentsabout how things
and people in the world relate to the self. For her, the emotions are
a sort of parallel thinking system that is founded upon an implied
theoryof individualflourishing;emotionsenable an individualto care

868 BeforeIntimacy
about many different things in many different ways. A modern
cognitiveaccountvalues emotions because they enshrine a personal-
ity, a particularworld view, so much so that to change the emotional
life is to change the personality and vice versa. But even as the
emotions define an irreducible personality that is distinct from
others, they also define a terrainon which isolatedpsyches can meet.
Emotionsgo forth from the individualto affirmresponsibilityfor and
claims upon others, even, for Nussbaum, certain animals. For
Nussbaum,the goal of educationshouldbe to build an emotionallife
that maximizesthe emotionalidentificationbetween self and others,
that maximizes the recognition that other people's (and animals')
emotions elicit. Nussbaum essentially wants to program her own
liberalvalues deep inside the heartsof her imaginedsubjects,and in
so doing she illustratesthe paradoxicaltask that emotions are called
upon to perform within a modern framework:emotions are valued
both because they define a singularand irreduciblepersonalityand
because they seem universal enough to provide a bridge between
disparate individuals. It is a framework that fits perfectly into
Luhmann'saccount of romanticintimacy.
Early modern thinkers, of course, did not yet feel the liberal
pathos of individualswho must bridge their separateness.However,
some early modern writers, especially those working in the early
seventeenth century,did anticipatethe modern vision of emotional
life. In A Treatiseof the Passionsand Facultiesof the Soul (1640), for
example, Edward Reynolds develops the view that emotions define
an individualidentity, and he views controlling and managingthe
emotions as the key to controllingindividualbehavior."7 To mold the
emotions is to mold the individualand his or her most fundamental
ways of responding to the world. Reynolds essentially aims to
hardwire Puritan sociability into the individual subject just as
Nussbaumdoes a liberal sociability.But despite his emphasison the
possibilityof molding the emotional life, Reynold'stext is suffused
with momentsin whichparticularemotionsinvadethe well-constituted
subject, emotions that are endowed with a recalcitrant,alien power.
At these moments emotions do not seem like plastic core competen-
cies of the humanindividualbut morelike dangerousforcesemanating
from anotherworld. Reynolds interpretsthese emotional outbreaks
as momentsin which God (or Satan)breaksdirectlyinto the individual
consciousness. But I would argue that these alien emotions in fact
emanatefromanotherdiscursiveworld,the discursiveworldof generic
Galenismthat stillinformsmuch earlymodem thinkingon emotions.s8

Daniel Juan Gil 869

 Generic Galenisminterpretsemotions as the result of unbalanced
humors in the body which diet and drugs can modify more readily
than moral philosophycan.19 The view of emotions as states of the
body is an important and widely shared bias in the early modern
period, but it has given rise to some misconceptionsabout what is
different about the early modern approach to emotional life as
compared to the modern. To some extent, for instance, the early
modern refusal of a sharp distinction between thought and body
recurs in Nussbaum'saccount of emotions as a sort of corporeal
thinking.20The most important consequence of the Galenic bias
comes in how emotions are valued or what informationaboutthe self
and the world they are asked to provide. Unlike modern cognitive
theorists, early modern writers typicallydid not value the emotions
for the personalitythat they supposedlyembodied.
Indeed in early modern thinkingon the humors, the category of
personalityis largelyreplacedby the notion of recurringdispositions,
as it is in Galen who posits four humors and nine basic personality
dispositions correspondingto different combinationsof these hu-
mors. To a considerableextent, early modern thinkersviewed emo-
tions as constituting a finite set of body-mind types that could be
readilyclassed. Moreover,ratherthanvaluinghumoraldispositionsas
a source of individualityor distinction,early modern thinkersoften
coupled a recognition of recurring humoral dispositions with a
normativeaccountthat values a kind of stoicalbalanceand emotional
neutrality.Textslike Robert Burton'sAnatomyof Melancholy(1621)
and Ben Jonson'shumoralcomedies (I am thinkingspecificallyhere
of Every Man in His Humor [1598]) imply that to whatever extent
humorsdo ossifyinto somethingresemblinga personaldisposition,to
that extent the individualis sick and in need of a cure. Drawingupon
deep reservoirsof stoicism,the goal of both Burton'sdisquisitionand
Jonson'scomedies is to restore a balanced,neutraldispositionwhich
looks a lot like the absence of personality.Whatis importantlytrue of
Burton and Jonson,though not alwaystrue of Reynolds,is that they
do not value emotions as signs of a distinct personality.Ratherthey
tend to view them as recurringpatterns of disease that threaten to
shift the individualout of the shared social world altogether.
But the early modern discoursethat couples a normativestoicism
with an emphasis on recurring dispositions opens the door to an
emotionalcounterdiscourse.When emotions are conceived as recur-
ring somatic types ratherthan as mental states, they can be used to
define bodies that link with (or repulse) other emotionallydefined

870 Before Intimacy

bodies in ways not regulatedby social norms. Even in Jonson'sEvery
Man In His Humor,differenthumoraltypes can in fact do quite a lot
to and with one another,even if what they do seems antisocial.Proud
and fearful characters are yoked together in an endless, if also
sadistic, dance. These humors define connections between bodies
that spring up when connections between persons have become
temporarilyunavailable.And if writers like Burton and Jonson see
emotional dispositions as antisocial because they separate people
from a social world defined (for them) by norms of moderationand
balance, then such dispositionscan also be valued precisely on the
grounds that emotions define interpersonalconnections that stand
outside of the normal frameworksof the social world, that are in
some importantsense an alternativeto the normalinteractionsupon
which early modern society depends. This counterdiscoursevalues
emotions for the way they put the body in touch with other bodies in
ways that cannot be reduced to intimacybetween persons or to the
norms of social interactionthat allegedlygovern the social world.
The ability of emotional states to define a grammarof relation-
ships at a physical, somatic level is one reason the literarytexts I
examine turn to them as a vocabularyto describe a sexualitythat
cannot be reduced to the categories of intimacy.An equally impor-
tant reasonsixteenth-centuryliterarytexts use humoralemotions as a
grammarof sexual connections is that they do not seem psychologi-
cally inwardor hard to see. After all, if emotions are imbalancesof
humorsin the body, then they are visible to a spectator(or at least a
trainedspectator)in just the way that other facts about the body are.
In The Faerie Queene, for example, Edmund Spenser thinks of a
physical descriptionof a characterwho is in the grip of a powerful
emotional experience as giving full access to the emotional state;
there is no furtherinformationto add and there is therefore no deep
problem about sharingemotional states with others. In the absence
of a theory of rich interiorlife, earlymodern emotions simplydo not
seem especiallyprivateor hardto communicate.They are public, and
they define a public matrixof interactionsinto which emotionally
defined bodies can enter. In literary texts, emotions encode the
position of charactersnot in social space but in an emotional space
where the self and others can interactin ways that bypassboth social
normsand intimacy.Ratherthan seekingto renegotiatea relationship
that is at an emotional impasse, the emotions themselves are cel-
ebrated as the basis of a powerful connection. A perfect example of
this sort of interactioncomes in the final stanzasof book 4, canto 7 of

DanielJuan Gil 871

TheFaerie Queene,when ArthurreadsTimias'sterribledepressionas
ipsofacto evidence of love, and interactswith Timiason the basis of
that knowledgeby managinghis pain but without aimingto undo it.
At this moment, Arthurmakes use of a sort of x-rayvision that cuts
behind the supposed norms of social interaction to reveal new
circuitsof sociabilitythat inhere in powerfulemotions that open and
close bodies to one anotherin profoundlyextra-socialways.
One analogueto this x-rayvisionperspectiveand to the powerfully
emotionalconnectionsbetween bodies that appearbeyondthe norms
of the socialworld lies in the sadomasochismwhich Bersani,for one,
sees as revealingthe truth of all sexual encounters, even those that
appear to be based on mutualityand respect.21In sadomasochistic
scenes social codes, often invidiouscodes of gender or class hierar-
chy,are used tacticallyto provokea certainemotionalchargethat also
contains a sexual charge. I would add that part of the reason these
emotions are eroticallychargedis that they define relationships-or
at least interactions-between people that seem to go beyond the
claimsof the socialworld.JudithButler,amongothers, has sought to
portraysadomasochisticscripts,along with camp parodies,as critical
political acts that reveal that social codes are, at bottom, merely
performative.22 Respondingto such claims Bersanirightlynotes that
camp and sadomasochism are not about political critique but are
about delivering a sexual charge. The emotional charges generated
through sadomasochisticscripts (pride, perhaps, or fear or hatred)
deliver an erotic charge despite the self-consciouslytheatricalway in
which they are produced. These emotions define relationships(or
nonrelationships)that feel sexual because they are not reducible to
any functional social terms. Like the luxuriantemotions that are
liberated in S-M scenes, early modern emotions do not designate
states of the psychologicallydeep individualbut social states that
cannot be described in any other way.
The celebrationof overwhelming,somatic emotions suggests that
early modernliteraryauthorselaboratean approachto sexualitythat
emphasizes what Foucault terms an ars erotica. The discourse of
sexualitybefore intimacyfocuses on the ways that sexualizedexperi-
ences can be provokedand managedratherthan on categoriesof licit
and illicit acts. Early modem authors, including Wyatt, see the
civilizing process as a way of provokingintense, limiting emotions
that define sex before intimacy.It is an approachthat leaves a residue
in the literarytexts,enablingus to recoverthe specificemotionalaffects
associatedwith erotic connections in the early modern period.23

872 Before Intimacy

 The painful emotions that define the specificity of a sexual
connection to others is one of the hallmarks of Wyatt's poetry. I want
to turn to Wyatt now to illustrate how the schematic model of
incompatible social imaginaries and emotionally defined limit experi-
ences can be applied in practice. In doing so, I will attempt to show
the complexity that results from including gender in the analysis.
While the basic formula for a sexual turn is not gender specific, in
practice incompatibility in the terms of social ordering is always
vectored through gender. In "The Long Love that in My Thought
Doth Harbour," for example, a sexual turn is defined by renouncing
the complex social totality of the modern world in favor of a simpler,
less ambivalent, and distinctly feudal kind of relationship defined by
a traditional hierarchy; at the same time, however, this turn is
depicted as a move away from cross gender relationships to same-sex
relationships:
The long love that in my thought doth harbour
And in mine heart doth keep his residence
Into my face presseth with bold pretence
And therein campeth, spreadinghis banner.
She that me learneth to love and suffer
And will that my trust and lust'snegligence
Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,
With his hardinesstaketh displeasure.
Wherewithalunto the heart'sforest he fleeth,
Leavinghis enterprisewith pain and cry,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do when my master feareth,
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life ending faithfully.24

The beloved here teaches ("learneth") Wyatt a new standard of

civilized self-restraint that seems to him a constraining of his natural
impulses; she wills that his "trust and lust's negligence / Be reined by
reason, shame, and reverence." From Wyatt's standpoint, the stan-
dard of restraint championed by the lady represents a commitment to
sickliness, since with his "hardines"she "taketh displeasur." The lady's
displeasure is specifically directed toward the sexualized "baner"that
Wyatt's "long love" spreads on his face. This banner suggests a blush
which apparently seems too aggressive (like part of a military
campaign). For the lady (and apparently for Wyatt) the blush is not
understood as the effect of a self-conscious struggle with forbidden
desire (the sort of thing the lady would evidently endorse). In the

Daniel Juan Gil 873

sestet Wyatt flees from this perverse (and modern) standard of civility
into the very different bond that connects a feudal lord and his vassal:
"What may I do when my master feareth, / But in the field with him
to live and die?"25 The lord/vassal bond, with its unconditional
internal loyalty and unchecked, outward aggression, is presented as a
comforting alternative to the disturbingly inhibited, modern bond
proposed by the lady. By moving backward in time, by fleeing into the
arms of his feudal warlord, Wyatt effectively rejects the terms of the
modern, complex social totality associated with the restraint that the
lady champions.26And yet it is an escape that remains within the orbit
of the lady's restraint, for insofar as Wyatt's feudal lord is his own
desire, the feudal bond that is so comforting nevertheless maintains,
indefinitely, the struggle within the self that the lady advocates. The
master/vassal relationship has been transposed from a real battlefield
onto the psychological battlefield of the "heart's forrest" to which
Wyatt flees; war, hereafter, will turn self against self. The moment a
relationship with the other is shattered is also the moment the self is
shattered. And if this double social crisis triggers the luxuriant
emotions that flood the speaker's breast where he can take pleasure
in them, it is a pleasure that is inseparable from the painful pressure
applied by the lady and the norms of interpersonal bonding that she
projects.
This poem defines sexuality as a space where Wyatt and the lady
are yoked together in ways that depend upon an intensified experi-
ence of the friction between incompatible accounts of social bonding.
Respect for a hypothetically universal core of humanity sponsored by
the lady seems to drive her and Wyatt together toward a relationship
of emotional restraint that is then spectacularly violated by Wyatt's
inability to imagine completing the journey. Wyatt and lady are
driven together only to be powerfully repelled again by the continu-
ing pressure of archaic social ideals. Far from aiming to resolve the
interpersonal impasse, far from trying to reenter the world of
functional social ties, Wyatt's poem celebrates the proud and un-
swerving beloved as the occasion for an endlessly renewed turn away
from others and away from himself into a place defined only by
lavish, emotional suffering.27
In this poem and in others, the basic contradiction between a
universal social grammar and persistent vestiges of a premodern
social vision are vectored through gender. An extreme emphasis on
gender difference is, to some extent, a hallmark of Petrarchan poetry
generally, and such poetry often seems to be an expression of

874 Before Intimacy

homosocialdesire. In the basic Petrarchanscenario,competingfor a
beloved can readily become a way of competing with other men.28
For Wyatt,the struggleto refine the masculineself to makeit worthy
of the female beloved is, at the same time, a struggleto triumphover
other men at court who also seek to displaya conspicuouscivility.In
Wyatt'sPetrarchtranslations-of which "TheLong Love"is one-the
beloved often embodies, effortlessly, the ethos of the glittering,
civilized, cultured, and restrainedworld of the absolutistcourt that
Wyatthas trouble adoptinghimself.29But here gender difference is
pushed to the point where it provokesa beneficent social crisis that
opens the door to a sexual experience whose consequences cannot
readily be calculated in the register of homosocial competition
between men. If many of Wyatt'spoems do reveal the connection
between cross gender courtship and homosocial competition be-
tween men, they more frequently reveal the poet pushing beyond
this connection and trying to define specificallysexual connections
both in relationto the beloved and in relationto other men that stand
outside of a homosocial dynamic. In "Whoso List to Hunt," for
example, the beloved wears a collar that marks her as the king's
propertyso that desire for her becomes a way of exploringa desire to
displace the king himself.
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas, I may no more.
The vain travailhath wearied me so sore,
I amof themthatfarthestcomethbehind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And gravenwith diamondsin letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
'Noli me tangere for Caesar'sI am,
Andwildforto holdthoughI seemtame.
Here Wyattplays a dangerousgame, announcinga desire to possess
a beloved owned by Caesar, even as he ostentatiouslydeclines to
compete for her.30 But discouragementresultsnot so much from the
face to face encounterwith a forbiddingmasteras from the fact that
winningover the lady herself is as impossibleas the quest is alluring;
Wyattmay by no means his "weariedmind / drawfrom the deer"yet

DanielJuan Gil 875

chasingher is as futile as chasingthe wind. This economy of endlessly
renewed but endlesslyimpossiblequest suggeststhat the principleof
exclusionoperatingbetween Wyattand the deer is nothingso simple
as the worldlypower of Henry VIII. Indeed, the fact that the lady
wears a collarmarkingher as Caesar'spropertydoes not seem to rule
out chasing her for others. Wyatt hints that he does not expect the
readershe is addressingto have any more luck with the deer than he
has had, but at the same time he remarksthat he is especiallybad at
hunting deer, being one "of them that farthestcometh behind."The
beloved's attractive-repulsivequality is produced by a force that
cannot easily be reduced to the turns of male homosocialdesire.
Far from engaging in red blooded competition with other men,
Wyatthere seems to be developinga kind of compensatorypleasure
in announcingwhat a loser he is, how little threat he is to his male
competitors, a move that may also have the effect of deprivinghis
male competitorsof the pleasures of vanquishinghim insofar as he
beats them to the Sunday punch. But the pressures of male-male
competitionover a lady who is off-boundsis absorbed,in this poem
and in others, by the lady herself and by the metaphysicalproblems
of catchingher. The final line of the poem-in which Wyattreadson
the lady'scollarthat she is "wildfor the hold though I seem tame"-
introduces a vocabularythat Wyatt uses throughout his poems to
figure the problem of access to women who may be the propertyof
other men. But the wild/tame vocabularyseeks to define sexual
availabilityoutside of homosocial struggles; here availabilityand
nonavailabilityrefer to the cultural differential between lady and
poet and not to whether another man has beaten Wyatt to her. By
superimposingthe vocabularyof wildness and tameness onto the
problem of gaining access to women who may belong to other men
Wyattopens paths to social relationshipsthat push againstthe limits
of homosocial competition. One poem in which Wyatt exploits the
ambivalence between tameness and wildness to open forms of
relationship that are not contained by homosocial competition is
"TheyFlee From Me."
"They Flee From Me" is a poem about a dramatic change in
Wyatt'slife, where women who had once been availablehave ceased
to be so, a change that he tries to represent as their becoming wild.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalkingin my chamber.

876 Before Intimacy

 I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
Thatsometimetheyput themselfin danger
To takebreadat myhand;andnowtheyrange
Busilyseekingwitha continualchange.
(1-7)
Here women have become wild and therefore reject Wyatt;they do
not rememberthat sometimesthey put themselvesin danger.Yetthe
wild/tamevocabularyis not so stable, for when women were gentle,
tame, and meek they nonetheless stalkedinto Wyatt'schamberto be
fed. Equally to the point, insofar as the sort of wildness that makes
women unavailableto Wyatt is marked by "busilyseeking with a
continual change,"it seems like a variationon the "newfangleness"
and calculating refinement that markswomen as creatures of the
court, a world that seems to Wyattboth tame and utterlywild, both
human and utterly inhuman, both civilized and barbaric. Wyatt
returnsto hyper-refined,courtlyways of interactingin the conclud-
ing stanza.
It wasno dream:I laybroadwaking.
Butall is turnedthoroughmy gentleness
Intoa strangefashionof forsaking.
AndI haveleaveto go of her goodness
Andshe alsoto use newfangleness.
But sincethatI so kindlyam served
I wouldfainknowwhatshe hathdeserved.
(15-21)

Wyatthere glances at the beloved'spolite, genteel ways of rejecting

her suitors;"youhave leave to go,"is evidentlythe way she says "no"
to Wyatt.Her rejectionof Wyattand her use of polite and even kind
language to express this rejection are, for Wyatt, two sides of the
same coin. Here "newfangleness,"the "strange fashion" that has
infected the social world, is presented as a bewildering code that
defines a form of life from which Wyattis alienated,but which the
beloved evidently calls home. The beloved's ambiguouswild/tame
qualitytokens membershipin the circles of the courtlyelite. Interest-
ingly, this is a quality that Wyatthimself acquireswhen he plays at
newfangledrefinementin the concludinglines of the poem. In those
lines Wyatt uses the codes of good manners to express profound
hostility and aggression toward his beloved that exceeds (and is
meant to exceed) the norms of good breeding that the lady polices.

Daniel Juan Gil 877

Between the frustrated and uncertain wild/tame ambivalence in the
first and the third stanzas, Wyatt tries to compensate himself for the
bad new world in which rules of good manners conceal fundamental
duplicity by remembering a time when everything was different.
Thankedbe fortune it hath been otherwise
Twentytimes better, but once in special,
In thin arrayafter a pleasantguise,
When her loose gown from her shouldersdid fall
And she me caught in her armslong and small,
Therewithalsweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Dearheart, how like you this?"
(8-14)
This sexual memory is allegedly compensatory, and may also repre-
sent something like an impulse to humiliate the class of women that
the wild/tame beloved represents, since Wyatt reminds them that he
has had them. Yet what ought to be the unambivalent remembrance
of better things past is undercut by a profoundly unsettling sense of
control by the lady. With her mysterious question the lady undercuts
Wyatt's masculinity; Stephen Foley even argues that the sexual
memory is underpinned by an Ovidian impotence farce.31The lady's
undercutting of masculine self-possession seems to derive from her
strangeness; it is almost like she belongs to a exotic tribe whose
anthropological difference keeps Wyatt off balance.32But why would
Wyatt want to remember (and write a poem about) a somewhat
disturbing memory that hints at a bewildering encounter of a weak
and potentially flaccid Wyatt with a powerful because deeply strange
woman? Only if Wyatt posits pleasure in the kind of relationship
depicted in "They Flee From Me," a relationship characterized by an
unbalanced, asymmetrical encounter between characters who apply
very different social standards to their relationship.
Like many Wyatt poems, "They Flee From Me" is addressed both,
or sequentially, to a beloved and to some unnamed, potentially
sympathetic reader or readers who are presumed to identify with
Wyatt's masculine plight. A strange and disabling relationship with a
woman might make relationships with men seem comforting or
compensatory. In fact, however, the emasculating memory that Wyatt
offers these readers would seem to undermine the possibility of
fleeing from a bad heterosexual relationship into the arms of some
loving and understanding man; offering a humiliating story to his
readers would instead repeat between poet and readers the emascu-

878 Before Intimacy

lating relationship depicted inside the poem. Much the same thing
happens in the ballad "Lament My Loss" where Wyatt invites
masculine readers to lament for him who suffers from "the grief and
long abuse / Of lover's law and eke her puissant might" (13-14). This
poem defines the relationship with his beloved as sexual by announc-
ing the pain that she causes him to a public of interested readers. The
important point is that the relationship that Wyatt tries to open with
other men through this lament is not so much compensatory for the
deprivations of his beloved as it is an opportunity to relive pain in a
public context: "Yet well ye know it will renew my smart / Thus to
rehearse the pains that I have passed" (17-18). The poem ends with
a somewhat flat moral admonition (Wyatt offers himself as an
example of what not to do), but the poison of eroticized pain that the
poem injects into male-male relationships seems to persist.
Again and again in Wyatt's poems a homosocial relationship that
promises relief from the deprivations of a cruel, beloved woman is
transformed into-at best-a one-sided opportunity to relive that
pain or-at worst-a mechanism for spreading that pain to other
readers. Wyatt positions himself either as a sacrificial lamb, or he
views the community of male readers as an echo chamber where pain
is amplified without any payoff. The relationship between men that is
based on shared or multiplied pain that emanates from the massive
asymmetry between the male lover and the female beloved is one
important way that male-male bonds can be sexualized. Women are
ambivalently wild/tame and men suffer, but this suffering becomes
the basis for relationships between men that are as one-sided and as
dysfunctional as relationships between male lovers and female be-
loveds.
In "The Pillar Perished," however, Wyatt uses a man directly to
launch himself into the seas of eroticized pain that also define sexual
connections with his wild/tame beloved. In this sonnet Wyatt seems
to address a single male reader and patron who has ceased to listen to
Wyatt's complaints because he has died. In dying, however, the
patron attains a degree of unattainability and even otherworldliness
that is clearly reminiscent of Wyatt's wild/tame beloved.
The pillarperished is whereto I leant,
The strongeststay of mine unquiet mind;
The like of it no man again can find-
From east to west still seeking though he went-
To mine unhap, for hap awayhath rent
Of all my joy the very bark and rind,

DanielJuan Gil 879

 And I, alas, by chance am thus assigned
Dearly to mourntill death do it relent.
But since that thus it is by destiny,
What can I more but have a woeful heart,
My pen in plaint, my voice in woeful cry,
My mind in woe, my body full of smart,
And I myself myself alwaysto hate
Till dreadfuldeath do cease my doleful state?

The Petrarchan precursor to this sonnet,"Rotta e l'Alta Colonna e 1'

Verde Lauro," is addressed to Petrarch's patron Giovanni Colonna
(whose name puns with the Italian word for "pillar")and to Laura,
and it maintains a complex double vision.33In Wyatt'spoem the word
play of Colonna and column is lost, but the poem seems to be much
more exclusively addressed to a man than Petrarch's poem; for one
thing, the pillar is here distinguished by its phallic properties. The
notion that Wyatt's beloved and understanding reader has only just
died suggests that the erotic pain of the rest of Wyatt's poems is now
to be understood as tactical posturing at odds with the comfort and
satisfaction Wyatt himself has felt all along, apparently, in the
"strongest stay of my unquiet mind."34But a situation of compensa-
tory male bonding is deflected here insofar as, in absence, this pillar
himself becomes the source of the eroticized pain that had heretofore
been directed primarily at the beloved. Wyatt is assigned "dearly to
mourn till death do it relent" and the sestet delivers a blazon of
suffering: "What can I more but have a heart, / My pen in plaint, my
voice in woeful cry, / My mind in woe, my body full of smart." The
poetry that he will write now, in other words, is in no obvious way
different from the poetry he has written heretofore; the patron, at
least in absence, can be treated in precisely the manner that the cruel
beloved has been treated: he too is inaccessible, he too is unassail-
able, and in his absence, he too provokes the turn against the self that
is also the opening (in Wyatt) to a sexualized connection to others:
Wyatt finishes the sonnet by asking what can I do but "I myself
myself to hate / Till dreadful death do cease my doleful state." In
death, the patron has precisely the effect on Wyatt that the cruel
beloved had, and if he remembers a happy period of homosocial bliss
(when the bark had not yet been rent from the tree of "all my joy,")
Wyatt nevertheless only writes a poem about his patron once he is
dead and has therefore become an occasion for pain.35
In "The Pillar Perished," Wyatt uses a vocabulary of powerful
emotions-self-hatred and overwhelming grief-to chart the power-

880 Before Intimacy

ful ties that connect him to his erstwhile patron in ways that exceed
all available social vocabularies, including the powerful geometries of
homosocial desire and competition. Throughout Wyatt's poems,
powerful emotions provide a grammar of the ties that spring up when
functional social ties between people have withered away. Such
emotions do not point to a psychologically deep self. Rather, they
document and, indeed, define a powerful form of sexual bonding.
One poem that depicts an interpersonal relationship that has been
stripped of all functional social indexes is "What Rage Is This?" Here
the beloved and the speaker appear not as socially legible persons but
only as hypotheses to account for the felt reality of intense, emotional
pain.
What rage is this? What furorof what kind?
What pow'r,what plague doth weary thus my mind?
Within my bones to rankleis assigned
What poison pleasantsweet?
(1-4)

The fact that Wyatt does not know what significance to attribute to
these affects (what rage is this?) suggests that he has no privileged
relation to them in the way modern readers tend to assume that they
have a privileged relation to their own emotions. These emotions do
not tell Wyatt anything about himself, nor about his situation, nor do
they seem to require action to restore something like emotional
balance or interpersonal functionality. What they do tell him is that
he is in the grip of a painful tie with a beloved who appears only as a
delivery vehicle for pain. It is an interpersonal (or apersonal) dynamic
that the poet and the poem seek to prolong, indefinitely.

Oppressthou dost, and hast of him no cure,

Nor yet my plaint no pity can procure.
Fierce tiger fell, hard rock without recure,
Cruel rebel to love!
(13-16)

Here an impasse in the terms of a functional relationship between

Wyatt and his beloved (Wyatt earlier reminds the lady that "Thy
friend thou dost oppress" [12]) is represented as a sort of metaphysi-
cal problem, the problem of domesticating a tiger or softening a rock.
Such problems are obviously irresolvable, and the value of this
framework is to enable us to imagine an abiding limit experience that
embodies simultaneous attraction to the beloved and profound, even

DanielJuan Gil 881

violent repulsionfromher. The interpersonaldynamicchartedin this
poem is not in need of adjustmentfor it is perfectly calibrated-to
produce pain-and the felt reality of this pain, and its positive,
generativepower,is the only real topic of "WhatRage Is This?"
Lo, see mineeyes swellwithcontinualtears.
The body still awaysleepless it wears.
My food nothing my faintingstrengthrepairs
Nordothmylimbssustain.
(5-8)
These physical symptoms seem to represent the outer limits of
Wyatt'ssocialpersona.They are a publiclylegible indexto a set of ties
that go beyond normalchannelsof socializing,a set of ties that spring
up when the functionalsocial dimensions of a relationshipbetween
Wyattand beloved have withered away.Whatis left is a beloved, who
manufacturespain, and Wyatt,who absorbsit.
In this poem and throughouthis work,Wyatttakes as his task, as a
poet, to explore the in-between spaces where social relationships
between men and women and between men and other men break
down and remainbroken.Wyatt'sis a poetry of social corrosion;in a
gesture that borderson the suicidal,it tears the self out of the social
world within which it is normallyembedded. If poems like "What
Rage Is This"representthe zero point of Wyatt'spoetic, the moment
Wyatt indulges in a suicidal renunciation, they also document a
breakthroughto a world apartwhose existence is felt in intense and
painful emotions inscribed on the body. Wyatt'spoetry celebrates
suicidal despair, murderoushatred, fear, and contempt of self and
other as the luxuriantsigns of a new form of pleasurethat combines
a profound turn away from others with a brazen disregardfor the
limits of the self. These poems seek to unmoorthemselves from the
social world in order to give themselves wholly to the exploding
emotions that color the asymmetriesof sex before intimacy.

Universityof Oregon
NOTES
1
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985).
2 Alan
Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1982). In a book length study of the early modern rhetoric of friendship,
Laurie Shannon offers fresh insights into how the homosocial/sexual continuum
operates in literarytexts. She also offers valuablediscussionon how the homosocial

882 Before Intimacy

continuum inflects relationships between women. See Sovereign Amity: Figures of
Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002).
3 See Jonathan Goldberg's introduction to the important collection of essays on

early modern sexuality in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Goldberg (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 1994), 4. Goldberg's Sodotmetries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexuali-
ties (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), is a defining text for study of sexuality in
Renaissance literature.
4
In general, my account of radical social alternatives encoded in powerful early
modern emotions owes a debt to Foucault's account of the political potential of
sexual subcultures to define fundamentally new forms of relationship that go beyond
the norms of liberal society. I am drawing on the excerpts of interviews published in
David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1995), 99-100. This project is extended by Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum
a Grave?" October 43 (Winter 1987): 197-222; Bersani's The Freudian Body:
Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986); as well as by
MichaelWarnerin The TroubleWith Normal:Sex, Politics,and the Ethics of Queer
Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). In another line of inquiry, Halperin himself
explores how premodern social agents could define a sexuality not reducible to
identity in "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,"
Representations 63 (Summer 1998): 93-120.
5 Here am
I paraphrasing a sentence from Bersani, "Rectum," 222.
6 Niklas
Luhmann, Love as Passion:The Codificationof Intimacy, trans. Jeremy
Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).
7 Luhmann, 15.
8 Luhmann, 25.
9 On
friendship, see Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in
Elizabethan England," in Queering the Renaissance, 40-61.
Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols.
10 See Norbert Elias's The

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978-1982).

11
Elias, 2:331. In general this dimension of Elias's argument is more pronounced
in State Formation and Civilization, the second and less frequently cited volume of
The CivilizingProcess.
12Richard Halpern also notes that Erasmus's notion of civility emphasizes
imaginary identification with and imitation of other people. See his important
account of humanism and the emergence of modernity in The Poetics of Primitive
Accumulation:English RenaissanceCulture and the Genealogyof Capital (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), esp. 32-33. For an account that sees civility as an
unambivalent effort to increase the integration and discipline of the social body see
Jacques Revel, "The Uses of Civility," in The Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger
Chartier, vol. 3 of The History of Private Life, ed. Phillipe Aribs and Georges Duby
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989).
13
Pierre Bourdieu sees early modern conduct manuals as laying the groundwork
for the striated cultural system whose role in reproducing social classes he discusses
in Distinction:A Social Critiqueof the SocialJudgmentof Taste,trans.RichardNice
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 70-74.
14Bersani, "Rectum," 215.
15 Bersani, "Rectum," 222.
16 Martha
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligenceof Emotions (New
York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). My own interest in the ways literary texts make

DanielJuan Gil 883

use of concrete and specific emotional experiences is strongly influenced by the
editors' introduction to Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed.
Sedgwickand Adam Frank (Durham:Duke Univ. Press, 1995). Tomkins'sthinking
on emotions is in some ways quite anomalous, and Nussbaum's work better
illustrates both mainstreampsychology and key aspects of an unspoken common
sense consensus that implicitlyinforms much modern thinkingabout subjectivity.
17
EdwardReynolds,A Treatiseof the Passionsand Facultiesof the Soule of Man
(1640), facsimile edition (Gainsville,FL: Scholars'Facsmiles and Reprints, 1971),
41-46.
18 Adela Pinch
emphasizes the alien and unsettling quality of emotion in her
influential Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologiesof Emotion, Hume to Austen
(Stanford:StanfordUniv. Press, 1996). As I go on to argue,however, at least in the
early modern context the view that emotions are alien results from (presumably
shortlived)turbulencebetween different theories of emotions.
19 On Galen, see Oswei
Tempkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical
Philosophy(Ithaca:CornellUniv. Press, 1973);as well as Galen,On the Passionsand
Errors of the Soul, trans. Paul W. Harkins (Columbus:Ohio State Univ., 1963).
There have been severalefforts to recoverthe importanceof Galenicapproachesin
Renaissancethinkingon the emotions. For one instancethat sees humorsas a bodily
excess see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed:Drama and the Disciplines of
Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). Michael
Schoenfeldt also offers a nuanced review of the role that humoralthinkingplays in
literarydescriptionsof selves and their connectionsto bodies. Schoenfeldt'saccount
is valuable because of his emphasis on the importance of the stoical ideal of
moderation and temperance of bodily affects, which he offers as a corrective
additionto accountslike Paster'sthatemphasizethe excessiveandeven carnivalesque
aspects of bodily life. See Bodies and Selves in Early ModernEngland:Physiology
and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare,Herbert and Milton (New York:Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1999). In contrastto both Pasterand Schoenfeldt,I focus on the
implicationsof humoralthinkingon how sociallife and socialbondingare conceived.
20 For a
neurophysiologicalaccountthat emphasizesthe physicalroots of emotion,
see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Makingof Consciousness(New York:Harcourt,1999). NussbauminterpretsDamasio
awayfrom reductionismand towarda cognitiveperspectiveand accepts him in that
form. The cognitivist bias in modern thinking on emotions occasionallysparks a
reactive overvaluationof the physical or material component of emotion. One
famous instance is WilliamJames, The Principlesof Psychology(New York:Dover
Publications,1950).
21Bersani
argues that all sexualityderives from infant masochismcultivatedas a
defense againstthe perceived danger of being overwhelmedby the physicalworld.
See The FreudianBody. In developing this view he drawson Jean Laplanche,Life
and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. with an introduction by Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976).
22 JudithButler'sviews follow from her
emphasison the performativityof gender.
See GenderTrouble:Feminismand the Subversionof Identity(New York:Routledge,
1990), 128-41.
23 Michel Foucault undertakes such an
approachin the second volume of the
historyof sexualityin which he emphasizesthe Greek effort to manageratherthan
to repress pleasure. See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure,trans. Robert Hurley (New

884 Before Intimacy

York: Vintage Books, 1990). For a discussion of Foucault's interest in sadomasochis-
tic eroticism as a kind of limit expeience that might push beyond the norms of liberal
society see Halperin, 85-99.
24
Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1981). Hereafter, all Wyatt poems are from this edition and, where
necessary, are cited parenthetically by line number.
Many critics of Wyatt's poetry see it as a site where a powerful sense of self
25

emerges. See, for one instance, Anne Ferry, The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of
Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983). Stephen
Greenblatt argues that Wyatt's poetry registers the difference between a series of
masks that he adopts to deal with the shifting political ground in the court of Henry
VIII. See the paradigm defining Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 3. My response to Wyatt
has been deeply influenced by Jonathan Crewe's brilliant discussion in Trials of
Authorship:AnteriorForms and Poetic Reconstructionfrom Wyatt to Shakespeare
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990). In his discussion of Wyatt as well as
Surrey, Crewe is attentive to the payoff these poets hope for (in terms of authority or
pleasure) from assuming extremely risky, self-abasing positions; for Crewe, in
Wyatt's and Surrey's poetic, the loser wins. Here I see this mode of risk-taking as
defining a basic mode of sexuality in the early modern period.
Wyatt's poetry as a rejection of an emerging
26 Thomas Greene also sees

modernity, though Green defines modernity in a negative way as the loss of

traditionalstability.See The Light at Troy:Imitationand Discovery in Renaissance
Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), chap. 3. Some commentators have
sought to contextualize Wyatt's world-weariness within nascent capitalism. In this
regard,see RaymondSouthall,Literatureand the Rise of Capitalism:CriticalEssays
Mainlyon the Sixteenthand SeventeenthCenturies(London:Lawrence& Wishart,
1973).
27 Butler discusses a similar turn
against the self in The Psychic Life of Power:
Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997). For her this turn
against the self stands at the beginning of the modern subject, yet it remains a
potentially destabilizing force that reappears in desire. As Butler puts it, "desire will
aim at unraveling the subject, but will be thwarted by precisely the subject in whose
name it operates" (9).
28 For Joan
Kelly, the emphasis on gender difference in Petrarchan poetry (both
Italian and English) represents a major departure from the earlier medieval romance
tradition. Kelly argues that the medieval tradition of courtly love was, in fact,
premised on the aristocratic similarity of the lover and his beloved lady. Cqurtly love
represents the transfer of the political theory of vassalage onto an extramarital love
relation; the freedom to enter into such a bond attested to a shared aristocratic
status. One of the main points Kelly makes is that feudal male homosociality is so
intensely focused on reproduction that it actually allows aristocratic women consid-
erable freedom to define extramarital sexual bonds as long as those bonds do not
interfere with familial reproduction. Kelly argues that the Italian Renaissance
inheritors of the courtly love tradition begin to emphasize gender dissimilarity
because of changes in how elite men relate to one another. In Renaissance courts
elite men no longer relate to their superiors as aristocratic equals but as dependants,
and Kelly argues that this new and disturbingly unequal relationship between rulers
and courtiers is worked out, in part, by imagining countless courtships of a chaste

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and inaccessible beloved. See "Did Women Have a Renaissance?"in Women,
Historyand Theory:The Essays ofJoan Kelly(Chicago:The Univ. of ChicagoPress,
1984). For a powerful account of how humanists used gender to manage their
asymmetricalrelationshipswith their aristocraticpatrons see BarbaraCorrell, The
End of Conduct: "Grobianus"and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), chap. 2.
29I want to
emphasizethat the brandof early modern sexualityI discuss in these
pages cannot simplybe reduced to Petrarchanism,though it is often bound up with
Petrarchanconventions.Wyattsimplymakesstrategicuse of Petrarchanconventions
to point to a basic fissure in the social fabricof his socialworld that exists outside of
those literaryterms and contains a sexual charge that real people are presumably
capableof experiencing.Other early modern authorsshareWyatt'sinterest in using
Petrarchandiscourseto point to the erotic experiencesthat inhabitthe limits of the
social world, but they deploy these conventions in very different ways. Whereas
Wyatt tends to emphasize the culturally alien force of the beloved and is often
explicit about the presence of other men in the Petrarchansituation,a fact I shall
consider shortly,in the Amorettisequence, Spensertreats the beloved as occupying
a stable place near the apex of the social hierarchyin order to paint himself as
abjectlylow-bornin relationto her. Shakespeare'ssonnets representa more complex
use of the Petrarchanframework.In his sonnets, the YoungMan oscillatesbetween
being an elite aristocratand a poor upstart,and it is the ensuing uncertaintyabout
how Shakespeare, as a poet, should approach him that opens the door to a
specificallysexualtie between these men.
30
Wyattwas rumoredto have had an affairwith Anne Boleynwhose executionhe
may have seen while imprisonedin the tower of London,an experiencethat maybe
recordedin "WhoList His Wealth and Ease Retain."Eric Ives reviewsthe historical
evidence for their affairin Anne Boleyn (Cambridge:Blackwell,1986), esp. 83-85.
Heather Dubrow observes that the poem pulls in multiple interpretivedirections
and that this ambiguityis especiallypronouncedin the word "wild"which can mean
either "resistant"or "shy."This undecidabilitywill become relevantto my discussion
below. See Echoesof Desire:EnglishPetrarchismand Its Counterdiscourses(Ithaca,
NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), 95-97.
31 See
Stephen MerriamFoley, Sir ThomasWyatt (Boston:Twayne Publishers,
Publishers,1990), 104.
32
In his discussionof the connection between Petrarchanrhetoricand European
colonialism, Roland Greene also argues that the lady of "They Flee From Me"
invokes early modern European discoursesabout Native Americans.See his Unre-
quited Conquests:Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: Univ. of
ChicagoPress, 1999), 163-66. While BarbaraL. Estrindoes not connect the beloved
woman of this poem to colonial discourses, she tellingly describes her unsettling
power. For Estrin,the beloved here actuallymorphsinto a manwho "penetratesand
controls"the speaker. See Laura: UncoveringGender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne
and Marvell(Durham:Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 129.
33 See Petrarch's
Lyric Poems, trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge:Harvard
Univ. Press, 1976), 443. H. A. Mason argues that Wyatt'spoem refers to Thomas
Cromwell.See Sir ThomasWyatt:A LiteraryPortrait(Bristol:BristolClassicsPress,
1986), 250-56.

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 34
The translationof a male superior into a female beloved is made possible by
seeing in the chastityof the beloved the (very masculine)power to keep a (perhaps
dependant) man off balance.
35Wyatt'spoems illustratepathsto the sexualizationof male-maleand male-female
bonds. The case of relationshipsbetween women is harder to fit into the model I
explorehere. The thoroughnessof earlymodernpatriarchyleads to opportunitiesfor
female-female sexualitybut also makes it difficult to define these as specifically
sexual. Valerie Traub argues that female-female desire could be represented as a
legitimateoption in plays as long as it was not identified as a threatto heterosexual-
reproductive relationships. For her, such desire is not condemned unless it is
interpreted as a usurpation of masculine gender by one partner. See "The
(In)Significanceof 'Lesbian' Desire in Early Modern England,"in Queering the
Renaissance,62-83. Elizabeth SusanWahl does examine ways that sexual relations
between women might become visible as such. See her Invisible Relations:Repre-
sentationsof FemaleIntimacyin the Age of Enlightenment(Stanford:StanfordUniv.
Press, 1999), esp. chap. 4. There Wahl traces how KatherinePhilips comes close to
articulatingsomething like a lesbian identity. But rarely are such relationships
invested with the massive social difference that defines the discourse of sexualityI
describe in this essay.

DanielJuan Gil 887