UC Santa Cruz

Abstract

Echo-critical Poetic Narcissisms:

Being Transformed in Petrarca, Ronsard, and Shakespeare

Melissa Yinger

“Narcissism” is a term that was popularized by Freud in the twentieth century, but whose roots date back to the first century C.E., to a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s story, Narcissus is a beautiful youth who falls in love with his image in a pool and wastes away, leaving only the Narcissus flower. Only slightly less famous is the story of Echo, with which Narcissus’s story is intertwined. Echo is a wood nymph who, in punishment for her garrulousness, is denied her ability to speak for herself and is permitted only to return the speech of others. Then, later in life she has the supreme misfortune of one day coming across Narcissus by the mirror-pool and falling in love. When he spurns her, she too wastes away, becoming a disembodied voice that reverberates in forests and caves.

This project focuses on the Narcissus and Echo myth because, for some of the most canonical Renaissance poets - Francesco Petrarca, Pierre de Ronsard, and William Shakespeare - Narcissus is as important a figure as Orpheus or Apollo. Petrarca develops a particular aesthetic pattern out of the Narcissus myth, which later poets imitate and expand. The first goal is to define the narcissistic aesthetic that Renaissance poets found so appealing. This aesthetic valorized sameness and fetishized mirror images, the formal poetic equivalents of which are rhyme, repetition, and chiasmus. The second goal is to understand the presence of Echo in some of literature’s most narcissistic moments. Because Narcissus’s rejection of Echo causes her to melt into the landscape and live disembodied in forests and caves, she becomes the voice of the natural world in Renaissance poetry.

As an ontologically liminal figure, Echo is able to become a mediator between the human and non-human worlds, and allows poets to think through the stakes of an aesthetic that favors self-love and sameness over caring for non-human others. In Renaissance poetry, she gives voice to a nascent version of the central concerns of ecocriticism. To elucidate this important moment in the genealogy of the growing and evolving field of ecocriticism, Echo-critical Poetic Narcissisms seeks to define the parameters of what I call Echo-criticism, an ethical imperative in the period that questions but does not ultimately displace the era’s narcissism.

For the poets included in this study, the Narcissus and Echo myth is a source of inspiration as well as anxiety. Significantly, their ambivalence about the myth is mirrored in and perhaps shapes our ambivalence about humanism, which we associate with great art, on the one hand, and on the other, recognize as what Richard Schechner calls, “very arrogant, anthro[po]centric, expansionist, and high-energy ideology.” Renaissance poets’ engagement with the Narcissus and Echo myth brings this tension into focus and gives us a perspective from which to reevaluate our own aesthetic and ethical values.

The ambivalence about Renaissance humanism that these poets bring into focus is becoming magnified, as ecocriticism and posthumanism continue to influence the shape of the humanities. Like tectonic plates that bear stress, shift, and settle, we are again, as were the great humanists, in the midst of a shift. Will anthropocentrism continue to be the reigning worldview in the era of posthumanism? Can we separate positive versions of narcissism from the more ethically and environmentally dangerous forms? This project suggests that if we allow ourselves to learn from humanists’ engagement with this myth, their lessons could have an impact on the future of the humanities. A more nuanced understanding of humanism’s negotiations of aesthetics and ethics in these poetic contexts will make us more self-aware scholars of the humanities, and may inform our decisions regarding our responsibilities to and for others.