Another symptom mentioned by Styron is a menacing change in the appearance of the nonhuman world. Terror is externalized, like a toxin coating the landscape and every object within it. Styron found that his “beloved home for thirty years, took on ⦠an almost palpable quality of ominousness.”
24
Similarly William James, no doubt drawing from his own long struggle with the illness, wrote that to “melancholiacs,” “the world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold.”
25
These perceptions fit neatly with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century melancholics' notion that the natural world was itself in a state of deteriorationâcrumbling, corrupt, and doomed. As John Donne put itâand I cannot think of a more apt image of the world as it appears to a depressiveâ“
colour is decai'd
” (my emphasis).
26
Hence, no doubt, Styron's sense of immersion in a “gray drizzle of horror,” and Johnson's repeated references to “the distresses of terrour.”
27
So I think we can conclude with some confidence that the melancholy experienced by men and women of the early modern era was in fact the same disorder we know today as depression, and that the prevalence of melancholy/depression was actually increasing in that era, at least relative to medieval timesâthough admittedly we have no way of knowing how substantial this increase was in statistical terms. We can return, then, to the question of the relationship between this early “epidemic of depression” and the larger theme of this book: the suppression of communal rituals and festivities. Very likely, the two phenomena are entangled in various ways.
It could be, for example, that, as a result of their illness, depressed individuals lost their taste for communal festivities and even came to view them with revulsion. But there are other possibilities: First, that both the rise of depression and the decline of festivities are symptomatic of some deeper, underlying psychological change, which began about four hundred years ago and persists, in some form, in our own time. The second, more intriguing possibility is that the disappearance of traditional festivities was itself a factor contributing to depression.
One approaches the subject of “deeper, underlying psychological change” with some trepidation, but fortunately, in this case, many respected scholars have already visited this difficult terrain. “Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, “that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.”
28
This change has been called
the rise of subjectivity
or
the discovery of the inner self
, and since it can be assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of selfhood and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous “I,” separate from, and largely distrustful of, “them.” As we saw in chapter 5, the European nobility had undergone this sort of psychological shift in their transformation from a warrior class to a collection of courtiersâaway from directness and spontaneity and toward a new guardedness in relation to others. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the change becomes far more widespread, affecting even artisans, peasants, and laborers. The new “emphasis on disengagement and self-consciousness,” as Louis Sass puts it,
29
makes the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrangements, which is all to the good. But it can also transform the
individual into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else.
Historians infer this psychological shift from a number of concrete changes occurring in the early modern period, first and most strikingly among the urban bourgeoisie, or upper middle class. Mirrors in which to examine oneself become popular among those who can afford them, along with self-portraits (Rembrandt painted over fifty of them) and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others. In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated, for the first time, from the private spacesâbedrooms, for exampleâin which one may retire to let down one's guard and truly “be oneself.” More decorous forms of entertainmentâplays and operasârequiring people to remain immobilized, each in his or her separate seat, begin to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival.
30
The very word
self
, as Trilling noted, ceases to be a mere reflexive or intensifier and achieves the status of a freestanding noun, referring to some inner core, not readily visible to others.
The notion of a self hidden behind one's appearance and portable from one situation to another is usually attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to beâa peasant, a man of commerce, or an aristocratâand any attempt to assume another status would have been regarded as rank deception; sumptuary laws often barred the wealthy commoner, for example, from dressing in colors and fabrics deemed appropriate only to nobles. According to the historian Natalie Zemon Davis: “At carnival time and at other feast days, a young peasant might dress as an animal or as a person of another estate or sex and speak through that disguise ⦠But these were temporary masks and intended for the common good.”
31
But in the late sixteenth century, upward mobility was beginning to be possible or at least imaginable, making “deception” a widespread way of life. The merchant who craved an aristocratic title, the craftsman
who aspired to the status of a merchantâeach had to learn to play the part, an endeavor for which the system of etiquette devised in royal courts came to serve as a convenient script. You might not be a lord or a lofty burgher, but you could find out how to act like one. Hence the popularity, in seventeenth-century England, of books instructing the would-be member of the gentry in how to comport himself, write an impressive letter, and choose a socially advantageous wife.
Hence, too, the new fascination with the theater, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles. This is a notion that takes some getting used to; in the early years of the theater, actors who played the part of villains risked being assaulted by angry playgoers in the streets. Within the theater, there is a fascination with plots involving further deceptions: Shakespeare's Portia pretends to be a doctor of law; Rosalind disguises herself as a boy; Juliet feigns her own deathâto give just a few examples. Writing a few years after Shakespeare's death, Robert Burton bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theater, for “men like stage-players act [a] variety of parts.” It was painful, in his view, “to see a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon ⦠to act twenty parts & persons at once for his advantage ⦠having a several face, garb, & character, for every one he meets.”
32
The inner self that can change costumes and manners to suit the occasion resembles a skilled craftsperson, too busy and watchful for the pleasures of easygoing conviviality. As for the outer self projected by the inner one into the social world: Who would want to “lose oneself” in the communal excitement of carnival when that self has taken so much effort and care to construct?
So highly is the “inner self” honored within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progressâa requirement, as Trilling called it, for “the emergence of modern European and American man.”
33
It was, no doubt, this sense of individuality and personal autonomy, “of an untrammeled freedom to ask questions and explore,” as the historian Yi-Fu Tuan put it,
that allowed men like Martin Luther and Galileo to risk their lives by defying Catholic doctrine.
34
Which is preferable: a courageous, or even merely grasping and competitive, individualism, versus a medieval (or, in the case of non-European cultures, “primitive”) personality so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a “self”? From the perspective of our own time, the choice, so stated, is obvious. We have known nothing else.
But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, “the obverse” of the new sense of personal autonomy is “isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it.”
35
Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation or, to use the term adopted by Durkheim in his late-nineteenth-century study of suicide:
anomie.
Durkheim used it to explain the rising rates of suicide in nineteenth-century Europe; epidemiologists invoke it to help account for the increasing prevalence of depression in our own time.
36
As Durkheim saw it: “Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ⦠But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all men [human].”
37
The flip side of the heroic autonomy that is said to represent one of the great achievements of the early modern and modern eras is radical isolation, and, with it, depression and sometimes death.
But the new kind of personality that arose in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was by no means as autonomous and self-defining as claimed. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is
continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them: “How am I doing?” this supposedly autonomous “self” wants to know. “What kind of an impression am I making?” Historians speak of the
interiorization
that marks the new personality, meaning “the capacity for introspection and self-reflection,” but it often looks as if what has been “interiorized” is little more than the human others around one and their likely judgments of oneself.
It is no coincidence that the concept of
society
emerges at the same time as the concept of
self:
What seems to most concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinion of others, who in aggregate compose “society.” Mirrors, for example, don't show us our “selves,” only what others can see, and autobiographies reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people's judgmentsâimagined or realâwould help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure: Johnson's forced exit from Oxford, Cowper's approaching exam. In the nineteenth century, the historian Janet Oppenheim reports, “severely depressed patients frequently revealed totally unwarranted fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace.”
38
This is not autonomy but dependency: The emerging “self” defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others.
If depression was one result of the new individualism, the usual concomitant of depressionâanxietyâwas surely another. It takes effort, as well as a great deal of watchfulness, to second-guess other people's reactions and plot one's words and gestures accordingly. For the scheming courtier, the striving burgher, and the ambitious lawyer or cleric of early modern Europe, the “self” they discovered is perhaps best described as an awareness of this ceaseless, internal effort to adjust one's behavior to the expectations of others.
Play
in this context comes to have a demanding new meaning, unconnected to pleasure, as in “playing a role.” No wonder bourgeois life becomes privatized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with
bedrooms and studies to withdraw to, where, for a few hours a day, the effort can be abandoned, the mask set aside.
But we cannot grasp the full psychological impact of this “mutation in human nature” in purely secular terms. Four hundredâeven two hundredâyears ago, most people would have interpreted their feelings of isolation and anxiety through the medium of religion, translating
self
as “soul”; the ever-watchful judgmental gaze of others as “God”; and
melancholy
as “the gnawing fear of eternal damnation.” Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval; and even Lutheranism, while rejecting most of the rituals, posited an approachable and ultimately loving God.
Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism, which by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had spread beyond such hardcore Calvinist denominations as Presbyterianism and the Reformed Church of Holland to infect, in varying degrees, Lutheranism, Anglicism, and even, through the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for anomie: If you felt isolated, persecuted, and possibly damned, this was because you actually were. Robert Burton understood the role of Calvinism in promoting melancholy, singling out
religious melancholy
as an especially virulent form of the disease, and his book can be read, at one level, as a polemic against that harsh, puritanical religion.
The main matter which terrifies and torments most that are troubled in mind is the enormity of their offences, the intolerable burthen of their sins, God's heavy wrath and displeasure so deeply apprehended that they account themselves ⦠already damned ⦠This furious curiosity, needless speculation, fruitless meditation
about election, reprobation, free will, grace ⦠torment still, and crucify the souls of too many, and set all the world together by the ears.
39
With Calvinism, the sense of isolation purportedly rampant in early modern Europe is ratcheted up to an intolerable degree. Christianity requires that every soul ultimately confront God alone, at least at the moment of death, but the Calvinist soul wanders forever in solitude. Friends may turn out to be falseâenemies and competitors in disguiseâas illustrated by what Weber calls “the strikingly frequent repetition, especially in the English Puritan literature, of warnings against any trust in the aid and friendship of men.”
40
Even family deserves no lasting loyalty. In that great Puritan epic, John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
, Christian flees his home in the “City of Destruction,” despite the fact that “his Wife and Children ⦠began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, âLife Life Eternal Life.' So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the Plain.”
41
Bunyan's own inner domain, to judge from his spiritual autobiography,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
, was rarely visited by another human or brightened by a glimpse of the physical world. In over eighty claustrophobic pages recounting alternating fits of despair and moments of hope, one finds few pronouns other than I or animate beings other than Satan and God. When Bunyan does mention some fellow humans at one point, it is to express his disillusionment about these people, whom he had taken as reliable fellow Calvinists: “[They were] much distressed and cast down when they met with outward losses, as of husband, wife, child, etc. Lord, thought I, what a do is here about such little things as these!”
42
One of Max Weber's greatest insights was to see the compatibility between Calvinism and capitalism, or, we might just as well say, to sense the terrible sense of psychic isolationâ“the unprecedented inner loneliness”
43
âthat a competitive, sink-or-swim economy
imposed. Just as the soul struggled along its solitary path toward damnation or grace, the self toiled and schemed along a parallel trajectory in the material world. But if that trajectory was to slope upward toward wealth or merely security, much more was required than a cold indifference to others. One had to engage in an endless project of self-discipline and self-denial, deferring all gratification, except perhaps for the pleasure of watching one's assets mount. “The most urgent task” of Calvinism, Weber wrote, was “the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment.”
44
A late-eighteenth-century Scottish medical handbook confirms this view of Calvinism, advising that
many persons of a religious turn of mind behave as if they thought it a crime to be cheerful. They imagine the whole of religion consists in certain mortifications, or denying themselves the smallest indulgence, even of the most innocent amusements. A perpetual gloom hangs over their countenances, while the deepest melancholy preys upon their minds. At length the fairest prospects vanish, every thing puts on a dismal appearance, and those very objects which ought to give delight, afford nothing but disgust.âLife itself becomes a burthen, and the unhappy wretch, persuaded that no evil can equal what he feels, often puts an end to his miserable existence.
45
John Bunyan seems to have been a jolly enough fellow in his youth, much given to dancing and sports in the village green, but with the onset of his religious crisis these pleasures had to be put aside. Dancing was the hardest to relinquishâ“I was a full year before I could quite leave it”
46
âbut he eventually managed to achieve a fun-free life. In
Pilgrim's Progress,
the Bunyan-like hero Christian finds that any time he lets down his guard and experiences a moment of rest or even just diminished anxiety, he has lost ground or been sorely taken advantage of. The only thing Christian encounters resembling festivity, “Vanity Fair,” turns out to be a death trap
for the virtuous, the place where Christian's high-minded companion, Faithful, is seized, tortured, and finally burned to death by the wanton fairgoers. Carnival, in other words, is the portal to hell, just as pleasure in any formâsexual, gustatory, convivialâis the devil's snare. Nothing speaks more clearly of the darkening mood, the declining possibilities for joy, than the fact that, while the medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.
Oliver Cromwell experienced a psychological crisis very similar to Bunyan's. Born to a Puritan family in the rural English gentry, he enjoyed a youth marked by “wilnesses and follies” as well as “love of horseplay and of practical jokes in something less than the best of taste.”
47
At the age of twenty-eight, however, he fell into a condition diagnosed by a physician as
valde melancholicus,
meaning “extreme melancholy,” apparently occasioned by reflection on his youthful sins. As he later wrote to a cousin, echoing Bunyan: “You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light. I was a chief, the chief of sinners.”
48
After what we might now call a “born-again” experience, Cromwell abandoned the worst of his sinsâwhatever they wereâthough, unlike Bunyan, he continued to enjoy music and drink ale and wine.
Whether Weber succeeded in establishing a seamless link between Calvinism and capitalism is open to question, but his own life provides vivid evidence of the connection between Calvinism and depression. A thoroughly secular thinker himself, Weber was raised by a Calvinist mother to see pleasure in almost any form as a danger to be fended off through ceaseless self-discipline and work. His biographer and wife, Marianne, wrote of his using work to “rescue” himself from the “danger of becoming comfortable.” Of his student life in the late 1800s, she reported, “He continues the rigid work discipline, regulates his life by the clock, divides the daily routine into exact sections for the various subjects, saves in his way, by feeding himself evenings in his room with a pound of raw chopped beef and four fried eggs.”
49
A few months after their marriage, he
wrote to her, “I can't risk allowing the present composureâwhich I enjoy with the feeling of a really new happinessâto be transformed into relaxation.”
50
In his mid-thirties, at a time of enviable academic success, Weber experienced a total breakdown, lasting for months and marked by back pain, trembling hands, insomnia, feelings of worthlessness and despair, andâperhaps most tragically for himâa complete inability to work. Another biographer tried mightily to fit Weber's problems into a Freudian mold, attributing the breakdown to tensions between Weber and his rather easygoing and self-indulgent father.
51
But Robert Burton would no doubt have blamed the mother's Calvinism and diagnosed Weber, whatever his personal beliefs, as another victim of religious melancholy.
We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depressionâsuicideâand suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, Durkheim found Protestants in the nineteenth centuryânot all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasionâabout twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics, and this was not just a matter of regional difference, since the same ratio prevailed in regions in which adherents of the two religions were intermixed.
52
More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late sixteenth century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose. Nor did the suicides reflect a failure to adjust to the Calvinist regime, with its many prohibitions on gambling, dancing, and sexual misbehavior. The historian R. Po-Chia Hsia reports that the plurality of the dead received postmortem praise as “honorable, God-fearing, bible-reading, diligent, and quiet Christians in life.” In fact a majorityâ61 percentâcame from families “that constituted the backbone of the Calvinist regime.”
53