The aristocratic ideal of suffering was intertwined with Christian values: it did not make reciprocity the condition for love, and it viewed suffering as a purification of the soul. Christianity provided a narrative framework to organize the experience of suffering, and even viewed it as the theological mark of salvation. Christianity, as a cultural frame, made sense of suffering, made it into a positive and even necessary experience, one that elevated the soul and allowed one to achieve a godlike state. In this cultural matrix, then, suffering does not undermine the self; it helps constitute and exalt it. With the dwindling of Christianity, romantic suffering became yet another source of self-worth in artistic expression, and especially in the Romantic movement. As in Christianity, suffering was thought to be an unavoidable, necessary, and superior dimension of existence. Lord Byron, one of the most representative figures of the Romantic movement, praised self-destruction and the destruction of others in love. He could thus write: “My embrace was fatal. [. . .] I loved her, and destroy’d her.”56 Byron, like other Romantics, was a sensualist who viewed pain as the manifestation of a greater existence. “The great object of life is sensation,” he wrote to his future wife, “to feel that we exist, even though in pain.”57 Thus, the lack of reciprocity was not experienced as an annihilation of the self, because recognition and self-worth were not based on the experience of love and because the self was thought to express its vital energies in a variety of experiences, ranging from loving to agonizing. Romantic expressions of romantic suffering were culturally framed and constructed under the organizing experience of melancholia. What characterizes melancholia is that it aestheticizes the feeling of love and, as in courtly love, ennobles the person experiencing it. Romantic melancholia was mostly male and was integrated into a model of the self in which suffering bestowed heroism on the afflicted man, who thus proved the depth of his soul through his capacity to endure. In melancholia, suffering does not affect or undermine the self’s sense of value, but helps express a form of delicacy and sophistication of the soul. One may go even further and claim that for those affected it accrued a kind of symbolic/emotional capital. Moreover, as these ideas of love and suffering were often, though not exclusively, a male prerogative, this may also indicate that they functioned to enhance the image of masculinity as a vital energy, as a form of prowess.