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(1996). American Imago, 53:353-383

Tales of Beauty: Aestheticizing Female Melancholia

Frances Restuccia

In “[l]ooking over the list of those one could consider ‘great melancholies’ (Petrarch, Ficino, Tasso, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Holderlin, De Quincey, Nerval, Dostoevsky, Walter Benjamin),” Juliana Schiesari (1992), in The Gendering of Melancholia, is “struck by the notable absence of women, an absence that surely points less to some lack of unhappy women than to the lack of significance traditionally given women's grief in patriarchal culture” (3). Worried about such nonrecognition of women's grief, Schiesari lambastes Kristeva for sustaining the gender split between melancholic male artists and depressed ordinary women, in part by including in Black Sun just one female melancholic artist, Marguerite Duras, and then attenuating Duras's artistic claim to gendered loss by placing Duras (alone) in an historicizing context, defined by the traumas of Hiroshima and Auschwitz.

One function of this essay, in light of Schiesari's critique, is to save Krist

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