Tales of Beauty: Aestheticizing Female Melancholia

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 Kristeva's seductive theory of melancholia for feminism by supplementing her analysis in Black Sun with an examination of three contemporary women writers who produce what can be read as Kristevan melancholic writing and thus achieve the symbolic status of male melancholic artists. In Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Drabble, melancholia is played out on both the levels of “content” and “form”: these women writers tell stories of women's mundane suffering at the same time as they spin out female melancholia in literary gossamer. In her latest book, New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva (1995) notes that the unnameable and deadly object relation unseparated from depressed subjects is “embedded in the ‘form’ as well as ‘content’ of depressive discourse”—which is what in effect I am taking the contemporary novels of this essay to be (41). The analyses that follow challenge Schiesari's contention that melancholia up to the present day has been