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In her recent study on racial melancholia Anne Anlin Cheng asks, “How does an individual go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance?” (3). In other words, how does one move “from suffering injury to speaking out against that injury”? (Cheng 3). This question is similarly at the heart of Frances L. Restuccia's Melancholics In Love: Representing Women's Depression and Domestic Abuse. Restuccia argues that melancholic and battered women have found ways out of suffering toward the healing process of grievance (also known as mourning) by engaging with artistic representations of depression and domestic abuse. The premise of Melancholies in Love is that for sufferers of depression and abuse, representation affords a kind of mourning by articulating previously unthinkable and unarticulated grief.
Restuccia's book, including two chapters never before published, traverses a range of female “melancholies in love” from classical novels (Austen's Emma and Persuasion), contemporary women's fiction (Anita Brookner's Look at Me, Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, Margaret Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden), mystical pornography (Pauline Réage's Story of O and Return to the Château), documentary film and photography (Defending Our Lives and Donna Ferrato's Living with the Enemy), and rock-star autobiography (Turner's I, Tina). These melancholic texts, Restuccia suggests, are nonetheless therapeutic for their subjects, readers, and authors. For by transferring “empirical violence” into discourse, artistic representation allows opportunities for non-violent engagement with the traumas of depression and domestic abuse. This engagement is crucial for the recovery of the melancholic or battered subject whose injury is “experienced as a breakdown in signification,” where she or he “loses a sense of the power of the signifier, having difficulties with thinking and speaking, ‘concatenating’ signs” (Clark 191-192). In Julia Kristeva's terms, this breakdown constitutes a loss o