Mourning and Melancholia in England and Its Transatlantic Colonies: Examples of Seventeenth-Century Female Appropriations

  • Gabriele Rippl
Chapter

Abstract

During the early modern period discourses of mourning and melancholia were flourishing. While today’s understanding of mourning and melancholia draws on the psychoanalytic definition outlined by Sigmund Freud in his influential essay of 1917, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, the terms had different meanings for early modern scholars and physicians. For Freud, the ‘normal affect of mourning’ (243) is a conscious working through of a concrete loss, and melancholia a form of neurosis, based on a pathological fixation on an imaginary sense of loss, that is, a sustained mourning. According to Freud, the

distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (244)

The ‘extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale’ (246) is only displayed by the melancholic, not the mourner. The melancholic’s dissatisfaction with his own ego, ‘his heightened self-criticism’ (246) — Freud’s example is Shakespeare’s Hamlet — is ‘on moral grounds’ (248).

Keywords

Private Tutor Early Modern Period Rhetorical Strategy Behaviour Code Autobiographical Account 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Works cited

Primary sources

  1. Bradstreet, Anne. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet. Eds Joseph R. McElrath and Allan P. Robb. Boston: Twayne, 1981.Google Scholar
  2. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtyer. Trans. Thomas Hoby. The Tudor Translations 23. London: David Nutt, 1900 (1561).Google Scholar
  3. Cavendish, Margaret. The Lives of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle and of His Wife Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. Ed. Mark Antony Lower. London: John Russell Smith, 1872.Google Scholar
  4. —. A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life. Kent: Private Press of Lee Priory, 1814 (1656).Google Scholar
  5. Gracián, Baltasar. Oráculo manual γ arte de prudencia. Ed. Emilio Blanco. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1995 (1647).Google Scholar

Secondary sources

  1. Abrams, Meyer Howard. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th edn. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.Google Scholar
  2. Bazeley, Deborah T. ‘An Early Challenge to the Precepts and Practice of Modern Science: The Fusion of Fact, Fiction and Feminism in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673)’. Diss. San Diego, University of California, 1990.Google Scholar
  3. Blackmore, Sabine. ‘Matchless and yet Melancholy? Weibliche Melancholie in den Gedichten von Katherine Philips’. Zeitsprünge 13 (2009): 131–56.Google Scholar
  4. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
  5. Cowell, Pattie. ‘Anne Bradstreet 1612?–1672’. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th edn. Vol. A. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 394–5.Google Scholar
  6. Ehland, Christoph. ‘When Lazarillo Meets Faustus: Negotiations of the Self in the Early Modern World’. The Paradigm of the Picaresque. Eds Christoph Ehland and Robert Fajen. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. 69–92.Google Scholar
  7. Enterline, Lynn. The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
  8. Fitzmaurice, James. ‘Fancy and the Family: Self-Characterizations of Margaret Cavendish’. Huttington Library Quarterly 53.3 (1990): 198–209.Google Scholar
  9. Franke, Astrid. ‘Phillis Wheatley, Melancholic Muse’. New England Quarterly 77.2 (2004): 224–51.Google Scholar
  10. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press, 1955 (1917). 239–60.Google Scholar
  11. Gibson, Andrew. ‘Oublier Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000’. New Formations 1 (1987): 123–41.Google Scholar
  12. Hammond, Jeffery A. The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. —. Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.Google Scholar
  14. Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
  15. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, History, and Art. New York: Basic Books, 1964.Google Scholar
  16. Lethen, Helmut. Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994.Google Scholar
  17. Radden, Jennifer, ed. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
  18. Reynolds, Myra. The Learned Lady in England, 1650–1760. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920.Google Scholar
  19. Rippl, Gabriele. Lebenstexte: Literarische Selbststilisierungen englischer Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Fink, 1998.Google Scholar
  20. Rombes, Nicholas D. Jr. ‘John Winthrop, 1588–1649’. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th edn. Vol. A. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 307–9.Google Scholar
  21. Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. London: Penguin, 1992.Google Scholar
  22. Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
  23. Schenck, Celeste M. ‘Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (1986): 13–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
  25. Wald, Christina. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Gabriele Rippl 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Gabriele Rippl

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations