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

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).