Known for her vivid feminine language and delicate wit and irony, the American writer Edith Wharton used tribal diction to depict the ritualistic practices of upper-class New York. Two of her best works, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) are classified as the novels of the upper classes of Old New York. Recently, Wharton’s novels have earned a lot of popularity since many of her novels have been adapted into film versions. Even though there are many Wharton studies, an interdisciplinary study of both her fictions and adapted films has been rare to find. Therefore, with a psychoanalytic analysis on topics of Kristevan “melancholy” and “abjection,” the study focuses on the cross-fertilized research of Wharton’s two literary novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth and their 1993 and 2000 film adaptations made by directors Martin Scorsese and Terence Davies separately. The Kristevan “melancholy” and “abjection” could be used here to analyze how the patriarchal view of Old New York society forces each lead into the melancholic mood by becoming an abject. Thus, the differences and similarities between the writer and directors in their unique way to present the lead’s psychological conflict to the living environment is the major issue in this study.

The two heterogeneities in Julia Kristeva, namely melancholy and abjection, proffer a formulation of the pre-oedipal and narcissistic structures of subjectivity that constitutes two oppositional systems, explicitly paternal law and maternal authority, where the primal repression lies. In an attempt to address these debated questions, I will argue for a recalling to a lost object situated in a pre-symbolic chora that thereby serves as a meditating and fluctuating rhythm linked with our memory of a forlorn mother. In addition, Kristeva meditates on a reconceptualization of melancholia as a linguistic illness whose primary symptom is chronic asymbolia or dysfunction of words. Her analysis of melancholic depression leads to a further clarification of the violence done to the lost other, especially the maternal other. However, the reading of Kristeva’s investigations into melancholic pathology and its association with abjection will explore two major characters Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence and Lily Bart in The House of Mirth whose intertextual relationships in Wharton’s original novels and adapted films consistently fantasize what Kristeva calls the imaginary mother and phallic mother.

I will propose, in separate sections, that both Newland and Lily fall into melancholy states and abjected situations which couch on unspeakable narcissistic wounds and abjects that are completely indifferent to or expel from the Victorian conventions dominated by the Symbolic order. In the first section regarding The Age of Innocence, the scene of tableaux vivants and the final “reaching out” scene are considered the best examples to explore Lily’s abjection. Wharton’s Lily is a reflection of the Victorian victim; Davies’ Lily is braver and more rebellious, yet, they are all considered as abjects offered to the sacrificial altar in the patriarchal society. In the section of The Age of Innocence, I propose to detail 3 major scenes, Newman’s opening flowers scene, Ellen’s abstract faceless painting scene, and May’s wedding photos scene, in Scorsese’s film and link them to Wharton’s novel, especially focusing on Newman and his melancholic relationships to his wife May and mistress Ellen. However, I will then presume that neither Newland nor Lily could survive their melancholy and abjection through a dynamics of sublimation since their object-cathexes do not outline reparable relationships with the mother. Briefly speaking, on the one hand, a caustic account of the repressive environment of turn-of-the-century New York Society has been explored along with its living characters who suffer from the brittle culture they inhabit; on the other hand, the visual images made by two famous directors Scorsese and Davies have been juxtaposed side by side with Wharton’s literal texts in order to invoke an alternative intertextual reading between two media.