Tales of Beauty:

Aestheticizing Female Melancholia

Frances Restuccia

In "[l]ooking over the list of those one could consider 'great melancholics' (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 [End Page 353] "considered to be in excess of a purely normative state of depression; its discourse encodes male eros and male subjectivity" (75). Schiesari fails to give not only Kristeva but also female artists (including Jane Austen, whose Emma I read as a politically savvy embodiment of the masochistic melancholia that both threatens and propels the text) 1 the credit they deserve for attributing profound significance to women's grief, for thereby altering the course of the represented history of melancholy, and for bestowing the prestige of an aestheticized melancholia on women. The women writers treated herein capture the glamour, the richness, the exquisite aristocratic quality of various forms of Kristevan melancholia through its amenability to elegant labyrinthine style. Referring in her essay "The Melancholy Persuasion" to the melancholia of both Austen's central character (Anne Elliot) in Persuasion and the text itself, Anita Sokolsky (1994) (reading the novel through the lens of Black Sun) seems compelled to indulge herself in beautiful language that testifies to the beauty of melancholia--"exquisite torments," "exquisite sensation," "an aristocracy of sensibility"--as if the aesthetic component of female melancholia were so essential that to write about it is necessarily to cultivate it (or at least to try) (132, 137, 141).

Yet even as they mark progress by aestheticizing a recognizably Kristevan pathological (rather than natural) female melancholia, expressing female loss through literary technique, the women writers I take up draw out a specific liability of Kristeva's theory that Schiesari (who stresses Kristeva's self-hatred, misogyny, and matriphobia) happens to miss. That is: one means by which Kristeva (1989) recommends that melancholic women enter the symbolic order--through "an other jouissance" effected by a partner, an Other, who invigorates the narcissistic object and displaces it, and who thereby enables "the beloved woman's symbolic life" (79)--invites an attachment to brutal men, to which the very pathology of melancholia renders them vulnerable in the first place. The women writers of this essay diagnose a propensity on the part of the female melancholic to favor a domineering man, whom she psychically identifies with her lost and at least in this way neglectful, if not abusive, mother. If the cure for melancholia [End Page 354] requires a kind of transferential duplication of the neglectful or abusive mother (as both my research and counseling intimate), then the means of therapeutic duplication needs to be unprone to cruelty. Of course this is tricky since the mother's illness-producing behavior is apt to have been cruel; it would seem that any duplication of her would have to duplicate it.

These writers, therefore, ask us to consider the social and cultural contexts in which women's melancholy is "worked out": what happens when the male Other (with whom the Kristevan melancholic woman unites to enter the symbolic order) acts in accord with his acculturation (acts normally) and dominates or (worse) is abusive? They also expand our sense of the source of female melancholia by raising the possibility of a social/cultural etiology: why is the mother herself depressed and/or angry, neglectful, abusive? Inverting Jacqueline Rose's objection (in Sexuality in the Field of Visiion [1986]) to the idea that "the social produces the misery of the psychic in a one-way process," since it "utterly divests the psychic of its own mechanisms and drives," the contemporary women writers of this essay inject the social into the psychic (16).

And so we loop back to Schiesari (1992): for Atwood and Drabble especially would seem to agree with Schiesari's general notion that "the lack of adequate integration into the symbolic that Kristeva associates with depression" may not be "the fault of the women involved but rather the fault of the extra-psychic structure found in the social hierarchy of a male-dominated symbolic order" (89). Of course Kristevan theory itself is not utterly asocial; on Schiesari's own account, a particular woman (such as Duras) may be thrown into a melancholia whose source is not entirely the woman but also a symbolic order whose issue, at one moment of history, was Hiroshima and Auschwitz. My specific quarrel with Kristeva, then--so that Austen, Brookner, Atwood, and Drabble not only reinforce Kristevan theory but also draw out its problematic implications--is that, with respect to the personal as opposed to the artistic cure, she may not fully apprehend the dangerous circularity of returning women to a patriarchal [End Page 355] symbolic order that contributes to the production of female melancholia in the first place. And it is in realizing this that the best impetus of the artistic solution may reside.

Not only do the texts that follow lend the weight of "seriousness" to women's grief that Schiesari assumes is missing in the discourse of melancholia. But they also gain weight in holding onto melancholy, and therefore evading (shielding themselves from) the patriarchal symbolic order, at the same time as they resist asymbolia, first, by being artistic/linguistic/cultural productions (with the necessary access to a signifying economy) and, second, by issuing political warnings about melancholic women's vulnerabilities. By including such political content, Austen, Brookner, Atwood, and Drabble do more than merely supplement the list that Schiesari (1992) points to--of exclusively male writers whose expression of melancholia serves "as a discursive and cultural practice that has given men a cultural privilege in displaying and representing loss so as to convert it into a sign of privileged subjectivity" (68). Novels by these women might be said to constitute part of a "feminine symbolic" that Schiesari calls for "that may indeed be a way to re-inscribe women's losses through another type of representation" (77), allowing women to express their losses without aggravating them. As Schiesari laments, "women's melancholia or depression is thought of as a problematic access to a phallic order that is fundamentally (and uncritically) viewed as desirable" (93). What Schiesari prefers instead the authors of this essay move toward putting into effect: "the voicing of women's depression, not as some personal failure to 'differentiate' but as the very site of mourning, or expression, and of community" (93).

To pick up on the idea of community: as the focus on aestheticized male melancholia shifts to aestheticized female melancholia, it is easier than it once was to keep in mind that not everyone has access either to melancholia or especially to its aesthetic expression--that it is the privilege of those with the leisure to revel in loss and possibly even to capitalize on it. Part of the "beauty" of Atwood and Drabble's representations of the daughter's fraught overattachment to a neglectful or abusive mother is that they fold in the mother's plugged up [End Page 356] pain. At the same time: although I feel compelled to raise the issue of class by calling attention to a lack of access on the part of disadvantaged women to a strategic, or at some level pleasurable, melancholia, I would not want to depreciate such a claim on the part of more "privileged" women. I say this not so much because psychic pain can be excruciating but primarily because the insertion of women's melancholic writing into culture--homeopathically attenuating melancholia while expressing it, unlike Kristeva's "other jouissance," which does not so much attenuate melancholia as renovate it--helps to do the work of brightening the black sun hovering over privileged and underprivileged women alike.