Notes

1. See: Frances Restuccia, "'A Black Morning': Kristevan Melancholia in Jane Austen's Emma," American Imago 52.4 (Winter 1994): 447-69.

2. I quote here from The Misalliance, in which a Brookner melancholic (Blanche) fixes on a wordless little girl (Elinor) whose natural mother died when she was one month old and whose putative mother feels that the three year old has encroached on her glamorous life. The nurse diagnoses Elinor's condition as maternal neglect that jeopardizes the daughter's access to language. Corroborating her hypothesis, Elinor toward the end of the novel begins to sputter words--"Something about Grandma. Going to Grandma" (185)--that seem predicated on her expectation of being at least grandmothered. But Elinor's breakthrough is not cause for unadulterated joy; the text is saturated with sadness over "The cruelty of the world in apportioning children to the wrong mothers"--misalliances that plunge Blanche into a vast mourning on behalf of all children whose mothers are cold. "Mothers like [Sally Beamish] as Blanche knew only too well, induce bewilderment, loneliness" (102). Anita Brookner, The Misalliance (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 44.

3. Dusty Miller, in Women Who Hurt Themselves, notes the tendency of the TRS (Trauma Reenactment Syndrome) woman to find a partner "similar to the abusive parent, . . . because of her loyalty to the abuser . . . . " The TRS woman's perception of intimacy, to Miller, is organized by the "idea that violence equals connectedness." Dusty Miller, Women Who Hurt Themselves (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 136.

4. The heroine (a reference librarian at "a medical research institute dedicated to the study of problems of human behavior" [5]) of this masochistic, melancholic narrative feels that she could "write a treatise on melancholy," which is, she has noticed, "usually portrayed [in old prints] as a woman, dishevelled, deranged, surrounded by broken pitchers, leaning casks, torn books. She may be sunk in unpeaceful sleep [Brookner's heroines are incorrigible insomniacs], heavy limbed, overpowered by her inability to take the world's measure, her compass and book laid aside." Frances observes that, while melancholy men seem "to be striking a bit of a pose," women "look as if they are in the grip of an affliction too serious to be put into words" (6)--a gender difference that Kristeva (1989) (alert to the issues Schiesari raises) corroborates with reference to the "sociologically proven fact" that there is a "greater frequency of feminine depressions," which she conjectures may "reveal an aspect of feminine sexuality: its addiction to the maternal Thing and its lesser aptitude for restorative perversion" (71).

5. Frances Hinton strikingly resembles Kristeva's patient Didier, whose "mother's death had made only a small impact on him." She had been "the only person allowed to look at his paintings"; he "kept [her] apartment the way she had left it" (Kristeva 1995, 12). "Ever since his 'audience' had died, his mother's apartment was closed off, and Didier dared not lay a finger on it or sell it." His sexuality is voyeuristic, "one in which sadomasochistic scenarios gave him the most pleasure" (12, 42).

6. Or, as Irigaray writes about the girl's relation to the mother: it is "not to be mastered by the fort-da. The mother always remains too familiar and too close. . . . Furthermore, the sexual movement fundamental to the feminine is much closer to gyration than to the gesture like little Ernst's . . . . The girl tries to reproduce around her or inside herself a movement whose energy is circular, and which protects her from dereliction, from immediate effraction, from depression, from loss in itself." Luce Irigaray, "The Gesture in Psychoanalysis," translated by Elizabeth Guild, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge, 1989), 133.

7. This Green (1980) passage continues by exemplifying "the variety of precipitating factors": "among the principal causes of this kind of maternal depression, one finds the loss of a person dear to her: child, parent, close friend, or any other object strongly cathected by the mother. But it may also be a depression triggered off by a deception which inflicts a narcissistic wound: a change of fortune in the nuclear family or the family of origin, a liason of the father who neglects the mother, humiliation, etc. In any event the mother's sorrow and lessening of interest in her infant are in the foreground" (149). Abraham and Torok (1994) also are typically concerned with cases in which a child's inchoate passions encounter "a parent's own conflictual or paralyzed history of desire" (103).

8. In the earlier "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), however, Freud assumes that grief can be resolved, that a decathexis may occur, and that new replacement attachments may be formed. Butler (1995) points out and works with this distinction in "Melancholy Gender--Refused Identification" (167).

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