Melancholy Gilded Age:

On Edith Wharton’s Literal / Visual World

        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. 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 discover. With the psychoanalytic analysis on the thematic topic of Kristevan “melancholia/depression,” the study focuses on the cross-fertilized research of Wharton’s literary novel The House of Mirth and its 2000 film adaptation made by Terence Davies. The Kristevan “melancholia/depression” used here to analyze how the patriarchal view of Old New York society forces the major female lead Lily into the melancholic mood which leads to her suicide. Lily’s state of melancholia proffers 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 issues, I will focus on Kristeva’s 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. In The House of Mirth, the scene of tableaux vivants and the final “reaching out” scene are considered the best examples to explore Lily’s depression. Wharton’s Lily is a reflection of the Victorian victim; yet Davies’ Lily is braver and more rebellious with a modern soul. However, they are both trapped in the sacrificial altar that provokes their depressive despair in a patriarchal society. 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 character Lily, who suffers from the brittle culture she inhabits in Wharton’s novels; on the other hand, the visual image has been juxtaposed side by side with Wharton’s literal text in order to invoke an alternative intertextual reading between two media on the issues of melancholia.

Key Words: melancholia/depression, lost object, maternal other, asymbolia, narcissistic, primal repression

Centre for British Studies, Berlin, 30 September to 1 October, 2010

Call for Papers and Panels

Convenors: Pascal Nicklas (Humboldt University Berlin),
Gesa Stedman (GBZ Berlin), Eckart Voigts-Virchow (Siegen University)

The Centre for British Studies, Berlin (Großbritannienzentrum) will host an international conference on “Rewriting, Remixing, and Reloading: Adaptations across the Globe”, in co-operation with the Association of Adaptation Studies and the Centre of Adaptations, De Montfort University, Leicester.

 

 

Rewriting, Remixing, and Reloading: Adaptations across the Globe

This abstract has submitted to the International Conference whose webstie information stated as follows:  http://www.adaptation.uk.com/?q=node/26