Abstract
Women’s melancholia is the subject of philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry in feminist theory: Clément and Cixous, together but in different ways, have shown how melancholia can be appropriated through the dance of hysteria, through poetry and writing. Irigaray and Kristeva have investigated it, using and overturning the Lacanian paradigm: Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman, has spoken of woman’s ‘melancholic sexuality’; Christine Buci-Glucks-mann in Tragique de Vombre has equated the Shakespearean tragic hero, particularly Hamlet, to Pessoa and other contemporary figures who escape the laws of classical tragedy to inhabit a world of shadows and shades, a world of undecidability, that is often associated with women. Kristeva in Black Sun has outlined three figures of female depressives in the case studies of Hélène, Marie-Ange and Isabelle, and deconstructed the Western paradigm of the melancholic in four artists (Holbein, Nerval, Dostoevsky and Marguerite Duras).
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Notes and References
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun — Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) p. 3.
C.T. Neely, ‘Remembering Shakespeare, Revising Ourselves’, in M. Novy (ed.), Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
The gaze, both active and passive, is associated with the anatomical exam: ‘my purpose and endeavour is … to anatomise this humour of melancholy, through all its parts and species’; and, soon after: ‘I have anatomised my own folly’: R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924), pp. 72 and 73.
B. Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Picador, 1987), p. 10.
The 1919 essay does not deal with Hamlet but uses it as a subtext. Cf. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 127. Freud had dealt with Hamlet first in a letter to Fliess in 1897, then in the famous formulation of the Oedipus complex in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and later in a manuscript called Psychopathic Characters on the Scene (c. 1905), eventually published after his death.
‘I … emphasize preoedipal motives, in which phantasies of merger with and annihilation by the mother are prior to genital desire for her, and in which the strong father is needed more as an aid to differentiation and the establishment of masculine identity than as a superego protecting against incestuous desire’: J. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers — Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 247.
Cf. T. Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 5ff.
J. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 126–7. She remarks that the ambiguity of the text, its aesthetic inadequacy, its ‘excess’, all leading to an image of the feminine, are the repetition of the psychic experience described by Freud in his essay on the Hamlet-like Leonardo da Vinci, written nine years before Eliot’s essay.
S. Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood’ (1910), in The Standard Edition, vol. XI (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 115. In the androgynous figures appearing in many of his paintings, ‘Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and triumphed over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures’ (p. 118). It is interesting to notice how close Eliot goes to the notion of the unconscious in his descriptions of Hamlet’s failures and displacements. His essay, always quoted for the notion of objective correlative, in fact invokes the hidden and the inexpressible: ‘We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable … We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself: ‘Hamlet’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1953), p. 146.
‘And there I see such black and grained spots/As will not give their tinct’ … ‘These words like daggers enter in mine ears’: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by J. D. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), III, 4, 90–1 and 96. All references in the text are to this edition.
R. Chandler, The Big Sleep (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), respectively pp. 13 and 220. All references in the text are to this edition.
R. Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 232.
P.D. James, The Skull beneath the Skin (London: Faber & Faber, 1982.
J. Lacan, Il seminario — Libro XIX (Turin: Einaudi, 1983).
E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Invagination (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), p. 113. As in the case of the purloined letter, and also in the terrible murder of two women in Rue Morgue, it will be discovered that ‘there were ... no secret issues’ (p. 120). As in a game of chess, ‘what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound’ (p. 95).
S. Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight — Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 42.
M. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 27.
Barbara Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), p. 38.
H. Cixous and C. Clément, The Newly Born Woman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), respectively pp. 66 and 67. The figure of Sleeping Beauty is present in some of the novels I have examined, above all among Angela Carter’s female freaks in Nights at the Circus.
S. Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 4.
The dream is related in Ch. 2 of The Interpretation of Dreams. It is what he calls the navel of the dream, its impenetrable core: There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable — a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown’: S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 111, note 1). Garber discusses at length this concept and defines Hamlet ‘as origin — or marker of the unknowability of origins, what Freud called the navel of the dream’: Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, p. 158.
According to Abraham, the ghost of illegitimacy haunts the Polonides as well. Cf. M. Vitale, ‘Romanzo familiare e fantasmi amletici’, in L. Curti (ed), Ombre di un’ombra (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1994).
‘[T]he compelling force of transvestism in literature and culture comes … also from its instatement of metaphor itself, not as that for which a literal meaning must be found, but precisely as that without which there would be no such thing as meaning in the first place’: M. Garber, Vested Interests — Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 390. She sees the appropriation of transvestism in the service of a humanist ‘progress narrative’ at work in Shakespearean criticism, and above all in Stephen’s Greenblatt’s readings. Her encyclopaedic book moves from Peter Pan to Red Riding Hood, from Rudolph Valentino and Arab mores to Freud’s Wolf-Man, finally seeing transvestism as a re-enactment of the primal scene.
Severo Sarduy, ‘Copy/Simulacrum’, in Written on a Body, trans. by Carol Maier (New York: Lumen Books, 1989), p. 2, originally published as Escrito sobre un Cuerpo (1969).
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© 1998 Lidia Curti
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Curti, L. (1998). The Empty Place of Melancholia: Female Characters in Hamlet. In: Female Stories, Female Bodies. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26207-6_7
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