The Drama of Melancholia

Abstract

In the Drama of Melancholia, gender is a matter of life and death. The plays stage the impact that the reaction to death has on the gender performances of the protagonists. Struggling with the experience of bereavement, the protagonists are unable to accept the loss of their loved ones, but resurrect the dead in their imagination and thus psychically preserve their presence. Freud describes this state of unresolved or disavowed mourning as melancholia. Since the dead return as ghost companions who intrude into the melancholic’s perception, the plays enact yet another form of the Freudian notion of Wiederholungszwang, which draws on the alternative meaning of the German wieder holen as fetching something or someone back. From the Drama of Melancholia, to which authors such as Alan Ayckbourn, Shelagh Stephenson, Sebastian Barry, and Dermot Bolger have contributed, I have chosen Proof, Portia Coughlan, and Cleansed for closer analysis,¹ since they allow a particularly productive discussion of crucial aspects that concern the interface of melancholia and gender identity in the Drama of Melancholia.