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A contribution to: Melancholy

Edited by Joanna Neilly and Alex Stuart

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 6

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  This article has been written as part of my ongoing PhD research. My project re-reads William Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890) as a mundane intervention into a series of different discursive spaces, which include, but are not limited to, the particular civic space of Trafalgar Square; the metropolitan space of fin de siècle London; the figurative space of the national imaginary, as well as its more tangible built environment; the political debates and lieux de mémoire of the early British socialist movement and, finally, the generic space of the narrative utopia. The word mundane has a twofold meaning, signifying both the dullness of the routine of political agitation, as well as the non-transcendent worldliness of Morris’s utopianism, which is immanently rooted in the everyday life of late Victorian society. In this article, I examine the status of melancholy in Morris’s projected utopian society, responding to recent critical discussion of the marginal figure of the Mulleygrub in Nowhere. I do so with reference to Frederic Jameson’s elaboration of the utopian impulse, as well as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic account of the psychical state of melancholy. The ambivalent status and semantic instability of the Mulleygrubs – a word which can refer both to physical ailments and to psychological dejection – has led some commentators to argue that residual forms of exclusivity persist in Morris’s ostensibly hospitable post-revolutionary society. This bears out Wolf Lepenies’ hypothesis that utopia necessarily entails a prohibition of melancholy. I argue that the situation is more complexly nuanced. The uncertainty surrounding the Mulleygrubs does not necessarily imply a proscriptive, or prescriptive, desire to cure the ‘disease’ of melancholy; rather, it should be read as part of an attempted self- supersession on the part of the heart-sick revolutionary agents who brought Nowhere into being in the hope of superseding the lived reality of alienation and widespread social melancholia.

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