Melancholy
Joanna Neilly, Alex Stuart
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William Blake’s Analysis of Melancholy
Mark Ryan
doi:10.59860/wph.a8d2eda

The eighteenth century consisted of a wide range of theories that presented experimental attempts to understand the workings of the human nervous system. In 1800, the first foundations of psychiatry were in the process of being formed, as a result of much groundwork and anatomical research, as well as the theories of artists and scientists who tried to make sense of the functioning of the body. Certain theorists were more objective than others, but what became known as ‘The English Malady’ or ‘Melancholia’ was generally understood simply in terms of its symptoms and classified with other illnesses, such as mania and hypochondria. However, William Blake theorised about cognitive dysfunction like no other poet of his time and his ideas challenged the prevailing Zeitgeist of opinion. Despite the fact that Blake appears to use the symbolism of eighteenth-century anatomical studies, such as that relating to animal spirits, to the extent that his creatures of the psyche, the Zoas, are described in such terms, it is clear that they are not simply rooted in physiology. In rejecting the mechanistic notion of splicing nerves and fibres to study the corporeal functions of the human being, Blake made a profoundly important choice. This article seeks to explore Blake’s analysis of the causes of melancholy and possible solutions to the problem that he presented in his later works, such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. It is an attempt to advance the general field of research into the nature of Blake’s interest in cognitive processes and to illuminate some of the essential differences between Blake’s ideas and those of his contemporaries on the subject of the causes, symptoms and solutions to ‘Melancholia’. As monologistic discourse is a feature of the psychic life of Blake’s main character, Albion, the poet’s notion of how the structure of language is instrumental in determining psychic health is considered.

‘A Jeu de Melancholie’: George Eliot’s Reflections on Dejection
Simon Richard Calder
doi:10.59860/wph.a058ca1

This article reassesses George Eliot and Baruch Spinoza’s ideas about the ethical salience of two modes of sorrow: anguish and melancholia. Although Eliot finished translating Spinoza’s Ethics in 1856, one year before publishing her first work of fiction, the only book-length account of the influence of Spinoza’s moral treatise on Eliot’s ethical fiction remains Dorothy Atkins’s George Eliot and Spinoza (1978). This article challenges Atkins’s thesis that Eliot ‘dramatizes’ the process of total liberation from the passions that Spinoza ‘describes’. Spinoza distinguished between three kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the first kind, which includes all knowledge afforded by the passions and is the sole cause of falsity; rational knowledge, which concerns the eternal structure of reality; and intuitive knowledge, which concerns the unchanging essence of things apart from their relations. Once it is understood that passion-ideas are only fallible because they – and they alone – concern the relation between particular bodies, it becomes evident that the same thing that makes them ‘inadequate’ in an epistemological sense makes them necessary as a means of working out how to live. The object of this article is to compare Spinoza and Eliot’s responses to this fact. In Section I, an analysis of Will Ladislaw’s passions in Chapter Seventy-Eight of Middlemarch (1871-2) enables us to recognise how Spinoza and Eliot anticipated neurobiologist Antonio Damasio in acknowledging that the passions provide the foundation for all subsequent moral reasoning. In Section II, the work of Spinoza scholar Michael Lebuffe sheds light on the means by which Dorothea Casaubon distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ passions in Chapter Eighty of Middlemarch. Finally, in Section III, a turn to Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story (1857) and a critical assessment of Spinoza’s ideas about intuitive cognition enables us to trace the discrepancy between Spinoza and Eliot’s ethics back to a fundamental difference in their thoughts about that most problematic passion, melancholia.

Utopia and the Prohibition of Melancholy: Mulleygrubs and Malcontents in William Morris’s News from Nowhere
Owen Holland
doi:10.59860/wph.a1680e8

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.

Melancholy and Loss in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg
Maureen Ann Watkins
doi:10.59860/wph.a2774cb

In this paper I examine the theme of melancholy in relation to Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg. I argue that in connection with the very overt subject of physical illness in the novel, specifically the condition of tuberculosis, there is also the theme of melancholy which is evident in the novel’s subject matter, characters and structure. Relating my discussion to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, I argue that the pervading sense of melancholy in Der Zauberberg can be attributed to a sense of loss at a number of levels, including not only concrete losses such as the death or desertion of a loved one, but also abstract losses, such as the loss of hope experienced by the terminally ill. I examine how the loss incurred by the deprivation of meaning in life experienced by the seriously ill can be compounded by further losses experienced through institutional life, such as the loss of dignity, self-respect and a sense of identity, leading in some cases to thoughts of, or actual suicide. In addition I note how the structure of the novel echoes the feeling of disorientation and timelessness experienced by those in a melancholic state, and how a sense of loss continues when the main protagonist, through whose eyes we view the events of the narrative, disappears and most probably dies at end of the novel. This paper relates to a wider exploration of ‘Impotence, Mental Illness and Suicide’ in relation to Mann’s novel, as a chapter of my thesis which relates to ‘Thomas Mann and the Body’, and focuses particularly on issues of the taboo. My work addresses taboo acts and conditions, and the theme of melancholy relates both to the stigmatised condition of mental illness, and the taboo act of suicide.

A Melancholy of my Own: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City
Hacer Esra Almas
doi:10.59860/wph.a386912

Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul: Şehir ve Hatıralar (Istanbul: Memories and the City) (2003) is a recent addition to the literature on melancholy. In the memoir, Pamuk identifies with the city, and diagnoses its predominant mood as the melancholy of a city in a state of decrepitude. Istanbul in his account is a humanized city suffering from chronic, even pathological, sadness, which transmits its mood to its inhabitants. Pamuk uses a Turkish word, hüzün, denoting a medley of melancholy, sadness and tristesse, to unite the city, its past and its present within a timeless as well as transnational feeling. This article addresses a key question in the context of Pamuk’s personalised understanding: how does melancholy make sense when relating to Istanbul, and, reciprocally, what makes the city’s melancholy, as it arises from Pamuk’s work, stand out from the large body of literature on the term? I respond by tracing the imagery of melancholy in Pamuk's work, in relation to the complex meanings and imagery of the term, to show how they find expression in the memoir.