Melancholy Aesthetics:: Experiencing Loss in Woolf and Duras

Thesis advisor: Kevin OhiThesis advisor: Kayla WalczykFiction, in that it need not position itself at a safe distance from melancholia in order to point at with a theoretical probe, presents a more accurate vision of the melancholic structure. Instead of simply describing and defining melancholia, fiction can inhabit the space of the pathology. In this way, it can perform the consuming and debilitating suffering that ensues after the experience of an inexpressible loss. In doing so, it can force the reader to experience in the act of reading what it would be like to meet melancholia in all its disturbing allure and destructive capacities. Certain fictional representations of loss, in the way they pull their readers into a melancholic vortex, profoundly enact the difficulties that result in this encounter. The capacity of fiction to render the melancholic structure in all its complexity is evident in Marguerite Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein and in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In the way these texts perform the dynamics of the melancholic structure, they push beyond the precipice of where scientific language is forced to stop. This reading of The Ravishing of Lol Stein and To the Lighthouse is not an attempt to psychoanalyze fictional characters or the authors who created them; such a study is highly speculative and relatively unproductive. It is an attempt to recognize how melancholy seems to be functioning in and performed by these texts, and in this interpretive schema, recognizing how fiction can do what theory cannot.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2018.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: English