Beloved pain: Male melancholia at the fin-de-siecle.

This dissertation analyzes melancholia as a theme and narrative technique in Swedish and Austrian writings at the fin de siecle. Focusing on August Strindberg's A Madman's Defense (1887/88), Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Das Marchen der 672. Nacht (1895), Arthur Schnitzler's Casanovas Heimfahrt (1917), and Otto Weininger's Geschlecht and Charakter (1903), I argue that crises of masculinity evolve in these texts through expressions of loss and longing, i.e., symptoms of melancholia. While crises of masculinity have often been studied separately in both the Austrian fin de siecle and August Strindberg's works (addressing masochistic tendencies in the former and aggressive tones in the latter texts), I show that the figure of melancholia reveals structural and thematic similarities between these writings. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's Trauer und Melancholie, I contend that melancholia is a reaction to the loss of an ambivalently cathected object, which results in the subject's need for self-accusation. Melancholic mourning always reveals more about the melancholic subject than about the lost object because of the subject's attempts to overcome his or her sense of fragmentation. Furthermore, melancholia becomes a narrating device, which I demonstrate by means of Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory as the correlate of melancholia. Allegories refer only to themselves because they cannot completely capture any object in the real world, and thus manifest a verbally rich surface that disguises its self-referentiality. Melancholia is felt as lost love in Strindberg's A Madman's Defense , while it characterizes the structure of narration in Hofmannsthal's Marchen. Schnitzler's Casanova story reveals the dead-end character of melancholic repetitions through irony which accepts rather than mourns the fragmentation of the subject. Finally, Otto Weininger's monograph Geschlecht und Charakter becomes melancholic in spite of itself, repetitively seeking to solve the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity as a problem of lost morality. Melancholia and masculinity form a pair in these texts, revealing that melancholic longing is integral to modern man in his attempt to come to terms with the fragmentation of his self.PhDGerman literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124523/2/3150056.pd