Abstract
This thesis explores the representation of melancholia in the autobiographies written by Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) and Jean Rhys (1890-1979). By a close reading of Cavendish’s A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1656) and Rhys’s Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979), this thesis argues that melancholia, as represented in these texts, is the very basis of the authors’ path to a sense of self. Historically, melancholia (or melancholy) refers to a condition that is both destructive and a source of creativity and authorial self-construction. Within its tradition, the condition has been considered a gendered construction, granting men a superior position as creative geniuses, as Juliana Schiesari explored in her study The Gendering of Melancholia (1992). Against Schiesari’s conclusion of how melancholia has exclusively been delimiting in women, I propose a critical reassessment of the melancholic persona in order to include the self-understood female melancholic. This thesis aims to reveal how the previously mentioned female writers portray a melancholic subjectivity that challenges the traditionally gender-based distinction between the inarticulate female melancholic and the loquacious male equivalent. In my analysis, I employ scholarly studies on melancholia, particularly Robert Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) as a framework through which I explore the women’s melancholic subjectivities. This thesis thus seeks to inscribe the female melancholic into a tradition from which she has been culturally excluded.