The persistence of melancholia’s gaze : representations of melancholia in Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett

Abstract

Through close readings of three canonical modernist works: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and their respective representations of melancholia, this dissertation puts into question both traditional and contemporary understandings of this notion. By analysing melancholic speech woven in the texts of Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett, and by tracing the origins and subsequent development of the melancholic throughout the years, this dissertation emphasises the importance of melancholia at the heart of literary modernism. In today’s age, the shape that melancholia has taken is one where feelings of boredom and indifference are predominant. It can be argued, however, that melancholia is also capable of instilling feelings that depart quite significantly from those associated with listlessness and despair. As this dissertation makes apparent, the state of melancholia can prove to go against this description, potentially acting as the very tool through which the world can be made, or perhaps viewed as, interesting. In addition to this, the extensive alignment of modernist texts with Freud’s concept of melancholia in contemporary theory is examined and, subsequently, contested. Here, this dissertation argues that, while Freud depicts the state of melancholia as a psychological labour that afflicts the individual in a deeply agonising and gradual manner, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett portray melancholia as a transformative and destabilising force that the individual is, paradoxically, radically passive to.