Scholarship has already demonstrated the value of literary approaches to understanding the multiple dimensions of grief. Phillipe Ariès’ Western Attitudes Towards Death (1975), Jahan Ramazani’s The Poetry of Mourning (1994), Melissa Zeigler’s Beyond Consolation (1997), and Sanja Bahun’s Modernism and Melancholia (2013) chart the transformation of bereavement in recent centuries. Concerning the American context, Dana Luciano’s study Arranging Grief (2007) reveals that the proliferation of consolation literature in the nineteenth century permitted Americans to prolong their expressions of grief. In Death’s Door (2006), Sandra Gilbert turns a spotlight on modern America’s “strictures against mourning.” Whereas nineteenth-century authors used their writing to protract grief, twentieth-century writers spoke of grief as an embarrassment.
This MLA special session proposes to extend this critical examination of grief by looking closely at writing produced in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, a period of transition in the United States.
During this period, Sigmund Freud published his influential study Mourning and Melancholia (1916), which defined mourning as both “the reaction to the loss of a beloved person” and as a relationship to the world. Freud writes, “in mourning, the world is poor and empty.” Our first speaker, Gabriel Briex reflects on the value and limitations of Freud’s ideas by considering them in relation to scenes of mourning from Willa Cather’s (1873-1947) O Pioneers! (1913), a novel that takes inspiration from the historical transformation of the American frontier. Briex will suggest that elements of Cather’s novel provide the basis for an alternative paradigm to the one articulated by Freud, one in which grief is an occasion for reconciliation.
Our remaining two speakers will consider how texts from the period look backward to nineteenth-century literary precursors while giving expression to more distinctly modern sensibilities. Nikolai Duffy (who, alongside his literary criticism, is writing a novel engaging the theme of loss) proposes to consider Stephen Crane’s (1871-1900) writing as a case in point. His paper places Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) in conversation with earlier writings by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville and later writing by Charles Olson. It turns a spotlight on the narrative’s reframing of cultural and personal sovereignty. Drawing inspiration from Sadeq Rahimi’s theory that all human experience is fundamentally haunted, this paper will explore the hauntogenic as both a mode and a model through which the discourses of American futurity can be understood as indivisible from narratives of grief.
The influence of Poe can also be tracked in the writing of Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944). Poe claimed that the “death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Hartmann was a Japanese-German immigrant to the United States, and in his poetry, art criticism, and unpublished autobiography gave expression to his grief connected to the loss of his mother, Osada, who died shortly after he was born. Our third speaker, Andrew Hill, proposes that Hartmann in his life and writing grieved the death of his mother as, and in place of, Poe’s “beautiful woman.” Hartmann grieved with and through the American literary canon. Hill’s paper attends to the erotics of racial, psychic, and poetic melancholia to re-evaluate Hartmann’s relationship to American literary history as a Japanese-German immigrant.
Our three panelists will speak for 12-15 minutes each, and then our respondent, David McWhirter, will comment. McWhirter’s insights will be informed by his expertise in modernist literature and culture. His recent article for The Henry James Review considers representations of “melancholic retrospection” in James’ oeuvre, and he is currently writing about language and loss in the writing of William Faulkner.