Of Mourning and Melancholia

In Toni Morrison's Beloved, we follow a mother who has lost her daughter and cannot come to terms with this loss. Beloved is about memory and forgetting: partially accepting the past while acknowledging the impossibility of fully accepting the past and, crucially, moving on, letting oneself forget. Beloved is also about mourning and melancholia: a grieving which comes to terms with loss and a grieving which does not. Sigmund Freud, in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia”, tried to distinguish between these two types of grieving. Freud saw mourning as a normal process of dealing with loss whereas melancholia he saw as pathological. He struggled to articulate a process of grieving that would allow the ego to recognize and cope with its own impotence in the face of loss and, in doing so, would allow a person to heal despite the necessary failure of ego defenses. This aim is crucial to understanding his distinction between mourning and melancholia because, in the end, the distinction hinges upon whether or not the ego is able to recognize both the loss of the loved object as well as its own impotence in light of this loss.

In mourning, the ego recognizes and slowly comes to terms with the loss of the loved object and finally manages to move on and to form new attachment relationships. Mourning begins with a transition period that is often long and painful and can involve denial of loss and anger at the lost object. However, once this period is over, the mourner learns to reorient her attachment behavior. Mourning ends once the loved object has been de-cathected and emotional investment has been mostly removed from it and transferred to another object. While the lost object is not fully replaced nor forgotten, and neither would we desire it to be, the mourner does learn to live in a world without the loved object. Thus, the process of mourning handles the pain of loss by granting the mourner time to come to terms with and recognize her loss, time to acknowledge that the loss cannot be fully healed, time to realize that she can and must move on.

Unlike mourning, melancholia does not involve the process of coming to terms with loss because the melancholic is not willing or able to recognize the loss of the loved object. Granted, the mourner might not admit to the loss at first any more than the melancholic, but the difference is that the melancholic denies the loss because of the type of attachment she has formed with the loved object, namely, one of intense identification. Thus the melancholics sense of loss-a purely unconscious sense-leads her to incorporate the lost object into the ego and to redirect libidinal attachment towards the ego instead of learning to live with its loss. This incorporation causes a change in the structure of ego-internalization. Such incorporation can be seen in the character of Jo March, following the death of her sister Beth, in Little Women. Jo, who might have accepted the loss of Beth, never accepted the loss of her Beth, the object of her desire.  Following Beth's death, Jo finally begins to change her tomboyish ways and become more demure, patient, and reserved. She becomes more like Beth. This incorporation happens defensively in order to protect the ego (and also to keep alive a prohibited desire). However, melancholic internalization can turn ugly. The hate and anger previously directed at a loved object now turns inward and is directed at the self, and this causes guilt to emerge and ultimately destroys the ego.

Mourning and melancholia both come out of a sense of loss and a felt disruption of the self; the one can speak of this loss and disruption, the other cannot. In order to recognize and speak of loss, the ego must feel sufficiently equipped to deal with it. Melancholia results from an inability to recognize and articulate the loss because the pain is too profound, too primitive, and hidden too deep in the recesses of the unconscious for the ego to handle. Melancholia needs to be managed by allowing mourning to finish and the ego wound to heal. But this healing itself is not sufficient; there has to be an admission that the ego is not whole and is impotent to begin with. At times however, melancholia can be necessary because the price of admitting to certain losses is too high for the ailing psyche to pay. For example, Sethe's house number, 124, names that which Sethe herself must repress-her daughter's murder at Sethe's own hands.

In order to escape melancholia, one needs not so much to form new attachment relationships as to recognize one's loss. Sethe's “disremembering” could not exorcise Beloved. Paul D's exorcism succeeded, if only for a while, because he could face Beloved and acknowledge the loss and impotence that she stood for while also willing to match his will against hers. The refiguring of Beloved's murder scene at the novel's climax allowed Sethe to finally come to terms with her memories of loss and trauma. With the community's support, she is now able to enter her mourning period. Beloved is finally exorcised, her memory finally put to rest, and her claim to recognition finally fulfilled.