This thesis examines the relationship between the early modern understanding of female melancholia and women’s depression today. Working with proto-medical treatises and Shakespearean drama from the early modern period (1580-1665), alongside contemporary diagnostic frameworks and psychosocial research (1960-2017), it investigates how female melancholics and depressed women speak to each other across the historical divide. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century experiences of melancholia shed new light, in particular, on the neglected area of women’s experience of depression today. I interrogate the notion, prevalent in early modern literature and culture, that female melancholia is equated with weakness; and demonstrate how this assumption was explored and challenged on the early modern stage by William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and George Wilkins. I argue that melancholia emerges in early modern drama as a potential site for identity and agency, and emphasise the importance of sympathetic recognition for sufferers in the past and the present. The terms ‘melancholia’ and ‘depression’ are only accessible to women under certain circumstances, however, and not all women are equally successful in eliciting a sympathetic response. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, women’s social class determines their degree of success in receiving sympathy, as I discuss through the sharp disparity between the grieving Queens and the greensick Jailer’s Daughter. In King John, royal position affects how much sympathy Queen Constance receives in her maternal grief. And in Pericles, a surprising relationship emerges between recognition, chastity and melancholia through the complex figure of Pericles’ daughter Marina. These three plays reveal important and counterintuitive links between early modern feminine selfhood and melancholia which, I argue, can illuminate in new ways the experience of female depression today. This thesis does not propose a seamless continuum from the early modern period to the present, but instead sets out to show how certain important cultural trends and assumptions are retained in more recent diagnostic and psychosocial studies. By exploring the narrative of these two periods together, in an open and interdisciplinary manner, my project seeks to improve our understanding of the way melancholic women were treated in the early modern period; and, in so doing, to reconsider the ways women experiencing depression are recognised and supported today.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/n1yr-bg35
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Waters, Sarah Ruth Alice
Supervisors: Craik, Katharine ; Boulton, Mary ; Lowe, Eleanor
Faculty of Humanities and Social SciencesDepartment of English and Modern Languages
Year: 2018
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