Haunted by memories: The language of melancholy and depression in 1800
Jane Darcy
W042
About the event
Event type: Seminar
Although dying within three years of each other, Mary Wollstonecraft (d. 1787) and the poet William Cowper (d. 1800) drew on radically different discourses to explain their experiences of profound melancholy. For Cowper, the defining moment of his life was his dramatic religious conversion, which he described in a private document later published as Adelphi. My paper considers what happened when this comforting model of the spiritual conversion was put under acute strain by Cowper’s subsequent bouts of madness. Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, in her popular Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, presented her melancholy in Rousseauvian terms as a sign of exquisite sensibility. This paper asks why it is, therefore, that in her letters Wollstonecraft rarely used the term melancholy, but chose to discuss her suffering in terms of nervous disease and debility. As a contrast, this paper looks at the place played by personal memories in the autobiographical fragments of the distinctly non-melancholic William Godwin.