Melancholy in John Dryden’s All for Love
##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.main##
Antony, the mourner, sticks to his bondage to others by entering the bondage of love of Cleopatra. This makes the difficulty in acting independently. Antony shows most persuasively that he is seeking a life secure in the arms of Cleopatra. In Freud’s narcissism, secure life is achieved through the process of self-regard. This is a pathology. However, I argue that Antony does not incorporate Cleopatra into himself but loses her to demand a possibility, a mood, or an orientation toward the world. His feeling is changed into a mood that copes with the problems caused by the libidinous involvement with the object in Freud. He changes his feeling into a countenance towards the world, rather than a pathology. This is what Walter Benjamin calls melancholy.
References
-
Benjamin, W. (1997). The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Trans. John Osborne, London: NLB.
Google Scholar
1
-
Benjamin, W. (2002). Calderon and Hebbel. In Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.
Google Scholar
2
-
Butler, J. (2002). Afterword: After Loss, What then? In Loss: The Politics of Mourning. (Eng, D., & Kazanjian, D. Eds.). NJ: University of California Press.
Google Scholar
3
-
Clewell, T. (2004). Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 52(1), 43-67.
Google Scholar
4
-
Dryden, J. (1909). All for Love. New York: P.F. Collier & Son.
Google Scholar
5
-
Ferber, I. (2013), Philosophy and Melancholy, Benjamin's Reflections on Theater and Language. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Google Scholar
6
-
Fonagy, P., Person, E. S., & Sandler, J. (1991). Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (Contemporary Freud Series). Yale University Press.
Google Scholar
7
-
Freud, S., Strachey, J., & Rothgeb, C. L. (1974). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Amsterdam University Press.
Google Scholar
8
-
Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. (1974). The Language of Psycho-Analysis (6th printing). W. W. Norton & Company.
Google Scholar
9
-
Laplanche, J., & Fletcher, J. (1999). Essays on Otherness. Routledge.
Google Scholar
10
-
Vance, J. A. (1986). Antony Bound: Fragmentation and Insecurity in All for Love. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 26(3), 421. https://doi.org/10.2307/450571.
Google Scholar
11
-
Williams, A. L. (1984). The Decking of Ruins: Dryden's All for Love. South Atlantic Review, 49(2), 6-18.
Google Scholar
12
Most read articles by the same author(s)
-
Hossein Moradi,
Ben Jonson’s Baroque in A Tale of a Tub: Chance as Fate and Melancholy , European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences: Vol. 1 No. 5 (2021)