According to Sara Schlemm, Hamlet is the most famous melancholic. It has been a while since I read Hamlet, but my high school knowledge was due for a dusting off. During the talk, we were brought back to the beginning of the novel with Hamlet dressed in all black, surround by his family in ornate, celebratory clothing following Hamlet’s mother’s marriage to his uncle. Schlemm has us focus on that while his black clothing may be cliche, his melancholy is indescribable, as melancholy tends to be.
According to the dictionary, melancholy is “a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause”. This is obviously apparent in Hamlet, where his beginning speech describes displays he has a deep and incurable sadness. When Schlemm asked the room what our definition of sadness versus melancholy was, people typically answered that melancholy is a way you are, and sadness is something you feel towards an event. Another example given was “black bile”, which is the word actually broken down, and hints at melancholy being a medical affliction, and not just a feeling. She says that when you try to look up melancholy in a modern medical dictionary, you are redirected to depression. She also mentioned that a long time ago melancholy was explained through astrology, and was just part of who you were, while now sadness has a very small place in our lives, with a new ideal placed on positive thinking.
Another interesting topic brought up is a “love melancholy”. This is the idea that you cannot truly love without being sad. I’m not sure I quite agree. I think love brings along many other feelings, but I don’t think being in love should make one sad. I think it can make people nervous or feel as though they cannot live without what they’ve found, but none of those are sadness. I may feel this way because, as is true with many mental illnesses/conditions, it is hard to fully understand unless you’ve experienced it.
I’m not a very psychological person, so I feel a lot of the lecture went right over my head, but I do think it is very interesting how Sara Schlemm can research and discover so much about an emotion or feeling.
I also felt like I left without a complete understanding of what melancholy is. As a Human Development major, I approached the subject from the perspective of clinical psychology. What is the difference between melancholy and depression? Sara made it seem like they were different, so I suppose this is what makes the study of melancholy so fascinating.
perhaps the thing with love melancholy is that, once you’ve made a powerful and deep connection with someone, it makes you realize how rare, and often how fleeting those connections are. or perhaps it’s that, while you feel very close to the person you love, you know that you can never truly know them completely, the way that you know yourself. their mind, no matter how close you swim, is still and island an ocean away.