Last Wednesday I attended the Becker-Rose café talk on the nature of melancholy. I thought it was interesting how melancholy and mourning were juxtaposed with mourning defined as a purely emotional experience and melancholy defined as a more intellectualized experience. Melancholy often appears in art and, in my opinion, it often comes off as a kind of romanticized sadness. The representative character of melancholy is usually the tortured, artistic male genius. Sara focused on a passage in Hamlet where there is a confrontation between Gertrude and Hamlet over his continued mourning over his father’s death. She asks why he “seems” sad, due to his mourning garb, and he responds by saying that he does not “seem” sad but he is sad. We do not always trust the outward appearance of Hamlet, but he tells us that his outward appearance is only the smallest manifestation of his inward feelings of grief. This is especially important because throughout the play, there is a lingering question about Hamlet’s honesty as he performs different roles that leave the other characters and the reader questioning his stability.

Sara also showed a scene from the movie, Vertigo, which I have never seen before. We saw the detective spying on a young woman and following her to an art gallery. At the art gallery there are close ups on the flowers she holds in her hands as well as the painting of the woman she is observing. While it seems that we have intruded on her period of mourning, the scene is too interested in appearing pretty and pristine as it focuses on the flower, the painting and the woman’s hairdo. In that moment there is an association of death with femininity and beauty. There is also the fact that the scene does not show the woman’s face. So in addition to being observed without her knowledge, the woman is not even allowed to show her own face or show any emotion indicating mourning. This does not feel like a true emotional moment of mourning but rather the romanticized sadness that I mentioned before. There is no real expression of emotion from this faceless stranger, which seems dehumanizing. Even in death and mourning there are expectations placed on women to be beautiful and they are not granted full autonomy. As we learn later, this woman was actually playing a role in this moment and this scene was part of an elaborate identity scheme. Before this reveal, the main female character experiences the same emotional problems that her supposed grandmother faced. Her grandmother’s tragic death thus becomes a generational or circular story passing down to the another generation of women. She states how she knows that she is going to die and this fatalistic outlook leaves the woman a passive character who simply allows things to happen to her while the man makes all of the decisions. The man in this story is experiencing vertigo due to a traumatic experience on the police force. The vertigo is the physical manifestation of his melancholy, which is cured at the expense of the female protagonist. It is interesting because he is physically unable to look down until his emotional wounds are healed. Even though he experiences melancholy through a physical disadvantage, the cause of his vertigo is emotional. The way in which the outward manifestation and the inward feelings are linked is similar to Hamlet. It is also interesting how the man in the story experiences melancholy through a physical disadvantage while the woman experiences it through art and beauty.

Sara’s overall idea was about how society typically views melancholy and sadness as negative and undesirable but melancholy is actually a natural experience. I think that all human emotion is valid and can have favorable and unfavorable results. To use her example, in various forms of art, people use emotion to express ideas. Some of the greatest works of art have been produced because of a state of melancholy. However, that isn’t to say that melancholy is only good for its production value. Ultimately, I believe it’s best to feel a wide range of emotion because that is how we make meaning out of our thoughts and surroundings.