Melancholia Chic; or Why Does Culture Glamourise Female Misery?

Katarzyna Szmigiero

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Melancholia Chic; or Why Does Culture Glamourise Female Misery?

In: 'And Then the Monsters Come Out': Madness, Language and Power

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Katarzyna Szmigiero

Katarzyna Szmigiero
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 55–64

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848883239_007

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Commonsensically speaking, there is hardly anything less sexually stimulating than depression. Lack of energy, anhedonia, profound indifference to one’s surroundings and, frequently, elemental neglect of personal hygiene do not come to mind as obvious attributes of a great lover or a life-long companion. Nevertheless, despite these obvious truths, there exist myriads of cultural representations of deeply unhappy – yet desirable – women. What is even more disturbing, they often reach the height of their beauty when suicidal, or actually dead. From Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott, innumerable damsels in distress of Gothic fiction and swooning Victorian hysterics, ending with F. S. Fitzgerald’s Nicole Diver or E. M. Remarque’s Genevieve Terhoven, female suffering is glamourised and eroticised both in literature and in visual arts. My chapter tries to answer the question why female depression, ignored and ridiculed in everyday life, is presented as sexy by culture. I seek the explanation in gender stereotypes as well as the tradition of ‘heroic melancholia,’ to use Peter Kramer’s expression. The former encourage women to be passive and vulnerable while the latter equates sublimation with sadness, or even illness. Just like heroin chic in 1990s fashion, culture’s fascination with female misery supplies women with inappropriate role models and promotes unhealthy patterns of behaviour. As long as culture takes the advice from Edgar Allan Poe, who claimed that the death (preferably preceded by pain) of a beautiful woman is the ultimate subject for a work of art, ordinary lives of healthy women remain underestimated.

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'And Then the Monsters Come Out': Madness, Language and Power

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848883239

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2014

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Comparative Studies & World Literature
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Melancholia Chic; or Why Does Culture Glamourise Female Misery?

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'And Then the Monsters Come Out': Madness, Language and Power

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