The Henry James Review

Abstract:

James and his characters practice a melancholic attachment to the losses of the past.Drawing on a variety of James’s writings, and engaging recent theory concerned to rethink the mourning/melancholy binary, this essay argues that “feeling backward” in James is a specifically modern response to loss, a relation to the past necessitated by a modernity where traditional forms of mourning have become problematic.Often misunderstood as a nostalgic, self-destructive clinging to the past, Jamesian melancholia bears witness to an experience of loss and a relation to the past and the dead fundamentally altered yet strangely rendered precious by the circumstances of modernity.