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Feminine Melancholia in Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes

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Feminine Melancholia in Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 536-544, May 2013 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/jltr.4.3.536-544 Feminine Melancholia in Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes Motahareh Sadat Peyambarpour English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran Helen Ouliaeinia English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran Abstract—Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes (1996) addresses different notions such as gender, politics, masculinity and language. Julia Kristeva's theory of melancholia and depression, as one of the most important psychological theories, strives to elaborate the condition of melancholic subject. She remarks that the melancholic subject, unable to share her / his melancholia with others, suffers from an unsignified sense of loss which causes her / his psyche to be wounded. Ashes to Ashes explores the melancholic condition of the female protagonist who suffers from an unsignified sense of loss. This study is an attempt to trace the signs of melancholia — regarding Kristeva's theory of melancholia — which reveal through Rebecca's fragmented dialogues, dream-like memories and tense monologues. Index Terms—Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes, Julia Kristeva, the melancholic subject, loss, language I. INTRODUCTION Widespread interest in Julia Kristeva, a professor of linguistics, stems from her concerns with different disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, feminis m and politics. Kristeva is a prolific writer and a complex thinker whose theory of melancholia and depression has won her lasting fame among psychoanalytic theorists. Her psychoanalysis proposes a loss theory of melancholia in the tradition of Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia". The significance of Kristeva's theory lies in making a connection between melancholia and the lost mother (other). She asserts that the early separation of the infant from the mother results in a sadness of depression with a mourning for the lost mother. Moreover, Kristeva adapts Freud's theory of death wish to formulate the notion of a kind of depression that is narcissistic. Thus, melancholia, Kristeva claims, is a form of mourning for the lost mother as well as for the lost self. In Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes, the female protagonist suffers from an unsignified sense of loss which has caused her psychological collapse. This mental instability is recognizable through her fragmented dialogues, dream-like memories and tense monologues. The very sense of loss from which she suffers has rendered her melancholic ego wounded and has reduced her to a living dead as far as it places her in the state of seemingly enduring hallucination at the end of the play. Therefore, the protagonist is left in her depression without any suggestive resolution which may spread the melancholic condition of the play to the readers. To project the development of an infant from a non-differentiated to a speaking subject, Kristeva makes a distinction between "the semiotic" and "the symbolic". The semiotic, in Kristeva's words, goes back to "the pre-linguistic states of childhood" in which the child "babbles the sounds s/he hears, or where s /he articulates rhythms, alliterations, or stresses" (Rice and Waugh, 1989, p.129). The child's imitation of the rhythm of her parents' speech distinguishes this stage as a kind of "extra-verbal" in which "bodily energy and affects make their way into language" (McAfee, 2004, p.17). But the semiotic, including both the subject's drives and articulation, is not subject to the rules of syntax. The concept of the semiotic, Kristeva proposes, is "asymbolic" in which "cries, laughter, sound and touch and gesture indicate ... a pre-symbolic dimension" that lacks "the defining structure, coherence and spatial fixity" (Becker-Leckrone, 2005, p.28). Thus, there is no meaning in the linguistic sense in the semiotic. In the semiotic stage the so-called symbiotic interaction between mother and child sets up a psychic space which Kristeva calls "the semiotic chora". Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body – always already involved in a semiotic process – by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are ―energy‖ charges as well as ―psychical‖ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated. (Kristeva, 1998, p.453) The concept of chora signifies this semiotic relationship to maternal space. In this psychic space, all the child's needs are satisfied without any delay, there is not yet any differentiation between the child and the mother or surroundings; through this imaginary union, the child identifies herself / himself with her mother as one object. In the symbolic, where the speaking being acquires language, the separation of the child from her mother takes place. Entering the symbolic is accompanied with a lifelong sense of loss. The child undergoes this sense of loss before the ability to articulate and name it; therefore, later in life, as a result of trauma, she falls down into a deep depression © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND RESEARCH 537 making her apathetic and reticent. The occurrence of loss in the primary process — chora — brings about narcissistic depression. The child king becomes irredeemably sad before uttering his first words; this is because he has been irrevocably, desperately separated from the mother, a loss that causes him to try to find her again, along with other objects of love, first in imagination, then in words. (Kristeva, 1989, p.6) Therefore, from kristeva's standpoint, the symbolic depends on "language as a sign system complete with its grammar and syntax" (McAfee, 2004, p.17). The symbolic stage for kristeva means "orderly communication"; the use of normal rules of "syntax and semantics" to carry meaning which results in losing the mother (ibid. P.22). Therefore, the symbolic order is necessary in getting a unified subjectivity; to resist entering the symbolic order results in disjointed subjectivity. The early ego lacks cohesion, and a tendency towards integration alternates with a tendency towards disintegration, a falling into bits... the anxiety of being destroyed from within remains active. It seems to me in keeping with the lack of cohesiveness that under the pressure of this threat the ego tends to fall into pieces. (Kristeva, 1989, p.19) In Kristeva's view melancholia results from denial of separation from the mother — a denial of the "matricide" which is our vital necessity to gain individuation: "For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity" (ibid. p.27). In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Kristeva strives to analyze some poets and novelists such as Nerval, Duras and Dostoyevsky in terms of melancholic representation in language. She suggests that the melancholic "sadness would be rather the most archaic expression of an unsymbolizable, unnamable narcissistic wound, so precocious that no outside agent (subject or agent) can be used as referent" (ibid. p.12). Then, the loss would never be an object for the depressed narcissist, but an unnamable thing: "The depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing ... [and] the 'Thing' ... does not lend itself to signification ... [it is] a light without representation: the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time" (ibid. p.13). The child mourns for the lost mother; the depressed feels incomplete and empty since s/he has internalized this sense of loss. As the child has lost her / his mother before acquiring the ability to use language, later in life s / he encounters difficulty in using language. Kristeva believes that the language of melancholia is the dead language: "the depressed speak of nothing, they have nothing to speak of: glued to the Thing, they are without objects. The total and unsignifiable Thing is insignificant — it is a mere Nothing, their Nothing, Death" (ibid. p.51). Kristeva establishes a mutual relation between artistic creativity and melancholia; in her view melancholia, on the one hand, is a source of literary creation; and on the other hand, works of art are able to provide a sublimatory means in overcoming melancholia. Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect — to sadness as imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol’s sway; to joy as imprint [marque] of the triumph that settles me in the universe of artifice and symbol, which I try to harmonize in the best possible way with my experience of reality. (as cited in Oliver and Keltner, 2009, p.146) Storytelling is the one means that can be used by the melancholic subject, caught in a death embrace, to master or minimize the pain of loss and abandonment. The artistic creation should produce sublimation; otherwise, like Duras ', it spreads its suffering and infects the readers. This lack of catharsis and resolution, Kristeva claims, "produce[s] an eerie depressive silence", then it should be kept away from sensitive readers (ibid. p.151). II. DISCUSSION Harold Pinter (1930-2008), Noble Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor, is the product of a post-war generation whose gift in evoking the dead voice within silence has made him one of the most influential dramatists of "the theater of the absurd". His plays are mostly noted for their use of verbal minimalism, understatement, reticence, elliptical language and even silence to expose the hidden emotions and veiled motivations of characters, which often lie several layers beneath their speech.
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