Hannity, Mary; (2020) Kindly Fictions: Rereading Loss in the Writings of Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Denise Riley. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the response to loss through attention to a distinctive set of narrative texts written by Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Denise Riley. What connects these different writers, across time and place, is not only that each responds to loss in writing, but that each writer does so in a manner contesting prevalent associations of melancholia and trauma, giving place to an alternate ethics of mourning. Freud’s seminal essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), established the groundwork for contemporary critical examinations of loss, both a source of definitions and a framework to be revised. In particular, melancholia has been reappraised extensively as an ethically privileged response of fidelity following loss. However, as a number of critics elsewhere have noted, the moral economy of the melancholic risks reifying loss in subject-formation and, consequently, risks aggressive and exclusionary attempts at identity reconstruction and consolidation. Associated with an appeal to trauma transfigured as ethically originary, the critical ascendency of melancholia is one from which this thesis departs. As I show, Cixous, Rhys, Woolf and Riley emphasise instead the ways in which loss can be playfully and pleasurably set in motion in the present, as each chapter argues in differing ways. Articulating loss through the framework of fiction, broadly conceived, allows us to avoid the effects of vicarious identification with loss and trauma, while strategies of displacement resist the assumption of an uncritical empathy. The attitude of multidirectional encounter at work across this thesis (with loss; with the ‘other’; across genre, time, and writing) is, what’s more, an attempt to mitigate the paradigm of non-approachability and unsharability when it comes to the loss and trauma of others that, as Denise Riley contends, isolates the bereaved in contemporary life to ‘the inhuman remote realms of the “unimaginable”’.

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