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Caught between American Melancholy and European Masochism: Notes on "Madame de Mauves"

Taking “Madame de Mauves” (1874) as a specimen story, I argue that Henry James shapes the focalizing consciousness in his fiction around the work of mourning, to be distinguished, however, from melancholy. If that is how James anticipates Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia, that is also how James mobilizes mourning to describe the transatlantic relationship, with America engaged for melancholy. James’s Europe, on the other hand, especially Paris of the Second Empire, seems to cohere around masochism, suggesting that masochism, unlike melancholy, may be an intellectual destination equally of mourning and of the focalizing consciousness, in narrative, political and psychoanalytic terms.

Henry James, the focalizing consciousness, narrative theory, mourning, melancholia, masochism

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