Journal articles on the topic 'Fanny Burney'

August 1984 saw volumes xi andxii of The Journals and letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay) 1791-1840 published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, bringing to an end the first phase of an editing project that began in 1951 with Joyce Hemlow’s research for her acclaimed biography The history of Fanny Burney. Initially, many thousands of manuscripts were catalogued and some 10,000 of these were included in A catalogue of the Burney family correspondence 1749-18781. Almost as many people, those who wrote, received, or were mentioned in the letters, were identified, annotated and indexed. Some personal reminiscences by one of the editors tell of problems and solutions in controlling this mass of information.

This article looks at Frances Burneys contribution to life writing through her composition, preservation and curatorship of her own personal archive and management of family papers. It charts Burneys chronic anxieties about the possible interpretation of the record that she had created, and the tension between self-expression and self-exposure which underlay her very revealing difficulties with editing, archivism and publication.

Fanny Burney at 15 wrote in her diary addressing her thoughts to ‘Nobody’, to her silent ‘self’ and interlocutor. Nobody learnt about this fact until her diaries were published. She became famous with her first epistolary novel about a young lady entering the world, though in the Preface to the novel the author pretended to be an editor of the letters. Her writing could be compared to contemporary blogs. Novelty and variety of subjects, personally coloured irony and wit, acute eyesight, ability to entertain a reader with an unusual insight of the ordinary event or situation (e.g., ‘Directions for Coughing, Sneezing, or Moving Before the King and Queen’), a dramatist talent to create dialogues and remember speaker’s intonation and other speech parameters, a lot of short fragments imprinting emotions and restoring the epoch in diaries and letters, - everything features her style and specifies her as a Romanticism writer. Some of the subjects could be accepted as obsolete though regarding different situations, circumstances and the performance the given descriptions of the royal household politely discussed by the Keeper of the Robe to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and a close acquaintance of British famous actor David Garrick (1717-1779) and even world-known painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) some of the episodes described in diaries could be praised for their author’s dramatic playwright talent. Blogging in its well-written form, the one possessing style and distinguishing good literature characteristics, could be compared to diaries reflecting every instant of modern life and becoming immediately public. Freedom of female voice in Romantic era and freedom of mass-media writer and reader on the verge of Millennium are manifested in both epochs

The paper, starting from the analysis of Northanger Abbey, suggests reflection on the attitude of Jane Austen to her predecessors, Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth etc., but also the other both fertile and popular authors of the end of 18th and the beginning of 19th century. Using the research of Dale Spender and Brian Corman, the author presents the novelist as a conscious heiress of a significant, though successfully marginalised in the Victorian period and overlooked even today, female literary tradition. Taken from Linda Hutcheon, the definition of parody allows to compare in the end Northanger Abbey to Strach w Zameczku of the first Polish novelist, who referred in a very similar way to her foreign predecessors, Anna Mostowska.

Domenico Scarlatti played a consistently significant role in English musical life from 1738 to the end of the century, even though he never travelled to England. His ‘absent presence’ was mediated by the eighty-three Scarlatti sonatas available in print in the eighteenth century. Scarlatti’s ‘English’ sonatas – defined here as those pieces available in print or manuscript to an eighteenth-century English player – display common compositional traits, in particular the frequent use of virtuoso techniques that appeal to the eye as well as the ear, such as crossed-hand passagework and leaps. English professional keyboard players used these visually virtuoso sonatas to establish their credentials in a competitive market, and the performance of this repertory – the most difficult in print – remained a benchmark for skilful execution at the keyboard to the end of the century. The performance venues for Scarlatti sonatas are difficult to document outside of anecdotal evidence drawn from personal accounts such as those by Charles and Fanny Burney. I provide new documentary evidence for semi-public performances of Scarlatti sonatas by Charles Jr and Samuel Wesley in the 1770s and offer further evidence that Scarlatti’s music held its place during a period of profound change in musical style and taste. Even as his sonatas were published and played to the end of the century, Scarlatti was frequently invoked in writings on music and aesthetics. His shifting position as exemplar or bad example is demonstrated in texts by Charles Avison, William Crotch, Uvedale Price, Sir John Hawkins and Charles Burney. Much like Arcangelo Corelli, another Italian with a strong absent presence principally mediated by print, Domenico Scarlatti had a powerful and lasting impact in England. This article presents an eighteenth-century portrait in absentia of the ‘English’ Scarlatti, suggesting how this elusive figure might be moved out of courtly isolation and into the thick of the eighteenth-century musical marketplace.

When Catholic Emancipation came at last in 1829 it was the culmination of half a century’s agitation. The first landmark was the Relief Act of 1778, which repealed most of the penal legislation of the 1690S, and the second was the Act of 1791, which, in effect, removed penal restraint on Catholic worship in England. Of course, both the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Gordon Riots which followed the 1778 Act and the repression after the rebellions of 1715 and ’45 have remained vivid in the national memory. On the other hand, we ought to recall how Defoe observed that Durham was full of Catholics, Svho live peaceably and disturb nobody, and nobody them; for we … saw them going as publickly to mass as the Dissenters did on other days to their meetinghouse.’ After the death of the Old Pretender in 1766 the Pope recognized George III de facto and ordered the Catholic Church to pay no royal honours to ‘Charles III’. The penal laws on church-going were now only lightly enforced and then usually at the behest of informers, until the 1778 Act frustrated them, since it was no longer illegal for a priest to say Mass. Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle (the head of probably the richest Catholic family in the kingdom) maintained six chaplains in different houses; his ability to do so must have been helped by the fact that the Lulworth estate had not paid the double land tax, for which it was theoretically liable, since 1725.* Mr Weld deliberately flouted the remaining archaic laws by building a handsome chapel in his grounds (‘truly elegant,—a Pantheon in miniature,—and ornamented with immense expense and richness’, said Fanny Burney).

Who was Clara?By Kaj ThaningIn this essay the author describes his search for Clara Bolton and her acquaintance with among others Benjamin Disraeli and the priest, Alexander d’Arblay, a son of the author, Fanny Burney. He gives a detailed account of Clara Bolton and leaves no doubt about the deep impression she made on Grundtvig, even though he met her and spoke to her only once in his life at a dinner party in London on June 24th 1830. Kaj Thaning has dedicated his essay to Dr. Oscar Wood, Christ Church College, Oxford, and explains why: “Just 30 years ago, while one of my daughters was working for Dr. Oscar Wood, she asked him who “Mrs. Bolton” was. Grundtvig speaks of her in a letter to his wife dated June 25th 1830. Through the Disraeli biographer, Robert Blake, Dr. Wood discovered her identity, so I managed to add a footnote to my thesis (p. 256). She was called Clara! The Disraeli archives, once preserved in Disraeli’s home at Hughenden Manor but now in the British Museum, contain a bundle of letters which Dr. Wood very kindly copied for me. The letters fall into three groups, the middle one being from June 1832, when Clara Bolton was campaigning, in vain, for Disraeli’s election to parliament. Her husband was the Disraeli family doctor, and through him she wrote her first letter to Benjamin Disraeli, asking for his father’s support for her good friend, Alexander d’Arblay, a theology graduate, in his application for a position. This led to the young Disraeli asking her to write to him at his home at Bradenham. There are therefore a group of letters from before June 1832. Similarly there are a number of letters from a later date, the last being from November 1832”.The essay is divided into three sections: 1) Clara Bolton and Disraeli, 2) The break between them, 3) Clara Bolton and Alexander d’Arblay. The purpose of the first two sections is to show that the nature of Clara Bolton’s acquaintance with Disraeli was otherwise than has been previously assumed. She was not his lover, but his political champion. The last section explains the nature of her friendship with Alex d’Arblay. Here she was apparently the object of his love, but she returned it merely as friendship in her attempt to help him to an appointment and to a suitable lifelong partner. He did acquire a new position but died shortly after. There is a similarity in her importance for both Grundtvig and d’Arblay in that they were both clergymen and poets. Disraeli and Grundtvig were also both writers and politicians.At the age of 35 Clara Bolton died, on June 29th 1839 in a hotel in Le Havre, according to the present representative of the Danish Institute in Rouen, Bent Jørgensen. She was the daughter of Michael Peter Verbecke and Clarissa de Brabandes, names pointing to a Flemish background. On the basis of archive studies Dr. Michael Hebbert has informed the author that Clara’s father was a merchant living in Bread Street, London, between 1804 and 1807. In 1806 a brother was born. After 1807 the family disappears from the archives, and Clara’s letters reveal nothing about her family. Likewise the circumstances of her death are unknown.The light here shed on Clara Bolton’s life and personality is achieved through comprehensive quotations from her letters: these are to be found in the Danish text, reproduced in English.Previous conceptions of Clara’s relationship to Disraeli have derived from his business manager, Philip Rose, who preserved the correspondence between them and added a commentary in 1885, after Disraeli’s death. He it is who introduces the rumour that she may have been Disraeli’s mistress. Dr. Wood, however, doubts that so intimate a relationship existed between them, and there is much in the letters that directly tells against it. The correspondence is an open one, open both to her husband and to Disraeli’s family. As a 17-year-old Philip Rose was a neighbour of Disraeli’s family at Bradenham and a friend of Disraeli’s younger brother, Ralph, who occasionally brought her letters to Bradenham. It would have been easy for him to spin some yarn about the correspondence. In her letters Clara strongly advocates to Disraeli that he should marry her friend, Margaret Trotter. After the break between Disraeli and Clara it was public knowledge that Lady Henrietta Sykes became his mistress, from 1833 to 1836. Her letters to him are of a quite different character, being extremely passionate. Yet Philip Rose’s line is followed by the most recent biographers of Disraeli: the American, Professor B. R. Jerman in The Young Disraeli (1960), the English scholar Robert Blake, in Disraeli (1963) and Sarah Bradford in Disraeli (1983). They all state that Clara Bolton was thought to be Disraeli’s mistress, also by members of his own family. Blake believes that the originator of this view was Ralph Disraeli. It is accepted that Clara Bolton 7 Grundtvig Studier 1985 was strongly attracted to Disraeli, to his manner, his talents, his writing, and not least to his eloquence during the 1832 election campaign. But nothing in her letters points to a passionate love affair.A comparison can be made with Henrietta Sykes’ letters, which openly burn with love. Blake writes of Clara Bolton’s letters (p. 75): “There is not the unequivocal eroticism that one finds in the letters from Henrietta Sykes.” In closing one of her letters Clara writes that her husband, George Buckley Bolton, is waiting impatiently for her to finish the letter so that he can take it with him.She wants Disraeli married, but not to anybody: “You must have a brilliant star like your own self”. She writes of Margaret Trotter: “When you see M. T. you will feel so inspired you will write and take her for your heroine... ” (in his novels). And in her last letter to Disraeli (November 18th 1832) she says: “... no one thing could reconcile me more to this world of ill nature than to see her your wife”. The letter also mentions a clash she has had with a group of Disraeli’s opponents. It shows her temperament and her supreme skill, both of which command the respect of men. No such bluestockings existed in Denmark at the time; she must have impressed Grundtvig.Robert Blake accepts that some uncertainty may exist in the evaluation of letters which are 150 years old, but he finds that they “do in some indefinable way give the impression of brassiness and a certain vulgarity”. Thaning has told Blake his view of her importance for Grundtvig, and this must have modified Blake’s portrait. He writes at least: “... she was evidently not stupid, and she moved in circles which had some claim to being both intellectual and cosmopolitan.”He writes of the inspiration which Grundtvig owed to her, and he concludes: “There must have been more to her than one would deduce by reading her letters and the letters about her in Disraeli’s papers.” - She spoke several languages, and moved in the company of nobles and ambassadors, politicians and literary figures, including John Russell, W.J.Fox, Eliza Flower, and Sarah Adams.However, from the spring of 1833 onwards it is Henrietta Sykes who portrays Clara Bolton in the Disraeli biographies, and naturally it is a negative portrait. The essay reproduces in English a quarrel between them when Sir Francis Sykes was visiting Clara, and Lady Sykes found him there. Henrietta Sykes regards the result as a victory for herself, but Clara’s tears are more likely to have been shed through bitterness over Disraeli, who had promised her everlasting friendship and “unspeakable obligation”. One notes that he did not promise her love. Yet despite the quarrel they all three dine together the same evening, they travel to Paris together shortly afterwards, and Disraeli comes to London to see the them off. The trip however was far from idyllic. The baron and Clara teased Henrietta. Later still she rented a house in fashionable Southend and invited Disraeli down. Sir Francis, however, insisted that the Boltons should be invited too. The essay includes Blake’s depiction of “the curious household” in Southend, (p. 31).In 1834 Clara Bolton left England and took up residence at a hotel in the Hague. A Rotterdam clergyman approached Disraeli’s vicar and he turned to Disraeli’s sister for information about the mysterious lady, who unaccompanied had settled in the Hague, joined the church and paid great attention to the clergy. She herself had said that she was financing her own Sunday School in London and another one together with the Disraeli family. In her reply Sarah Disraeli puts a distance between the family and Clara, who admittedly had visited Bradenham five years before, but who had since had no connection with the family. Sarah is completely loyal to her brother, who has long since dropped Clara. By the time the curious clergyman had received this reply, Clara had left the Hague and arrived at Dover, where she once again met Alexander d’Arblay.Alex was born in 1794, the son of a French general who died in 1818, and Fanny Burney. She was an industrious correspondent; as late as 1984 the 12th and final volume of her Journals and Letters was published. Jens Peter .gidius, a research scholar at Odense University, has brought to Dr Thaning’s notice a book about Fanny Burney by Joyce Hemlow, the main editor of the letters. In both the book and the notes there is interesting information about Clara Bolton.In the 12th volume a note (p. 852) reproduces a letter characterising her — in a different light from the Disraeli biographers. Thaning reproduces the note (pp. 38-39). The letter is written by Fanny Burney’s half-sister, Sarah Harriet Burney, and contains probably the only portrait of her outside the Disraeli biographies.It is now easier to understand how she captivated Grundtvig: “very handsome, immoderately clever, an astrologer, even, that draws out... Nativities” — “... besides poetry-mad... very entertaining, and has something of the look of a handsome witch. Lady Combermere calls her The Sybil”. The characterisation is not the letter-writer’s but that of her former pupil, Harriet Crewe, born in 1808, four years after Clara Bolton. A certain distance is to be seen in the way she calls Clara “poetry-mad”, and says that she has “conceived a fancy for Alex d’Arblay”.Thaning quotes from a letter by Clara to Alex, who apparently had proposed to her, but in vain (see his letter to her and the reply, pp. 42-43). Instead she pointed to her friend Mary Ann Smith as a possible wife. This is the last letter known in Clara’s handwriting and contradicts talk of her “vulgarity”. However, having become engaged to Mary Ann Alex no longer wrote to her and also broke off the correspondence with his mother, who had no idea where he had gone. His cousin wrote to her mother that she was afraid that he had “some Chére Amie”. “The charges are unjust,” says Thaning. “It was a lost friend who pushed him off. This seems to be borne out by a poem which has survived (quoted here on p. 45), and which includes the lines: “But oh young love’s impassioned dream /N o more in a worn out breast may glow / Nor an unpolluted stream / From a turgid fountain flow.””Alex d’Arblay died in loneliness and desperation shortly afterwards. Dr. Thaning ends his summary: “I can find no other explanation for Alexander d’Arblay’s fate than his infatuation with Clara Bolton. In fact it can be compared to Grundtvig’s. For Alex the meeting ended with “the pure stream” no longer flowing from its source. For Grundtvig, on the other hand the meeting inspired the lines in The Little Ladies: Clara’s breath opened the mouth, The rock split and the stream flowed out.”

It is worth remarking how many theories of consumer capitalism (of which postmodernism may be one exotic variant) have come to take capitalism at its face value: as a system of circulation, exchange and consumption. In doing so, they manage to reproduce the problem of commodity fetishism: the obscuring of the conditions and relations of production. It is as if the Burger King I consumed while reading Lyotard did not rest on a whole system of capitalized agriculture, transportation systems, food processing plants as well as the service economy of cooking and exchange that takes place in the house of the Burger King itself. (Clarke, 1991: 29)

The title of this column comes from the parting provocation in my column in the previous SIGCAS Newsletter (48: 3-4). Besides reducing the burden of coming up with a new title it actually does describe this essay reasonably well. Fancy that!

Major depression in older medical inpatients is frequent, persistent, and disabling (Cole and Bellavance, 1997). The incidence is 20.5%–30.2% during the 12 months following admission to hospital (Fenton et al., 1997; Cole et al., 2008). Up to 73% of patients have a protracted course (Koenig et al., 1992; Cole et al., 2006; Koenig, 2006). Moreover, major depression in older medical inpatients appears to be associated with decreased function (Covinsky et al., 1997), increased use of health care services (Koenig et al., 1989; Büla et al., 2001), increased caregiver burden (McCusker et al., 2007), and possibly increased mortality (Cole, 2007).

This 11th volume of BJMT appears in a new design, of which the Editors and the BJMT Management Board hope our readers will approve. Both the APMT and the BSMT were consulted in liaison with Nigel Taylor of Devious Designs. The redesign of the journal has involved fairly intensive intercommunication between individuals and committees over several months, after being on the ‘back-burner’ for three years or more. The Board and Jackie Robarts are particularly grateful to Nicky Barber for her skill and professional advice. Our limited budget has prevented any radical changes, and the A4 format has also been retained for reasons of economy. Flights of fancy (or ‘phantasy’) thus restrained, the BJMT's new design has focused first on creating a new distinctive cover (using laminated paper that will not show coffee rings and finger marks as readily as the former Astralux) and, secondly, on the overall ‘look’ of the inside pages which we hope will make the BJMT easier, clearer and more attractive to read.

Smectite clays or bentonites are used in several industrial applications. The aim of this study was to describe the characterization and organophilization of a green clay sample coming from the State of Paraíba, Brazil. The clay was characterized by XRD, XRF, CEC, SEM, stereoscopic microscopy, Fann viscosity (before and after the organophilization process), swelling capacity in water and some organic solvents. Prismatic specimens were conformed by pressing, for which were conformed the mechanical sthegth after drying at 110°C and after burning at 950°C. The burned specimens were analyzed to evaluate dimensional variations, water absorption, apparent porosity and apparent density. XRD showed that the sample was constituted mainly for montmorillonite claymineral. Analysis of rheological properties of the modified clay indicates its potential to meet the specifications of the standard N-2604 of Petrobras, concerning clays used to oil drilling.

Abstract<title> RIASSUNTO </title>Il presente articolo intende mettere in luce la complessità dei legami tra l'innovazione scientifica ed il progresso sociale abitualmente indicato dal termine « secolarizzazione ». Vengono delineati i contrasti tra Boyle e Priestley, tra Newton e Laplace, tra Burnet e Hutton, tra Ray e Lamarck, allo scopo di illustrare le trasformazioni concettuali compiute durante l'illuminismo. Ogni trasformazione rappresenta ciò che potremmo chiamare una secolarizzazione della conoscenza. L'autore sostiene, comunque, che va stabilita una distinzione critica tra la secolarizzazione interna alla scienza e la scienza come agente della secolarizzazione. L'importanza di tale distinzione è manifesta se si sottolineano le seguenti considerazioni: 1) non vi è polarità semplice tra sacro e « secolare », profano, nelle reazioni all'innovazione scientifica; 2) diversi significati religiosi possono venire attribuiti alla nuova scienza; 3) le scienze molto spesso non fanno altro che mettere in luce conflitti metafisici preesistenti; 4) in quanto risorsa nelle polemiche teologiche, le scienze possono addirittura riflettere, piuttosto che causare, attitudini profane. Riferendosi a studi recenti di Funkenstein, Buckley e Brockliss, l'argomentazione si conclude con il commento di fatti profondamente ironici rilevabili nei legami storici tra scienza illuministica e religione.

Abstract Background In 2016, the World Health Organization estimated the global incidence of gonorrhea (GC) to be 86.9 million, and the reported incidence of GC in 2017 was 145.8 cases per 100,000 females and 212.8 cases per 100,000 males in the US. GC therefore represents a significant global healthcare burden; as the infection can be recurrent, overall costs can accumulate. We undertook a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the economic burden of illness for GC in key countries. Methods Systematic searches were conducted in MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane databases to identify English-language articles published from January 1, 2009–December 1, 2019 reporting data on the economic burden of uncomplicated urogenital GC (uuGC) in the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and China. The SLR was conducted in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines (2009). Articles were evaluated for eligibility using population, intervention, comparison, outcome, study design and time period criteria (Table). Dual-independent screening was used at both the abstract and full-text levels; data were captured by a single reviewer with validation by a second reviewer. Table. PICOS-T Study Selection Criteria Results The SLR identified 27 eligible articles (Figure), of which 17 studies (16 US, 1 UK) reported the economic burden of uuGC. The studies primarily reported cost data, with a subset reporting limited resource use. Lifetime costs for uuGC, when elaborated upon, considered the potential for pelvic inflammatory disease among women, and epididymitis in men, as well as lifetime medical costs associated with human immunodeficiency virus. Among the 16 studies reporting costs, the total estimated lifetime cost of uuGC in the US reached as high as $162.1 million. Costs varied vastly based on sex, with one study reporting lifetime estimates up to $163,433 for men but $7,534,692 for women in 2005. Nine studies described costs per patient/infection and found average costs ranging from $26.92–$438.46, though most fell in the range of $79–$354. Figure. PRISMA flow diagram of study inclusion and exclusion Conclusion We identified a large body of evidence detailing the economic burden of GC. The cost burden varied by sex and was higher for females. However, the vast majority of the evidence came from the US, highlighting the need for more global research. Disclosures Amber Martin, BS, Evidera (Employee)GlaxoSmithKline plc. (Other Financial or Material Support, Funding) Fanny S. Mitrani-Gold, MPH, GlaxoSmithKline plc. (Employee, Shareholder) Monica Turner, MPH, Evidera (Employee)GlaxoSmithKline plc. (Other Financial or Material Support, Funding) Emma Schiller, BA, Evidera (Employee)GlaxoSmithKline plc. (Other Financial or Material Support, Funding) Ashish V. Joshi, PhD, GlaxoSmithKline plc. (Employee, Shareholder)

Eat healthy and live healthy is one of the essential requirements for long life. Unfortunately, today’s world has been adapted to a system of consumption of foods which has several adverse effects on health. Lifestyle changes has compelled us so much that one has so little time to really think what we are eating is right or not. Globalization and urbanization have greatly affected one’s eating habits and forced many people to consume fancy and high calorie fast foods, popularly known as Junk foods. Diseases like stunted growth and obesity, constipation etc. have seen a profound rise in developing countries and such unhealthy junk food consumption is one of the notable factors to its contribution. This global problem of consuming junk food on a large scale and its impact on health that needs emphasis on health education which can greatly contribute to its limited consumption and switching over to healthy eating habits for the better living. By keeping in mind the following problems associated with fast food consumption the present study was conducted with the objectives i.e. to study the food habits of target group, as well as to study the health problems among target group. The result showed that cent per cent respondents consumed wafers and 93 percent, 90 percent and 86 percent used to have momo’s burger and spring roll and the frequency was thrice and twice a week respectively. That is why it was seen that due to the food consumption pattern the respondents were having less height as per their age (96 per cent) having the problem of obesity (93 per cent) constipation (86 per cent) abdominal Pain (83 per cent) and acidity (73 per cent).

Caroline Lucretia Herschel, apart from being the amanuensis of her brother, Sir William Herschel, F.R.S., was herself a remarkable observer. In contrast to her brother, who was never the first to see a comet, she was not only the first woman to discover a comet, but found eight. Her success was due to an amazing familiarity with the sky. As can be read in a manuscript recently discovered in Hanover, she expected even an amateur to be able to recognize any star up to the 4th magnitude of brightness on sight, and to find any nebula in the ‘ Connaissance des Temps’ within a minute. What did the instruments that she used look like? This new discovery in Hanover makes it clear that Michael Hoskin and Brian Warner, in their article in the Journal for the Journal for the History of Astronomy (12 (1981), no. 1) did not identify correctly the instruments of which they published sketches (figures 1—3). In brief, Hoskin and Warner argued that figure 1 was a sketch of Caroline’s small comet sweeper, that figure 2 showed Caroline’s 5 ft sweeper, and that W. H. Smyth’s captions were simply wrong. The evidence from Hanover shows that figures 2 and 3 are Caroline’s ‘small Newtonian Sweeper’, which she was using in 1785 as Smyth says, and with which Caroline Herschel must have found what Fanny Burney called ‘the first lady’s comet’ on 2 August 1786(1).*

Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia depicts the last days of the earth through the eyes of a young woman, Justine, who is suffering from a severe depressive illness. In the hours leading up to the Earth’s destruction through the impact of a massive blue planet named Melancholia, Justine tells her sister that “the Earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” We can read this apparently anti-environmental statement in one sense as a symptom of Justine’s melancholic depression. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines melancholia as a form of depression that is “qualitatively different from the sadness experienced during bereavement” (419). It is as if Justine’s illness relates to some ungrievable loss, a loss so pathologically far reaching that it short circuits the normal psychology of mourning. But, in another sense, does her statement not strike us with the ring of an absolute and inescapable truth? In the wake of our destruction, there would be no one left to mourn it since human memory itself would have been destroyed along with the global ecosystems which support and sustain it. The film’s central dramatic metaphor is that the experience of a severe depressive episode is like the destruction of the world. But the metaphor can be turned around to suggest that ecological crisis, real irreparable damage to the environment to the point where it may no longer be able to support human life, affects us with a collective melancholia because the destruction of the human species is a strictly ungrievable event. The discoveries of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century constituted a major thought event which placed the emergence of humanity within a temporal context extending far beyond the limits of human memory. Claire Colebrook suggests that the equivalent event for present times is the thought of our own extinction, the awareness that environmental changes could bring about the end of the species: “[the] extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species.” While the scientific data is stark, our mediated cultural experience provides us with plenty of opportunities to, in Colebrook’s words, “[domesticate] the sense of the human end” by affirming “various modes of ‘post-humanism’” in ways which ultimately deny the shattering truth of extinction. This domestication obviously takes place in one sense on the level of a conscious denial of the scale of the ecological crisis. On another level, however, environmentally conscious representations of “the planet” or “nature” as a sheer autonomous objectivity, a self-contained but endangered natural order, may ultimately be the greatest obstacle to genuine ecological thinking. By invoking the concept of a non-human nature in perfect balance with itself we factor ourselves out of the ecological equation while simultaneously drawing on the power of an objectifying gaze. Slavoj Žižek gives the example of Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us which imagines a contemporary world in which all humans have disappeared and nature reasserts itself in the ruins of our abandoned cities. Žižek describes this as the ultimate expression of ideology because: we, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence [...] this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial (80). In many ways, the very spectacle or fantasy of our own destruction has provided us with a powerful means of naturalising it—environmental catastrophe occurs to and in a “nature” whose essence excludes us—and this renders it compatible with a psychology by which the human end is itself internalised, processed, and normalised. Ironically, this normalisation may have been affected to a great extent through the popularisation, over the last ten years or so, of environmental discourses relating to the grave threats of climate change. A film such as Wall-E, for example, shows us an entirely depopulated, desertified world in which the eponymous robot character sorts through the trash of human history, living an almost-human life among the ruins. The robot functions as a kind of proxy humanity, placing us, the viewers, in a position posterior to our own species extinction and thus sending us the ultimately reassuring message that, even in our absence, our absence will be noted. In a similar way, the drama-documentary The Age of Stupid presents a future world devastated by environmental collapse in which a lone archivist presides over the whole digitised memory of humanity and carefully constructs out of actual news and documentary footage the story of our demise. These narratives and others like them ultimately serve, whatever their intentions, to domesticate the end of humanity through the logic of a post-human mastery of the story of our own obliteration. The starker truth with which Melancholia confronts us is that the end of humanity cannot and will not be internalised by any process of human memorialisation. Von Trier’s film does not portray any post-catastrophe world from which we might be able to extract a degree of psychological comfort or residual sense of mastery. Rather, the narrative frame is entirely bounded by the impact event, which we witness first in the film’s opening shots and then again at its close. There is no narrative time posterior to the impact and yet for us, the viewers, everything happens in its shattering aftermath, according to the strange non-successional logic of the future-anterior. Everything begins and ends with the moment of impact. If the narrative itself is concerned with the lives of the characters, particularly the effects of the main character’s depression on her family relationships, then the film’s central event remains radically disjunctive, incapable of being processed on this interpersonal level through the standard cinematic tropes of the disaster or survival genres. The value of regarding Melancholia as an environmental film, then, is that it profoundly de-psychologises the prospect of our extinction while forcing the burden of this event’s unfathomable content onto us. Von Trier’s film suggests that melancholy, not mourning, is a more apt emotional register for ecological crisis and for the extinction awareness it brings, and in this sense Melancholia represents a valuable alternative to more standard environmental narratives which remain susceptible to ideological reinscriptions of human (or post-human) mastery. As ecocritic Timothy Morton suggests, “melancholy is more apt, even more ethically appropriate, to an ecological situation in which the worst has already happened, and in which we find ourselves [...] already fully implicated” (75–6). The most influential account of mourning and melancholia comes from Sigmund Freud, who described these attitudes as two different ways of dealing with loss. In the process of mourning, Freud states that there comes the realisation “that the loved object no longer exists” which “[demands] that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (245). The healthy outcome of this very painful process is that our libidinal attachments are free once again to take on another object of love; the lost object can be replaced according to a logic of temporal succession. Melancholia also results from a loss, says Freud, but this time it relates not simply or primarily to a replaceable external object but, more complexly, to something in the ego itself, not a discrete thing in the world but a certain way of being in the world which the lost object facilitated. Freud writes that the trauma of melancholia is thus manifested by the ego itself taking on or embodying the loss. The ego, stripped of its sense of being, comes to mimic the non-existence of that which once supported it. The “delusion” of the melancholic’s depressive state, says Freud, stems from the fact that something has ruptured her affective and libidinal attachment to the world, but this cannot be psychologically processed in terms of a replaceable loss since what is lost was never simply an external object. Her world is struck by an absence that cannot be mourned because it is kept alive as a non-being which she is. She has taken on the burden of this structural impossibility and does not pursue an imaginary resolution of it which, to invoke Žižek’s Lacanian terms once more, would involve her submitting to the subjective position of fantasy (i.e. becoming a witness to her own non-existence). The melancholic’s attitude is, Freud observes, “psychologically very remarkable” because it involves “an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (246). The melancholic carves out an existence apparently contrary to nature. This is the context in which Justine remarks that the earth, as an ungrievable object, is “evil.” Her melancholia is never explained in the course of the film, and, indeed, we see little of her personality apart from the events which manifest her psychological crisis. The film opens with the moment of interplanetary impact itself. The great blue planet of Melancholia approaches and begins to swallow the earth into its atmosphere. We cut immediately to Justine and her sister in the moments just before the impact: the air is electrified by the approaching collision and birds cascade from the trees. Our way into the narrative is this moment of chaos and dispersion, but von Trier’s depiction of it, his use of highly choreographed slow-motion shots resembling tableaux vivants, distance us from any sense of urgency or immediacy. It is as if the closer we come to the collision, the less real and the more stylised the world becomes; as if the impact holds a content which cannot be rendered in realist terms. By contrast, the subsequent scenes focusing on Justine’s interpersonal drama use a shaky, handheld camera which embeds us in the action. The narrative follows Justine on her wedding day. As events unfold we see cracks appear in the wedding party’s luxurious facade: Justine’s divorced parents argue viciously; her wealthy brother-in-law, who funded the wedding, fears that the occasion may be ruined by petty squabbling, to his great expense. Beneath these cracks, however, we realise that there is a deeper, more inexplicable crack opening up within Justine herself. At one point she retreats with her newlywed husband from the tumult of the wedding party. We expect from this scene an articulation or partial resolution, perhaps, of Justine’s mental conflict, or at least an insight into her character. In a more conventional story, this moment of conjugal intimacy would allow Justine to express an “authentic” desire, distinct from the superficial squabbling of her family, a means to “be herself.” But this doesn’t happen. Justine inexplicably rejects her husband’s overtures. In clinical terms, we might say that Justine’s behaviour corresponds to “anhedonia,” a loss of interest in the normal sources of pleasure or enjoyment. Invoking Freud, we could add to this that the very objective viability of her libidinal attachments has been called into question and that this is what precipitates her crisis. If such attachments are what ground us in reality, Justine’s desire seems to have become ungrounded through the emergence of something “nonobjectifiable,” to borrow a term from philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy?, 209). This “something” is revealed only in the second half of the film with the appearance of Melancholia and the prospect of its obliterating impact. Justine is drawn to this new planet, in one scene luxuriating naked beneath its blue glow. We could argue, in one sense, that she has discovered in Melancholia a correlate to her own self-destructive desire: the only thing that can possibly gratify her is the annihilation of the earth itself. However in another, more constructive sense, we can say that her melancholic desire amounts to a kind of geophilosophical critique, a political and ultimately ecological protest against the territorialisation of her desire according to a supposed acceptability of objects. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that, if desire’s libidinal attachments form a kind of ground or “territory” then all territories interact with one another at some level because they are all equally founded on “lines of deterritorialization” sweeping them towards a mutually shared, extra-territorial outside (A Thousand Plateaus, 9). Or, putting it in plainer terms: beneath every ground is a non-ground such that the earth cannot ultimately ground itself in itself. Every mental, material, or social territory is founded upon this global movement of ungrounding. The trauma of Justine’s melancholia refers us to something which cannot be resolved within the given territories of her social or interpersonal milieus. While her illness can be registered in terms of the events of the film’s narrative time, the film’s central event—the collision with Melancholia—remains irreducible to the memorial properties of storytelling. We may thus argue that the impact event is not strictly speaking an element of the film’s narrative, but rather a pure cinematic sign evoking a radical form of ecological openness. The film moves through different territories—conjugal, familial, economic, scientific—but what propels us from one territory to another is the impact event whose content is reducible to none of these territories. Of all the film’s characters, only Justine is “open” to this absolute irreducibility, this resistance to closure. Her openness to Melancholia is not determined by whether or not it can be objectified, that is, rendered assimilable to the terms of a given territory. Both her brother-in-law (an amateur astronomer) and her sister attempt to calculate the chances of impact, but Justine remains open to it in a manner which does not close off that which precludes survival. In the end, as Melancholia bears down on the Earth, Justine’s attitude—which in Freud’s terms is antithetical to the instinct for life—turns out to be the most appropriate one. The point of this article is certainly not to argue that we should acquiesce to the traumatic realities of environmental crisis. Its aim, rather, is to suggest that well-being and harmony may no longer describe the appropriate emotional register for ecological thinking, given the current urgency of the crisis. Human and ecological health may, after all, be radically different and incommensurable things. The great anthropologist and structuralist thinker Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked: I am concerned with the well-being of plants and animals that are threatened by humanity. I think ecologists make the mistake of thinking that they can defend humans and nature at the same time. I think it is necessary to decide if one prefers humans or nature. I am on the side of nature (qtd in Conley, 66). Lévi-Strauss may well be right when he says that a common human and ecological health may be an illusion of wishful thinking. However, what if there is a common trauma, whose ineradicability would not be a tragedy but, rather, evidence of radical openness in which we no longer have to pick sides (humans or plants and animals)? What if the proper “base” from which to begin thinking ecologically were not a conception of a harmonious human-ecological whole but a foundational non-harmony, an encounter with which contains something ineliminably traumatising? In a recent paper, the philosopher Reza Negarestani proposes just such a traumatic account of ecological openness. All existence, understood geophilosophically, is, says Negarestani, “conditioned by a concatenation of traumas or cuts [...] there is no single or isolated psychic trauma [...] there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas.” Ecological openness, in this sense, would be necessarily melancholic, in the terms described above, in that it would necessitate the perpetual precariousness of those links by which we seek to ground ourselves. Ecology is all too often given to a “mournful” attitude, which is, as we’ve argued, the very attitude of psychological incorporation, healing, and normalisation. Similarly, “nature,” we are told, holds the key to harmonious self-regulation. But what if today such notions are obstacles to a genuine awareness of the ecological realities facing us all (humans and non-humans)? What if this ideal of nature were just a product of our own desire for stability, order, and regularity—for some imaginary extra-social and non-human point of reference by which to attain to a position of mastery in the telling of the story of ourselves? References Age of Stupid, The. Dir. Fanny Armstrong. Spanner Films, 2009. American Psychological Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th Ed. Text Revision. Washington: American Psychological Association, 2000. Colebrook, Claire. “Introduction: Framing the End of the Species.”.Extinction. Ed. Claire Colebrook. Open Humanities Press. 2012. 14 April 2012. Conley, Vera Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought. London: Routledge, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 24. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1917. 237–58. Melancholia. Dir. Lars von Trier. Zontropa, 2011. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Negarestani, Reza. “On the Revolutionary Earth: A Dialectic in Territopic Materialism.” Dark Materialism Conference. Natural History Museum, London. January 12th 2011. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Picador, 2007. WALL-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Pixar, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.