Al welcome!
Graduate Seminars in Narrative
The NOVELLA ESRC Research Node, Institute of Education and
The Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London
Narrative self-analysis and melancholic state(ment)s
in 19th century family letters
Dimitra Vassiliadou, University of Crete
Tuesday November 4thth, 5.00-6.30
The Library, Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, 27-8 Woburn Square, London WC1H OAA
Given the rarity of the patient voice in medical writings and the relative absence of female personal accounts in 19th century Greece, this paper clearly states the “voice of the silent”. Based on two rich bodies of letters that two upper middle-class Athenian women, Sofia Schliemann (1852-1932) and Marigo Makka (182[?]-1877), exchanged with their husbands during the second half of the 19th century, my analysis concentrates on the self-defined melancholic subject and the autobiographics of sadness. My aim is to contribute to the history of melancholy, walking the thin line between influential medical narrations of melancholy on the one hand, and first-person accounts of the disorder on the other, which were produced in a non-medical context, namely, in conjugal correspondence. I am particularly interested in the contested ways in which two “ordinary” middle-class Greek women perceived the bodily and emotional experience of their illness. Far from being mere transformations of their medical condition as it was defined by their Greek and foreign family doctors at the time, their narrations constitute successions of self-diagnosis, steadily open to individual interpretations and, therefore, highly negotiable phenomena. I will turn to these forceful autobiographies, in order to discuss the development of the numerous and confusing symptoms of gloom. Subsequently, I shall probe how the subjects themselves rationalized their medical condition, and commented on the dynamics, the relations and the circumstances they defined as the primary causes of their maladies. I shall then explore the treatments the patients themselves proposed for their mental and physical recovery. Finally, I’ll try to bond all these strands together, by proposing a set of answers to the big question, “why”?
Dimitra Vassiliadou is currently completing her PhD thesis in modern history at the University of Crete, and visiting the Centre for Narrative Research, UEL. In her research project, which is based on large collections of letters, she is tracing the emotional economies of middle class families (late 19th-early 20th century). Her research interests include gender history, family history (with emphasis in culture), history of emotions, autobiographics and narratives of the self. She is the co-editor of the collective volume Speaking to/against Certainties: Genders, Representations, Subjectivities, OMIK, Athens 2013. She is currently looking for post-doctoral opportunities.
All welcome, especially graduate students. For further details contact Corinne Squire ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) Details are also on the CNR website: http://www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/home.htm
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