From a Competition of Mourning to a Community of Sorrow: The Improbable Alliance of Women and Melancholic Solidarity in Richard III

초록

Against Mario DiGangi’s recent challenge to the feminist recuperation of (dis) empowered women in Richard III, I argue that the play builds up a sense of solidarity among the females by representing its gradual transformation. The competitive elite women in the play’s later part strike up a kind of melancholic solidarity with the shared experience of mourning, cursing, losing, and grieving. When they are empowered to communicate with each other and feel sympathy towards the others’ loss and pain, an alternative vision of relationship emerges against Richard and his cohorts’ frequent invocation of male friendship. As pitted against the Ricardian exploitation and mockery of friendship as a humanist ideal, I suggest, the female alliance of Richard III points to the limit-case of melancholic solidarity as a shared experience that would lend itself to a symbolic front of resistance without necessarily producing a sense of belonging or firm ground for identity.

키워드