Loss, Mourning and Melancholia in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Narrative Poem "The Lunatic Girl"

This study aims to analyse the 19th-century American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem “The Lunatic Girl” within the framework of loss, mourning, melancholia and madness. The paper argues that the female character of the narrative experiences the loss of her boyfriend and her mourning grows into a form of melancholia as she becomes unable to process the work of mourning and remains at the stage of denial, the first stage of grief. That is why she waits for the return of her lover at the seashore every day and goes completely insane. As the mourning grows into madness, she passes away to end her pain and reunite with her dead lover. The study aims to examine the actual reasons for her melancholia and to demonstrate the ways the loss of the love object turns into the loss in the ego. The paper accordingly aims to analyse the narrative levels within the text and investigate the function of the narrator. The study is chiefly based upon the theories of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and makes use of narratology to explore the narrative levels.