Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

141It is worth noting that for Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia” and “The Uncanny” the shadowis the trope by which he explains melancholia. In a sense “the shadow of the lost object falls uponthe ego” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 249), transforming object loss into an ego-loss. It requiresno further argument to stress the importance of the model of the shadow to the analysis of theFreudian trope of melancholy. In the following section of this chapter, I will explain thisinterconnection and the extension of the Freudian concept of melancholia to signification itselfand the dialectic of self and Other. The shadow then is both the antagonist and the lost object.Applying Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian theories of psychology, I shall study in thischapter the tropology of the double and its ties with trauma, the missed encounter, and theDerridean concepts of différance, destinerrance, trace, origin, and supplementarity. Gothicliterature is replete with doubles, re-doubles, ghosts, restes, and shadows. The double isintroduced in the Gothic text and blazes the inner struggles of the characters and their combatwith the other doubles. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a perfect example of theGothic co-existence of protagonist and antagonist. Dorian Gray is the protagonist and theantagonist at the same time. He is the desiring subject and the object of desire, the mirror and thereflection, 46 presence and absence. Melville’s characters’ narcissistic attitude is not, like the caseof Wilde’s Dorian Gray, driven by a fear of death and a libidinous fixation on the ego; rather, it ispursuit of unity with the double. Dorian Gray lives and grows in his portrait, fixated upon hisunimaginable beauty when the portrait was painted. Ahab, however, lives in the White Whale andembraces his own death. 47 Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Melville’s protagonist, Ahab, provides uswith the poetic and psychoanalytic tools to understand the figure of the double. In Wilde’snarrative, the double (the portrait that re-duplicates the young man) extends, in terms of narrative