Melancholia and the Mother/Child bond in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry

Abstract

This article sheds light on Elizabeth Bishop’s demonstration of Julia Kristeva’s concept of Melancholia within the maternal realm of her fluid language called the “semiotic chora”. Unlike the celebration of this maternal space in her first collection “North and South”, Bishop’s second collection “A Cold Spring” highlights the loss of this mother-child bond within the semiotic realm. The oxymoronic nature of water imagery in the second collection “A Cold Spring”, exhibits Melancholia, a depressive state marking the loss of mother love. Unlike forming plural identities in “North and South”, the cold and fiery water images celebrate the unnameable loss of mother love. The subject finds the mother as an unreachable object. The way out for the subject is to desire death, which will unite her with the lost love, her mother.