Historical Melancholy, Feminine Allegory

This essay examines Marguerite Duras’s Moderato cantabile (1958) and Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995) to propose a feminine melancholy manifested in these novels. It argues that the work of Duras and Wang functions allegorically, revealing a tension between the globalizing present (France during the period from 1945 to 1973 known as the Trente glorieuses and China during the period following 1989 known as the Post–New Era) and the traumatic past (the German Occupation of France and the Tiananmen Square incident in China). Whereas Walter Benjamin draws his theory of allegory from the male perspective of Charles Baudelaire, this essay initiates the possibility of a feminine melancholy and a feminine allegory. This melancholic feminine allegory reveals a new conception of time and a new focus on aural perception, the eternal return, and the resounding cry of trauma reverberating in the era of globalization.