Women on the Fringe: Representations of Depression in Lorde and Emily Dickinson

"Liability (Reprise)"

Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (numbered 340) recounts a first-person speaker’s nonresistant journey into a state of unsalvageable depression through the extended metaphor of someone being buried alive with the structure of one long, drawn out sentence. Throughout the first four stanzas of the poem, Dickinson capitalizes key words that create the situation and imagery of a premature burial. In the first stanza, the words “Funeral” (line 1) and “Mourners” (2) are obvious indicators of the metaphorical situation of the poem – a person being buried alive – and other associative diction used to describe the “Service” (6) – especially the beating “Drum” (l6) and the reference to people “lift[ing] a Box” (9) or coffin – reinforces the idea of a funeral along with the slow rhythm created by the punctuation that resembles a funeral march. However, the speaker is obviously not really being buried alive; rather, the funeral, a ceremony marking the transition from life to death, represents the speaker’s move from rationality to extreme depression. Repeatedly, the speaker acknowledges a loss of control over her mind, first that “Sense was breaking through” (4), escaping her grasp, and later that her “mind was going numb” (8), or, in other words, dying. By equating insanity to the extremely macabre event of death, Dickinson creates not only an extremely gloomy mood but also implies that losing one’s mind is so terrible that it is worth fighting against. Yet, the speaker/protagonist in poem 340 does not attempt to resist her fate because she is trapped in a state of inaction. Like someone sealed in a coffin, the speaker is trapped “in [her] Brain” (1), unable to save herself or seek out the help of others because she has already receded too far into her own mind, transformed into “some strange Race, / Wrecked, solitary” (15-16), and totally removed from the rest of the world. This poem ends abruptly because of the irrecoverable deletion in the last line stating that she “Finished knowing – then” (20) without clarifying what exactly happens after “then,” but one can assume that she totally lost control of her mind and entered the “World” (19) of total mental chaos. Thus, this poem has an incredibly depressing mood and message: that insanity is an unavoidable, uncontrollable phenomenon of agony and solitude.

Lorde’s “Liability (Reprise)” mimics poem 340’s form and message – existing as one long, dreary, depressing, painful sentence that recreates the feeling of undergoing a mental breakdown. “Liability (Reprise)” begins with the same melody and lyrics of “Liability,” but here, the lines repeat in a reflective way, or as Alexis Rhiannon says, “they're repeated and mulled over just as you might turn over events from the night before in your brain” (Rhiannon). However, these reflections and observations are practically incoherent and meaningless ramblings and regrets that she repeats to herself; Lorde struggles to find meaning and purpose at the party but cannot resist spiraling into depression. At this point in the party that structures Melodrama, Lorde seems to be watching the action unfold as a relative outsider: she is at the party alone watching everyone else having fun and being part of a group, but she cannot escape her own psyche to join in the fun. Rather, this song emphasizes her isolation by highlighting the contrast between Lorde and the other partygoers to construct an atmosphere of mental illness.
 

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