This chapter revisits the gendering of loss in discourses of decadence through an exploration of four texts by Algerian authors. Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jasad (Memory of the Body), Yamina Méchakra’s La Grotte éclatée (The Blasted Cave), Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White), and Hélène Cixous’s Si près (So Close) each produce spontaneous, singular forms of female solidarity in the face of institutional expectations relating to language, religion, and the state that overdetermine the value of women’s social work of remembering and forgetting. The chapter explores these four texts in light of psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia and also a certain injunction of postcolonial theory that would impose permanent melancholia on postcolonial writing and thought. These texts experiment with inventive modes of literary mourning, from the “female grotesque” (Mary Russo) to a range of syntactic elaborations, which propose a different cure for postcolonial melancholia and open the possibility of a “melancholia of the public sphere” (Judith Butler).
A tale of two women: the female grotesque in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful