SOURCE: Kuchar, Gary. “Southwell's ‘A Vale of Tears’: A Psychoanalysis of Form.” Mosaic 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 107-20.

In the following essay, Kuchar offers a psychoanalytic reading of “A Vale of Tears.”

Contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of subject formation attribute immense importance to processes of mourning. This concern with mourning in the work of post-Lacanian theorists, most notably Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva, is not simply a reflection on how one negotiates loss throughout one's life but more primarily how the subject is itself constituted by mourning: formed, that is, by and through loss. From this perspective, mourning is not simply something the subject engages in when confronted with abandonment; but, rather, the subject is itself an effect of loss—the product of a series of renunciations and compromise formations. For Lacan and his recent reformulaters, a primordial loss of an egoless sense of unity and fullness—the loss, in other...