Abstract
Henry James’s melancholic quality of mind enabled him to understand his relation to the past so that he could free himself of its hold without, at the same time, separating himself from it. It shaped his way of living. As James demonstrates in his notebooks, his past remains with him through his awareness and naming of it. His melancholy relation to the past enables him to use it as part of his identity and, at the same time, as part of the changes to that identity. This is James’s melancholy practice of “facing” his past. His way of using memory, engaging the past as he recalls it, the uses to which he puts the products of that engagement, establishes the ethics of recollection. To develop this study, the essay uses work on melancholy from Sigmund Freud, Jonathan Flatley, Heather Love, David McWhirter, and Lynda Zwinger.