Melancholia as Resistant Mourning in Toni Morrison's Home

Drawing on recent scholarship on productive melancholia and the politics of mourning, this article examines Toni Morrison's Home (2012), arguing that the melancholia experienced by the protagonist, Frank Money, stems from his failure to mourn two strangers: an African American man whose death he witnesses as a child, and a young Korean girl whose life he takes during the Korean War. The article first explores how disarticulated grief is socially induced through the derealization of the Other, contending that if the lives of the two strangers are not acknowledged as lives, they cannot be mourned - ungrievability stems from unlivability. It then explores how Frank's melancholic recounting - the rediscovery and narration of these two strangers' stories - enables him to finally grieve their losses. Only when Frank recognises the shared precarity between himself and the two strangers does he perform the proper rituals to mourn them, integrating them into a community that unites them all. Ultimately, the article argues that melancholia in the novel serves as resistant mourning, through which Frank offers a more inclusive definition of livable life and expands the notion of the human subject.