ABSTRACT
Wetlands are anti-aesthetic, bodily, repressed and sublimated. Wetlands have been also associated with melancholia, or depression, especially ‘the slough of despond’ beginning with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Freud also associated melancholia with mourning. This chapter considers melancholia and mourning in relation to Vera Brittain’s account in Testament of Youth of a visit in the wake of losses experienced in the mud hell of World War I to Venice, the wetland city par excellence, and to Walter Benjamin’s early work on the German mourning play.
