ABSTRACT
In his 1621 treatise Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes idleness as “the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness” (158). The remedy for this condition, he insists, lies in recreation and travel: there is “no better physic for a melancholy man than change of air, and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions” (335). Yet Burton’s prescription seems at once oddly contrary to the tone of contemporary adventure narratives-which so frequently read as sustained meditations on loss-and still complexly consistent with the spirit of these narratives. In the modern idiom of melancholic travel, the journey acts as a gesture of commitment to a loss rather than as a curative for that loss. The journey, that is, symbolizes the
melancholic state-functions as an expression of it-and cannot be said to provide an antidote in the sense evoked by Burton. Yet though these modern narratives indulge their melancholic states-perhaps, it may be said, to the point of masochism-they do in many cases address themes of redemption and recovery. If travel does not function quite the way that Burton describes, animating the senses in a manner that abates the melancholy condition, then it may be possible, these later narratives suggest, to restore oneself by delving deeper into the melancholy state itself-to derive a kind of satisfaction from its enlargement, rather than its mitigation, in the journey. Travel, in other words, may offer a curative after all.
