Humour as Defence Mechanism: Coping with Grief and Guilt in Fleabag

Abstract

Fleabag is a monologue written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and first performed in 2013. It was later adapted for television as a series on the life of Fleabag, a young London woman, who faces the deaths of two central female figures of her life. The first one is her mother, dead because of breast cancer three years before the beginning of the story and, more recently, her best friend Boo, who died accidentally flattened by a group of cyclists when trying to get herself hurt. Despite the tragic events mentioned before, the tone of the monologue is comic and irreverent, just like the protagonist, as she confronts the deaths and her life's troubles with humour. The aim of this study is to analyze the precess of grief from a psychoanalytic perspective based primarily on Sigmund Freud's Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and Humour (1928). Humour is a self-defense mechanism used by grief-strcken and guilt-ridden protagonist, Fleabag, to cope with a reality that is actually extremelly painful for her: Particular attention will be paid to the twomother figures, Mother and Boo, whose absence pushes Fleabag into a frenzy of sexual relations that never develop into fully satisfactory relationships with men. Fleabag's pain is aggravated by a profound feeling of guilt for her detachment from her family and for Boo's death