A Tale of A Tub

 The Title and Structure

The first thing that's puzzling about A Tale of A Tub is its title. The preface explains that it is the practice of seamen when they meet a whale to throw out an empty tub to divert it from attacking their ship. The whale that this tub is thrown out for most obviously represents Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Swift's tub is intended to distract Hobbes and other critics of the church and government from picking holes in their weak points.

The Tale, with its two appendages ('The Battle of the Books' and 'The Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit') is Swift's first important prose work. It was written during the 1690s, when Swift was living with his patron Sir William Temple, and it was published in 1704. Most modern scholars read the revised fifth edition published in 1710. Like Swift's other major prose - including Gulliver's Travelsand A Modest Proposal - A Tale of a Tub was published anonymously. But unlike with those later works, Swift was obsessively concerned with preserving the anonymity of his authorship of the Tale. His authorship of the Tale was never publicly acknowledged in his lifetime, nor did it appear in authorised editions of his collected works.

But although Swift vigorously maintained the fiction of anonymity in relation to A Tale of a Tub, never at any point did he try to suppress the book as a whole; he only tried to obscure his direct connection with it. But despite the fact that he was desperate that no one should ever know that he wrote A Tale of a Tub, he also seems to have been extraordinarily proud of his satire. The one comment that we have on record from Swift about the Tale comes from a letter transcribed for the Earl of Orrery:

'There is no doubt but that he was Author of the Tale of the Tub. He never

owned it: but as he one day made his Relation Mrs Whiteway read it to him,

he made use of This expression. 'Good God! What a flow of imagination had

I, when I wrote this.'

There is a strange paradox here: Swift wanted to disavow his connection with the work, yet at the same time he wanted the genius evident in the satire to be recognised as his.

Religious Orthodoxy

Swift says in the 'Apology' that was added to the 1710 edition that A Tale of a Tub was partly intended to attack the religious groups that he saw as threatening the hegemony of the Anglican church. In the Tale, Swift uses the analogy of the three brothers - Martin, Peter and Jack - to represent, respectively, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, and the Low Church, or Dissenters. In doing so, he is trying to demonstrate that the spiritual practices of the Catholic Church and dissenting sects were based on a false interpretation of the true Word, the Bible. However, the sweep of Swift's irony in the book, and, the destabilising and confusing nature of its changes in satiric personae meant that many of his contemporaries read the Tale as an attack all religion.

For a young Anglican churchman intent on a speedy ascension through the ranks of the church, this was a very damaging charge. Swift's decision to publish the apology in the revised edition of 1710 likely is related to his anxiety about his career at this time, and the Tale's potential to compromise his position. Late 1710, was perhaps the most exciting and promising time in Swift's career; he was being courted by the rising Tory leader Robert Harley to join the Tory cause, and power and importance seemed imminent. Swift was to believe for the rest of his life that his failure to secure the ecclesiastical promotions that he wanted was due to influential (including royal) disapproval of the perceived irreligious tendencies of A Tale of a Tub.

Authorship and Identity

Portrait of Jonathan Swift

Portrait of Jonathan Swift [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

But there may be more to Swift's desire to remain guarded about his authorship of A Tale of a Tub than just its potential to compromise his rise to power. Swift seems to be ambivalent about his ownership of the work not just in the original text of 1704, but also in the 'Apology' added in 1710. The 'Apology' is a very strange document: it purports to be a straightforward clearing up of unnecessary misunderstandings, but it actually fails to clear anything up at all.

It is supposed to be an intervention in the controversy over the intended meaning of the Tale. However, the author of the 'Apology' does not admit to being Swift, or even the author of the Tale. Swift creates a third person figure that seems to ventriloquise a defence of the work that is part on behalf of an enraged and violated author, and part an outsider coming to his rescue. The apology refers consistently to the author, saying that 'the author cannot conclude this apology without…' or 'the author observes'. But the tale is complicated by the Apology's use of an 'I' in it, a figure that is differentiated from 'the author'.

What then is the authority of the 'Apology'? Whose is this intervention? Does it matter if we do not know? Does it make a difference to the way we read the text if it is prefaced with a foreword by the author, as opposed to someone else? And once we get into the argument of the 'Apology' itself, there seem to be rather contradictory arguments at work about the role of the author. On one hand, the speaker inveighs against all those who have sought to identify Swift as the composer of the parody:

'He thinks it no fair proceeding, that any Person should offer determinately

to fix a name upon the Author of this Discourse, who hath all along

concealed himself from most of his nearest Friends.'

However, further on, he seems to assert the originality of the work, and suggests that there is only one original genius that could have composed a work of such verve and erudition. Taking issue both his critics' charges that he had plagiarised the work, and with the fact that a man called Thomas Swift had recently claimed to have written the Tale, the apology asserts:

'It indeed touches the Author in a very tender Point, who insists upon it,

that through the whole Book he has not borrowed one single Hint from any

Writer in the World; and he thought of all Criticisms, that would never have

been one. He conceived it was never disputed to be an Original, whatever

Faults it might have'.

What we seem to have here is the desire to disown the text, to disown

responsibility for it, to suggest that a book's authorship is irrelevant.

But we also see the urge to lay claim to it, on the grounds of some notion

of original genius.

Originality

The idea of originality is vexed by A Tale of a Tub. As we've seen here, Swift both dismisses the importance of authorship and fiercely defends it. These ambiguous and contradictory concerns are is mirrored within the text, which in some ways it seems to push the boundaries of what can be called an original. A Tale of a Tub is profoundly postmodern in its intertextuality, its play with literary forms, and its changes in speaker and genre and that constantly undermine readerly expectations of the text. It parodies bookseller's catalogues, scholarly treatises, scientific works, effusive dedicatory prose, and it borrows, magpie-like, from a wide and disparate range of sources. A Tale of a Tub is a patchwork of unattributed quotations to Dryden, Marvell, Richard Bentley, Thomas Browne, and Joseph Addison.

After the Tale appeared in 1704, William Wotton, an Anglican clergyman incensed by what he saw as Swift's impropriety, published a critique of the work. It was entitled Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, With Observations upon The Tale of a Tub(1705). In the critique, Wotton offered an explication of the story of the three brothers, attempting to demonstrate that the Tale was a work of radical impiety. When Swift brought out his revised 5th edition in 1710, he cheekily copied the explanatory material of Wotton's attack and had them printed as notes to the new edition his own text. Thus, from 1710, part of the Tale was made up chunks of Wotton's attack on it, cut and pasted in as the Tale's textual apparatus. So in one sense, since it derived so many bits and pieces from other authors, none of the Tale is original. Yet on the other hand, Swift used these other works to compose a wholly new text, one he asserted roundly in the apology was 'an Original, whatever its Faults might have been' and which he later declared was the product of a magnificent 'flow of the Imagination'.

These ideas about originality are reflected in the Tale's relationship to one of its major influences. The text that the Tale most explicitly situates itself in relation to is one that also poses problems of classification as 'original work': John Dryden's Translation of the Works of Virgil in English, of 1697. Dryden's Virgil was the big publishing sensation of the decade. The former laureate issued his definitive version of the great Latin's epic poems, and Dryden's Virgil remained the standard edition until well into the twentieth century.

Swift's A Tale of a Tub was composed at the same time that the Virgil was printed, and in A Tale, Swift takes it upon himself to attack Dryden's work. Swift represents Dryden as a midget cowering in gigantic Virgilian armour, an author who represents the worst of modern literary narcissism. Dryden's extraordinary multiplication of prefaces, dedications, and illustrations offer a model for the external structure of A Tale, which parodies these excesses by incorporating an unfeasible amount of prefatory material before we ever get to the main text: Swift's Tale has an 'Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Posterity', followed by a preface, and then an introduction.

So when Swift snidely suggests that any 'very Considerable Addition to the Bulk of the Volume' is 'a Circumstance by no means to be neglected by a Skilful writer,' he is taking a swipe at Dryden. But Dryden's Virgil is also very interesting in relation to the idea of originality, and plagiarism; like all translation, it is at once a version of an older text, and a new work in its own right. To whom did the lines of the Aeneid belong? Dryden or Virgil? To complicate matters, in producing his edition, Dryden stole words and phrases on a large scale from previous translators, particularly Lauderdale. And to turn this same scrutiny upon Jonathan Swift, is A Tale of Tub is actually an enormous compilation of quotation claiming inspired originality?

The Ancients and Moderns

How do Swift's concerns about originality and authorship reflect on contemporary cultural debate? 'The Battle of the Books', along with the Tale, was perhaps the most impressive English contribution to the so-called quarrel of the Ancients and the moderns. The history of this quarrel can be traced back to the Renaissance. Rediscovery and publication of the philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and Rome generated a huge sense of intellectual and cultural liberation for many sixteenth century writers. But with this revival came a questioning of assumptions about the value of the classical texts.

In literary terms, the debate polarised around the question of whether present civilisations could hope to outdo the achievements of the ancient world in the arts, and in science and technology. Some contemporaries, 'the Moderns', were excited by this possibility. There were moderns who were classical scholars, like Richard Bentley (who is satirised in 'Battle of the Books'), who believed that there was nothing sacred about classical texts. He believed that the classical past should be seen as a body of material that could be dated and analysed, and above all historicized. The classics were not a body of transcendent truths for all time, but an historical source about a much less advanced classical past. So he produced editions of classical texts with endless footnotes and appendices re-contextualising and analysing the poetry in terms of this historical past, not unlike modern critical editions of the works of Shakespeare.

But 'the Ancients', among whose number Swift counted himself, realised with horror that aspirations of this kind threatened the educational and cultural structures that Europe's elite had shared ever since the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical past. Educated in a humanist tradition of scholarship, 'the Ancients' believed that the values derived from Greek and Roman literature continued to provide authoritative standards of virtue, rationality, and aesthetic taste. The classics weren't remnants of a past and primitive culture: they were culture, and were cornerstones by which all human endeavour could be measured. They were not to be questioned or dissected by scholarship in the way Bentley attempted.

Swift was tied in to this debate heavily because his patron at the time of writing the Tale, Sir William Temple, was a key figure among the group of Ancients. Swift's 'Battle of the Books' engages fully on the side of the Ancients: through the figure of Scaliger, Swift attacks Bentley for his lack of grace, observing the irony that the classics have failed to infuse their decorum and civilising influence on the scholar. Swift writes, "All Arts of civilising Others, render thee rude and untractable." The social and cultural superiority of the Ancients is reflected in their imperviousness to the assaults of the moderns, and this is illustrated in the mock-epic passage near the end of the 'Battle of the Books', where the Anglican churchman and modern defender of Bentley, William Wotton, hurls a lance at William Temple but we are told that Temple "neither felt the Weapon touch him, nor heard it fall".

This debate about ancient and modern learning is clearly intimately bound up with the interrogation of authority and authorial status that we see in A Tale of a Tub. The Ancients and Moderns debate was in essence about a question of origins, and of textual authority. It was about how far the authority of the classical poets extended. If you took the Ancients argument to its logical conclusion, no truly newgreat literature could ever be produced, because the summit had already been achieved. The best that was left was imitation. And so you could read the tissue of allusions and borrowings that constitutes the Tale as a trope for the indebtedness of modern literature, for its dependence upon earlier texts that render the idea of modern originality meaningless. And in formulating a brilliant work out of a collage of older ones the tale, Swift gestures toward the way in which the ancients can continue to generate new and imaginative literature: the habits of allusion and imitation that were at the centre of the neoclassicism of the Ancients could also be generative.

The Tale is self-consciously digressive, and attacks the modern writers unmindful of the past and obsessed with the idea of being up to the moment. The narrator of the Tale is fatuously scrupulous in recording this contemporaneity by recording the most trivial domestic circumstances and everything that enters his head at the moment of writing, including his thoughts on the writing of his thoughts. In drawing attention to its newness, A Tale of a Tub parodies the novelty associated with the romance and early novel, always presenting new scenes and "surprising adventures".

Swift also satirises contemporary developments in the book trade: the expanding commercialism of the literary marketplace, and the hybrid forms of scholarship, history, and pamphlet that it was spawning. The Tale is just such a hybrid. And it makes a nonsense of typographical innovation, the random and pointless use of asterisks, hyphens, and parentheses gesture towards an over-excited print culture whose sense of literary merit has got lost in new and various forms of textual egotism.

Paralleling this obsession with textual modernity comes a corresponding collective cultural amnesia. The moderns are so obsessed with being new, that they have forgotten their past. This is made explicit in section six of A Tale of a Tub:

'Memory being an employment of the mind upon things past, is a

faculty for which the learned in our illustrious age have no manner of

occasion, who deal entirely with invention, and strike all things out of

themselves'.

The invention that is being satirised here is both scientific and literary.

Parody and Allegory

Martin Luther

Painting of Martin Luther, on whom Swift's 'Martin' is based [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In addition to the 'digressions' that form a satire on modern learning and print culture, A Tale of a Tub's more obvious satire is that on abuses in religion. The satire works through the allegory of the three brothers: Martin, Peter, and Jack. Martin symbolises the Anglican Church (from Martin Luther); Peter symbolizes the Roman Catholic Church; and Jack (from John Calvin) symbolises the Dissenters. Their father leaves each brother a coat as a legacy, with strict orders that the coats are on no account to be altered. The sons gradually disobey his injunction, finding excuses for adding shoulder knots or gold lace, according to the prevailing fashion. Martin and Jack quarrel with the arrogant Peter (the Reformation), and then with each other (the split between Anglicanism and Puritanism), and then separate. As we might expect, Martin is by far the most moderate of the three, and his speech in section six is by the sanest thing anyone has to say in the Tale.

Both parody and allegory work by implicitly, or explicitly, comparing one sort of book with another. As a broad generalisation, they are concerned with intertextual relationships, and how you can use one text to invoke or critique another. But the distinction is that allegory teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise truth, while parody teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise error.

In the case of the allegorical story of the three brothers, the ultimate pre-text is the Bible: the father's last recorded words take the form of a will, a dead letter, defining and confining the ways in which the sons are to live their lives:

'You will find in my Will (here it is) full Instructions in every Particular

concerning the Wearing and Management of your Coats; wherein you must be

very exact, to avoid the Penalties I have appointed for every transgression

or Neglect, upon which your future Fortunes will entirely depend'.

The later subversion of the will provides us with an allegory of misreading. The abuse of the living coats (the Church) provides an allegory of desire and corruption. The brothers abuse and misinterpret the will as a way of figuring misuse and misinterpretation of the Bible. The attack on Jack, representing Dissenters, is particularly biting: it targets the sectarian groups who exalted the individual worshipper or small congregation with their claims to inner light and private conscience, unchecked by tradition and institutional authority.

In the case of the satire on writing and scholarship, as we have seen in the first half of this lecture, texts like Dryden's Virgil and scholarship of Bentley that are being undermined. They are works whose claim to authority is spurious, and whose authors fail to pay homage to the only true originals of classical civilisation.

In this reading of The Tale of a Tub, then, there seem to be clear distinctions between parody of lesser forms and allegory of higher forms, which roughly corresponds to the twin foci of Swift's work. Both the parody and the allegory are concerned with discerning true and false models of textual authority.

But perhaps there is more overlap between parody and allegory than there seems at first glance. If we think about the brothers and their coats as an allegory of misreading, we can see that the notion of the Bible as sacred pre-text is complicated by the fact that what the brothers can so misread and miscontruct the words of the will that they are able get it to justify whatever they want it to do. We slip out of allegory and into parody, as Swift mocks as his ludicrous pretext false exegetical analyses of the Scripture. Initially, the Will has the power to protect the brothers from their fallen nature, but slowly and insidiously, the relationship of masterful text to obedient interpreter is turned around. Led by Peter, the Catholic, the brothers subvert the terms of the Will by means of wilfully self-seeking interpretation. The simple, explicit dictates of the Will are twisted to serve as a canonical sanction to justify shoulder knots on the cloaks. Flame-coloured satin is said to be 'found' in a codicil of the will, a dangerous supplement, which corresponds to apocryphal additions to the Bible. Embroidered images are forbidden, so they are excused by the sophistry that the new fashion in images is different from that which existed in the father's time, and is therefore acceptable.

By the time the brothers have finished, the Will, or the Word that they are authorising their actions with is no longer the true, original, sacred word, but their corrupt and self -serving version of it. The pre-text underwriting the allegory of the coats is no longer the Bible, but a distorted misreading of it, a fallen text that must be discredited. Thus we have moved across into parody. The impact of an allegory is to reveal the privileged status of the pretext, while a parody aims at undermining the value of the pretext.

One of the implications of the shifting and unstable nature of the satiric forms employed in the Tale is that it makes it difficult to establish what Swift does take to be his ideal point, the true perspective against which the follies satirised can be measured and found wanting. Because we're not sure of the interpretative framework we're working within, allegory or parody, it's hard to be confident about the moral thrust of the work. It is no wonder that contemporary readers so frequently misinterpreted Swift's intentions, to Swift's professional detriment.

Citation

Cite:Jonathan Swift and 'A Tale of a Tub' by Abigail Williams, Kate O'Connor at http://writersinspire.org/content/jonathan-swift-tale-tub. Accessed on Wednesday, December 16, 2020.

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Critical approaches to Othello

 Introduction

Othello was crafted at the dawn of the 17th century, shaped by complex social and geopolitical issues that new historicist critics, who seek to place literary works within a historical framework, have recently sought to unravel. Yet from its first staging to the present, Othello has also been among the few Shakespearean plays to be repeatedly staged to enthusiastic audiences, not only in England, but across the globe. This continuing appeal suggests that the tragedy transcends the time and location in which it was written, provoking new interpretations from generation to generation, place to place. In order to fully appreciate Othello, we need to see it in its multifaceted historical context – then – and consider the myriad ways it speaks to audiences now.

1]   Postcolonial reading: ‘something from Cyprus’

Postcolonial readings focus on the play’s representation of Ottoman Turks. Shakespeare derived Othello’s plot from a short narrative in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), but set his play within the context of Venice’s struggle during the 1570s with the Ottoman Empire for control of Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean island that overlooked the shipping lanes between Europe and trading centres in the East. Venice owned Cyprus from 1470 to 1569, but in 1571 Turkish forces seized the island. Later that year an alliance of Christian powers defeated the Turk in the famous naval battle of Lepanto. As a young man, James VI of Scotland (James I of England in 1603) celebrated that battle, fought ‘Betwixt the baptiz’d race, / And circumcised Turband Turkes’.References throughout Othello to ‘the Turk’ or ‘turning Turk’ evoke the intermittent conflict between Europe’s Christian powers and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which was as much an economic competition as a clash of religions. In sermons and treatises, English writers like Richard Knolles, who published The General Historie of the Turks (1603), demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbaric and cruel, even as they admired its military success and bureaucratic structure.

Shakespeare draws upon the Christian-Turkish binary but also undercuts it by making the play’s most villainous character a Venetian and its hero an outsider. Fearful of vesting military power in one of its own citizens, Venice’s republican government contracted with foreign mercenaries who could easily be dismissed once the crisis was over (as Othello is in Act 5). Although Othello has been chosen by the Venetian government to lead its army, ‘the Moor’ (a term that originally referred to practitioners of Islam) remains an alien in Venice. Like the liminal island of Cyprus, he is caught in the middle, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, and in his suicide he highlights his service as a Christian hero by killing the ‘turbaned Turk’ within, who ‘beat a Venetian and traduced the state’ (5.2.352–53).

Othello’s geopolitical impact is not limited, however, to conflicts between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Othello’s blackness and his background as a foreign mercenary prefigures the hybridity postcolonial theorists have identified in colonial subjects. Brabantio and Desdemona are fascinated by his strange stories of cannibals and anthropophagi; Othello’s first gift to her is a handkerchief given to him by an Egyptian charmer, ‘dyed in mummy [a black liquid distilled from corpses] and steeped in the ancient lore of charmers, sibyls and magic’.The Moor’s stories allow Desdemona to experience the exotic/erotic delight found by many early modern readers in travel narratives that described the ‘antres vast’ of unexplored territories in Africa, the East and the New World.

2).   New historicist reading: ‘far more fair than black’

New historicist critics often debate whether or not race was a factor in early modern representations of non-English peoples. Although Othello’s racial identity is clearly a factor in Shakespeare’s text, when the play was first performed the audience would not have seen it as squarely focussed on race as we do. As editor Michael Neill observes, ‘to talk about race in Othello is inevitably to fall into some degree of anachronism, while to ignore it is to efface something fundamental to the tragedy.’ As a result, Shakespeare’s Othello has been appropriated worldwide as a vehicle for the exploration of racial and ethnic tensions.

In the opening scene Iago refers to Othello as ‘the thick-lips’ (1.1.66) and later he raises a toast to ‘the health of black Othello’ (2.2.29). Through these and other comments we learn that Othello is a black African of sub-Saharan origin. In 1604 England was not yet formally immersed in the slave trade, but as early as 1565 English privateers had bought captured Africans, and Shakespeare may well have known some of them or other people of African heritage. Contemporary conceptions of race and racism, influenced by the history of racial slavery and 18th-century pseudo-science, are often based on hard and fast racial categories that were only incipient in Shakespeare’s England. While Iago’s and Brabantio’s remarks in Act 1 exude what is today accepted as racism, the Duke’s pronouncement that Othello is ‘far more fair than black’ and Montano’s claim that ‘the man commands / Like a full soldier’ (2.1.36–37) indicate the high esteem others have for him. Nevertheless, references to Othello as black and a Moor, as well as his lack of understanding of Venetian customs, establish his liminal position in Venetian society.

In Shakespeare’s time Othello was performed by Richard Burbage, a white actor who wore black make-up and a wig of black lamb’s wool. (Burbage’s powerful cross-racial performance should not be confused with the caricatured blackface used in 19th-century minstrel shows.) Still, by the early 19th century, a truly black Othello was no longer tenable in England and America. The English actor Edmund Kean chose instead to appear as a North African in light brown make-up, suggesting an African from the Mediterranean rim rather than a sub-Saharan. With the exception of Ira Aldridge, a black actor who portrayed Othello throughout northern Europe in the 19th century, the role was taken by white actors in various shades of make-up until the African-American actor Paul Robeson undertook the role in London (1930) and New York (1943). Since then, black actors have usually impersonated Shakespeare’s Moor.

3) Feminist reading: ‘a maiden never bold’

Feminist critics highlight the ways Shakespeare portrays gender roles. In Act 1, Scene 3, Brabantio describes his daughter Desdemona as ‘a maiden never bold’, yet in choosing a foreigner she has violated the Venetian norm of arranged endogamous marriages (the practice of marrying within a local community or ethnic group) and rejected her father’s authority. Still, she honours the patriarchal dictum that, once married, the wife owes her husband the same respect and duty she had shown her father. Emilia, too, defers to her husband Iago’s wishes. Even after she realises the full extent of his villainy, she admits, ‘’Tis proper I obey him, but not now’ (5.2.194). At the same time, romances, poems and plays often countered patriarchal authority in favour of romantic love. Just as the Duke overrules Brabantio’s demands in Act 1, Scene 3, in fictional narratives the blocking father figure cannot prevail and young lovers marry. If Othello ended after Act 1, it would be, as many commentators have observed, a romantic comedy.

Alas, Desdemona and Othello’s love is no match for Iago’s plots and the green-eyed monster jealousy. Infidelity was the ultimate marital crime in early modern England. The prospect of illegitimate children subverted the bedrock of the era’s social and economic system, the inheritance of property from father to son. In a speech that is often described as ‘proto-feminist’, Emilia argues that a wife’s infidelity is a response to the husband’s behaviour:

Say they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant of former having in despite –
. . .
Yet have we some revenge. (4.4.82–88)

Desdemona rejects this reasoning, promising ‘Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend’ (4.4.100). As she nears death in the play’s final moments, she exonerates Othello by claiming no one has murdered her except herself.

From the play’s earliest performances, audiences responded sympathetically to Desdemona’s plight. After a 1610 production at Oxford, Henry Jackson recalled that Desdemona ‘entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance’.That changed in the late 20th century, however, when feminist critics underscored Desdemona’s initial independence and Emilia’s eventual strength, and outlined the ways both women – as well as the courtesan Bianca – were constrained by the male characters’ patriarchal suppositions. From a feminist perspective, early modern England’s preoccupation with cuckoldry demonstrates a basic male insecurity about women’s sexuality.

5) Marxist reading: ‘’Tis the curse of service’

Marxist critics are concerned with the economic and psychological impact of early modern England’s hierarchical social system. In 1604 James I took Shakespeare’s acting company under his patronage, making Shakespeare a ‘servant’ of the king. Indeed, service to someone in a higher position was expected from the lowest kitchen maid to the lords and ladies of the king’s court.The pecking order in Othello is clear. The Duke and aristocratic members of the Venetian Senate give orders to Othello, who in turn commands his Lieutenant Cassio. Ensign Iago is subordinate to both. All three ostensibly serve out of loyalty to the state and for the status their military position brings, but they can be dismissed at the pleasure of their superiors. Iago resents Cassio, a man with ‘a daily beauty in his life’ (5.1.19), hates being tied to Othello’s service and yearns for preferment.

The different gradations of status embedded in the text are often represented in military terms, with Iago presented as a rough-speaking non-commissioned officer, resentful of Cassio’s rank and courtly manners. But the play’s exploration of rank and class go beyond the military. Iago’s repeated advice, ‘Put money in thy purse’, suggests that a new economic model has replaced the feudal obligations of service, which had been based on a bond of loyalty and duty between servant and master. As a ‘servant’ of the king, Shakespeare – who applied for a coat of arms to be named a ‘gentleman’ but was also an entrepreneur who loaned money and invested in land and rents – was implicated in both models.

Work citation

Critical approaches to Othello. (2015, December 09). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/critical-approaches-to-othello

A Journey into Capitalist Failure

Capitalism is said to provide the opportunity to achieve "The American Dream". With
good work ethic, financial sense, and a little bit of luck, everybody could become a wealthy
entrepreneur. However, this dream is hopelessly outdated and become increasingly difficult to
achieve. "The American Dream" has turn to a myth and a means of laying blame. People who
themselves try to achieve "The American Dream" may suffer the highest costs of this excessive
capitalism. "The 'working poor' as they are appropriately termed, are in fact the major
philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others
will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and
perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a
member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone
else" (Ehrenreich, P. 221). Tyson believes that it is what the capitalist culture has done to its
people, "Every family wants to own its own home on its own land is a capitalist ideology that
sells itself as natural by pointing, for example to the fact that almost all Americans want to own
their own property, without acknowledging that this desire is created in us by the capitalist
culture in which we live" (P. 53).
Marx analysis about "The American Dream" reveals that it is just an ideology, a belief
system that is employed by the capitalism, not a natural way of seeing the world. It blinds its
pursuers to the enormities of its own failure. O'Neill in Long Day's Journey concerns about this
failure and reveals the reality of "The American Dream" in the capitalist society. He represents the failure of American man, American values, and American culture. He shows the man who
is looking for a fulfilled life but he cannot find it in the real unequal conditions that are created
by capitalism. Metaphorically, O'Neill sees "The American Dream" as a way of escaping from
this painful reality.

Mary's words show that Tyrone is a practitioner of "The American Dream" and he
comes to this land for the financial success. The Tyrones are hopeless people that by drinking
and consuming morphine try to escape from the reality of their life. They are shocked by the
failure of their dreams and now alcohol and morphine are kinds of protection for them. Mary is
repeating a song of fatalism that "But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it.
None of us can help the things that life has done to us" (P.22). O’Neill addresses the problem of
existence in the capitalistic Man.
In a capitalistic society, a man is not a “Man” until he is subjectified by the monetary
discourse. O’Neill has no hesitation in demystifying the “ugliness of American reality” behind
the innocent discourse of "The American Dream”. Unlike Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,
O’Neill chooses not to romanticize the castrating effect of Money with a dreamy outlook, but to
foreground how this unconscious language can regulate the living body. In the play, Mr.
Tyrone’s rise to prosperity represents the birth of the modern, masculine Subject—the economic
Man. Marcelle Marini believes that O’Neill forces the reader to see that a man like Tyrone is
“caught as a whole, but like a pawn” in the play of the capitalistic signifier, “and this even
before the rules are transmitted to him. . . . Such an order of priorities has to be understood as a
logical order, that is, as an always actualized order” (P.45). While pleasure in itself may not be a
linguistic phenomenon, the idea that Money can give pleasure is certainly related to what
James M. Mellard claims, “the ordering function of the culture, a culture that separates man
from nature, by inscribing him from the start in language, in the founding law whose
primordial interdiction” (P.395-407) is that of the law of the father. The fear of lack on the
ontological level is translated by the capitalistic discourse to become Tyrone’s fear of poverty,
the “fear of poorhouse.” In O’Neill’s play, Mr. Tyrone has no hesitation in forgoing what he
truly likes in order to achieve "The American Dream". With all his money, he ends up saying, “I
don’t know what the hell it was I wanted to buy” (P.5).
Tyrone measures all human relations based on the notion of "productiveness" or "use
value". In Mr. Tyrone’s eyes, Jamie is an “evil minded loafer” (P.24) because he is depraved and
unproductive. Edmund is disappointing for he is weak in terms of his health or financial well￾being. Mr. Tyrone learned this lifestyle from the capitalist society. He is the only character in
the play that is exempt from despair and confusion of values. Thus, Mary notes, “Ten foghorns
couldn’t disturb” (P.17) Tyrone. To a miser like Tyrone, the world is a very stable, easily
readable zone: his enemy is the one who wants to “have the house ablaze with electricity at
[night], burning up money!”(P.26). He sells his talents for money, spends his money on many
“bum piece[s] of property,” and ends up celebrating his life by drowning regrets with alcohol.
The paradox of success and non-being, happiness and unhappiness eventually leads Tyrone to
utter—with clear-headed sincerity—something that he really desires to do and never desires to
put it into action: “On my solemn oath, Edmund, . . . I’d be willing to have no home but the
poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have
been” (P.51).
Tyrone is the result of capitalism. He wants to save both his family and his money, but
he is unable to manage both of them. In the capitalist society, everything must be scarified for
money. Tyrone's soul is destroyed by possessiveness and greed. He creates a dream of success
for himself but at the end, he and his family go disappointed they find their dream false and
inaccessible in the unequal capitalist society. They come to the point that they have been
betrayed by what "The American Dream" has created for them.


Work Citation


Babaee, Ruzbeh. “Long Day's Journey into Night; a Journey into Revelation. International Journal of International Social Research. 4.19 (2011): 7-14 Print.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/1046883/Long_Days_Journey_into_Night_a_Journey_into_Revelation._International_Journal_of_International_Social_Research._4.19_2011_7-14_Print.

Psychoanalysis , Repression , Oedipus complex

Mary

The members of the family are not happy within their respected slots.
Long Days Journey can be regarded as a play of fate, where the family is encompassed by forces of resentment, lust, blame and remorse.
The bewailing attitude of the family members hardly allows them to
recognize their love for each other. For any family to be happy it is imperative that the roots remain strong in order to strengthen the entire family, but here we have a family where the mother finds contentment in relapsing into her past through her morphine addiction. She
blames her husband for her present unhappy condition. Mary always
thinks of her blooming youth when she got married to a handsome
Shakespearean actor, giving up her intense ambition of being a nun
to serve the divinity. Psychologically, she is under the firm grip of her
subconscious that doesn’t allow her to come out of her past blooming youth. Mary feels that her ambition is not fulfilled and desires to
roll back from her present life. This sense of sacrifice ruined her family
relationships. There is disproportionate Ego (her reality) and Id (the
world of her own) within Mary. It is also seen in the drama that her innate state of denial doesn’t allow her to accept the fact that Edmund
was suffering from tuberculosis. Mary, a product of Electra Complex,
knew within herself that confiding to the fact would put her in a similar state as before, when she witnessed her father’s death due to the
same disease. Desperately trying to escape the similar pain for the
second time, she deliberately chooses not to accept the disease of
Edmund as being Tuberculosis, but terms it as a normal cold. She is
happy to live in a fake world of denial rather than facing the painful
reality.

• James Tyrone 

The father of the family is eager to save money in every way possible. He is positioned in a precarious situation within the family. Trying
to balance his attitude of money saving with the needs of his family,
James is driven by the so called American Dream. It was his childhood
desire to become super rich within a very short span of time. Such a
penny pinching attitude of the father, leads to many complications
within the Tyrone family. His wife Mary is addicted to drugs, courtesy of the cheap doctor that was hired by James during Mary’s pregnancy, who prescribed her to inject morphine for the temporary relief
of her labor pain, which then became a lifelong habit. The character
of James Tyrone was suffering from a dual – personality disorder. On
one hand, he is desperate to understand the feelings and emotions
within his family, by comforting everyone, despite continuous blame
and regret. On the other hand, he is a penny pincher. He intends to
admit Edmund into a cheap sanatorium for his cure from Tuberculosis.
He also hired a cheap doctor for his pregnant wife who had injected
morphine as a curative relief from the pain. He is materialistic in action, but contrary through his intention. James Tyrone can be termed
as a character with a shade of Schizophrenia. The Psychological imbalance of “Id” and “Ego” within his psyche is evident. The unconscious
impulse of the characters is unsuccessful in negotiating with their
present situation, due to the unconscious repositories that are actively functioning within their psyches.

• Jamie Tyrone

The elder son, Jamie Tyrone is a product of the Oedipus complex. His
acute oedipal repression searches leeway in the form of incestuous
relations, with mistress’s of his mother’s age. He tries to corrupt his
younger brother, by trying to lead him in his immoral ways, because
he senses his mother’s affection for Edmund which becomes intol￾erable to him. Jamie says to Edmund,” But don’t get me wrong, kid. I
love you more than I hate you” (O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night,
1984, p. 166)

• Edmund

The Author had found his character in the character of Edmund. He
is the only character, seen with a ray of hope within the Tyrone fami￾ly. O’Neill had desires for his mother and his intense oedipal complex
searched for the love of his mother in his three wives. The author sub￾consciously yearned for his mother’s love, which is portrayed through
his characters in all his major plays like Mourning Becomes Electra,
Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and many others. One can
say that O’Neill was trying to relive his emotional frustration through
his dramas unintentionally.



Work Citation


Fathima, Sabreen. “The Consequence of Psychological Imbalances in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/29094520/The_Consequence_of_Psychological_Imbalances_in_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

Mother figure & guilt , dependence from Goswami Mahirpari


Work Citation


Barnes, W. (n.d.). Guilt and Dependence as Practised Family Religions in Eugene O' Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Marsha Norman's 'night Mother. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/6731500/Guilt_and_Dependence_as_Practised_Family_Religions_in_Eugene_O_Neils_Long_Days_Journey_Into_Night_and_Marsha_Normans_night_Mother

Guilt and dependence

Eugene O’Neill in
Long Day’s Journey Into Night conveys the struggle which arises out of the growing social and psychological problems which face the victims of addiction and personal trauma in an America that increasingly subverts the accepted morality of older European religious beliefs. The decline of
family and community in O’Neill’s play represents a trauma that is unique to a Catholic viewpoint.


The shadow of old religious values looms consistently throughout the play; for example even within O’Neill’s character Edmund’s appropriation of nihilistic European literature to his personal beliefs
he feels a debt to his mother and excuses her self-martyring addiction.

Recognised as America’s “first important playwright” (Harold Bloom, Eugene O’Neill; Modern Critical Views-Updated Edition, New York, Infobase Publihing, 2007, 1) O’Neill used an autobiographical sense of family to imbue Long Day’s Journey into Night (completed 1942, first performed 1956) with an internally destructive familial hubris in an attempt to replicate the effects of Greek tragedy for the American stage. The overhanging moral albatross represented by the influence of a particular form of Irish-American Catholic guilt permeates this play, with it themes of addiction, self-destruction, blame and regret all reflecting the conflict of reverence and damnation which the Tyrone family accord to their family history and to each other. In a sneeringly judgemental display of the allocation of guilt regarding their family’s decline, James Tyrone intimidates his wayward son Jamie into accepting responsibility for his brother Edmund’s ill-health and lack of contentment:

Tyrone: The less you say about Edmund’s sickness the better for your conscience.

 You’re more responsible than anyone!

 Jamie: (Stung) That’s a lie! I won’t stand for it, Papa!

 Tyrone: It’s the truth! You’ve been the worst influence for him. He grew up admiring

 you a hero! A fine example you’ve set for him. You’ve made him old before his time, pumping him full of what you considered to be worldly wisdom,

 when he was too young to see that your mind was poisoned by your own

 failure in life, you wanted to believe every man was a knave with his soul

 for sale, and every woman who wasn’t a whore was a fool!”

 (O’ Neil, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, London, Nick Hearn Books, 1956 1

 191 Act 1, 16, 17)

Tyrone’s singling out of Jamie for responsibility comes loaded with a sense of patriarchal moralismthat is aligned significantly in his belief in the “one true faith of the Catholic Church” (O’Neill, 44).His son’s turning away from the influence of this ideological stronghold, as well as turning awayfrom the works of their father’s beloved Shakespeare and towards reading more modernist andnihilistic works of Nietzsche and the British Fin-de-Siecle poets invokes a rage in their fathertowards their self-destructive rebelliousness which eludes taste in literature with their personal
decline. Jamie’s response to his father’s accusations asserts that he was merely acting out of hisbrother’s best interests, that the nihilistic streak was already alive in him despite his religiousupbringing to the contrary, and that he only offered him frank advice with regards his decadent
pursuits;

 Jamie: (with a defensive air of weary indifference again) All right, I put
 Edmund wise to things, but I knew he’d laugh at me if I tried the good
 advice, older brother stuff. All I did was make a pal of him and be
 absolutely frank so he’s learn from my mistakes that...(He shrugs his
 shoulders, cynically) If you can’t be good you can at least be careful.
 (O’Neill, 1:16, 17.)

This sense of disregard for their parent’s moralistic standards contributes to the familial decline.However it also establishes an unusually dependent relationship between the two brothers. Jamiehas Edmund comply in many of his decisions throughout his lifetime, yet it is Jamie who isdependent on Edmund’s role as the “Kid” in the family to define his role as his brother’s keeper andthe wayward, bitter son. Edmund is the son who replaced the dead brother Eugene, whose infantdeath their mother blames Jamie for, yet both have catered to Jamie’s fragility and whimsthroughout his life. Jamie has as a result borne the majority of the guilt which the family wage oneach other, yet he takes it upon himself, in much the same way in which his mother acts out her role
of martyrdom.

In being the personification of a morally abhorrent bad influence on his brother, Jamie is determined to prove his parents’ accusations towards him to be true. This is explicably made apparent during the scene of Jamie’s confession to Edmund, which in the sense that it is spoken by a lapsed Catholic conveys Jamie’s wishes to absolve the wrongs which he feels he has committed to his brother. Jamie confronts his brother with the damning truth after he arrives home drunk after Edmund is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Needing to confess what he sees as his continuing moralising against his brother he speaks of his self-accused intent on ruining Edmund’s life:

Jamie: Never wanted you to succeed and make me look worse by comparison.
 Wanted you yo fail. Always jealous of you, Mama’s boy, Papa’s pet!
 (He stares at Edmund with increasing emnity) And it was you being born that
 started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, God
 damn you, I can’t help it, I hate your guts!
 (O’Neill, 4: 103)

By saying this, Jamie is not only announcing the transparency of his maliciousness but also opens the audience to the understanding of the shared maliciousness of the Tyrone family unit. In this light the critic Michael Hinden posits Jamie as the Tyrone family scapegoat, the sone who bears the burden of blame and the psychological contamination that his family expounds upon each other as solely the responsibility of himself; “O’Neill has Jamie function as a familial scapegoat, scourging his own conscience but also symbolically bearing away the various contagions that plague the Tyrones. (Michael Hinden, Long Day’s Journey into Night: Native Eloquence, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1990, 59). By giving Jamie such an uncompromising admission of guilt in the confession scene, O’Neill conveys him as the prophet of the family’s moral demise





Work Citation




Barnes, W. (n.d.). Guilt and Dependence as Practised Family Religions in Eugene O' Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Marsha Norman's 'night Mother. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/6731500/Guilt_and_Dependence_as_Practised_Family_Religions_in_Eugene_O_Neils_Long_Days_Journey_Into_Night_and_Marsha_Normans_night_Mother

About drama long Day's journey in to the night from Goswami Mahirpari



Work Citation

Sufian, Abu. “O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night: A Bleak Journey to the Author's Life.” The Criterion, www.academia.edu/6945609/ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night_A_Bleak_Journey_to_the_Authors_life.

Split Mother in O'Neill's Play

In his Long Day’s Journey, Mary Tyrone appears to possess the dual
Kleinian role in a marked way. This could be observed differently in her
thoughts, mental disposition towards the sons, and verbal expressions. The
good breast role is to be found in her deep motherly affection and caring attitude for the younger son Edmund in the play. She shows deep sense of
concern on his ill health and possible tuberculosis. It makes her develop open
and direct confrontation with her husband and accuses him of miserliness
and saving money at the cost of Edmund’s health. It also makes her develop
antipathy towards Dr. Hardy who has been advising medical treatment to
Edmund. She charges him as a third degree cheap doctor, “I wouldn’t believe
a thing he said, if he swore on a stack of bibles!”
. Edmund, as the play
opens, seems to be suffering from some disturbing health problem that has
taken away his appetite and affected his physical appearance. He seems to be
growing thin with sallow complexion that distinguishes him from strong and
sturdy elder brother Jamie. Mary’s motherliness is evident in her deep desire
to see him healthy and fully recovered from the trouble. It even makes her
behave bizarrely in building illusions about his health and returning to
terrible morphine addiction. Having lost a son earlier through infected
measles, she cannot bear the very idea of losing another son through another
disease. Therefore she consoles herself verbally that what troubles Edmund
is just a common cold that has taken away his appetite, and a bit of care will
do him perfectly well, “James, it’s Edmund you ought to scold for not eating
enough. . . I keep telling him that but he simply has no appetite. Of course
there’s noting takes away your appetite like a bad summer cold” . And in
response to James assurance that “it’s natural and don’t let yourself get
worried”, Mary retorts “Oh I’m not. I know he’ll be all right in a few days if
he takes care of himself” . These verbal expressions however, are
contradicted by her thoughts and mental disposition. In fact, one of the
strong reasons for her recent return to morphine lies in her deep concern
about Edmund’s health and possible tuberculosis. Her genuine motherliness
is evident in her infrequent verbal expression to Edmund himself. For
instance, the mere sound of his coughing for instance alarms her to a
disproportionate level. Warm motherly affections are evident when she finds
Edmund coughing nervously: Mary. “(Goes worriedly to Edmund and puts
her arm around him). You mustn’t cough like that it’s bad for your throat.
You don’t want to get a sore throat on top of your cold”  with James and
Jamie very early in play. It is her concern for his well being that makes her
deny Edmund having any serious problem, and for her “It’s just a cold!”
, and to James remarks that “doctor hardy thinks it might be a bit of
malarial fever he caught when he was in the tropics” Mary retorts with
contemptuous expressions, “Doctor Hardy! I wouldn’t believe a thing he
said, if he swore on a stack of Bibles!”


But the bad breast role is equally evident and in fact more vocal, but
annihilating than of nurturance, motherliness and affection. It is evident in
her failure to act responsibly in leaving young Eugene to die of infected
measles at home. As a mother, she should have taken it her first responsibility to look after the baby or take proper measure in that direction
if she had to leave. She becomes directly responsible for his immediate death
through measles. It is equally evident in her whole attitude after Eugene
death. It fills her with deep sense of guilt for the whole life that is evident in
the following pathetic expressions:
I blame myself. I swore after Eugene died I would never have another
baby. I was to blame for his death. If I hadn’t left him with my mother
to join you on the road, because you wrote telling me you missed me
and were lonely, Jamie would never have been allowed, when he still
had measles, to go in the baby’s room .
Secondly, it compels her to behave unnaturally and un-motherly in her
avoidance to procreate another baby (Edmund in this case). Hinden
terms her attitude to Edmund birth as one of denial of his identity, something
that is “clouded in refusal”  and if it is procreated at all, it is necessitated
by the desire to blot out the guilt of personal responsibility in the death of
Eugene earlier. Mary tells Tyrone plaintively,
“Above all I should not have let you insist I have other baby to take
Eugene’s place, because you thought that would make me forget his
death. I knew something terrible would happen. I knew I’d proved by the
way I’d left Eugene that I wasn’t worthy to have another baby, and that
God would punish me if I did, I never should have born Edmund”.
Here the bad breast role emerges strongly in her character. Procreation is
essential to motherhood as is evident in Nina Leeds’ strong desire to
procreate in Strange Interlude. On the other hand, a woman who refuses to
procreate without any valid reason that could be biological in fact denies her
natural motherly self and attempts to annihilate the possibility of a child
being born. In Mary’s case, the refusal was based on certain unfounded fears
rather than on her inability to play a role of nurturance and care that resulted
in death of the helpless baby. Then, her attitude to Edmund, when he is born,
is indicative of her negative self on several occasions in the play. In the first
place, his birth coincided with his miserable lonely existence in dirty hotels,
morphine injections to relieve her of birth pain for which he could not be
blamed. In fact, it was Edmund’s birth that put her on the lifelong morphine
addiction. These particular memories make her respond aggressively,
irritably and negatively to Edmund, which contrasts with her motherliness to
him and reveal the deep fragmentation in her personality. Her attitude to
Jamie, the elder one, is marred by hostility, neglect, annihilation and denial
of her duty. Jamie — “the jealous elder brother, the cynical tempter of
innocent youth, pans, Mephistopheles Can . . .”  is a miserable failure in
life. Drunkenness, prostitution and jealousy dominate his depraved
personality that he deliberately and persistently pursued as a self-destructive
strategy for evasion from the initial brought up in the family. Mary blames the past for making him so, “It’s wrong to blame your brother. He can’t help
being what the past has made him any more than your father can or you or I”
. In fact, his ruined state and personality is largely so because of his
mother’s inability to play a constructive part in nurturing his personality
along healthy lines. Mary’s conduct has ingrained in him a deep-seated
jealousy and a self-destructive attitude that is related strongly to Jamie’s need
of caring/nurturing mother. A positive motherly attitude would have
developed his personality and rescued him from such negative traits as
despair and extreme jealousy.

• For a more detail click here

Work Citation


EduSoft, Academia. “MOTHERS IN EUGENE O'NEILL'S STRANGE INTERLUDE AND LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.” LiBRI. Linguistic and Literary Broad Research and Innovation, www.academia.edu/35876334/MOTHERS_IN_EUGENE_ONEILLS_STRANGE_INTERLUDE_AND_LONG_DAYS_JOURNEY_INTO_NIGHT.

LDJN AND SON'S

Unfulfilled desire of the son's edumund and Jamie from Goswami Mahirpari



Work Citation


Ali, Emman. “Lacanian Orders in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, www.academia.edu/3111234/Lacanian_Orders_in_Eugene_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

LDJN AND MOTHER

The mother's desires to return to imaginary from Goswami Mahirpari




Work Citation


Ali, Emman. “Lacanian Orders in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, www.academia.edu/3111234/Lacanian_Orders_in_Eugene_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

Traumas and Jouissance of Characters LDJN

• Traumas and Jouissance of Characters 

The Real Order is the most inaccessible part of human psyche, according to Lacan, since we live in the symbolic world
where we have to adopt ourselves with ideologies and imposed on us by the Other. However there are times when one
can experience the Real for fleeting moments of joy and terror, in traumas, and of course while seeing through
ideologies. The symbolic world is the only world through which the subject has the understanding of reality, since their
understanding of reality is shaped through language that is made of signs which do not represent the real essence of the
things. Therefore reality, as it really is, does not have any place in the unconscious mind, instead some representations
of it exist there, consequently we can experience the real only when a cut happens to the Symbolic Order, such as in the
case of having trauma, especially a sad one.
Many times in the play, Mary experiences the trauma of being with her father. Whenever she looks at Edmund, she
compares his situation with that of her father's whose trauma comes to life again, since he had tuberculosis and drank a
lot, like Edmund, and that caused his death. In one scene Tyson tries to hide the truth that Edmund has tuberculosis,
since it reminds her of her father: "She has control of her nerves—or she had until Edmund got sick. Now you can feel
her growing tense and frightened underneath .... What makes it worse is her father died of consumption. She worshiped
him and she's never forgotten. Yes, it will be hard for her. But she can do it! She has the will power now! We must help
her, Jamie, in every way we can!" (LDJ, I. p. 2017). In another scene, she blames Tyron for letting Edmund drink, since
she is afraid that he would die because of it: "did you take a drink? Don't you know it's the worst thing? You're to
blame, James. How could you let him? Do you want to kill him? Don't you remember my father? He wouldn't stop after
he was stricken. He said doctors were fools! He thought, like you, that whiskey is a good tonic!" (LDJ, I. p. 2030).
To experience the Real, Jamie drinks a lot and spends his time with whores in whom he looks for pleasure, for an
extended Jouissance which never happens. To find himself out of the symbolic and the big Other's rules through this, he
drinks more and more to experience and maintain the feeling of Jouissance, but it is just a short, fleeting moment. In
one scene, his father criticizes him for spending time with the whores in the bars: "at the end of each season you're
penniless! You've thrown your salary away every week on whores and whiskey!"( LDJ, I. p. 26), though Jamie does not
care for such a loss, and only wishes to get rid of the symbolic world of the big Other.
The same thing is observed in the mother who uses morphine to forget her loss, and to escape from the ideologies
imposed on her, as Thaddeus Wakefield argues: "Mary takes morphine to escape the reality that she has failed ...
prescribed by the society in which she lives" (2004, p. 49). Moreover she uses morphine to keep herself "high" in
pleasure, to forget the present situation in which she just changes desire after desire to feel real, and to experience
Jouissance. When she is "high", she sees herself as a girl in a perfect situation in the past – free from the pains of the
Symbolic Order and the rules imposed on her by the Other. Morphine alleviates her pains, as she tells Cathleen:
CATHLEEN: [stupidly puzzled] You've taken some of the medicine? It made you act funny, Ma'am. If I
didn't know better, I'd think you'd a drop taken.
MARY: [dreamily] It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you
were happy is real. (LDJ, III. P. 2047)
Edmund too drinks a lot to forget the present situation which he suffers from, and to experience Jouissance, though he
knows he is sick and drinking is detrimental for him. He tells his father that there is no problem with being drunk, as he
forgets the pains of his conditions by drinking: "let us drink up and forget it .... Well, what's wrong with being drunk?
It's what we're after, isn't it? ... We know what we're trying to forget, [hurriedly] But let's not talk about it. It's no use
now" (LDJ, IV. P. 2059). Moreover there are some hints in the play that shows he has decided to commit suicide to get
rid of the symbolic world and the rules of the big Other. He speaks of death as an outlet that brings permanent feeling of
Jouissance: "yes, particularly the time I tried to commit suicide at Jimmie the Priest's, and almost did. ... I was stone
cold sober. That was the trouble. I'd stopped to think too long" (LDJ, IV. P. 2067). As the result of reading books and
getting aware of ideologies at work in society, he is quite aware of what he is doing when he commits suicide. Once
when he speaks about the English poet Arthur Symons, he talks about the experience of real and how everything is just a hoax granted to us: "The fog was where I wanted to be. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it
is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself ...
Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?" (LDJ, V. p. 2059).
Each of these characters has their own "method of escape", as Rogers calls it: "Mary has her drugs, Tyron and Jamie
their liquor, and Edmund has poetic sense of personal dissolution" to escape from suffering that "has formed their lives
and their feeling" (1965, p. 720), the suffering that is caused by ideology. Edmund is the only character of the play that
has realized the point and seen through ideology, hence he wishes to go beyond, since it seems to be just a bunch of lies
and craps to him, thus attempts to commit suicide.



Work Citation


Ali, Emman. “Lacanian Orders in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, www.academia.edu/3111234/Lacanian_Orders_in_Eugene_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

Entanglement of Characters in the Web of the Other LDJN

• Entanglement of Characters in the Web of the Other 

Lacan holds that the Symbolic Order is the stage in which the subject recognizes themselves as having a separate
identity from that of their mothers'. Moreover the law of the father is gradually presented to and imposed on the subject
by the social rules and ideologies engendered by the Other that equals the symbolic order, language, and the law of the
father in Lacan's terminology. The Symbolic Order is the realm of the Other or the symbolic father that is not, however,
the real father, but a function that imposes rules and regulates desires. The real father is the agent of the symbolic father
that shapes desires and has a decisive role in shaping the subject's identity. There is no escape from the law of the
father; it is inevitable, because "the law is the father, the thing before, the inheritance, the compulsion, the inescapable,
the inevitable, and the desire for the law itself" (Mottram, 1995, p. 25). Lacan holds that the law of the father is
symbolized by the phallus "the primacy of [which] is established by the existence of the symbol, of discourse and of the
law" (S5, 1957, p. 169-170).
In the Long Day's Journey into Night, James Tyson represents the Other and his rules have a crucial impact on shaping
the desires and identities of his wife and sons. He plays the role of the big Other who sets the desires of the other
members of the family in motion and expects their obedience. For instance Mary is not satisfied with the place they live
in, but Tyson has decided to be there. She tells Edmund that it is his father's desire to be there not hers: "not that I want
anything to do with them. I've always hated this town and everyone in it. You know that. I never wanted to live here in
the first place, but your father liked it and insisted on building this house, and I've had to come here every summer"
(LDJ, I. p. 2020). And this is one of several things he has decided for Mary. The suppression of her desires gradually
becomes a complex and causes her abnormal deeds at the end of the play.
Tyson also encourages Jamie to become an actor, while he does not like it, as he says here: "I never wanted to be an
actor. You forced me on the stage"( LDJ, I. p. 2015) – hence his present unemployment for which he condemns his
father. Moreover Mary blames Tyson for his role in making Jamie a drunken loafer. She believes that when Jamie was
young, Tyson made him drink alcohol when he drank himself, as we read here: "you brought him up to be a boozer.
Since he first opened his eyes, he's seen you drinking. Always a bottle on the bureau in the cheap hotel rooms! And if
he had a nightmare when he was little, or a stomach-ache, your remedy was to give him a teaspoonful of whiskey to
quiet him" (LDJ, III. P. 2050).
 Even Edmund's desire to become a so-called man of literature is his father's desire, not his own. Tyson appreciates
Edmund's writing and asks him to read books and write poetry to be a journalist, though he is not a good writer and the
journal he works for does not like his writing. There is a dialog between Jamie and his father that shows the father's
desire to make Edmund a journalist, while he has no talent for it:

TYSON: He's been doing well on the paper. I was hoping he'd found the work he wants to do at last.
JAMIE: [sneering jealously again] A hick town rag! Whatever bull they hand you, they tell me he's a
pretty bum reporter. If he weren't your son— [ashamed again] No, that's not true! (LDJ, I. p. 2015)
Regarding the role of the father as the big Other in shaping his sons' desires and destiny, Abbotson argues that "Tyson
pushes his sons to make something of their lives to compensate, but usually in the wrong direction, exploiting rather
than assisting them. James despises acting and Edmund sees working on a newspaper as a waste of time" (2005, p. 104).
The desires of the father for them have caused a frustrating life for them.
Another notable case regarding the functioning of the Other in the play is a mother's functioning as the big Other in
Mary's desire to be a nun that has originally been her mother's wish that was later internalized by her – representing her
wish for a perfect place where she could feel secure. Mary's mother was a strictly religious person who did not like her
daughter to get married, as Mary relates to James: "My mother didn't. She was very pious and strict. I think she was a
little jealous. She didn't approve of my marrying—especially an actor. I think she hoped I would become a nun" (LDJ,
III. P. 2052). After a while, however, it becomes her own desire, as she internalizes her mother's wish. This time Mother
Elizabeth acts as the big Other who decides for her by asking her to go away and experience the world for a while.
Though she does not like to do so, she has to accept it as the big Other's order.




Work Citation


Ali, Emman. “Lacanian Orders in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, www.academia.edu/3111234/Lacanian_Orders_in_Eugene_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

Lacan's Psychoanalysis LDJN

• Lacan's Psychoanalysis

Lacan holds that human psyche is formed of three orders (the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real) which mold the
unconscious mind and motivate human actions and reactions. He believes that in the formation of the first psychic
order, the Imaginary, "the child, in the presence of his mother, begins to manifest his needs. It is here that he encounters
the mother as a speaking subject" (S5, 1957, p. 425). It is a world of satisfaction for the child where" the infant emerges
from satisfaction, and not from frustration, to construct a world" (p. 424) that is the realm of ideal completeness in
which the child feels no lack or loss, since it is governed by the illusive joyful unity of the child and its mother.
Moreover there are no traces of language in this order. When the child is six-month old, Lacan holds, it starts to
distinguish itself from its mother in a phase that Lacan terms the Mirror Stage in which the child sees its own image
distinct from that of its mother, and thereby the illusion of unity with the mother crumbles down.
In the next stage, Lacan argues, the Symbolic Order is formed in the child's mind. In contrast to the Imaginary, the
Symbolic is an order in which the identity of the subject is formed, since it is associated with language and signs.
Whereas mother governs the Imaginary Order, the symbolic Order is the territory of father whose laws and rules shape
the identity of the child. In the Imaginary Order, the desire of the mother is mediation necessary for the child, whereas
this mediation is "precisely given by the position of the father in the symbolic order" (S5, 1957, p. 163). The Symbolic
Order is also the realm of the Other presented by the law of the father and the ideology in which the child learns to
speak. Lacan holds that the meaning of "the Other as another subject" is strictly secondary to the meaning of "the Other
as Symbolic Order", since "the Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted"
(S3, 1955, p. 274).
Another key notion in Lacan's terminology is Object petit a which is the lack created by the subject's entry into the
Symbolic – the lack which will never be compensated for and attained, since the subject has fallen into the web of
language and its floating signifiers. From the moment the subject feels lack, Lacan argues, s/he is in search of what is
lacked, in search of satisfying it by different means such as knowledge, love and sexual fulfillment. Regarding those
means, he affirms that ''the Object petit a ... serves as a symbol of the lack. It must be an object firstly separable and
secondly that has some relation to the lack'' (S11, 1964, p. 112). However as we live in the world of signs and
ideologies, no desire can bring us back to the initial Imaginary world of completeness.
The Real Order in Lacanian terminology resists representation, as it emerges as something outside language, resisting
"symbolization absolutely" (S1, 1953, p. 66). This remains a constant theme through the rest of Lacan's work and leads
him to link the Real with the concept of impossibility. He believes that the "Real is the impossible" (S11, 1964, p. 167),
because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to engage the Symbolic Order, and impossible to attain. The Real is an
unknown zone, as Homer tries to define it: "exists at the limit of this socio-symbolic universe and is in constant tension
with it" (2005, p. 81). It is the most inaccessible part of human psyche that cannot be experienced, since nothing real
exists in the Symbolic Order, Lacan argues, and what we see as reality is just ideology imposed by the Other on us.
However he holds that we can experiences the Real in the fleeting moments of joy and terror (Jouissance) or in our
traumas which cut the process of signification and representation. These feelings of disturbance and sufferings, as
Booker calls them, place the person in the Real which is "available to consciousness only in extremely brief and fleeting
moments of joy and terror that Lacan describes as Jouissance" (1996, p. 35)

•  A Lacanian Reading of Long Day's Journey into Night

Lacan's key concepts such as the Imaginary Order, the Symbolic Order, the Real Order, the Other representing the law
of the father, Object petit a, desire and lack are traceable in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1941). The play
dramatizes one day of Tyron family's life through which the personalities of its members are revealed via their
memories and also their disputes with each other. O'Neill shows that the mind of all four members of the family is
haunted by the past, and all suffer from some lacks they try to compensate for by such means as drinking alcohol, using
morphine, acting as an actor or a man of literature, while they constantly fail to do so, as they are entangled in the web
of ideology and the law of the Other imposed on them, though in different ways. The members of the family make
efforts to escape from the unbearable reality of their life to experience the Lacanian Real which remains, however,
impossible to experience throughout the play.
One of the noteworthy features of O'Neill's play is the fogginess of the stage throughout the play that creates a gloomy
atmosphere, and signifies the delving into the unconscious mind, since fog is the symbol of unconsciousness. Lacan
believes the child does not acquire the unconscious till its initiation into the symbolic world of language wherein all
desires are repressed by the law of the father and hence stored in the unconscious. The fog symbolizes that process for
the whole family that seems to experience the loss, lack and repression of the Symbolic Order. This is somehow
illustrated in the play when Mary the mother of the family expresses her feelings toward the fog in this way to Cathleen (the maid): "hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is
what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore", thus it is "the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It
keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back. But it can't tonight. It's just an ugly sound. It doesn't
remind me of anything" (LDJ, III. P. 2044)ii
.
Mary hates the fog, because it reminds her of the past, happy times to which she cannot return. It seems that the fog has
detached her and other members of the family from the rest of the world, as Jean Chothia argues that "the audience
learns through references in the dialogue and through the repeated sounding of the foghorn in the latter part of the play
that fog has descended on the surrounding world and presses close around the house, isolating its occupants the more
thoroughly" (1998, p. 199). Considering Lacan's ideas, her annoyance of remembering the past, besides the fogginess
of the stage signify loss, lack and repression – all residing in the Symbolic Order where the desire for return to the
Imaginary Order is repressed and stored.
Every character of the Long Day's Journey into Night wishes to re-experience the lost union of the Imaginary Order
which they ultimately find, nonetheless, impossible to regain. As the result of that wish, their mind is obsessively
haunted by the past, as Mary says: "the past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life
won't let us" (LDJ, II. P. 203). The characters seek to fill in the lack they have experienced in their life (after the
Imaginary and through the formation of the Symbolic Order), via such means as poetry, alcohol, and morphine,
however they fail to fill in their lack. Regarding the matter of loss in the play, it has been already been argued by
Shaugnessy that it "confirms the timeless mystery of loss" (2007, p. 68).

Important points

1] Entanglement of characters


2] Traumas and Jouissance


3] The mother's desires to return to the imaginary order


4] Unfulfilled desire of the son's


Work Citation


Ali, Emman. “Lacanian Orders in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, www.academia.edu/3111234/Lacanian_Orders_in_Eugene_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

Gender and power through stylistic devices in macbeth from Goswami Mahirpari

Use of power by male characters macbeth from Goswami Mahirpari

The source of Macbeth

For the primary characters and overall plot of Macbeth, Shakespeare deducted on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, issued in 1577 and 1587. Various publications of Macbeth incorporate portions from Holinshed’s rendition of Macbeth’s life and reign during the century. An addition of Holinshed’s Scottish narratives surrounds upon the vicious act upon King Duff by Donwald, which obviously assured Shakespeare with material for Macbeth’s vicious act upon Duncan  as  Macbeth, Donwald killed the king’s chamberlains on the following morningthe country was plunged into darkness; and horses ate each other.
During the process of comparing Holinshed’s historical account to Macbeth, it is obvious that the whole plot of Shakespeare’s play was ‘borrowed’ from Holinshed with some judicious embellishments and additional departures from his source.

Due to the cohesive correspondence with King James’ religious and political convictions and noting how closely Shakespeare’s play resembles Holinshed’s history, Shakespeare likely does not see the need to corroborate his information with a second source. Further, another historical publication regarding Scotland was available.

Rerum Scoticarum Historia (The History of Scottish Kings) by George Buchanan also gives an accounting of Macbeth and his ascension to the Scottish throne. In his version, he differed from Holinshed regarding the prophetic offerings of the ‘witches’ Although Buchanan’s version mentions a framed within a dreamscape prophesy given to Macbeth,  there is no suggestion of magic or supernatural forces of any kind.
The portrayal of the women who appear in Macbeth’s dream is also radically different from that of Holinshed, and would not fit comfortably into the narrative that Shakespeare was devising for his version of Macbeth’s story.

As equally famous as Macbeth are the weird sisters Shakespeare so skilfully and cunningly portrays as practitioners of witchcraft immersed in the dark and shadowy nether regions of magic and the supernatural.
Macbeth suggests the grimmest and most menacing portrayal of the supernatural with his depiction of the weird sisters. Indeed, in the opening scene of the play, with only the stage direction of Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches, Shakespeare sets the tone of the entire play.
Shakespeare pushes Lady Macbeth’s oddity so far as to reverse Macbeth’s gender roles. In the play, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is considered nearly sinister in comparison with her husband, Macbeth, a perception that is supported by such assertions as from the lips of her character. Indeed, Macbeth demonstrates considerably less determination than his wife does.


Work Citation

1]Feraru, Cornelia. “Macbeth.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/36458519/Macbeth.

Use of power by female characters

The characters of Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff and the three ‘weird sisters’ offers three different views of women and they perform three different game retirements.
Lady Macbeth is one of the most discussed characters in literature.
Contrary to many of the female characters created by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Lady Macbeth is powerful and power hungry, willing to manipulate her husband to make sure that the crown of Scotland stand on his head. It schools him on how to behave and even invoke dark spirits to ‘unsex’ them and any female inclination she might have that might cause her to behave in a vulnerable or feminine manner.
Lady Macbeth, until the end of the play is broken and disturbed. Her role in ‘Macbeth’ seems to warn desperate women regarding the fate that awaits them if they try to ‘escape’ their natural femininity.
It is safe to call Lady Macduff  ‘the dramatic film’ of Lady Macbeth, because her behaviour is exactly the opposite of Macbeth’s wife.
Lady Macduff’s husband flees Scotland in fear of his life, but leaves a trace. It does criticize the actions of her husband, but holds her ground loyal to their family home, where she and her son are murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen. She personifies all the qualities of ‘feminism’ which Lady Macbeth has no knowledge: maternal love, devotion and steadfast passive acceptance.
‘The weird sisters’ represent a fascination across Europe, and at the same time repulsion towards witches in Shakespeare’s day.
Women from all over Europe were charged and convicted of performing witchcraft. Those who were killed were sentenced for their crimes.
Shakespeare’s audience, for the most part, would have fully believed, and may have been appalled the witches in Macbeth. Their presence certainly added to the atmosphere of ‘creepiness’. It is interesting to note that they were hunted down, for the most part, it targeted only women and many have denounced the actions of those who persecuted a ‘witch’ as an attempt to punish women who were seen by the community as too independent or ‘weird ‘.
The maternal power in Macbeth  is not embodied in the figure of a particular mother; it is instead diffused throughout the play, evoked primarily by the figures of the witches and Lady Macbeth.
Largely through Macbeth’s relationship to them, the play becomes  a representation of primitive fears about male identity and autonomy itself, about those looming female presences who threaten to control one’s actions and one’s mind, to constitute one’s very self, even at a distance. When Macbeth’s first words echo those we have already heard the witches speak:
So fair and foul a day I have not seen
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Finding ourselves in a realm with doubts upon the very possibility of autonomous identity, in the end, the play will reimagine autonomous male identity, throughout the ruthless excision of all female presence, its own peculiar satisfaction of the witches’ prophecy.




Work Citation

1]
Feraru, Cornelia. “Macbeth.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/36458519/Macbeth.

Values and morality in Macbeth

Shakespeare’s Macbeth was born due to a feeling regarding ambition. Without any hesitation, ambition represents an amazing interior force to spread upon the individual in order to rise with strength in life just when it is aimed in the proper way.
Macbeth decides based on an ambition to become King though he does it by killing the present ruler, who is his kinsman, who shown only love and generosity, likewise, he is a visitor to his house.
Macbeth takes into considerations all these factors and deliberates to introduce the manner of killing the king. He indeed  realizes that his role is to be a good host instead of taking a life. Though his wife, Lady Macbeth overpowers him and ‘gives a hand’ in committing the crime, one can realize who the real monster is. She is harsh and ingenious without any type of womanly qualities. Due to her restless desire to rule over the country she puts behind and the qualities regarding moral values and concentrates only upon the goal.. Not only is her end unfair though she also employs most unfair methods to achieve it.
A proverb adequately  applies to her: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ She has to bear the consequences for her evil deed, goes insane and commits suicide. Those who commit such deeds suffer on a mental and spiritual level, regardless of how hard they might try to conceal their real condition. Ergo ‘look before you leap’ is a good advice to take into consideration for all and sundry who undertake some task. 
Macbeth believes the witches’ prophesies, encounters them as they support his secret ambitious desire. In any play, having contact with evil surroundings, either natural or supernatural, never results well. It is the ‘recipe’ for  disaster and inevitably death.
Often, we see and read in the media stories revealing innocent individuals being killed, even though the foul deed is dreadful for any normal human being. A spouse can form or mar the life of the other spouse.
Lady Macbeth paths the way for her husband to his undoing as a result of the fact that she dominates him fully.
A woman should reveal her strengths or weaknesses  in her relationship with her other half. Those two should be at the same level. Neither should she take a bow in front of him unnecessarily nor make him feel empowered.




Work Citation

1]Feraru, Cornelia. “Macbeth.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/36458519/Macbeth.