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.

Power and duplicity Macbeth

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reveals the tragic results of Macbeth’s craving for power. Revealed as an honorary worthy and loyal soldier, and filled with goodness and respect, Macbeth’s ‘obsessive’ ambition to become King follows the end of the dignified King Duncan.  Macbeth’s kingship is nothing but a supreme form of derision.
Power becomes psychosis, and at ‘night’ Macbeth moves forward to madness, a madness of a king which cannot escape and takes the form of obsessive desire mined by fear.
The combination of power and ambition blinding man reappears in many of Shakespeare’s works. The same manner in which this combination played an important role in Julius Caesar for instance, the impetuous effects of ambition and power also affect the main in Shakespeare’s disputed play in the this paper.
Ambition has the capacity to highly lead a character into accomplishing amazing goals in life.  Still, when it is taken too far, ambition can become a character’s main end leading flaw which ultimately ends his road for success.
Throughout the play, Macbeth is seen nonstop trying to reach more goals in life all determined  from the main prophecy that as being a king.
The first time ambition plays a harmful role in Macbeth’s quest for power is when he in fact plans to kill the king.  King Duncan, the present king when Macbeth hears the prophecy, honours Macbeth with great fervour after his many military accomplishments in the name of Scotland.  Because Macbeth desires kingship over his own morals, he kills Duncan in the night after honouring Duncan with a feast.
The second time Macbeth’s ambition gets the best of him occurs when he orders the death of both Banquo and Macduff’s family.  In killing these people, specifically Macduff’s family, Macbeth shows his true ambition of reigning as king by killing all possible threats to his reign displaying such a state of paranoia.  This ambition in Macbeth’s life eventually leads to his fall from power because he cannot control its influences.  If Macbeth had not given in to the murderous temptations and deceptive actions that came from his ambition for power, then he might have had a peaceful and successful rule as king of Scotland. During the last moments of a Macbeth performance on stage, as he feels himself increasingly cornered  by enemies
The duplicity of Macbeth’s repeated questionits capacity to mean both itself and its oppositecarries such weight at the end of the play, because the whole of the play represents in very powerful form both the fantasy of a virtually absolute and destructive maternal power and the fantasy of  absolute escape from this power; the peculiar texture of the end of the play is generated partly by the tension between these two fantasies.




Work Citation

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

The role of fate in Macbeth

Numerous manners in which one can define fate exist. According to Websters Dictionary, it is a power that supposedly predetermines events, it is synonymous to destiny, suggesting that some actions are inevitable. Regarding Shakespeares Macbeth, fate has a vital role in the lives of characters as Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Banquo.
The characters lives have been dominated in terms of fate. Each situation they found themselves, that happened/didn't happen to them was a straightforward result of fates layout for them. A situation which applies in real life.
After reading the play for the first time, one might think why Macbeth falls to the depths of evil that he does.  In a superficial manner, Macbeth might appear as a victim of fate, including  destructive characters such as the witches and his wife leading him in the arms of evil acts.  Still, Macbeth is no victim of fate. What goes around comes around!  In exchange, he allows destructive elements influence him, lending in a path of murder.  Hence, even though Macbeth is influenced by the witches and Lady Macbeth, in the end, he performs as an agent of free will.
Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.
Surrounded by all the female characters, Macbeth takes into consideration murder as a way to accomplish his kinghood: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical.
After a closer look at Macbeth from a cause and effect standpoint, the witches appear to be an starting point of Macbeths tragedy.
In conclusion, it is Macbeths own fault for allowing this prophecy to take over him into committing murder and corruption.
From a metaphoric point of view, the witches gave Macbeth something to start with, a fire for instance,  but Macbeth lit himself on fire and kept feeding with fuel that fire until the point in which he was completely doomed. Therefore, Macbeth being a victim of fate is hardly believed, him being  a victim of circumstance is quite absurd.  In return, Macbeth “builds brick by brick his own tragic doom, murdering his way to his demise without any strings attached.




Work Citation

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

The Plague

Here I am sharing my point of view about task and it's just point of view ( opinion) and it's my reading and that kind of possibility are there that we can interpreted or illustrate with the other way also.

About French resistance

• Autobiography work 

Maybe this work is talk about existentialism and observability.

1]  But according to me it's personal autobiographycal element , we can find it also.

In this context, Camus's allegory of the wartime occupation of France reopened a painful chapter in the recent French past, but in an indirect and ostensibly apolitical key. It thus avoided arousing partisan hackles, except at the extremes of left and right, and took up sensitive topics without provoking a refusal to listen. Had the novel appeared in 1945, the angry, partisan mood of revenge would have drowned its moderate reflections on justice and responsibility. Had it been delayed until the 1950s, its subject-matter would probably have been overtaken by new alignments born of the cold war.

Oran, the setting for the novel, was a city Camus knew well and cordially disliked, in contrast to his much-loved home town of Algiers. He found it boring and materialistic and his memories of it were further shaped by the fact that his tuberculosis took a turn for the worse during his stay there. This involuntary deprivation of everything that Camus most loved about his Algerian birthplace - the sand, the sea, physical exercise and the Mediterranean sense of ease - was compounded when he was sent to the French countryside to convalesce. The Massif Central of France is tranquil and bracing, and the remote village where Camus arrived in August 1942 might be thought the ideal setting for a writer. But 12 weeks later, in November 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa. The Germans responded by occupying the whole of southern France (hitherto governed from Vichy by Pétain's puppet government) and Algeria was cut off from the continent. Camus was thenceforth separated not just from his homeland but also from his mother and his wife, and would not see them again until the Germans had been defeated. Illness, exile and separation were thus present in Camus's life as in his novel, and his reflections upon them form a vital counterpoint to the allegory.

Camus put himself directly into the characters of the novel, using three of them in particular to represent his moral perspective. Rambert, the young journalist cut off from his wife in Paris, is initially desperate to escape the quarantined city. His obsession with his personal suffering makes him indifferent to the larger tragedy, from which he feels quite detached - he is not, after all, a citizen of Oran, but was caught there by chance. It is on the eve of his getaway that he realises how, despite himself, he has become part of the community and shares its fate; ignoring the risk and in the face of his earlier, selfish needs, he remains in Oran and joins the "health teams". From a purely private resistance against misfortune he has graduated to the solidarity of a collective resistance against the common scourge.

Camus's identification with Dr Rieux echoes his shifting mood in these years. Rieux is a man who, faced with suffering and a common crisis, does what he must and becomes a leader and an example, not out of heroic courage or careful reasoning, but rather from a sort of necessary optimism. By the late 1940s Camus was exhausted and depressed at the burden of expectations placed on him as a public intellectual: as he confided to his notebooks, "everyone wants the man who is still searching to have reached his conclusions". From the "existentialist" philosopher (a tag that Camus always disliked), people awaited a polished worldview; but Camus had none to offer. As he expressed it through Rieux, he was "weary of the world in which he lived"; all he could offer with any certainty was "some feeling for his fellow men and [he was] determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise".

Dr Rieux does the right thing just because he sees clearly what needs doing. In Tarrou, Camus invested a more developed exposition of his moral thinking. Tarrou, like Camus, is in his mid-30s; he left home, by his own account, in disgust at his father's advocacy of the death penalty - a subject of intense concern to Camus and on which he wrote widely in the postwar years. Tarrou has reflected painfully upon his past life and commitments, and his confession to Rieux is at the heart of the novel's moral message: "I thought I was struggling against the plague. I learned that I had indirectly supported the deaths of thousands of men, that I had even caused their deaths by approving the actions and principles that inevitably led to them."

This passage can be read as Camus's own rueful reflections upon his passage through the Communist party in Algeria during the 1930s. But Tarrou's conclusions go beyond the admission of political error: "We are all in the plague... All I know is that one must do one's best not to be a plague victim... And this is why I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die."

This is the authentic voice of Albert Camus and it sketches out the position he would take towards ideological dogma, political or judicial murder, and all forms of ethical irresponsibility for the rest of his life - a stance that would later cost him dearly in friends and even influence in the polarised world of the Parisian intelligentsia.

• 2] Importance of being earnest

      This novel is also autobiography work .
The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde's career but also heralded his downfall. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde's lover, planned to present the writer with a bouquet of rotten vegetables and disrupt the show. Wilde was tipped off and Queensberry was refused admission. Their feud came to a climax in court, where Wilde's homosexuality was revealed to the Victorian public and he was sentenced to imprisonment. Despite the play's early success, Wilde's notoriety caused the play to be closed after 86 performances. After his release from prison, he published the play from exile in Paris, but he wrote no further comic or dramatic work.

• 1] Story related some fact.

The text of "The Plague" is divided in 5 part .


At the same way French resistance history divide in 5 part ,  second world war time.

1] 1940 : The refus absurde.

2] 1941: Armed resistance begins.

3] 1992: The struggle in tensifies.

4] 1943: A mass movement emerges.

5] 1944: The height of the resistance.

     This all 5 part shows that novel follow this chronologically all open down will follow by Albert camus that chronicle order is follow in his novel.

•  Character and their representation as a nation.

1] Dr.Bernard Rieux      French resistance

2] Jean Tarrou.         Britain

3] Raymond Rambert.    U.S.A.

4] Joseph Grand.        French Government

5] Father Paneloux.      The great race of Aryan

6] Cottard.                Catholics, Protestan

7] Plague.                 Nazi, Second world war

8] Algerian city of Oran       French Jewish people victimised in second world war
  VictimCitizen of Plague
   

•  Allegorical tone

The novel has been read as an allegorical treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. The Plague represents how the world deals with the philosophical notion of the Absurd, a theory that Camus himself helped to define.


Absalom and Achitophel is a celebrated satirical poem by John Dryden, written in heroic couplets and first published in 1681. The poem tells the Biblical tale of the rebellion of Absalom against King David; in this context it is an allegory used to represent a story contemporary to Dryden, concerning King Charles II and the Exclusion Crisis (1679-1681). The poem also references the Popish Plot (1678) and the Monmouth Rebellion (1685).

• Historical reading

If we won to see historical narration techniques . Then we find that midnight children novel go parallel.


1) here in this novel The talk about second world war and it's focusing on Francis resistance against Nazi or the against the Germany.

2) same way we can find in this novel let's talk about Bangladesh freedom movement and it's war history of 1981

• Metaphysical technique.

In this novel " Plague "  word used for Germany or the second world war.The novel has been read as an allegorical treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II.

• The word earnest

Importance of being earnest in this novel we find that same way the word earnest has double meaning.

The Importance of being Earnest suddenly has a hot and hidden new narrative in which Wilde hides exclusively gay content for his queer audience while simultaneously covering the surface of his play with his regular, socially acceptable, humor, wit and charm. One play, two audiences and here’s how.

The name Ernest was a slang word for a homosexual in the late nineteenth century seen here in a line from a book of gay love poetry by an Oxford classmate of Wilde’s (John Gambril Nicholson) titled Love in Earnest (1882). “While Earnest sets my heart aflame.”

As briefly discussed before, homosexuality in Great Britain was publically shamed and even punishable by law, therefore men had to remain silent about their gay love interests.

Through the naked eye, any audience would understand the play, but they wouldn’t. Coded into the text are gay allusions and humor that perhaps only those in England’s queer community would understand. By doing this he pays homage to his sexuality that has been suppressed unfairly by his government. A bit of a rebel don’t you think? It is the masterful way he creates one play for two audiences that sets him apart from other authors and the memories of readers. No matter how you look at The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde’s works are so amazing you may undoubtedly accumulate some debt from all your amazon purchases of them, but just remember when it comes to Mr. Wilde detail, it’s always worth taking a second look.

• Work Citation

 1]. Judt, Tony. “A Hero for Our Times.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Nov. 2001, www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/17/albertcamus.

2]  “French Resistance.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Apr. 2020, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resistance.

3]. “The Plague.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 May 2020, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague.

4] “Absalom and Achitophel.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Mar. 2020, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalom_and_Achitophel

5] Hunter, W. (n.d.). A Wilde Coincidence: Gay Theory and The Importance of Being Earnest. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/31944435/A_Wilde_Coincidence_Gay_Theory_and_The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest

The Rover and important themes Marriage and prostitution

The Rover and important themes marriage, prostitution from Goswami Mahirpari





Work Citation • 
Martinez, Raquel. “Marriage and Prostitution in Aphra Behn's The Rover.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/14064486/Marriage_an d_Prostitution_in_Aphra_Behns_The_Rover.

The Rover and important points

• Hellena and carnival

For Hellena, the carnival has already begun: she is indulging in vigorous colloquial outspokenness—her free expression of oaths (‘Now hang me if...’) and her skills of witty mockery make her a natural sparring partner for the outspoken Willmore. Hellena looks to the carnival to provide her with experience of love and life and, as Elin Diamond aptly expresses it, ‘She exercises her will only by pursuing and winning Willmore, for as it turns out he has the “more” she “would fain know’”. Unlike Lent, carnival is characterised by abundance and easy gratification. Willmore steps ashore in search of ‘Love and mirth’ in a ‘warm climate’ after having been deprived of women and good living on board ship. He may stink ‘of tar and ropes’ ends like a dock or pesthouse’ but he has an abundance of persuasive rhetoric as well as desire: ‘I have a world of love in store. Would you would... take some on’t off my hands.’ While he has been confined to male company at sea, Hellena has been pent up in a nunnery and, like him, she is eager to start making up for lost time: ‘for when I begin, I fancy I shall love like anything; I never tried yet.’ She has no intention of dying ‘a maid, and in a captain’s hands too’, but the liberality of carnival does not mean that she has forgotten the realities of everyday life. Hellena’s gipsy disguise is only a disguise: she does not really want a life of hardship and ‘A cradle full of noise and mischief, with a pack of repentance at my back’. Her plain speaking and scorn of Willmore’s attempts to win her persuade him into a marriage ‘bargain’ which, although both enter defensively, she has engineered. Perhaps marriage is as unattractive to her as it is to Willmore but, without it, the freedom to explore her sexual desires could take her back to the convent as an abandoned, unmarriageable young woman, with or without a child. Marriage may have its faults but a nunnery has few pleasures for a woman of her nature.

• Double standards in characters :- 

The Rover’s carnival setting highlights the double standards normally practised by both men and women. A society in which rich old men take young wives they cannot satisfy encourages the latter to ‘ramble to supply the defects of some grave impotent husband’ and allows women like Lucetta to use this as a cover for deception and robbery. When, as Belvile insists, there are wealthy ‘whores’ who do not fit the traditional stereotype, and wealthy wives doing much the same but without the fee, how is a man like Blunt to discern whether he is predator or prey?

Why yes, sir, they are whores, though they’ll neither entertain you with drinking, swearing, or bawdry; are whores in all those gay clothes and right jewels... with those great houses richly furnished... are whores, and arrant ones.

The men perpetuate a situation where the honour of their own women is valued and fiercely defended, but a woman without an effective protector is seen as fair game or, as Willmore puts it, ‘another prize’. When circumstances temporarily remove a woman from family or marital protection, the men become victims of each other’s prejudices and lusts. For all his boasting, Frederick has little experience of women; he acts according to the primitive distinctions that governed much male behaviour at the time, ‘I begin to suspect something; and ‘twould anger us vilely to be trussed up for a rape upon a maid of quality, when we only believe we ruffle a harlot.’ The ‘harlot’ is, of course, Florinda: Frederick’s description of her earlier as ‘that damned virtuous woman’ is almost realised.
             The farce, which provokes both laughter and unease as the masked Florinda is physically threatened by one male after another, reaches its climax when her own brother, who has been the fiercest defender of her honour, draws the longest sword in the contest to take possession of her body. Belvile is helpless, and only the timely intervention of Valeria saves the day. The ridiculous situation was brought about by Don Pedro’s insistence that Florinda should marry the man of his choosing rather than her own, and that Hellena should be denied marriage altogether. Finally, Florinda’s match is a fait accompli, and the strain of making a stand against that of Willmore and Hellena is too great. Don Pedro consents in the face of mass resistance, relieved to ‘be free from fears of her honour’. ‘Guard it you now, if you can’, he tells Willmore, ‘I have been a slave to’t long enough.’ Willmore’s advice that ‘a woman’s honour is not worth guarding when she has a mind to part with it’ could be said to be the message of the play.

• Freedom of carnival 

One freedom of carnival is the opportunity to act foolishly without regard to social position. In not opposing his sisters’ marriages, Don Pedro bows to the prevailing pressures of festivity. It is a huge relief for him to relinquish the burden of patriarchal responsibility. Wickedly, Behn allows him to relish his liberation. When we first meet Pedro he is about to put on his masked costume and participate in revels he has forbidden to his sisters. By the end, in forgiving everyone, he has entered into the spirit of equality which characterises carnival life. One by one, male and female alike, the characters venture out: Florinda and Belvile to find each other, Hellena and Valeria to woo husbands, Pedro and Antonio to win Angellica, Blunt to seek an inexpensive woman, and Willmore to take any woman. Those who achieve their desires do so by complicated routes, often involving potential humiliation and risk: others are exposed to ridicule, danger, and defeat. Antonio is wounded, and Belvile, a victim of mistaken identity, is driven to participate in the equivalent of a carnivalesque mock duel. All are free to play the fool for a time, but if any person could be considered to have been elected King of Fools by his companions, that person must be Blunt.

• Blunt and victimize

He is victimised by Lucetta, Philippo, and Sancho in additional ways to those found in Killigrew’s text, where his counterpart, Edwardo, is merely turned out of doors in his drawers in the night and is lost in the city streets by the equivalent of Sancho. Bakhtin notes that carnival hell included, amongst other things, a trap to catch fools, and Behn adds a Rabelaisian touch to Blunt’s debasement by dropping him literally into excrement. On one level the foolish country fop becomes a hero of folk humour when he falls down the trapdoor into the sewer and undergoes a mock journey to the underworld, returning in the tradition of such folk heroes, to tell of the horrors he found there. At another level Blunt’s fate can be seen as a veiled political comment. It is wished on him in I.ii by Frederick when, having noticed Blunt’s disappearance in pursuit of Lucetta, he declares.

• Costume and  carnival

In carnival time costume is crucial, and from the first scene of The Rover characters are changing their clothes and exchanging identities for a variety of purposes. When characters lose control of their state of dress, as in the case of Blunt and, later, of Florinda, who escapes to the garden ‘in an undress’, their vulnerability is apparent. Hellena, however, always appears to have the situation in hand and makes successful transitions from novice’s garb to gipsy costume, and finally to the boy’s clothes she is wearing when Willmore agrees to marry her. Female cross-dressing was popular on the Restoration stage as a means of allowing the audience to view more of the woman playing the part, so Behn may have merely been catering to audience expectations here, but Willmore’s possible associations with the Earl of Rochester and John Hoyle, both of whom pursued men as well as women, probably gave her choice an additional frisson. Historically, there is also a link between women who adopted male attire and certain prostitutes who used such dress to signal their profession. There is no indication that Hellena’s appearance would have been viewed in this way, but the ambiguous natures of costume and masquerade in the play reveal the dangers of judging by appearances.

• In I.ii Belvile explains to Blunt that the ‘fine pretty creatures’ he is admiring ‘are, or would have you think they’re courtesans, who... are to be hired by the month’. By drawing attention in the drama to a confusion that extended from carnival into life beyond the play, Behn makes her audience question notions of respectability and notoriety in relation to women’s sexuality. Nancy Copeland sees Behn’s juxtapositioning of Hellena and Angellica resulting ‘in a narrowing of the distance between virgin and whore that complicates the final rejection of the courtesan and her ultimate exclusion from the play’s comic conclusion’. In many ways these characters are two sides of the same coin: both advertise their attractions to Willmore and pursue him in different fashions; both are willing to subsidise his poverty with money from the same source (Hellena’s fortune comes from her uncle who was Angellica’s ‘Spanish general’); and both offer themselves to him for love. They differ mainly in the way they view that concept in relationships between men and women. Ironically, the worldly courtesan is less astute than the convent girl in assessing the nature of a rover like Willmore. In depriving Angellica of her man, Behn is not taking a moral stand: Angellica, the romantic, must give way to Hellena, the realist, who will provide her revenge. Angellica’s future is left undetermined. The opportunity Behn gives her to express herself so eloquently and the sympathy this provokes on her behalf are apt reminders that love, like carnival madness, has its darker side—and that, in carnival, everyone has a voice.

Work Citation


The Rover. (2020, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rover

The Rover -" The victimisation of prostitutes "

Victimisation of prostitutes the rover. from Goswami Mahirpari



Work Citation


The Rover. (2020, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rover

Important points for - The Rover

• Characters and History

The play’s period setting in the 1650s is very significant. Cromwell’s Protectorate had suppressed pastimes and sports and, to Royalists, the period must have seemed like an indefinite extension of Lent. Joining in the festivities of carnival which were denied them at home, exiled cavaliers whiled away the time until the new order of the once-revolutionary Parliamentarians could be overthrown. Instead of being a wealthy, extravagant elite, the exiles had lost lands and money: they were now displaced and marginalised in foreign parts, and Behn’s play continually stresses their ‘outsider’ status. Willmore is not just a rover—a pirate, one who wanders, an inconstant lover—he is a ‘Tramontana rover’, which, apart from signifying someone uncouth, indicates a foreigner or stranger. In fact, most of the characters are outsiders of one kind or another: Naples is under Spanish rule, Angellica Bianca is introduced as a native of Padua, even the English are divided into the impecunious cosmopolitan cavaliers and the wealthy traveller from the country, whom they befriend but constantly taunt because he never committed himself politically and kept his privileges and estate. Established incomers prey upon more recent arrivals: Lucetta exploits Blunt’s ignorance of Naples and of her ways—though she does worry that her treatment of him may put paid to future dealings with foreigners if word gets around. The protagonists, then, are all away from their home ground and are vulnerable because of this. The usual social hierarchies are inverted. The Spanish, old enemies of the English, are either in power officially (Don Antonio is the viceroy’s son) or unofficially (Philippo takes the spoils Lucetta tricks from Blunt and reminds us of the old quarrel about the Spanish Armada in his reference to ‘old Queen Bess’s’ gold and the ‘quarrel... since eighty-eight.’ The English, who might have been gentlemen at home, are poor, riotous, and often despised abroad.

• Behn’s women characters:-

 Behn’s women are more certain of their intrinsic worth than Killigrew’s female characters. They reserve the right to adjust their monetary price as it suits them, being more financially secure than many of the men in the play. Even the upright Belvile is dependent on marrying into money (the box of jewels which Florinda, his Spanish love, hides in the garden may be a metaphor for the virtue she has so much difficulty preserving, but since Jessica’s flight to Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it is also a symbol of the defiant woman who breaks through family and cultural opposition to give herself and her wealth to the man of her choice). The woman-shy Frederick also has his future determined by Florinda, who tells him:

I’ll be reconciled to you on one condition—that you’ll follow the example of your friend in marrying a maid that does not hate you, and whose fortune (I believe) will not be unwelcome to you.

This world, where women can take the initiative, is the world of carnival. It is a time of misrule; everything is turned upside down, prohibitions are temporarily removed, and privileges and rank suspended. Everyone, however different, can be integrated by joining in. As Bakhtin wrote:

Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.

• Lucetta :-

Unlike Thomaso, The Rover does not begin by focusing on the men; it opens with Hellena and Florinda discussing their lack of independence. Both women display the confidence to have opinions and desires—and to express them. Only Lucetta, of all the females in the play, seems unable to do this—perhaps because she merely exploits the carnival spirit for financial gain at the command of Philippo and is always under his control. She never manages to break free and act as she would wish. As she tells him, speaking of Blunt: ‘And art thou not an unmerciful rogue, not to afford him one night for all this? I should not have been such a Jew’. But she is not allowed to follow her own desires because, as Philippo reminds her, he wants ‘to keep as much of thee as I can to myself. Lucetta, like Angellica, demonstrates how difficult it is for women—especially kept women and prostitutes—to retain their sexual freedom. Dependent on men financially for their survival, they cannot afford the luxury of dispensing favours at will. Angellica, with her greater independence and wealth, fares better than Lucetta. She also, like Hellena and Florinda, has the advantage of a female ally.

• Supportive womon character.

Her woman, Moretta, is probably motivated more by economic considerations than emotional attachment, but we feel sure that when Angellica finally turns her back on Willmore, Moretta will be there to help her return to her old, confident state. Similarly, in I.i. Hellena fiercely takes her sister’s part in criticising their father’s wishes and her brother’s intentions to carry them out; later, Valeria rushes to the rescue when Hellena and Florinda find themselves under threat. Supportive, energetic women are Behn’s speciality.

• Daring , Dialogue :-

Behn has been credited with creating more daring dialogue between the sexes than many of her male contemporaries. In The Rover this could be due in part to her use of Killigrew’s text (which is freer than most in this respect) and particularly to her reassignment to Hellena of certain speeches which Killigrew allocated to a male character—but the freedom with which her men and women converse is also due to the way in which another aspect of carnival is allowed to flourish. Hellena has already entered fully into its spirit when the play opens, ‘Nay, I’m resolved to provide myself this carnival, if there be e’er a handsome proper fellow of my humour above ground, though I ask first.’ She has resolved to find her own man and initiate a relationship: her father and brother may be planning to save the cost of a dowry by placing her in a convent, but she is quite aware of what she has to offer—and to gain by making other plans. Her sister, Florinda, has already determined to defy their father and refuses to marry ‘the rich old Don Vincentio’, being equally sure of her worth: ‘I shall let him see I understand better what’s due to my beauty, birth, and fortune, and more—to my soul, than to obey those unjust commands.’



Work Citation


The Rover. (2020, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rover

Performative space - The Rover

• The setting of carnival time in Naples in Aphra Behn’s play The Rover allows two sets of characters to explore their sexual desires in a “performative space” that grants them an unusual amount of freedom from external constraint, from public view, and from suffering the consequences of their actions. The term “performative space” refers to the way that characters on and off the stage respond to differing expectations that are associated with place and dress. The Rover explores three performative spaces: the carnival world, the theater, and London society. Carnival time is the epitome of a special performative space. Carnival goers for various reasons take advantage of the anonymity of this masked affair to engage in relationships that would otherwise be denied to them, because of their class or gender. Since the carnival represents the world turned upside down, carnival time in Naples is a time for experimenting with role reversals. 

•  During carnival time, a mood of licentiousness descends upon Naples, a city that in the seventeenth century was not known for its prudishness in the first place. Wearing costumes and masks to hide their identities, the participants are free to act on impulses they would otherwise suppress. The carnival offers a perfect opportunity for two unmarried sisters, according to critic Heidi Hutner in “Revisioning the Female Boyd,” to “ramble: to leave the house, to speak their minds, to approach men of their choice.” Going against her brother’s command that she be locked up in the house until Lent, Hellena goes to the carnival to find a man and feel “the vanity and power” of being desirable to him. Dressed as a gypsy, she acts like one, displaying her body provocatively and pretending to read Willmore’s palm, while hiding behind her mask. The freedom of carnival time lets her act upon impulses that a young lady would not normally indulge.

• For the male characters, too, carnival time gives people license to act out sexual desires. As Willmore exclaims to his fellow cavaliers, “’tis a kind of legal authorized fornication, where the men are not chid for’t, nor the women despised, as among our dull English.” They, too, wear masks to avoid being held accountable for the consequences of their dallying. Captain Willmore and his friends plan to take advantage of the sexual freedoms of young ladies in a carnival mood. The men drink, too, and drunkenness opens up a performative space that excuses swinish behavior. When Willmore blames his attempted rape of Florinda on the “influence” of the “cursed sack” he had been drinking, the others readily accept this excuse. But it is not just drink that influences Willmore: he responds to the influence of the performative space he occupies. The setting of the carnival is a catalyst that compels the characters to act compulsively. 

Behn fashioned her Hellena after Shakespeare’s Helena, not the Hellena from Thomas Killigrew’s play Thomaso; or, The Wanderer, the play she adapted. Behn replaced Killigrew’s Hellena, “an old decayed blind, out of fashion whore... that has neither teeth nor eyes,” with a young miss who knows herself to be “well shaped,” “clean-limbed,” and “sweet-breathed.” The playwright also reversed the old Hellena’s fortune so that the young noblewoman could express what Behn (and the aging prostitute) knew to be true: that “a handsome woman has a great deal to do while her face is good.” Therefore, Behn’s Hellena dons the costume and inhabits the performative space of a prostitute, pinning advertisements to her clothing to underscore her purpose, in case anyone missed it. To all eyes, Hellena is a whore. From the perspective of the viewer, the “play-acting... and reality... collapse into each other, and the boundaries of performative and essential self becomes indistinct,” as Derek Hughes explains in his work The Theatre of Aphra Behn. To Willmore, Hellena really is his “gipsie girl,” and he does not comprehend that she is a titled lady until he hears it twice.



For Hellena’s part, performance and reality have merged, for she continues the relationship as a hybrid of her gypsy persona with her identity of a mischievous nun-to-be. She has merged the two identities by enacting the gypsy part in the performative space of the carnival, and the resultant woman is equal to the challenge of taming the Rover’s wandering habits. Although, as Heidi Hutner points out, she is “brought back into the patriarchal fold,” when she requires and gets her brother’s approval, she occupies her own performative space within the marriage. In The Rover, Behn raises significant questions about the extent to which the social/sexual self truly represents the essential self. In seventeenth-century London, the traditional performative space for marriageable women was confining; even a gypsy, common prostitute, or high-priced courtesan had more freedom. Behn also,

“THE SETTING OF CARNIVAL TIME IN NAPLES IN APHRA BEHN’S PLAY THE ROVER ALLOWS TWO SETS OF CHARACTERS TO EXPLORE THEIR SEXUAL DESIRES IN A ‘PERFORMATIVE SPACE’ THAT GRANTS THEM AN UNUSUAL AMOUNT OF FREEDOM FROM EXTERNAL CONSTRAINT, FROM PUBLIC VIEW, AND FROM SUFFERING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS.”

 demonstrated that in the courtship marketplace it was often difficult to distinguish one mode of performance from the other, for the lady and the prostitute had to employ similar tactics to get by in life.

As in the carnival, within the performative space of the theater itself, it was also often difficult to distinguish between prostitute and lady of quality. The theater was the other public forum where masked prostitutes masqueraded as ladies of quality. In the theater, they could rub shoulders with women of quality, some of whom wore masks to playact as prostitutes. Thus, the audience was, in some ways, another world turned upside down. Charles II had reinstated the theater after twenty years of grim Puritan suppression, and here he wanted to celebrate his triumph over them. Many of the plays he supported legitimized his own licentious behavior by staging it for the audience to celebrate with him. His interest in theater created a new performative space for women, too, one that was both liberating and problematic. He had proclaimed through an act of Parliament that women must play women’s roles, thus inventing the career of the actress. However, by putting themselves on display in this fashion, they were instantly considered prostitutes, and the treatment they received at the hands of gentlemen at the back door of the theater usually succeeded in transforming them into such. Meanwhile, in the audience, prostitutes wearing masks were easily confused with ladies of quality, also wearing masks. The mask lent the woman an air of mystery and sophistication that was useful to prostitutes and ladies alike. However, as Anne Russell points out in her introduction to the Broadview edition of The Rover, “the distinctions between prostitutes and ‘respectable women’ became blurred. The mask became a sign of the prostitute but a sign which, with its offer of anonymity, could offer some freedom from conventional roles for any woman who wore it.” That inveterate playgoer of the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys, frequently observed the confusion. In one diary entry, he records his reaction to a lovely woman in a mask, saying that “one of the ladies would, and did, sit with her mask on all the play; and being exceedingly witty as ever I heard a woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; but was, I believe, a virtuous woman and of quality.... A more pleasant rencontre I never heard. But by that means lost the pleasure of the play wholly.” He was more entertained by the masked audience member than he was by the play, and it would have been difficult for him to ignore her, since the Restoration theater was lit uniformly, such that the audience was as visible as the play. Sophisticated banter and sexually provocative behavior being in fashion at this time, the theater was itself a performative space for enacting, watching, and practicing the sophisticated actions of the royal court. Prostitutes could learn to be witty, like the lady Pepys observed, and ladies could learn how to display themselves, like—and not like—prostitutes.

To a large extent, Aphra Behn produced exactly what Charles II and his audience wanted: an erotic and sophisticated entertainment. Yet, because of the social bias against female playwrights, she could not at first take credit for her achievement. She, too, was “masked,” for in her prologue she refers to the playwright as an anonymous “he,” and she refuses to identify herself as the author of her work. Nevertheless, Behn opened up a new performative space for women writers, not just as “the professional woman writer as a new fangled kind of whore,” as Catherine Gallagher claims in her essay “Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn,” but as a woman writer with, like her heroine, Hellena, the wit and power to control the theatrical performative space through establishing her own ground rules. She created this space, and by doing so, she invited other female writers to populate it.




Work Citation

The Rover. (2020, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rover