The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky        
Like a patient etherized upon a table    
                             —Dante’s Inferno (Canto 27; Lines 61 – 66)

Ezra Pound published  Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or "Prufrock" or "Prufrock Among the Women" (1915),   a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said

"to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment. ( Kathleen McCoy and Judith Harlan’s English Literature From 1785.)"

The epigraph heightens Prufrock's frustration. It refers to the torture of Guido da Montefeltro in the eighth circle of Dante's Inferno.

In the first part of the poem, the man—who thinks “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”—believes people should take the time to choose well thought out decisions, when he says “To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”. He further explains:

 “And indeed there will be time  
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and,    
‘Do I dare?’ …Do I dare Disturb the universe?…” (pg. 110-111).

In contrast, the wise old man’s has another view in the second part of the poem. He reviews his past life by considering other decisions he would have made. He states:

“Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball…”(page 112).

In the famous opening, “the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table," and the simile makes an equation between being spread out and being etherised that continues elsewhere in the poem when the evening, now a bad patient:

 "….. malingers,    
 Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me."

There it "sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers . . . ." This suspension is a rhetorical as well as a spatial and emotional condition:

"…streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent"

lead not to a conclusion but to a question, a question too "overwhelming" even to ask. Phrases like the "muttering retreats / Of restless nights" combine physical blockage, emotional unrest, and rhetorical maundering in an equation that seems to make the human being a combination not of angel and beast but of road-map and Roberts' Rules of Order.

In certain lines, metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the reader's eyes. "The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes" appears clearly to every reader as a cat, but the cat itself is absent, represented explicitly only in parts—back, muzzle, tongue—and by its actions—licking, slipping, leaping, curling. The metaphor has in a sense been hollowed out to be replaced by a series of metonyms, and thus it stands as a rhetorical introduction to what follows. The people in the poem also appear as disembodied parts or ghostly actions. They are the:

"Faces that you meet,"     
"Hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate,"        
"Arms that are braceleted and white and bare,”        
"Eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase."

Prufrock himself fears such a reduction, to use Kenneth Burke's term for the effect of metonymy. The dread questions "How his hair is growing thin!" and "But how his arms and legs are thin" reduce Prufrock to certain body parts, the thinness of which stands in for the diminution caused by the rhetorical figures. What Prufrock fears has already been accomplished by his own rhetoric.

The physical and psychological enervation of Eliot's early personae may be read in part as correlatives of his literary situation; this is the way Prufrock, for example, states his problem:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—       
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,           
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,        
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,  
Then how should I begin 
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?   
          And how should I presume?

Prufrock does not know how to presume to begin to speak, both because he knows "all already"—this is the burden of his lament—and because he is already known, formulated. His consciousness of the other's eye—I haunts his language at its source: "Let us go then, you and I." An "I" who addresses a "you" becomes subject to the laws of communication, and his voice is subsumed by expression. 

In this poem the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to metonymize. This is seen with this example:

In the room the women come and go   
Talking of Michelangelo.

Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the body over the whole.

An oddly similar relationship of part to whole governs Prufrock's conception of time. In a burst of confidence he asserts, "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." Yet he seems to quail before the very amplitude of possibility contained in time, so that all these decisions and revisions are foreclosed before they can be made. Thus Prufrock's prospective confidence in the fullness of time becomes a retrospective conviction that "I have known them an already, known them all: -- / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. . . ." To know "all" already is to be paralyzed, disabled, because "all" is not full of possibility but paradoxically empty, constituted as it is by pure repetition, part on part on part. In a figure that exactly parallels the bodily metonymies, time becomes a collection of individual parts, just as the poem's human denizens had been little more than parts: "And I have known the eyes already, known them all"; "And I have known the arms already known them all." The instantaneous movement from part to whole, from eyes, arms, evenings, mornings, to "all," expresses the emptiness between, the gap between dispersed parts and an oppressive whole made of purely serial repetition. The very reduction of human beings to parts of themselves and of time to episodes makes it impossible to conceive of any whole different from this empty, repetitious "an." As Burke says, metonymy substitutes quantity for quality, so that instead of living life Prufrock feels "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Prufrock's paralysis follows naturally from this subjectivizing of everything. If each consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock has no hope of being understood by others. "No experience," says Bradley in a phrase Eliot quotes, "can lie open to inspection from outside" (KE, 203). Prufrock's vision is incommunicable, and whatever he says to the lady will be answered by, "That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all" (CP, 6). The lady is also imprisoned in her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles, become one. Each is impenetrable to the other.

One of the puzzles of the poem is the question as to whether Prufrock ever leaves his room. It appears that he does not, so infirm is his will, so ready "for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions,/Before the taking of a toast and tea" (CP, 4). In another sense Prufrock would be unable to go anywhere, however hard he tried. If all space has been assimilated into his mind, then spatial movement would really be movement in the same place, like a man running in a dream. Memories, ironic echoes of earlier poetry, present sensations, anticipations of what he might do in the future ("I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" [CP, 71)--these are equally present. There is a systematic confusion of tenses and times in the poem, so that it is difficult to tell if certain images exist in past, present, future. Prufrock begins by talking of his visit to the lady as something yet to be done, and later talks of his failure to make the visit as something long past ("And would it have been worth it, after all,/Would it have been worth while" (CP, 61). Like the women talking of Michelangelo, he exists in an eternal present, a frozen time in which everything that might possibly happen to him is as if it had already happened: "For I have known them all already, known them all" (CP, 4)

 The general fragmentation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is obvious and notorious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls the modern "transition from metaphor to metonymy: unable any longer to totalize his experience in some heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity." Everything in "Prufrock" trickles away into parts related to one another only by contiguity. Spatial progress in the poem is diffident or deferred, a "scuttling" accomplished by a pair of claws disembodied so violently they remain "ragged." 

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter

A classic like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter “perpetrates bad morals (The Church Review),” takes on the themes of pride, sin and vengeance with a burning passion when Hester:

 “Yonder woman … was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam,”

was publicly branded as an adulterer, the people around town began to think of her as a figure of evil and that she symbolizes all that is wrong in the world:

“But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom.”

Hester Prynne's adultery causes her alienation from the Puritan society in which she lives. After the term of her confinement ends, she moves into a remote, secluded cottage on the outskirts of town; because of this seclusion from society, the Puritans regard her with much curiosity and suspicion:

"Children...would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage window... and discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off with a strange, contagious fear."

There is a catch, however; her husband has been missing for years. Hester is sent to prison, where she gives birth and calls the child Pearl—A born outcast of the infantile world,” for she is her mother's only treasure.

As her punishment, Hester is brought into the marketplace and is forced to wear a Scarlet Letter “A” upon her breast, which she proudly embroiders with gold thread. Hester is satisfied, and ready to lead a quiet life with Pearl, her child, as a seamstress as she had before, but her composure leads us to wonder:

Who is the child's father, and how will he cope with his guilt?

And when the clever husband returns, shall the father survive his venomous wrath?

Arthur Dimmesdale “a real existence on earth,” Hester’s partner in adultery, is a minister, whom the people calls:

"A true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of creed"

The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering but it also results in knowledge. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as "her passport into regions where other women dared not tread," leading her to "speculate" about her society and herself more "boldly" than anyone else in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the "cheating minister," his sin gives him:

"Sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his chest vibrate in unison with theirs."

Prynne and Dimmesdale infringe the seventh commandment which says “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” On the contrary, Hester believes in the sanctity of the love relationship between her and Dimmendale as she says:

“What we did … had a consecration of its own. We felt it so; we said so to each other.”

It is also viewed by the puritan community as "Able, So strong was Hester Prynne with a woman's strength," The letter A is to be precise, also becomes "the cross on a nun's bosom" In keeping with her status as a sister of Mercy, Hester's dark , oriental beauty also undergoes a change:  

"It was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had been cut off.”

Hester is transformed from a sinful woman into an “Angelic Sister of Mercy” and from a dark, voluptuous oriental woman into a nun who deliberately suppresses her youth and beauty.

Why did Hester Prynne keep secrets that ended up hurting everyone? Hester can atone for her sin of adultery, but every day that she keeps the secret of her lover, and the true identity of Roger Chillingworth a secret she is committing a sin.

“Take heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself---the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!”

Another theme is the extreme legalism of the Puritans; rejected Hester spent her life mostly in solitude, and wouldn't go to church and cries:

“There is one worse than even the polluted priest … That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so.”

Now the question comes in the mind, would it not have been better to have his sin revealed? Then, the minister is given another chance to redeem himself but he cowers yet again when Hester and Pearl stand with him Pearl asks: “Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, tomorrow noontide?”

Wild conclusion conclude, Hester Prynne's offense against society occurred seven years earlier, but she remains punished for it. Hester learned to forgive herself for her adultery, but society continues to scorn her for it. (One might remember Jean Valjean's permanent identity as criminal after a single minor crime in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.) Hawthrone seems ready to assert, at times the converse of Christ’s words:

 “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin.”

All in all novel “created an allegorical view of life upon which early Puritan society was based (Yvor Winters).”

Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness

Source: http://literarycriticismjohn.blogspot.in/2012/02/000171-elaine-showalter-s-towards.html

"Towards A Feminist poetics" is Showalter’s important critical essay.  Showalter discusses the following topics in this essay.  They are:

1.     Woman as reader [Feminist Critique],

2.     Woman as writer [Gynocritics],

3.     The problems of Feminist Critique,

4.     Program of Gynocritics, and,

5.     Feminine, Feminist and Female Stages.

1) Woman as reader [Feminist Critique]

According to Elaine Showalter feminism can be divided into two distinct varieties.  The first type is concerned with ‘woman as reader’.  In this concept woman is considered as the consumer of literature produced by male-writers.  She calls it male-produced literature.  Elaine argues that a female reading may change our idea of a given text.  Elaine calls this kind of analysis the feminist critique.  It is a historically grounded inquiry.  Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism.  It also look into the fissures in male constructed literary history.  For example Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, at the time of Julius Caesar has been treated differently by Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw.  Bernard Shaw gives her the role of Caesar’s adopted daughter, whereas Shakespeare considers her Caesar’s concubine.  Feminist critique also concerned with the exploitation and the manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film.  We find advertisements in which women appear in different poses exhibiting part of their body to get more publicity to various consumer products. 

2)Woman as writer [Gynocritics] 

The second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer.  In this concept woman is the producer of textual meaning.  It looks into and discusses themes, genres and structures of literatures by woman.  Woman as writer includes the following subjects:

a)      The psychodynamics of a female creativity,

b)      Linguistics and the problem of a female language,

c)       The collective female literary career,

d)      Literary history, and,

e)      Studies of particular female writers and their works.

As there is no particular term in English for such a branch, Elaine has adopted the French term la gynocritique and modified it as Gynocritics.

The Feminist critique is essentially political and polemical.  It is theoretically affiliated to Marxist sociology and Aesthetics.  Gynocritics is more self contained and experimental.

3) The problems of the Feminist critique

One of the problems of the Feminist critique is that it is male-oriented.  If we study stereotypes women, the sexism of male critics and the limited role the women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced.  We get only experience of whaat men have felt.  In some fields of specialization apprenticeship to the male-theoretician is essential.  That poses another problem, the problem of reluctance or resistance to questioning.  The critic has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable.

4) Program of Gynocritics

The program of Gynocritics is to construct a female frame work for the analysis of women’s literarature.  Another task is to develop new models based on the study of female experience.  It doesn’t support the idea of adopting male models and theories.  Showalter remarks “Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the lenear absolutes of male literary theory, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition.  Elaine hopes to establish a visible world of female culture. 

  

5)Feminine, Feminist and Female stages

In her book “A Literature of Their Own” Elaine Showalter writes on English women writers.  She says that we can see patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition.  Showalter has divided the period of evolution into three stages.  They are: the Feminine, the Feminist, and, the Female stages.

1)      The first phase, the feminine phase dates from about 1840-1880.  During that period women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture.  The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym.  This trend was introduced in England in the 1840’s.  It became a national characteristic of English women writers. During this phase the feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, because of the inferiority complex experienced by female writers. 

2)      The feminist phase lasted about 38 years; from 1882 to 1920.  The New Women movement gained strength—women won the right to vote.  Women writers began to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wrong womanhood.

3)      The latest phase or the third phase is called the female phase ongoing since 1920.  Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest.  Showalter considers that both are signs of dependency. Women show more independent attitudes.  They realize the place of female experience in the process of art and literature.  She considers that there is what she calls autonomous art that can come from women because their experiences are typical and individualistic.  Women began to concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and literature.  The representatives of the female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf even began to think of male and female sentences.  They wrote about masculine journalism and feminine fiction.  They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience.    

Rousseau

Rousseau uses the development of the arts and sciences as a way of describing the fall of man from a "golden age" of a "state of nature". He explains:

When there is no effect, there is no cause to seek. But here [discussing the arts and science] the effect is certain, the depravity real, and our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our sciences and arts toward perfection. [1] 

Therefore, he has drawn a direct link between corruption and the arts and sciences. It seems to me, however, that although he talks of cause and effect, they are quite confused in this work. Powers, writing in 1962, quoted an unnamed American historian who noted:

serious students of [Rousseau's] political philosophy are in complete disagreement as to what he meant. [2]

And Hope Mason is just as blunt:

if we read the Discours without benefit of hindsight it is hard to discern any complete philosophy. [3]

Rousseau's basic point is straightforward: man is corrupt and the arts and sciences have played a role in that corruption. He states in the First Part:

So long as government and law provide for the security and well-being of men in their common life, the arts, literature, and the sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men's breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilized people. [4]

This suggests that Rousseau believes arts and sciences make conformists of us all. He would go further and use the term 'slaves'. And it is the study of arts and sciences that causes us to be "mean, corrupt and miserable." [5] Therefore, he believes that arts and sciences corrupt morals and they are the direct cause of man’s downfall. In the Discourse, he specifically blames certain sciences:

Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices; we should be less doubtful of their advantages, if they had sprung from our virtues. [6]

The arts also come in for criticism. Without "...useless writers and litterateurs… society would be more peaceful and morals less corrupt." [7]

Therefore, Rousseau is clearly making the point that arts and sciences have had a corrupting influence. They are explicitly the cause of corruption. But later he writes: 

It is thus that the dissolution of morals, the necessary consequence of luxury, brings with it in its turn the corruption of taste. [8]

Now, it appears that luxury is the cause of corruption. Earlier, he wrote:

The waste of time is certainly a great evil; but still greater evils attend upon literature and the arts. One is luxury, produced like them by indolence and vanity. Luxury is seldom unattended by the arts and sciences; and they are always attended by luxury. [9]

This is a very curious passage, in which Rousseau seems to be arguing that both the arts and sciences and luxury are the product of indolence and vanity. Therefore, indolence and vanity now appear to be the cause of corruption, and the advancement of the arts and sciences the effect. Moreover, luxury is also described as being a corrupting influence on arts and sciences. It is therefore both cause and effect.

However, as Powers points out, there is a further contradiction. Rousseau believes that everything is radically dependent on politics. [10] Thus, "the arts and sciences and their relationship to morals could only be indirect." Powers goes on:

In his Discourse on the origins of inequality, he went to the root of the matter: the original difficulty was not the arts and sciences, but was the order of inequality, which they reflect and embellish. [11]

So now it appears that inequality, which is a by-product of politics and which is merely reflected and embellished by arts and sciences, is the cause of corruption.

At the root of this seeming confusion is Rousseau's contention that pride is the real cause of man's downfall. Everything else arises from that. Campbell and Scott note:

Human pride is the source of "all" human learning, and the cause of its corruption. [12]

They continue:

However beautiful the spectacle of the advancement of the sciences may be, Rousseau asks his readers to consider their deleterious effect upon public morals. [13]

And here, as always, Rousseau comes back to his view of civilisation and his central point, that man has fallen from his ideal state and become corrupted:

We cannot reflect on the morality of mankind without contemplating with pleasure the picture of the simplicity which prevailed in the earliest times. [14]

It is important to understand that Rousseau is not talking about a return to a golden age. He is not saying that the "state of nature" is an aspiration and it would be preferable for us to renounce our civilisation and our learning and our self-awareness. That is not possible: the fall has already happened and what has happened cannot be undone.

He says that in becoming civilised we have renounced freedom. Man is innately good, but civilisation forces him into badness. He states: "Nature made man happy and good, but society depraves him and makes him miserable." [15] Powers notes:

He believed that no human faculty was bad by nature. He did believe that amour de soi "is the only force which will make men act. Self-love (amour de soi) which is good and innate, degenerates into pride (amour propre), which is evil and which is acquired." Thus he believed that man, naturally good, becomes bad. [16]

What caused this degeneration of amour de soi into amour propre? Partly, of course, it is the arts and sciences. As Campbell and Scott note:

The sciences investigate the causes of natural phenomena traditionally attributed to divine power, and they corrupt morals by undermining the faith and public-spiritedness upon which Rousseau suggests popular virtue rests. "Science spreads and faith vanishes." The paradigmatic natural science in this regard is physics, which Rousseau specifically identifies as the product of "vain curiosity." [17]

Campbell and Scott also note:

[Rousseau's] remark that such individuals [those who should be allowed to study the sciences] must "feel the strength to walk alone" suggests that it is less their genius than their independence from popular trends and opinion that enables them to pursue the sciences without corruption. [18]

Thus, certain individuals may transcend the dangers of study, but only if they can stay true to their inner beliefs and not be swayed by vanity or pride – playing to the gallery or seeking to impress and become famous. Only a very few can do this. Rousseau concludes his Discourse by saying:

As for us, ordinary men, on whom Heaven has not been pleased to bestow such great talents; as we are not destined to reap such glory, let us remain in our obscurity... Why should we build our happiness on the opinions of others, when we can find it in our own hearts. [19]

For most of us, we lost our chance to be free when man turned from his state of nature. This was inevitable. Shklar summarises Rousseau's position thus:

By nature men are freed, but left to their own devices they will inevitably enslave each other... the spontaneous march to inequality and oppression in which all men participate. [20]

But Rousseau still appeals to the noble savage in us all. "Let us leave to others the task of instructing mankind in their duty, and confine ourselves to the discharge of our own," he writes. [21]

There is in much of Rousseau's work this conflict between the personal and the public. He himself was fiercely independent. "First of all I want my friends to be my friends, and not my masters,"[22] he wrote. As Shklar notes, "in the end he concluded that his need for personal liberty was such that he was simply not made for civil society."[23] This is instructive, because it goes to the heart of the contradictions in Rousseau. He observed how mankind had to behave, because they had no alternative. To succeed, men conformed. They were motivated by self-interest. Essentially, man was a social animal, and social living led to inequality. Inequality led to pride, which corrupted man.

The noble citizen, however, which as Powers notes was Rousseau's ideal,[24] and not the unattainable noble savage, could live outside such pride and vanity, could withstand the pressures of society. This could only be done, however, because such people were capable of living in themselves. Powers describes Rousseau’s position thus:

The savage lives in himself, the sociable man always outside of himself, unable to live except in the opinions of others. [25]

Rousseau believed civilisation corrupted, and could only corrupt. The only way to avoid it was to seek a completely individual path, but few men were capable of this. The opportunity to create an ideal state of nature was lost and could not be regained.

1. Jean Jacques Rousseau. Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. p 123

2. Richard Howard Powers. Rousseau’s “useless science”: dilemma or paradox. French Historical Studies, Vol. 2, No 4. (Autumn 1962), p 450

3. John Hope Mason. Reading Rousseau’s First Discourse. Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 249, p 251

4. Discourse, p 120

5. Ibid, p 141

6. Ibid, p 130

7. Ibid, p. 131

8. Ibid, p 134

9. Ibid, p 132

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Confessions.

11. Powers. Op. cit., p 459

12. Sally Howard Campbell and John T. Scott. Rousseau’s politic argument in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. American Journal of Political Science, vol 49, No 4. (Oct, 2005), p 822

13. Ibid., p824

14. Discourse. p 134

15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Dialogues. Paris; Gallimard, 1995 v 1 p 934

16. Powers. Op. cit., p 452

17. Campbell and Scott. Op. cit.., p 824

18. Ibid.

19. Discourse, p 142

20. Judith N. Shklar. Rousseau’s images of authority. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 58, No. 4 (dec 1964), p 919

21. Discourse, p 142

22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Correspondence generale de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris, 1924-1932. Vol III, p 44

23. Shklar, op. cit., p 920

24. Powers. op. cit., p 467

25. Ibid, p 465 

Rime of Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The most supernatural poem of English literature, named The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a psychodrama concerned with the guilt and expiation of ‘a Cain-Like’ figure, the arbitrary ‘Murderer’ of an albatross “made the breeze to blow” which, appears through the fog ‘as it had been a Christian soul.” That is why:

“The mariner gave it biscuits –worms    
And round and round it flew  ……..                          
….. everyday for food or play     
Came to the Mariner……..”

The poem is told to the Wedding Guest by the Mariner “Alone, alone, all, all alone,/ Alone on a wide wide sea!/ And never a saint took pity on/ My soul in agony,” who is

“Like one that hath been stunn'd            
 And is of sense forlorn.”

In this natural setting are set the supernatural incidents. A terrible storm hit and forced the ship southwards. The “storm blast” was “tyrannous and strong” and struck the ship with “overtaking wings”. Then the sailors reached a calm patch of supernatural sea that was “wondrous cold” full of snow and glistering green icebergs” as tall as the ship’s mast:

“And now there came both mist and snow,        
And it grew wondrous cold.”

The sailors were the only living things in this frightening, enclosed world where the ice made terrible groaning sounds that echoed all around.

“The ice was here, the ice was there,    
The ice was all around.”

Coleridge often blends the real and unreal in order to create a supernatural world. Here we see the story at first is given a known, familiar setting but soon it passes into an unreal world. The reader is not disturbed by this smooth transition from the real to the unreal world but indulges himself in the “willing suspension of disbelief”.

From the moment the mariner kills the bird retribution comes in the form of natural phenomena. The wind dies, the sun intensifies and it will not rain. The ocean becomes “revolting”, “rotting” and “thrashing” with “slimy” creatures and sizzling with strange fires. Coleridge depicts tactfully how nature punishes supernaturally for killing its innocent member—before the sun was “bright” but now it has become “the bloody sun” in a “hot and copper sky”:

All in a hot and copper sky,         
The bloody Sun, at noon,            
Right up above the mast did stand,         
No bigger than the Moon.

The nature continues punishing the mariners in supernatural ways. The wind refuses to blow, and the sun’s relentless heat chars the men:

Day after day, day after day,      
We stuck, nor breathe nor motion;         
As idle as a painted ship               
Upon a painted ocean

This hot sun makes the mariners thirsty but they have no drinkable water.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The throats became “unslaked” and “lips baked” under the hot sun.

We could not speak, no more than if     
We had been choked with soot.              

The shipmates, in their sore distress, throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner and in sign they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.

‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.’

The suffering becomes even more painful when all his fellow men dropped down one by one and the soul of each passes by him with the sound like that of his arrow that killed the Albatross. “They dropped down one by one.” For seven days and nights the mariner remained alone on the ship:

Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.

His surroundings- the ship, the ocean, and the creatures within it are “rotting” in the heat and sun, but he is the one who is rotten on the inside.

Only when the mariner is able to appreciate the beauty of the natural world, he is granted the ability to pray. The moment he begins to view the natural world benevolently, his spiritual thirst is quenched. As a sign, the albatross- the burden of sin falls from his neck.

‘The Albatross fell off, and sank               
Like lead into the sea.’  
It finally rains and his thrust is quenched.             
‘My lips were wet, my throat was cold, 
My garments all were dank”

The ship suddenly began to move towards the native land of the old sailor. Ultimately the ship reached near the harbor. It sank suddenly and the old sailor was rescued from the disaster. Iin the end “The Game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!” as “Four times fifty living men,/ With never a sigh or groan,/ With heavy thump, a lifeless lump/ They dropp’d down one by one.” Coleridge (also hint at the theme of the poem) clearly reflects his meditative mind when he says;

‘He prayth well, who loveth well              
Both man and bird and beast.’

He prayth best, who loveth best              
All things both great and small  
For the dear God who loveth us               
He made and loveth all.;

Wordsworth’s assertion that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner “contains many delicate touches of passion” is especially notable, given Derrida’s insistence that the concept of “passion” as it relates to a testifying subject implies not only “finitude” but also

“liability ….. imputability, culpability, responsibility” and “an engagement that is assumed in pain and suffering, experience without mastery and this without active subjectivity,”

About it, Derrida would say, only “chaos remains.”

Dr. Faustus

Doctor Faustus

In Tudor Dynasty the `most nearly Satanic tragedy that can be found' is Doctor Faustus tells the story of a certain doctor named `Faustus', meaning `auspicious' becomes an avid follower of the Black Magic and his Temptations go unabated as he desires the famous ‘Hellenic Beauty Helen’ for his company which was unusual for Helen had long been dead. Faustus strikes a deal with Mephistophilis “a servant to great Lucipher” that he will give his soul in exchange for A Kiss from Helen;

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--''[kisses her]''     
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!--             
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Mephistophilis explains that Faustus must “buy my service with his soul” by signing a contract:

But Faustus, thou must bequeath it solemnly
And write a deed of gift with thine own blood,
For that security craves great Lucifer.
If thou deny it, I will back to hell.

Subsequently, as Faustus draws blood and prepares to write the contract, Mephistophilis reminds him once more to “Write it in a manner of a deed of gift”. It would seem that this is not a “purchase” at all. As per Lucifer’s deal: “he will spare him four and twenty years, / Letting him live in all voluptuousness,” during which time he will have Mephistophilis as his personal servant “Having thee ever to attend on me”. At the end he will give his soul over to Lucifer as payment and spend the rest of time as one damned to Hell. This deal is to be sealed in Faustus's own blood. After cutting his arm, the wound is divinely healed and the Latin words "Homo, fuge!" (Fly, man!) then appear upon it.

With blank verse and prose, Marlowe sets the story in Wittenburg, Germany with Faustus selling his soul to the devil. At the end of his twenty-four years, Faustus is filled with fear and he becomes remorseful for his past actions, yet this comes too late. Marlowe creates doubt about the freedom of Faustus's will early when Faustus asks the Good Angel if it is too late to repent. The Good Angel replies: "ever too late, if Faustus can repent". The issue is raised again:

What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemn’d t o die?
Thy fatal time doth draw to final end;

When fellow scholars find Faustus the next morning, he is torn limb from limb, with his soul carried off to hell. Moreover, by magnifying his hero's aspirations (never presume to be `great emperor of the world' or strive `to gain a Deity') and sharply curtailing his realization (gains few of his grandiose dreams).

The roots of Doctor Faustus lie deep in the fertile loam of medieval legend. Faustus rejects God, and in doing so, effaces the traditional theological idea that the soul is “on loan” from God, and thus not his to give away. The stories surrounding magicians were typical Magus legends, the hubristic magician, sought to purchase from St Peter the power of the Holy Spirit. St Cyprian, performed many miraculous deeds and was eventually converted, martyred and canonized. Theophilus introduced into the tradition the diabolical blood pact. The entire drama thus occurs within the human psyche. Faustus appreciate Divinity as useless because he feels that all humans commit sin, and thus to have sins punishable by death complicates the logic of Divinity. He dismisses it as "What doctrine call you this? Que sera, sera" (What will be, shall be).

Doctor Faustus adopts and alters the schema of the morality play to its tragic format. The morality plays conclude with the redemption of the often-erring hero, Marlowe's drama ends in a harrowing denouement. Critics suggest that the religious controversies of the period between Catholic/Anglican/Lutheran free will and Calvinist predestination modify the play's morality psychomachia.

The man who earlier exulted, `The emperor shall not live but by my leave', now serves the emperor. In order to make his contract appear less threatening, he convinces himself that hell is only a fable and confounds it in Elysium. When Mephistopheles comes from hell to seize his `glorious soul' Faustus employs fallacious reasoning to convince himself and ignores Mephistophilis’s passionate warning

`to leave these frivolous demands
Which strike a terror in my fainting soul' (I.III.83±84).

Mephistophilis also stress the appearance of Lucifer instead of Christ in answer to Faustus's desperate plea,  `Ah, Christ, my Saviour, | Seek to save distressed Faustus' soul!', which reads, `Help to save distressed Faustus' soul!', as an emblem of the absence of God or Christ and the presence of evil as the controlling force of the play.

Doctor Faustus questions why man is put on the earth. We see in Faustus a man opposing and questioning the order of the cosmos and railing against the confines of human knowledge. While the play shares many of the characteristics of medieval morality plays it cannot be defined solely in this way. Faustus can be seen as a tragic hero who through his thirst for knowledge and his desire to go beyond the accepted wisdom of his time is ultimately destroyed.

Faustus appreciate Divinity as useless because he feels that all humans commit sin, and thus to have sins punishable by death complicates the logic of Divinity. He dismisses it as "What doctrine call you this? Que sera, sera" (What will be, shall be). Marlowe also allows him to confuse opposites and blur distinctions (he sees his necromantic books as ‘heavenly’ and, more damnably, he signs away his soul to Mephistophilis with Christ’s last words on the cross” “Consummatum est,” “It is finished” or “completed.”

“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,    
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’ed”

Here Faustus both clings to his cleverness by quoting, out of context, an amorous line from Ovid “Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night”

Doctor Faustus is a Tamburlaine on the intellectual level; his ambition for the ultimate knowledge; and if knowledge for him means power, the same can be said in some degree of the view implicit in the whole Bocanian tradition” But Faustus is not merely a man who seeks the practical fruit of knowledge: symbolizing in his own behavior the story of the Fall of Man through eating of the tree of knowledge. He had had a less aspiring mind he would have been a better man: less imaginative, less interesting, and less daring, he would also have been more virtuous. In the end of the play he cries:

Adders and Serpants, Let me breath a while      
Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer,    
I’ll burn my books,—ah, Mephistophilis.”

Here we have the germ of a truly tragic situation—corruptio optima perrima, the corruption of the best becomes the worst. Marlowe’s real difficulty comes when he has to illustrate the kind of knowledge Faustus has obtained by his compact with Mephistophilis and to present the kind of life he is now able to lead. Marlowe was at loss to illustrate superhuman knowledge and power in concrete dramatic situation. Milton, face with  the problem of putting divine wisdom into the mouth of God say what Milton had already been maintaining for some time; Bernard Shaw, presenting in Back to Methusaleh his Ancients who have achieved a wisdom beyond anything yet available to man, puts into their mouths the views that Shah had been long arguing.