The journal of Psychoanalytical Study of English Language and Literature
Online ISSN : 1884-6386
Print ISSN : 0386-6009
Volume 2005, Issue 25
Displaying 1-5 of 5 articles from this issue
  • Angela Locatelli
    2005 Volume 2005 Issue 25 Pages 1-12,93
    Published: 2005
    Released on J-STAGE: March 11, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The semantic and conceptual category of “the unspoken” and “the unspeakable” plays a great role in the meaning of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom suggests that his experience as Titania's lover is essentially unspeakable, and he expresses an intuition of love as knowledge, and viceversa, regretting that in Athens they “keep little company together”. The play is illuminating on the simultaneously affective and cognitive dimension of literature. It acknowledges both the experience of “apprehending” and “comprehending”, and offers a main road to the knowledge of poets, lovers and lunatics. In fact, the many aporias I have outlined in this comedy, suggest a strong link, and a simultaneous presence, between emotional and cognitive experiences, despite their apparent contradiction.
    Bottom's “unspoken” experience is a discursive position between the repressed and the expressed. It is mostly an effect of censorship by the subject' s consciousness on “realities” or emotions that collide with societal norms. Bottom insists on the difficulty of talking about dreams and infantile fantasies. He knows that he must silence the asinine stupidity of infantile narcissism, but he puts his desire in the hands of artistic creativity. Quince' s ballad will bypass Bottom' s reticence, showing that art can be a powerful compromise formation, expressing what is tabooed by dominant social codes. Quince becomes the prototype of the poet, whose tale is both a mask and a revelation of “a vision”. Artistic codification continues to represents the other side of the unsaid in several ways, but literature can be accepted as a (benign) transgression because what is sanctioned is shown only as “fiction”, i.e. as a harmless pseudo-truth, or as a jest, as a joke.
    The dream that “hath no bottom” is an allusion to the protagonist's unconscious, but it is also a meta-linguistic qualification of literary discourse, because literature both reveals and conceals meanings, while delivering them to the intrinsic and radical ambiguity of language. Literature is both hyper-sign and enigma, and both a mirror and a veil of “reality”. Hermia' s sentence: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, when everything seems double” (IV. i. 194-5) is an appropriate comment to the play' s entire representational philosophy. Hermias' s “parted eye” corresponds, in a way, to the dramatist's “parted voice” who lingers over the contradictions of his own discourse.
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  • Akiko Kimura
    2005 Volume 2005 Issue 25 Pages 13-26,95
    Published: 2005
    Released on J-STAGE: May 24, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891) is now a canonical feminist text with increasing critical attention. This short story describes the mental breakdown of a young wife who is suffering from postpartum depression in a haunting first-person narrative. As it is through the protagonist's own voice that readers trace her deteriorating mental state to psychosis, the story presents the fundamental problem of the authenticity of the language of madness and the possibility of depicting madness in fiction.
    By examining Gilman's autobiography, diary and other biographical sources, it is clear that she herself had the similar experience and this was the disguised record of her own mental crisis. We can detect her private voice of suffering in the narrative of madness and confinement. The story can also be interpreted as a feminist protest against the male domination of female bodies and imaginations. Gilman later declared its practical purpose in her accusation of Dr. S. W. Mitchell's ‘rest cure’ for mental illness and emphasized the public message of feminism.
    The unusual impact of the story, however, seems to be the result of the fusion of the private voice of suffering and the public voice by the narrative device of visualization of madness through the representation of the wallpaper. The protagonist' s breakdown is indicated by her changing perception of the pattern of the wallpaper in her room, and finally the transformation of the image of the figure behind the wallpaper swallows her own sense of identity. Although the story of confinement ends with a disastrous picture of madness, this tragic ending has a subversive assertion against the male domination of women's bodies and imaginations. Balancing the enclosed space of illusion and the sense of reality, Gilman reveals the narrator's inner world through her reaction to the wallpaper. The precarious task of representing one's own madness is accomplished by the complex layers of narrative in this story.
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  • A Vision of the Irish in their Subconscious
    Toshiko Ariyoshi
    2005 Volume 2005 Issue 25 Pages 27-50,97
    Published: 2005
    Released on J-STAGE: March 11, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The purpose of this paper is to discuss in what sense the image of women in Joyce's works is based on not only his individual experience but also on a vision of the Irish in their subconscious.
    In 1904 Joyce met his future wife Nor Barnacle for the first time who was from Galway in the west of Ireland, the center for the traditional culture of the Celts. For Joyce she was the woman who embodied the ideal image of Ireland. In a letter to Nora, Joyce wrote: “You have been to my young manhood what the idea of the Blessed Virgin was to my boyhood.” The beauty of Nora seemed to be like that of the Blessed Virgin Mary and his soul reflected as if it were “the pale passionate beauty of a pearl” when he met her first. The veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary is considered to have represented his platonic love for girls in the boyhood just as was the case with other Irish boys in those days. However, when Nora appeared before him as a woman who had both physical and spiritual beauty, Joyce came to love her as a real woman who reflected the image of “the love inside him.”
    The encounter with Nora proved to be a major turning point forJoyce' s life as an artist. According to Chester G. Anderson, Joyce stopped writing poetry after he met Nora and began to work on his four masterpieces, because he needed no longer to describe a girl as his
    “ soul-love” as he did in the collection of poems, Chamber Music. Nora was his “muse” who inspired Joyce to write his works, and the image of women in his works seems to be based on her. She was the incarnation of Ireland, and although he eloped with her as a self-chosen exile for the Continent, always keeping her close to him as his companion, he kept his mind fixed on his homeland. He tried to recreate Ireland in the art of his writing restoring its ancient glorious figure of Mother Ireland represented by the Irish Goddess Dana.
    This paper in the final stage discusses the artistic power Joyce exercised over Ireland in his description of the Irish male protagonists being awakened into rebirth from their spiritual death of paralysis. This spiritual transfiguration or rebirth is caused by the great “motherly wo men”who have the image of the Goddess Dana, an envoy from the court of “Tir-na-Og, ” the legendary land of everlasting youth and life in the Celtic mythology located in the bottom of the sea in the far west just like “Ryugu-jo” in Japan. In “The Celtic Element in Liter ature, ” W. B. Yeats describes this legendary land, which the Irish have been longing for, as “a world where anythihg might flow and change, and become any other thing.”
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  • Minoru Morioka
    2005 Volume 2005 Issue 25 Pages 51-73,99
    Published: 2005
    Released on J-STAGE: March 11, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Erik H. Erikson developed the idea of crisises in life. Those who are unable to obtain their own identities are assumed that they have lost what is important for their living in the society. America is a country of immigrants, whose settlers have always come with their success dreams and their own cultural identities. “Culture” here means an integrated system of learned behavior patterns characteristic of a self-identifying group. In many cases, these groups are ethnic minorities. When they have to interact with other ethnic groups having other cultures, communication becomes a major issue. After the start of World War II, 120, 000 Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps. Two tests of loyalty were applied at that time: an oath of allegiance to the United States and willingness to serve in the armed forces. Those who replied “no” to both questions were called “no-no boys, ” and regarded with suspicion. Ichiro Yamada, the protagonist of John Okada's novel No-No Boy, is one of these. Ichiro suffers from a cultural identity problem. Although he becomes classed as a “no-no boy, ” he himself never knows the reason why he answered in the negative. His mother, who has pledged her loyalty to Japan, can be considered the biggest influence behind his decision. Yet Ichiro, who was born and brought up in the USA, has an attachment to America and does not entirely align himself with Japan. However, he also has a feeling that America has betrayed his faith and trust by violating its own Constitution. The Constitution for the United States of America is the result of a spirit of amity. It promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to Americans and their posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution. Ichiro struggles in his choice of cultural identity between America and Japan. Ichiro cannot help rethinking what he acquired under the influence of his parents. My aim in this paper is to investigate the problems of cultural identity and the psychological background to them through interpretations of this novel.
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  • Junko Murakami
    2005 Volume 2005 Issue 25 Pages 75-91,101
    Published: 2005
    Released on J-STAGE: March 11, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Sherwood Anderson (1879-1941) made his name as a leading naturalistic writer with his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), of which stories concern an inward reality that focuses on the psychology of individuals within a small American town.
    In this study, I psychoanalyze the inner conflict of Reverend Curtis Hartman in “The Strength of God, ” pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Winesburg. To help understand this story I also look at “The Teacher, ” a story of a female teacher at elementary school in Winesburg called Kate Swift, which is the reverse story of “The Strength of God.”
    By accident, the minister saw the bare shoulders and neck of the teacher through the window of the study room in the bell tower of the church. While this sight gave him a great shock, he also realized his own lust, which he believed to be an evil desire. I observe his desire to peep at the teacher as the result of the domination of id toward ego. Put it at its most extreme, I regard this action of id causes his evil desire. I also apply this view to the notion of “shadow, ” one of the archetypes of Jung's collective unconscious. I consider this pastor's “shadow” as a man having the carnal desire while his “light” as a successful clergyman to be greatly respected by the town' s people. I judge it is necessary for him to accept own “shadow.” Then the shadow makes his light more stand out.
    In his work Anderson depicts the real aspect of men which is not possible to express with evading the issue of sex and through the work he wants to tell us to respect humanity which always has a dark side as the “shadow” while we accept the actual aspect of men.
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